The Evil that Men Plan and Do

About 30 major terrorist plots are being planned in the U.K. according to the director general of MI5, every one a priority one case.

UPDATE:  Terror Threat Here to Stay

Tony Blair has backed the chilling assessment of the scale of the terror threat in the UK given by the head of MI5.

In a rare public statement, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller said the threat from Islamic extremists would last a "generation".

She said the security services were dealing with up to 30 plots designed to cause mass casualties.

And MI5 agents and the police are tracking more than 1,600 suspects.

Dame Eliza warned that weapons of mass destruction could be used in future attacks.

The Prime Minister said Dame Eliza was right in her assessment.

"This is a threat that has grown up over a generation," he said.

"And I think she is right in saying that the it will last a generation."

Novelist Martin Amis says nothing beats jihad that promises people they can be righteous and violent at the same time.  He recently wrote a short story about Mohammed Atta's last day on earth, in part because "his face, so rich and malevolent haunted" him.

As for motivation, he says in his story that Atta was in it for the killing, "killing people is obviously terrific fun. It's a crude expression of power to kill people, and it's arousing."

He believes that Western ideology is to blame for weakening the West in the war on terror.
moral relativism is so far advanced that we don't believe we can be right about anything. It just hasn't been accepted in the consciousness of the West that we have a fight with irrationality on our hands. Everyone's casting about, saying, "Why are they doing this?" And gooey-eyed newscasters on CNN say, "Why? Why this anger?" Paul Berman, the author of "Terror and Liberalism," calls this tendency "rationalist naïveté."[Terrorists] rejected reason. This is what Hitler did, and it's what Lenin did. They want to believe anything is possible, and they're not constrained by the laws of logic. This, plus the death-cult element, gives any movement a huge surge of energy.


But the West goes on. I'm talking about a certain strata of opinion that is dying for American failure in Iraq because they hate George Bush. They're dying for failure, but they're also attributing reason to the enemy, saying, "What terrible historic wrongs have we committed to bring this down on ourselves?" And they haven't made the leap to seeing that it isn't a matter of reason. It's a psychopathology. Their war is against God's enemies and it's meant to last for eternity, and how rational an undertaking is that? Yet people won't make that leap because it feels racist to them.

When asked where he draws the line between Islam and Islamism, he replied
Violence. Any violence against civilians is absolutely intolerable. [And] there is a huge moral difference between trying to kill civilians and trying not to kill civilians. When an American soldier kills an Iraqi civilian on purpose, he faces the death penalty. There's no equivalent mechanism among the enemy. [They have] celebrations throughout the land when a good number of civilians have been killed.

Meanwhile one French priest,  Father Patrick Desbois, travels through the Ukraine to hear confessions from villagers in the Ukraine...

the last witnesses to the mass killing of Jews in a little-known part of the Holocaust more than 60 years ago.

He recounts one story - just one of a thousand he's heard - of a Ukrainian woman who was ordered by Nazi soldiers to cook them dinner. As they ate, the 25 Germans went out in pairs to kill Jews. By the time the meal was over, they had shot 1,200. It was the first time the woman had ever told the story. "These people want absolutely to speak before they die," says Father Desbois of the bystanders. "They want to say the truth."


Father Patrick Desbois has become one of the world's foremost chroniclers of what the French call the Shoah par Balles - the Holocaust of bullets. Though neither Jewish nor Ukrainian, he spends half his year combing the poverty-stricken landscape of Ukraine to document the annihilation of tens of thousands of Jews at the hands of traveling bands of Nazis called the Einsatzgruppen.

It is a self-appointed task that led the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to decree him "Patrick the Saint." Embarrassed, Desbois calls the characterization a midrash - Hebrew for exaggeration.

The priest, who has devoted his clerical life to fighting anti-Semitism, is uncovering, village by village, unmarked mass graves from the Holocaust era. Here the Jews were shot, one by one, mother in front of child, child in front of father.

The "Holocaust of bullets" was every bit as brutal as the extermination of Jews by gas chamber, starvation, and other means at Auschwitz and elsewhere in Europe. Yet the depth and details of the tragedy in Ukraine have only recently surfaced .

Another report that a Hungarian Roman Catholic cardinal, the primate of the nation, was an informer for the communist government according to Ron Dreher at Crunchy Con who also points to  a YouTube video of Father Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Christian, who describes the brainwashing techniques he endured.

Horrific, the evil that men can do.  It only makes what the Pope Benedict said at Regensburg, more right and brave and  true.