BatesLine

As Churchill said, Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.:

A military cargo plane carrying three senators and a House member was forced to take evasive maneuvers and dispatch flares to avoid ground fire after taking off from Baghdad on Thursday night.

The lawmakers said their plane, a C-130, was under fire from three rocket-propelled grenades over the course of several minutes as they left for Amman, Jordan.

"It was a scary moment," said Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., who said he had just taken off his body armor when he saw a bright flash outside the window. "Our pilots were terrific. ... They banked in one direction and then banked the other direction, and they set off the flares."

Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., as well as Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., were also on the plane.

Cramer and Martinez said they had just begun to relax about five or 10 minutes after the plane took off under darkness.

Crew members apparently communicated to the pilots as they saw the initial RPG fired from the ground, Cramer said. After the first burst, the pilots maneuvered aggressively and set off flares used for drawing incoming fire away from aircraft.

Once the flares lit up the sky, lawmakers said, two more RPGs were fired as the pilots continued maneuvering.

Thomas Sowell aims his laser-like brain at the situation in Iraq and how political decisions led to the current messy situation and how stateside political pressures are about to make things worse.

Here's the heart of the column:

Nations cannot be built.

You can transplant institutions from one country to another, but you cannot transplant the history and culture from which the attitudes and traditions evolved that enable those institutions to work.

It took centuries for democracy to evolve in the Western world. Yet we tried to create democracy in Iraq before we created the security — the law and order — that is a prerequisite for any form of viable government.

Having made democracy the centerpiece of the reconstruction of postwar Iraq, Americans have been hamstrung by the inadequacies of that government and the fact that our military could not simply ignore the Iraqi government when its politicians got in the way of restoring law and order.

People will support tyranny before they will support anarchy. Both can be avoided by creating an interim government based on competence, rather than on its being an embodiment of democratic ideals.

Sowell gives several examples of nations that weren't at all democratic 50 years ago but are there now or are at least headed in that direction.

Hong Kong under British rule is an example of how a society can have freedom and stability without democracy. Hong Kong was ruled from London, and the residents of the Crown Colony had no say in their laws or leaders at all until the last few years before the handover to China. But life, liberty, and property were protected by due process of law. If you entered into a contract, you knew it could be enforced. Economic activity was generally free from heavy-handed regulation. The colony thrived and was an enclave of liberty.

It was a mistake for US politicians to hold elections and create a new Iraqi government as quickly as it did. And before anyone blames the neo-cons, the idea that free and fair elections are all you need to create a free society has a long pedigree, going all the way back to Woodrow Wilson. The notion that occupation should be brief, and that elected locals should be put in charge as soon as possible, is an article of faith in Western foreign policy that dates back to the decolonization movement that followed World War II.

What we should have done is to treat Iraq and Afghanistan as trust territories -- not owned like a colony, to be exploited for its resources, but held in trust for the peoples of those nations, governed by the US with a view to their long-term interests. Democracy would come eventually, but not until the rule of law was well established.

Sowell's assessment of the problems with too quickly reestablishing a democratic form of government doesn't mean that he supports leaving now, and he makes a pointed diagnosis of the intentions of some members of Congress:

What has gone right is that the Iraq war is already over. Our troops won it. But our politicians may once more lose the peace — and with disastrous consequences for us and for the world.

Peace has not been achieved in Iraq, though pacification continues — always at a cost in American lives — and shows signs of progress, much to the dismay of those who have bet their political future on an American defeat.

Defeatists have not yet had the courage to directly ensure defeat by cutting off the money to continue military operations in Iraq.

That would be taking responsibility for the defeat. What would serve their political purpose better would be to legislate preconditions for the spending of military appropriations that would make defeat inevitable, but let it be seen as Bush’s defeat, not theirs.

Along the Del Rio sector of Texas's border with Mexico, the Customs & Border Patrol is actually prosecuting illegals who immigrate for economic reasons, and they're finding it makes it easier to spot and deal with those who immigrate for nefarious purposes. According to Chief Agent Randy Hill:

“Our number one priority is protecting our border from terrorists, then criminal aliens, and third drug interdiction. What Operation Streamline has done is removed the ‘clutter’ of economic refugees from our primary mission. When we relieve ourselves of dealing with a large influx of economic refugees, it allows us to concentrate on border security priorities,” he said.

“Economic refugees” in the Del Rio sector are mostly Mexican and “Other Than Mexican” or OTMs, illegally entering the country looking for better paying jobs and opportunity. The CBP uses the term “economic refugee” to differentiate between a unarmed, non-dangerous illegal alien and what they call a “criminal alien,” or an illegal alien with a criminal rap sheet in the U.S. or some other country. Operation Streamline has reduced the flow of economic refugees to almost a trickle. Apprehensions for the Eagle Pass area of the sector are down a whopping 77 percent this fiscal year. Across the sector, apprehensions are down 61 percent this year.

Illegal entry comes with a sentence of two to four weeks in jail, followed by deportation. Re-entry after deportation is a felony and could bring a sentence of up to two years. Those arrested are fingerprinted, and a background check is done. They appear before a Federal judge within three days of arrest.

You're probably wondering what I was wondering -- you mean that wasn't already being done? Here's the typical sequence of events prior to Operation Streamline:

1. Apprehension in the field.
2. In-process at CBP field office.
3. Suspect given a future court date for removal purposes and the defendant signs a promise to appear. Defendant released on own recognizance into the U.S. if OTM. Most Mexican nationals were transported and released in Mexico. Most OTM defendants were never seen again.
4. Prosecution was reserved for violent offenders, gang members, suspected narcotics smugglers, and those with a history of repeated immigration offenses.

(Via MamaAJ in the comments at Hot Air.)

The Judge Report passes along this news item:

Democrat John Edwards Wednesday repudiated the notion that there is a "global War on Terror," calling it an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration that has strained American military resources and emboldened terrorists.

Mr. Going's response: A photo he took of the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. And video of John "F-Troop" Edwards on the O'Reilly Factor from October 2001. In response to O'Reilly's question about how Democrats would respond if the war widens to "maybe Libya, maybe Syria, maybe the Sudan, maybe even Iraq," Edwards pledged that Democrats would be "united with the President throughout this war on terrorism."

Meanwhile, former Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Calvey is happy that Congress has voted to feed him and his colleagues in Iraq for a few more months:

Very decent of Congress to let us serving here in Iraq have bread and bullets, don't you think?

Looks like the Democrats in Congress are not so principled about the war as they previously claimed.

If they really think the war is immoral, then why cave in on the war funding bill?

The answer is that for many of them, this is all a big political game.

More Edwards:

SATIRE: Scrappleface reports on Edwards' plan for Universal Hair Care.

NOT SATIRE: Edwards denies involvement in $400 haircut: “Other people arrange these things, and I wasn’t personally involved in it.”

Joel Henry Hinrichs III, the OU student who blew himself up outside a packed football stadium on Oct. 1, 2005, was apparently not the only one in his family with violent tendencies. From the Nov. 23, 2006, Colorado Springs Gazette:

Thomas Carlisle Hinrichs, a 25-year-old Pikes Peak Community College student, says he thinks federal officers have harassed him since the Oct. 1, 2005, suicide of his brother, Joel, according to court documents.

He allegedly considered waiting at the FBI office to ambush an agent and also thought about killing his father and high school principal.

Hinrichs was arrested Nov. 15 at Pikes Peak Community College's Rampart Range campus with a Romanian-made assault rifle, bulletproof vest, military helmet, hunting knife and ammunition in the trunk of his car, according to Colorado Springs police.

The arrest came after his father, Joel Henry Hinrichs Jr., told police that Thomas had assaulted him and that he feared his son, whose mental health had deteriorated in the past year, would kill him.

This is not a new story, but I don't remember reading about it at the time. Big hat tip to Tulsa Chiggers for catching it.

Julia Gorin has been keeping a close eye on the story of the Fort Dix Six, the young Muslim Albanian men who were plotting an attack on the New Jersey army base. She has also been reminding her readers of some forgotten and unpleasant realities about U. S. support for a Muslim terrorist organization with ties to Osama Bin Laden.

It's not Julia's usual stock in trade, and here's how she explains her interest:

People often ask me how a comedian embarked on a Balkans-watching odyssey. When I woke up on March 24th to hear that the United States of America was dropping bombs on Europe on behalf of Muslims claiming oppression — in order to keep the conflict from spreading — it struck me as funnier than any joke I could write. When you help Muslims with their wars, it doesn’t keep the conflict from spreading. It spreads Islam. And it spreads to you.

Her sketch of the history of American involvement in Yugoslavia (from the same entry) deserves to be quoted at length:

I am sorry to report that, while Bill Clinton delivered the death blows to Yugoslavia, we started on this path with George Bush Sr., whose ambassador Warren Zimmerman flew to Sarajevo in 1992 to advise Izetbegovic to remove his signature from the Lisbon Agreement that all three parties signed precisely to avoid the civil wars that ensued. Zimmerman assured Izetbegovic that the U.S. would have his back if he wanted an independent Muslim Bosnia.

The rape, slaughter and dismemberment of Yugoslavia was a bipartisan enterprise from Day One, and it remains so. What makes the Clinton administration’s role more nefarious is that the first Bush administration was still operating on a Cold War mentality, in which any vestige of Communism was still a target — and Yugoslavia stayed fatally comfortable with the apparatchik system too long. Meanwhile, Islam wasn’t yet known to be the biggest international threat.

By 1999, however, the Islamic threat was a known entity and there were already two international warrants out for Osama bin Laden, including for the bombing of the U.S. embassiess in Africa. This is also why reasonable comparisons between our unholy alliance in Kosovo and our 1980s alliance in Afghanistan fall short. The Soviet Union was in fact an enemy and an international menace; the Serbs aren’t and never were — but Islamic terrorism was and is.

As well, while George H. W. Bush bumbled through the confusion that is the Balkans, Bill Clinton knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that his numbers of dead and displaced in Kosovo were a fabrication, but he needed a vanity war in his last two years in office so that the word “Lewinsky” wouldn’t be the last thing associated with his presidency. Outrageously, he, his wife, Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke and other Clintonistas continue, even eight years later, to boastfully lie to Americans that we “prevented a genocide” in Europe with our “successful war” in Kosovo, where not a single American life was lost.

It helps when you’re fighting for the enemy.

Read all of Julia Gorin's May 2007 and April 2007 archives for more on this topic.

MORE: Political correctness almost discouraged the Circuit City clerk from tipping off authorities about the terrorist training video tape he converted for the Fort Dix Six:

When the teen and another employee went into a back room and began the conversion of the tape, they saw a group of bearded men wearing "fundamentalist attire" and shooting "big, f-ing guns," the teen later told co-workers.

Throughout the 90-minute-long tape, above the booming gunfire at a Pennsylvania target range, the jihadists could be heard screaming "God is great!"

The two employees "freaked out," their co-worker recalled.

At first, the teenage clerk didn't know what to do, his pal said.

"Dude, I just saw some really weird s-," he frantically told his co-worker. "I don't know what to do. Should I call someone or is that being racist?"

The fellow employee tried to calm his friend and told him that if what he saw terrified him so much, he should tell the police.

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Karol remembers two of the Fort Dix Six:

When Elvis and Dritan Duka, two of the three brothers arrested on terrorism charges in Fort Dix, were kids, they were neighborhood bullies. When they got a little older, they became drug dealers.

How do I know? They grew up in my neighborhood, my brother and his friends used to brawl with them on a fairly regular basis. My brother's best friend's mom was friends with their mom. Then they moved to New Jersey and became Jihadis. Of all possible paths for the Duka kids, that one didn't seem the most likely.

They had been in the country illegally for 23 years, and despite numerous traffic citations, they were never detected, much less deported:

A federal law enforcement source confirmed to FOX News that the three — Dritan "Anthony" or "Tony" Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; and Eljvir "Elvis" Duka, 23 — also accumulated 19 traffic citations, but because they operated in "sanctuary cites," where law enforcement does not routinely report illegal immigrants to homeland security, none of the tickets raised red flags.

The brothers entered the United States near Brownsville, Texas, in 1984, the source said, which would put their ages at 1 to 6 when they crossed the border.

The source said there is no record of them entering by way of a regular border crossing, so they are investigating whether they were smuggled into the country.

So the folks who swim Rio Bravo near Brownsville aren't just Mexicans on their way to roof houses in Jenks. Some of them are Albanian Muslims from Yugoslavia who wind up living in Brooklyn and plotting attacks on U. S. Army facilities.

Julia Gorin asks why the media -- even right-wing columnists -- are so squeamish about saying that these alleged terrorists are Albanian Muslims, and she answers her own question:

The answer is that the Balkans narrative MUST remain what it is: Serbs=bad. Muslims=victim.

The pro-Muslim mainstream media aside, even conservatives jumped onto the anti-Serb bandwagon starting in the 90s -- because conservatives are often accused of being anti-Muslim. So the one bone they can toss the Muslims is to take the typical bombastic and outraged stance about what was supposedly done to Muslims in the Balkans. (Recall “Hannity & Colmes” condemning the “evil on display” in the widely circulated execution video of six Bosnian fighters by Bosnian-Serb paramilitary. Of course, you won’t recall the far more graphic images of dead Serbs -- for those are never shown.)

Never mind that the aforementioned executions were precipitated by mutilated, burned, decapitated, dismembered Serbs of all ages, whose bodies were stuffed down wells near Srebrenica, the site of “the worst atrocity since the Holocaust.” And that’s not even mentioning the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo for decades, as was reported in The NY Times, Christian Science Monitor and Washington Post throughout the 80s.

If you want to know more precisely what these Albanian Muslim illegal immigrants were up to, Michelle Malkin has an excerpt of the complaint against the Fort Dix Six, and a link to a PDF of the full complaint.

UPDATE 5/17/2007: Newsweek reports that the INS knew that the Duka family was here illegally for 16 years and did nothing:

As a result, for nearly two decades, American authorities were aware that members of the family were inside the United States, and that they had probably come here illegally. While the asylum application was under consideration, the government effectively suspended any effort to deport family members as illegal aliens, the source familiar with their immigration history said…

However, another official familiar with the Duka case history said that the family asylum claim got stuck for 16 years at INS because of a bureaucratic paperwork backlog of more than 100,000 asylum applications. The official said asylum claims routinely sat in “filing cabinets” for a decade or more.

(Hat tip: Hot Air.)

N. Z. Bear at Victory Caucus has put together an easy-to-navigate view of the Senate version of the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, S. 965. On the left sidebar, you'll see a list of projects stuffed into the bill. (For example, "Provision that extends the availability by a year $3.5 million in funding for guided tours of the Capitol. Also a provision allows transfer of funds from holiday ornament sales in the Senate gift shop.") You can click on each one, and it will take you to the actual language of the Senate bill.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) intends to force a vote on removing several of the provisions which are clearly not unanticipated emergencies, disclosing any earmarks pertaining to the bill, and . According to his office, he has filed the following amendments to the bill:

648 Strike emergency funding for the 2008 political party conventions
649 Strike University of Vermont earmark
656 Public disclosure of all reports provided to the appropriations committees by this Act
657 Offset Ag emergency funding

The $100 million in funding for the 2008 political party conventions is to reimburse cities and states for the cost of security for events that are over a year away. This emergency appropriation is supposed to be for the current fiscal year, which ends September 2007. Coburn said there was no place for convention security in a bill funding military activities. "Members will have to make a difficult choice between booze and balloons or body armor and bullets."

National conventions are a lot of fun. They are a great opportunity for party activists, donors, elected officials, and consultants to renew acquaintance every four years. They are a great way to kick off the final push for the general election. But they don't serve a national purpose and they shouldn't be subsidized with tax dollars.

If the absence of money for security means that some big names stay away and only C-SPAN covers the conventions on TV, so be it. If it means that the parties have to scale down the conventions to be able to afford to hold them, that would be grand. Perhaps national conventions will once again be meetings where party business is transacted, rather than four-day telethons.

I don't expect Coburn to get a majority on any of these votes, but I'm glad he's at least trying, and I hope he manages to get his colleagues on the record.

Just posted on FrontPage magazine is an in-depth interview with Jamal Miftah, the Tulsa Muslim who last fall wrote a bold guest opinion condemning terrorism in the name of Islam and was expelled from the Islamic Society of Tulsa's mosque.

The interview fills in some fascinating details about Miftah's background in Pakistan -- some things that he hinted about in earlier stories and in my conversations with him. He talks about his life in Pakistan before coming with his family to the United States in 2003. Living in the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, on the border with Afghanistan, he saw the harm done to ordinary Pakistani Muslims by militant misleaders who led them into battle against U.S.-allied forces across the border.

After the fall of Taliban regime, the leaders of TNS started coming back into Pakistan along with the groups of ordinary people who had gone with them to fight. During the course of time, ordinary people including myself realized that all the leaders made it back to their homes safe and sound, whereas a number of the ordinary men never returned. They either got killed or were held for ransom by Afghans and possibly the Taliban.

The interview also delves into his views on his faith and on the global war on terror. Miftah doesn't believe that Osama bin Laden is running an independent terrorist organization:

During the Soviet-Afghan conflict, many warlord groups, including that of Osama bin Laden's group, were receiving American money and equipment to fight the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union, some of those groups joined hands to start the campaign for removal of American forces out of Saudi Arabia. They attempted to mobilize support within the Muslim world for their cause by misguiding the Muslims that the presence of 'infidels' in 'the land of pure' was a great sin and should therefore be prevented by Jihad. The campaign was supported by the inflow of petro dollars and was the joint agenda of Osama bin Laden and the then Crown Prince (the present King) of Saudi Arabia. He, during Clinton's earlier era, was very vocal about the removal of American armies from Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan was thus used as a launching ground for the campaign by the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia and their most trusted family friend Osama bin Laden who was to lead the campaign and the proxy war for the Saudi Kingdom.

The interviewer, FrontPage managing editor Jamie Glazov, challenged Miftah on his belief in a "silent majority of the peace-loving Muslims around the world":

Upon what evidence do you base this view that the “majority” are peace-loving? For instance, do the majority of Muslims in the world reject the teachings of their own religion -- which mandates war against non-Muslims? (i.e. The Verse of the Sword, Sura 9:25, 9:29, etc.) Do the majority reject the imperative to subjugate the world under the rule of Islamic law – which is a mandate deeply embedded within Islamic teaching and tradition? (i.e. Sura 9:29, Sahih Muslim 4294; and a host of other evidence from all the Sunni madhahib and Shi’ite sources as well).

Miftah explains how he and many other Muslims interpret those verses:

Let me first clarify the misconception about the teachings of Islam or for that matter any other religion. The Qur’an was revealed over a period of 23 years. The revelation, as such, was during times of war, peace, oppression and rule of Muslims. Each verse, as such, has to be read in context of the conditions prevalent at the time of revelation and also the conditions of the Arab Society at that time.

In response to this and to Miftah's quoting of several verses from the Qur'an, Glazov pretty much says (as politely and graciously as he can), "No, you're wrong," and quotes a number of Islamic scholars down through the years who reject the moderate Muslim hermeneutic, including Sayyid Qutb. Miftah is not deterred and explains why he and many other Muslims reject the teachers that Glazov cited.

If you're a Christian, put yourself in Jamal's shoes for a moment. Someone who isn't a Christian comes along and tells you that you don't really follow the Bible because you don't agree with the method of interpretation used by Charles Taze Russell or Tony Alamo or David Koresh or Felix Manalo. Can you see how offensive that would be?

Glazov seems to shift his argument to say that there isn't any "sect of Islam or a school of Islamic jurisprudence that is generally regarded as orthodox and does not teach the subjugation of unbelievers." He creates a sort of circular argument. Why are the sects or schools who don't teach the subjugation of unbelievers considered unorthodox? Is it because they don't teach subjugation of unbelievers or is it for some other doctrinal reason? Or is it because they aren't backed with Saudi petrodollars?

It's a variation of the old "no true Scotsman" fallacy: "No true Muslim believes in peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims." Jamal Miftah says, "I am a true Muslim, and I believe in peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims." The response -- "Well, then, you must not be a true Muslim."

Aren't we working against our own safety and security to recognize the violent wackos as normative and to treat Muslims like Jamal Miftah as marginal?

To his credit, Glazov asks Miftah what can be done to support moderate Islamic voices. Miftah's response:

Unfortunately, the majority of the mosques in the U.S. and in West are under Wahabi control. The Muslims living in those parts of the world should particularly be vigilant towards the activities going on in places of worship (mosques) and should rise up against the self-imposed leadership in such places, if they witness any suspicious activities. They have a responsibility to the societies they live in, raise and educate their kids and therefore should not tolerate any activity which is aimed at causing harm to the countries they live in.

(Yesterday, JunkYardBlog linked to the story of a Newcastle, Australia, mosque that was taken over by university students who follow Wahhabism. The students "evangelized" members of the mosque, then won elections to control the board.)

Miftah goes into detail about his expulsion from the mosque in November, setting out a clear time line. He draws this conclusion about the actions of the mosque's leadership:

In my case, it was a very daring attempt by the leadership of the mosque, who first tried to silence me by scaring me with the word “anti-Islamic,” which carries a lot of repercussions and finally made me an example for other Muslims by expelling me out of the mosque. It now makes me believe, from the kind of response and the treatment that I received, that there are elements within the mosque leadership who have sympathies for terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. To root out and expose such elements we need moral support from organizations like yours and also legal help to prosecute such rogue elements.

Miftah sought the help of the ACLU in pursuing legal action against the mosque, but the ACLU said they didn't have the resources. (Glazov notes that the ACLU has plenty of money for other projects. A couple of examples: defending the pederasts at NAMBLA or working with an accused terrorist operative to develop a curriculum for teaching Islam in the public schools.)

If you're an attorney and can assist Jamal with his case, please e-mail him at jamalmiftah@sbcglobal.net.

MORE on moderate Muslims:

Rod Dreher responds to a reader who emails about the notion of banning Muslim immigration, thinking about the demographic differences between Muslim immigrants to parts of Europe and those who come to America.

The point here is that the situation can be a lot more complicated than simply saying, "It's Islam's fault." And if you make a blanket indictment of Islam itself, as my friend points out, you risk marginalizing good people, solid citizens. But on the other hand, when you look at poll data of British Muslims, for example, you find shocking levels of support for Islamic law (versus British civil law). Whatever the root causes of this state of affairs, it's frightening.

I am reminded by all this of how little, really, we know about the Muslims who live in the West. Or at least in America. I know the kinds of Muslims I've interacted with professionally here in Dallas, and it's not encouraging to me as someone who would welcome truly moderate Muslims here. On the other hand, I've been told by Muslims and non-Muslims, people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do, that the leadership in mosques and Islamic institutions in the US has been bought by Saudis, and that ordinary Muslims don't dare object.

Dreher links to a National Review article he wrote about the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, home to the first World Trade Center bombers and investigated for continuing to fund terror organizations. Dreher wrote about the fear non-Muslims in Brooklyn had about saying anything remotely critical of their Muslim neighbors.

If it's too dangerous for Arab Christians to speak out against Islamist neighbors, what is it like for dissenting Muslims? A senior terrorism analyst with The Investigative Project, which specializes in monitoring Islamic radicalism, insists that Muslims of goodwill believe, with reason, that standing up to Islamist thugs will get them killed. "Fundamentalists are the ones who have the drive. For non- fundamentalists, speaking out against them is not worth their life," explains TIP's Evan Kohlmann.

Kohlmann says that Islamic radicals get away with their activities both by stifling dissent within Muslim communities and by "turning any criticism into a civil-rights and a humanitarian issue. They know that by appealing to our sense of diversity and humanity, they evade scrutiny." Indeed, many non-Muslims in the liberal neighborhoods flanking the al-Farooq mosque would consider it racist and McCarthyite to question the loyalty of their Muslim neighbors.

Finally, Dinesh D'Souza wrote a four-part series in National Review Online calling on conservatives to work with "traditional Muslims" to oppose radical Islam. (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.)

MORE: A moderate American Islamic organization is offering to defend any of the passengers who might be targeted in a lawsuit by the "flying imams" against US Airways:

Lawyers and a Muslim group say they will defend at no cost airline passengers caught up in a lawsuit between a group of imams and U.S. Airways if the passengers are named as "John Does" and sued for reporting suspicious behavior that got the Muslim clerics booted from a November flight....

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a Phoenix-area physician and director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy -- a group founded in 2003 to promote moderate Muslim ideas through its Web site (http://www.aifdemocracy.org) -- told The Washington Times his group will raise money for legal fees for passengers if they are sued by the imams.

"It's so important that America know there are Muslims who understand who the victims are in air travel," said Dr. Jasser. "But I hope it doesn't get to that point because the backlash will be even greater when Americans see Islamists trying to punish innocent passengers reporting fears."

From AIFD's press release:

4. It is our hope as Americans and as Muslims that U.S. Airways stand firm in its defense of its actions to have the gentleman removed for concerns regarding their behavior after entering the plane. This is not about race or religion. It is about the privilege to fly securely.

5. The constant exploitation of America's culture of political correctness especially in this setting of what is the most dangerous environment of air travel is out of touch with America's priorities. Such misguided priorities by Muslim activist organizations like CAIR will make the legitimate defense of our civil rights far more difficult when more serious complaints of racism and discrimination are involved. America is quickly becoming numb to their constant refrains and the polls demonstrate the profound ineffectiveness of their tiring campaigns.

6. The organized Muslim community should instead be working on developing a strategic plan to counter militant Islamism within the Muslim community. That would do a lot more to change public opinion than suing the airlines who are trying to keep Americans who travel safe.

(Via JunkYardBlog.)