"In reflecting on the events of the past week, I am fully aware that the British Muslim community now faces its most difficult and profound challenge yet. We have reached a dangerous crossroads, and the direction we choose will prove to be a defining moment in our history."
 
    "The knowledge that the bombers were British Muslims, living what were, to all appearances, respectable and unremarkable lives, has sent us a signal we can no longer ignore, that there is indeed an "enemy within". The battle for the soul of the community has begun."

    Bush read the words of an Al Qaeda spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith: "We have the right to kill four million Americans--two million of them children--and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons."

    Then, Bush declared: "In all these threats, we hear the echoes of other enemies in other times, that same swagger and demented logic of the fanatic." He added: "Like their kind in the past, they will flame and fail and suffer defeat by free men and women."

    By the way, you might be wondering by now where the great procession of Arab leaders lining up to apologize to America for Nick Berg's murder has gotten to. Only a few Middle Eastern men want to saw the heads of Jews and infidels. But an awful lot more -- the majority in some states -- are either noisily approving or silently accepting of such an act. Winston Churchill wrote of two "curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries" -- not only the "fanatical frenzy," which you can see in the orgiastic pleasure Berg's killers take in their clumsy work, but also the "fearful fatalistic apathy," to which many more Arabs are prone.

It's the latter that makes them such easy waters for the sharks to swim among.
 
    We always come back to that strong horse/weak horse thing. But the point to remember is that Osama bin Laden talked about who was seen as the strong horse: It's a perception issue. America may be, technically, the strong horse but, thanks to its press and its political class, the administration is showing dangerous signs of climbing into the rear end of the weak-horse burlesque suit. If America retreats into its own fatalistic apathy, there will be many more Nick Bergs in the years ahead.
 

    This was not the first time a major news organization had reported allegations that copies of the Quran belonging to detainees had been desecrated -- the Washington Post, the BBC and the New York Times all got there first.

    To briefly recap, Newsweek reported in a small blurb May 9 that American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Koran down a toilet in attempts to get Muslim terror suspects to talk. Once the Newsweek story was broadcast abroad, the usually reticent hate-America crowd erupted in mass pique. Havoc ensued. At least 15 Afghans died and many more were injured.
 
    ...another story was circulating about Turkish women in Germany being executed by family members in "honor killings" sanctioned by certain interpretations of the Koran. Their offense? Acting like Western women. Or, in the pithy words of a 14-year-old Turkish boy who was justifying an execution: "The whore lived like a German."

    Yet these mass murders - this desecration and dismemberment of real Muslims by other Muslims - have not prompted a single protest march anywhere in the Muslim world. And I have not read of a single fatwa issued by any Muslim cleric outside Iraq condemning these indiscriminate mass murders of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds by these jihadist suicide bombers, many of whom, according to a Washington Post report, are coming from Saudi Arabia.

    This is adapted from an email sent to friends by Mr. Hoodbhoy on Oct. 12, four days after an earthquake hit northern Pakistan and Kashmir.
 
    Islamic groups from across the country have arrived in vast numbers. Some bring relief supplies, others simply harangue poor goat-herders and simple tillers of the soil to tell them that their misdeeds brought about this catastrophe. None seem to have an explanation for why God's wrath was especially directed to mosques, madrassas and schools -- all of which have collapsed in huge numbers. And none say why thousands of the faithful have been buried alive in this sacred month of fasting.
 
    For me personally, there was a sense of déjà vu. In 1974 a powerful earthquake had flattened towns along the Karakorum Highway killing nearly 10,000 people. I had traveled with a university team into the same mountains for similar relief work. Hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funds received from abroad mysteriously disappeared. Some well-informed people believe that those funds were used to kick off Pakistan's secret nuclear program.
 
    There are simply not enough tents, blankets and warm clothes to go around. Hundreds of tent clusters have come up, but thousands of families remain out under the skies. Those without shelter will die.