Graphic by MegaBee (flickr)

Note: MegaBee reserves all rights to his photo on flickr, but I am claiming fair usage here.  If he wants to retain exclusive rights to his work, he probably should refrain from deploying it in public forums to comment pithily and smugly on major news stories.

I got my copy of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West in the mail a couple days ago.  In comments on blogs and news articles across the country, multitudes of enlightened folks claim they left their copies unopened, either tossing them in the trash or saving them for when they require a good laugh.  They were astute enough to judge by the verbiage on the packaging that the movie is nothing but hate propaganda by right-wing extremists.

As we near the end of Ramadan, jihad attacks have noticeably increased in frequency and intensity everywhere, particularly in Pakistan, where security forces are on red alert, which for some reason translates into firing on US military choppers across the border in war-torn Afghanistan.  As usual, I have been monitoring the daily jihadi cyber- chatter, which appears to be largely  concerned with the current US financial meltdown.  Glee and exhilaration in the face of our misfortune unsurprisingly characterizes jihadi discussion about the Wall Street crisis, and I was just beginning to wonder what this preoccupation with the economic situation might mean when prominent counter-terrorism analyst Brigitte Gabriel explained it:

Some [jihadists] are talking that this is the time to strike, while America is down.

Clearly, now would be an especially inopportune time for a domestic terror emergency—not that there’s any such thing as a good time for one, from our perspective, at least—but I’m not personally aware of any Islamist chatter to that effect.  Ms. Gabriel, however, says the radicals are “talking” about it, and presumably she has better primary sources.  In a WorldNet Daily exclusive, she refers knowingly to the heartbeat on “the Muslim street,” which for my money is good enough to raise the terror alert level.

You can read Gabriel’s remarks here, and embedded in the article is an hour-long audio file of the KSFO interview with Barbara Simpson.

Photo of Ms. Gabriel from her website, American Congress for Truth

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War is an ugly business.  It’s even uglier when it entails bean counting, that “macabre calculus” whereby we compute acceptable levels of collateral damage and civilian casualties before “taking out” a target.  In American military practice, this calculus is always in play, because we are an ethical people concerned about loss of innocent lives.  Of course, we haven’t yet learned the ethics of avoiding armed struggle altogether, except as a last resort.