The fighters who do most of the dying in war don’t get special graves. Those most wounded don’t get special hospitals. They don’t get invited to the White House, or to any other Big House. They don’t get armor. They don’t get guns. They get to walk through the soldiers who have all that without anything except courage so huge, we can’t even see it.

Look at this graph from the BBC, and see if anything strikes you about it.

If Rushdie’s knighthood is a huge insult that demands an apology and a retraction of the offending knighthood, then there a few other insults that need to be addressed.

I am deeply offended by the treatment of women in many countries. A heartfelt apology is certainly in order, but even more, I want a retraction. Get rid of all those laws that deprive women of freedom of movement, of the right to vote, of something so damn basic as the right to choose their own clothing.

I am terribly offended that there are still governments who censor political speech. I want to see those practices stopped now, thank you.

I am appalled that there are governments that use torture. I expect to see that stopped — yesterday! — and all those heads of state and their henchmen tried for crimes against humanity.

And if these things aren’t done to my satisfaction, then . . . well, then we come to the difference between me and the Rushdie apoplectics. They talk of racing out and blowing things up. Me? I’ll probably write a strong letter to my blog.

That’s the other difference between me and them: I have a much better time of it.

Technorati tags: Rushdie, knighthood, politics, religion, current events

Bush praising the recent no-strings-attached funding for his occupation of Iraq:

[The bill reflects] “a consensus that the Iraqi government needs to show real progress in return for American’s continued support and sacrifice.”

Meanwhile (via True Blue Liberal) in Baghdad:

A friend who lives in the eastern Shiite slum of Sadr City was talking to a man who had lost a son in a recent bombing. “I am ashamed to talk about it,” said the grieving father. “Why?” asked my friend …. “Because my neighbor just lost all five of his children in one car bombing.”

Some Americans are paying a terrible price.

But, on the other hand, I know what the man in Baghdad means.

So says MSNBC in a breathless article on terrorists swarming in South America.

Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States …
From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, … Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of many Muslims

Oh, no. Not frustrated Muslims! Anything but that! Over here? Not over there, where they can be safely bombed in a completely unterrorist way? Say it ain’t so!

An investigation by Telemundo and NBC News has uncovered details of an extensive smuggling network run by Hezbollah

Really? Then how come I’ve heard about this hotspot for years? I don’t even remember where I first heard about it (Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment?), but it’s nice to know that NBC is capable, given enough time, of finding its backside with both hands.

U.S. officials fear that poorly patrolled borders and rampant corruption in the Tri-border region could make it easy for Hezbollah terrorists to infiltrate the southern U.S. border. …[I]t is easy for potential terrorists, without detection, to book passage to the United States through Brazil and then Mexico simply by posing as tourists.

Wow. Brazil has a border with Mexico? I never knew that. Scary. Wooooo. Oh, wait, if they’re going by land, they’d have to cross, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and then they’d reach Mexico. If they fly, they could — this is even worse, but we have to face facts — they could fly straight from Brazil to the You-nited States!

It is surprisingly easy to move across borders in the Triple Frontier …. A smuggler can bike from Paraguay into Brazil and return without ever being asked for a passport

And by the time he’s finished pedaling the whole Pan-American highway, he’s a solid mass of muscle and completely unstoppable.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Hezbollah militiamen would raise no suspicions because they have Latin American passports, speak Spanish and look like Hispanic tourists.

Someone, quick, get me a field guide to the Hispanic Tourist! I mean, what if I missed one because he looked like Javier Perez de Cuellar?

“People … have planned terrorist attacks from [the Tri-border],” said Luttwak, who has been a terrorism consultant to the CIA and the National Security Council. … “Our experience is that if you see one roach, there are a lot more,” said Frank Urbancic, principal deputy director of the State Department’s counterterrorism office

At this point, I’d had it. If you want to find out what the rest of the article says, you’ll have to read it for yourself. I quit there. In the unforgettable words of Barbara Bush, I don’t want to pollute my beautiful mind.

Technorati tags: terrorism, Tri-border, Triple Frontier, Hezbollah, current affairs

It’s becoming very clear that Iraq’s Oil Law is a give-away to Big Anglo Oil. No surprise there. What’s getting less attention is the so-called benchmarks being discussed in the US Congress. These are supposed to be the end of the free ride Congress has been giving Bush. They’re supposed to show that Iraq is actually accomplishing something with all that US aid that the Americans are firmly convinced they are giving Iraq.

Proof that the Iraqi government is finally getting a grip is that they actually get down to legislative business.

The first (and only?) legislative business they are to take care of is passage of the Oil Law. That’s the benchmark.

But the Oil Law gives away Iraq’s oil wealth and dooms it to being a poor debtor nation for as long as the Paris Club can keep it there. Judging by actions rather than words, grabbing the oil has been Cheney-Bush’s priority from the start. Now it also seems to be the priority of the (supposed) opposition Democrats in Congress.

At least on this issue, the whole pretense at opposition and vetoes is just so much theatre.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is in an impossible position. They’re widely viewed as US puppets. If selling their whole country down the river is a bit much, even for them, the US will pull out the troops propping them up. If they do sell their whole country, the US doesn’t need them for much any more and may stop propping them up.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. That’s how you can tell when you’re dancing with the devil.

Technorati tags: Iraq, oil, oil industry, politics, current affairs, Oil Law

Woody Guthrie had a line: “Some men’ll rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The Cheney Administration has realized that it’s not an either-or proposition. “We can do both!” they said.

About 20% of Iraq’s huge oil reserves are currently producing. The other four fifths are in known and potential reserves. (The boffins seem to be rather confident about the potential reserves, because I haven’t seen much dispute about these proportions.)

The oil law says that the revenues from currently producing fields are to be split equally among various Iraqi groups. This is the part that gets the publicity. It’s very nice. It also refers to a mere fifth of the country’s oil wealth.

The other four fifths of Iraq’s oil will be “opened” to investment by foreign oil companies. This is supposedly necessary because of all the cash needed to bring the fields into production.

Funny. I’d noticed that about the oil industry too. It’s so hard to make any money in it that investors with bottomless pockets are essential. They can wait years to turn a profit. There’d be no way for the Iraqis to sell their own oil and make enough money to build infrastructure.

Apparently these investments are structured so that the company keeps all the profits until its costs have been recovered. Judging by the spirit of the thing, the company probably decides when that point has been reached. After that, the company keeps some portion of the profits, such as more than half, for the life of the contract (which typically runs for decades). I’d bet the terms Iraq gives its (fallen) angel investors will be favorable even by industry standards.

I keep thinking the Cheney Administration has sunk so low they’ve hit bottom. And then they keep proving to me that I lack imagination.

(The details of the new oil law above are from Richard Behan in Counterpunch. I haven’t tried to find original sources, since they’re still hidden in specialist publications where the foot of the average schmoe like me hath not trod. This law is currently somewhere in the process of passage. The cabinet has approved a draft, and it is now waiting for parliament. That may be a long wait, since much of Iraq’s parliament spends its time in relative safety outside of Iraq.

Previous posts suspecting this very outcome here and here.)

Technorati tags: Iraq, oil, oil industry, politics, current affairs

It’s good he was convicted. It’s about time somebody in our kleptocracy faced some kind of responsibility for SOMEthing. But, let’s face it, Libby is the smallest of potatoes.

Walk it back: There was a cover up. The cover up was about who made known the name of a CIA agent. The name was made known for revenge on her husband. The husband’s crime was pointing out that Niger was not selling the raw materials for nuclear bombs to Saddam Hussein. There were documents, but the documents were childishly fake. Whoever had forged them had apparently not even bothered to get the right seal on the stationery.

And that’s where the story has sat. It seems to me that the burning question is who forged the damn documents? That should lead straight to the answer we really need, which is why?

Boring version: some two-bit secret agent wanted to make some money by selling the things to gullible journalist(s). It was a convenient story for the Cheney Administration, so they took it and ran with it. If this is the right version, why was Berlusconi’s government (on whose watch the forgeries happened) so obstructionist about finding the culprit?

Staggering version: a real investigation would trace the forgeries back to an interested government, who wanted something suitable for scaring people into war. The amateurish nature of the forgeries argues against this. But the energy with which governments are not looking for the answer argues for it.

Fabricating evidence in a rush to war goes far beyond lying about it.

You see why Scooter and the pathetic cover up is barely a fingernail scratch on the surface.

Passing this new oil law is one of the few things the Iraqi government has accomplished that I’ve heard about. There’s much talk about how this will divide up oil revenues fairly among the different provinces, including the unoiled ones.

Buried in the small print is: “The draft law also lays out method for international companies to invest in Iraq’s oil industry, reports say.” (BBC)

Could we have some details on that, please?

The small print in the Iraq Study Group report mentioned what a good idea it would be to privatize the Iraqi oil industry, and allow foreign companies to take home twice the already large industry-standard share of their profits. (Earlier post on that.) To put it less politely, having reduced Iraq to a condition of helplessness, the US demands money the way people generally do when they’re at the right end of the gun.

So what “methods” of foreign “investment” are laid out in this draft law? Is it the ISG method? If so, sharing oil revenues across provinces is not the real story. The real story is whether Exxon has run off with the pot roast while the Iraqis get to divvy up the crumbs.

Hopefully, it’s not that bad. Hopefully, the draft law allows foreigners to invest, without quotation marks, in Iraq. But it’s very odd that even the BBC and Reuters aren’t saying. It gives me a queasy feeling of being told: “Look over here! Don’t look at the man behind the curtain!”

The BBC has a series of short reports from Iraqi refugees about their lives in exile and, sometimes, the events that precipitated their flight. Heartbreaking, every single one. This one about a woman named Fatima is just one example of the insanity.

It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask.

And is there really a difference, when they’re both killing you?

This was brought on by Riverbend’s recent post.

I wonder. My immediate reaction is the same as hers. Nobody could be that stupid. (I adhere to the conspiracy theory that says it’s about oil. Once you have the war of the all against the all, they grind themselves to rubble, and then you have a free hand to come in with your siphon and get the black gold for next to nothing.)

But the scientist in me insists on considering the null hypothesis: What if they are that stupid?

Think about it. What if they really are that stupid? The mind reels. It’s actually easier to think they could be that evil instead of that stupid.

And the implications for democracy are staggering. It means there really is a minimum of wisdom required to run a country. It implies not everyone has it. We’d have to start limiting the pool from which leaders can be elected. But how? Any limits always seem to wind up selecting for rich and powerful nincompoops. Which is where we are now.

My head hurts.

Technorati tags: Iraq, politics, oil , conspiracy

There’s been much hoohah over the Iraq Study Group’s report and it’s suggestions about how to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic with a troop movement here and a withdrawal there. Lost in the static is this gem:

From Antonia Juhasz, Alternet, Dec. 7th:

Mission Accomplished.

Technorati tags: Iraq, oil, Iraq Study Group, ISG, Iraq war

Does it matter which one is happening in Iraq? If it’s “not a civil war” does that mean it’s “okay”? If it is, does that mean anyone plans on doing anything different?

This is yet another way of avoiding the issues. They aren’t hard to articulate:

1) Saddam Hussein was one of the world’s outstanding sadistic dictators. He needed to be deposed.

2) Killing the patient in order to save them is bad.

3) The US, with it’s hamfisted operating procedures and oil-murky motives, is busily killing Iraq. The US has an absolute moral obligation to stop destroying the place and to make reparations in whatever way is acceptable to civilian Iraqis.

4) While the US fiddles, arguing about how many hundreds of thousands have died and what the definition of war is, people are perishing, families are falling apart, and the land is turning into waste.

Update a few hours later. Well, that’s a relief. The whole thing has been cleared up because, as happens so often, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show have come to the rescue. What we’re dealing with here is a “minor linguistic flareup.” Also a “faith-based melee.” Or, just possibly, a “territorial argle-bargle.” The incomparable crooksandliars.com has the clip.

There is a big divide, important people say. Muslims are furious about the treatment of Palestinians, about discrimination, humiliation, and marginalisation. To demonstrate how to treat people right, they blow them up. The West is furious about people being blown up. To demonstrate how to treat people right, they blow up mosques. And people, but always only as a regrettable side-effect. It’s not terrorism when the West does it. Remember that, or nothing will make any sense.

The West has some other issues that get less press. Oil, for instance. This is not about oil. Do not think about oil. Think about the clash of civilizations. (Are you thinking about it? Good.)

And then there’s human rights. The idea of having to live with the restrictions, uptightness, and all-around neuroticism that most Muslim societies seem to consider normal horrifies the vast majority of Westerners. But since they don’t, themselves, have to live with it, not much is said. It would be intolerant, or meddlesome, or it’s an internal affair. Sort of like wife-beating used to be something between a man and a woman. However, just because almost nobody talks about it, doesn’t stop it from being a source of hostility. Too often, it’s over-generalized hostility, as things that aren’t voiced usually are.

There’s a common thread there. The anger is about occupation, humiliation, poverty, violence, and abuse. These are not religious issues. They aren’t even cultural issues.

They are issues of justice. Nobody, whether Western, Muslim, or Western and Muslim, wants to be poor, hurt, or humiliated. A world united behind impoverishing and abusing people would be worse than our current one, not better. It is not unity anyone wants. It is justice, at least for themselves.

Let me go through a few examples, just to make my meaning clear.

• Palestine. The Jews, having been atrociously treated by the Europeans, decided they needed a Jewish state. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to have a benign government without the separation of religion and state, but I’m also a strong believer in consenting adults doing whatever they damn well please. So I’ll blink the separation issue for a moment, and grant the concept of a Jewish state. They wanted that state in the Promised Land. The only problem was, the land had been promised to some other people as well (perhaps proving not only that God exists, but also that he wouldn’t pass his real estate license). So Palestinian people got turfed out to make way for Jewish people. No matter how you look at it, that is an injustice. The consequences of that injustice will continue to resonate until it either stops (which means the Palestinians can live in peace in their own country, whether that’s a non-religious state or a separate, viable Palestine) or everybody is dead.
• It doesn’t stop because the US is too busy supporting Israel, right or wrong. So we’re currently headed toward the second alternative while we waste time talking about bridging a non-existent divide. There is no divide. Nobody wants to be booted out of their country or have to pass checkpoints to reach a hospital. There’s only a lot of people who’d rather do what’s easy (for themselves) than what’s right. There’s a lot of people who’d rather use poor refugees as irritants against their enemies, or ignore the crimes of their client state. In other words, there’s only a lot of people who’d rather have (other) people die than do what it takes to right a wrong. No divide there either, unfortunately.
• Lack of respect for Muslim traditions. Some traditions should not be respected. Cannibalism. Slavery. Female genital mutilation. Only the first is not well-known from at least some Middle Eastern lands. None of them have anything to do with Islam, but the appalling treatment of people in majority Muslim societies puts the religion in a bad light. So why aren’t the clerics making sure these things stop? Instead, some come out with statements favoring wife-beating and rape. There are psychopaths everywhere. But the right-thinking clerics should be ostracizing the crazies, not meeting them with, at most, embarrassed silence.
• Many of these so-called traditions have to do with depriving women of basic human rights, such as freedom of movement, and even the basic ability to choose one’s own clothing. But they’re not limited to that. There are also ludicrous pronouncements about music and shorts, things that call to mind some of the excesses of Southern Baptists. When Muslims stop demanding respect for travesties of human rights, both serious and silly ones, and start demanding respect for traditions that deserve it, like the Middle Eastern concept of hospitality, at least they’ll have justice on their side.
• Globalization. That’s what it’s called. In actual fact, it gives corporations new ways to make money, new ways to avoid environmental laws, and new ways to avoid labor laws. Even in the US itself, that supposed bastion of globalization, when consumers tried to buy medicines from other countries where they were cheaper, the corporations soon put a stop to that. Globalization for me but not for thee. Nobody wants to be a cash cow for the wealthy. There’s no divide. There’s just rich people, Western and non-Western, who’d rather make money off less-rich people. Nothing new there, not even the diversionary tactic of riling up the poor with religion instead.
• State-sponsored terrorism, aka war. Killing people because it suits your purposes is bad enough, but I want to focus on the demonization that is necessary to allow it to happen. There is, we are told, some kind of “clash of civilizations.” On one side there are the blond, blue-eyed heroes, and on the other a bunch of cheating, thieving, no-good Semites.
  
   Wait, that’s the old script. Those were Jewish Semites. This time, it’s totally different. On one side are fine, upstanding followers of Western, Christian values, and on the other are a bunch of cheating, thieving, terrorist Arab Semites. Totally different.
• Every single cleric who is allowed to call him- or herself a Christian ought to be condemning this. Instead, there are a few fundamentalist Christian preachers who not only condone it, they promote it. By giving criminal heads of state religious cover, a few clerics make the religion seem like nothing but a bandage for an oozing wound.
• Small-scale terrorism, aka terrorism. Targeting civilians because you can’t get at soldiers is Bad. Not Honorable. Thoroughly despicable. Every single cleric who is allowed to call himself a Muslim ought to be condemning this. By giving criminals religious cover, a few clerics make the religion seem like nothing but a bandage for an oozing wound.

Not one of these issues is anything people disagree about. The only disagreement is how much it matters when they hurt other people. Trying to find “agreement” on that is either despicable (“Okay, I won’t discuss human rights for women if you’ll stop harping on human rights for Palestinians.”) or irrelevant (“We can agree that both Christianity and Islam are great religions”).

By pretending that the problem is some kind of cultural divide instead of injustice, it’s possible to pretend that the only thing needed for a solution is a bit of talk and understanding. Interestingly enough, nobody is ever quite agreed on what to talk about first. Is it respect for religion? Or tradition? Or market forces? Or not committing acts of war without a license? Pretty soon, we’re talking about talking, and that’s even easier than not solving the problem by talking about it.

Technorati tags: West-Muslim divide, current affairs, religion, politics, injustice

Many commenters on the Lancet study (pdf) boggle at the numbers, point at the uncertainty, express disbelief, and note that they’re not statisticians. Well, I’m here to help.

Although perhaps not very much. I’m not a statistician either. I scraped the bottom of the barrel as a student taking my one required stat class. It was only because Dick Lewontin was a brilliant teacher and exceedingly merciful that I passed at all. But in some ways that may make it easier for me to explain. I know what we all go through when statistics get thrown at us.

I won’t be discussing specifics of the methodology or how they collected data. (For what my opinion is worth, their methodology is excellent.) Billmon, Zeyad, and the Lancet article itself go into that in exhaustive detail. (Update, Oct 19. Another English- rather than statistics-based discussion by Greg Mitchell. Yet one more: Riverbend gives her usual excellent personal take on the numbers.) Iraq Body Count has a much lower number (about 43,000 at the low end of the estimate) because that is a tally purely of deaths reported in various media. Anyone who thinks that the media are cataloguing every single death in Iraq is living in a dreamworld. Of course IBC’s estimate is vastly lower.

I’d like to (try to) explain in a nutshell what the overall numbers in the Lancet article mean.

The main thing that seems to have people’s knickers in a twist is the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the true number of excess deaths. (It’s worth pointing out that the uncertainty would be much lower if the US had lived up to its obligations as an occupier and kept as good a count as it could of deaths in the country.)

There are two different kinds of uncertainty: the uncertainty of not knowing whether your numbers are right because of the difficulty of collecting the data, and the statistical measure of uncertainty. The broad range of estimates, 392979 – 942636, in the Lancet article is due to the difficulty of collecting data. Since getting the data is difficult, the distribution of estimates of the real number of deaths will look like the blue line below. Note that the line does NOT represent numbers of deaths. It represents estimates of what the actual real number is.

(Graphs modified from Wikipedia, showing generic normal distributions to illustrate the concepts discussed. These are not from the Lancet.)

The important thing to remember is that the statistics tell you how much chance you have of guessing wrong. The true number has a 68% likelhood of being somewhere in the blue zone in the lower graph above. It has a 95% likelihood of being somewhere within the blue plus beige zones. In the top graph, the 95% zone lies between the dashed lines: as discussed below, that’s a narrow range for the red line, broad for the blue one.

With good data, the chance that your estimate will be far from the true number (i.e. “0″) is low, so the curve is steep and pointy. If, for instance, the true number of excess deaths were 655,000, and the necessary records to count the number of deaths were easily available, the likelihood that the real number of deaths was, say, 600,000 would be vanishingly small. Ninety five percent of the estimates might fall between, for instance, plus or minus 10,000 deaths, as depicted by the dashed lines in the top graph.

With hard-to-collect data, the chance of estimating wrong is much higher. The likelihood that the real number was 600,000 is not vanishingly small. It’s quite large, and 600,000 may, in fact, be the real number. So may 700,000. Both are equally likely. If one wants to stress that the number of excess deaths could be as low as 393,000 according to this study, one has to also stress that it could be as high as 943,000. The uncertainty of the estimate means higher numbers are as likely as lower ones.

What the range of numbers means is that there is high statistical certainty (at least 95% to be precise) that the real number of deaths falls within that range. The range encompasses the blue and the beige areas under the graph (and is represented by the hard-to-see dashed lines at the extreme right and left of the blue line in the top graph). That means there is a 95% probability that the true number of deaths falls somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636. There is a less than one in twenty chance that “only” 350,000 people have died due to the occupation, or that a million people have died. In other words, there is a great deal of statistical certainty that the range is correct. The midpoint of the range is the likeliest true number, but that is less certain.

Hundreds of thousands of people have died. That is not in dispute any more than any other scientific conclusion that rests on a 95% confidence level (i.e. all biological and medical science).

So, now that I’ve cleared that up, can we stop pooh-poohing the numbers and start being appropriately horrified that hundreds of thousands of people have died?

Technorati tags: Iraq, body count, Lancet, war, human cost

What is it about popes? With rare exceptions, like John XXIII, what a bunch of benighted enablers of balderdash. Maybe it has to do with the selection process being limited to a few old men in skirts.

Now the current one has managed to quote a fourteenth century emperor as if he had some relevance six hundred years later. (Quoted from the BBC)

…[H]e [the emperor] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

That from the head of a religion that gave people the Inquisition and witch-burning. That from the head of a religion that was so famous for converting people by fire and sword that it’s a joke in one of the world’s most indispensable books, 1066 and All That.

The sad thing is, old Ratzinger–sorry, Benedict XVI–was actually trying to make a good point. Violence has no place in religion, which is sort of like saying that moms and apple pie go together. You’ll get no argument from anyone, except of course the people trying to use religion as an excuse for their own greed or hatred. That, too, is not limited to Islam or Christianity. You could probably dig up a paleolithic shaman with ten followers, and find a couple grunting slogans to justify killing their neighbors.

Ratzinger-Benedict was also trying to say that narrow Western concepts of reason interfere with dialogue with non-Western cultures. An attitude of “The facts, ma’am, just give me the facts” is indeed too limited to encompass any of the finer things in life. The Westerners have a lot to learn. So does everyone else. Worshipping gods made in our own image is not working out for us.

John Lennon said it best:

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Technorati tags: Pope, Islam, Christianity, terrorism, violence, religion

This is down there with “Attack Iraq because of terrorists in Afghanistan.”

A headline today in the UK newspaper Independent:
“Let us adopt Islamic family law to curb extremists, Muslims tell Kelly.”

Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, said he had asked for holidays to mark Muslim festivals and Islamic laws to cover family affairs which would apply only to Muslims.

Dr Pasha said he was not seeking sharia law for criminal offences but he said Muslim communities in Britain should be able to operate Islamic codes for marriage and family life.

Ri-i-ight. I’ve noticed the problem too. It’s all the young men running around without their veils on. And the wild girls: don’t get me started. They come under bad influences, and the next thing you know, they’re carrying blow-your-socks-off-red lipstick on to airplanes.

The application of a bit of Muslim family law should sort that right out.

Update, Aug. 21, 2006
British Muslim MP, Shahid Malik, says the same, more elegantly.

As I have repeatedly said, in this world of indiscriminate terrorist bombings, where Muslims are just as likely to be the victims of terrorism as other British and US citizens, we Muslims have an equal stake in fighting extremism.
…
When Lord Ahmed, the Muslim Labour peer, heard my comments — I said essentially that if Muslims wanted sharia they should go and live somewhere where they have it — he accused me of doing the BNP’s work. He is entitled to his opinion. However, a little honesty, like mine, in this whole debate might just restore trust in politicians and ease the population’s anxieties.
…
[earlier in the piece] …given that these [terrorist] acts are carried out in the name of our religion — Islam — we have a greater responsibility not merely to condemn but to confront the extremists.

I don’t know about “greater” responsibility, but certainly as much. And confronting extremism, rather than aiding and abetting it, might be worth a try, perhaps, bizarre as it sounds.