GUESS THEY HAVEN'T HEARD ABOUT AMERICA'S "OUTREACH" TO THE ISLAMIC WORLD – AT 8:56 A.M. ET:  There's a worrisome report from AP this morning, via Fox News, about the growth of Al Qaeda in North Africa.  There are possible implications for attacks on the United States:

WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda's terror network in North Africa is growing more active and attracting new recruits, threatening to further destabilize the continent's already vulnerable Sahara region, according to U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials.

The North African faction, which calls itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is still small and largely isolated, numbering a couple hundred militants based mostly in the vast desert of northern Mali. But signs of stepped-up activity and the group's advancing potential for growth worry analysts familiar with the region.

Americans sometimes hear numbers like "a couple hundred" and don't stop to think what several hundred terrorists can do, especially if they're willing to return their souls to Allah in the process. 

The rapid recent rise of the Al Qaeda group in Yemen — which spawned the Christmas airliner attack — is seen by U.S. officials and counterterrorism analysts as evidence that the North African militants could just as quickly take on a broader jihadi mission and become a serious threat to the U.S. and European allies.

The Mali-based militants have yet to show a capability to launch such foreign attacks, but are widening their involvement in kidnapping and the narcotics trade, reaping profits that could be used to expand terror operations, officials and analysts said...

...Those advances have set off alarms within the counterterrorism community, which watched as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula quickly transformed over the past year from militants preoccupied with internal Yemeni strife to a potent group recruiting and training insurgents for terror missions inside the U.S.

That threat was underscored by the failed Christmas airliner attack, which officials say was planned and directed by Yemeni insurgent leaders.

A key fear is that as AQIM expands, its criminal and insurgent operations will continue to destabilize the fragile governments of heavily Islamic North Africa, much as it has in Mali. The Maghreb includes the North African nations of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania.

COMMENT:  The left wing of President Obama's party wants us to wrap up the war on terror, as if the threat never really existed, and was somewhat the creation of BUSH (!!).  It's clear that the threat is expanding once again, despite outreach efforts by the administration.

We must finally realize that the jihadists are not simply "against" the United States.  They are for something, as the Nazis and Soviet Communists were for something.   They have an affirmative ideology that is too rarely discussed and presented in the American media.  (Do you ever recall a newspaper printing the Hamas charter?)  The multiculturalists believe that we must "understand" these views, "respect" them and give them validity, since all cultures are "equally valid."

No they're not.  And, while we must understand, we certainly don't have to "respect."  I find it hard to "respect" an ideology under which women aren't permitted to go to school, and can have their heads severed for defying their husbands.  What about you?

March 1, 2010