Know thine enemy

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Flash: Newseek has apologized. The magazine's editor says he is sorry for printing a possibly "mistaken" article that accused U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo of throwing copies of the Koran into prisoners' toilets. Evidently, Newsweek particularly regrets the murderous anti-American rioting the erroneous report set off in various parts of the Muslim world.

Ironic though it may seem, we might just owe Newsweek a debt of gratitude for its shoddy reportage. After all, it provided a wake-up call to see how quickly and how skillfully our enemies seized upon evidence of American purported hostility to Islam to advance their own agenda.

But who exactly is the enemy and what is their agenda? The instigators of the riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan and their counterparts elsewhere are adherents more to a political ideology -- some call it Islamism, others Islamofascism -- than to a faith. Using organizational and coercive tactics taken right out of the Bolsheviks' playbook, this Islamist minority seeks first to dominate the Muslim faith's non-Islamist majority, then the rest of us.

For the Islamofascists, material like the fallacious Newsweek report is a godsend. They portray it as proof positive of undifferentiated Western hostility toward all Muslims.

Armed with such evidence, the Islamists then strive to persuade their heretofore peaceable and tolerant co-religionists there is no choice but to subscribe to the most virulently intolerant interpretations of the Koran -- and to join in a divinely ordered violent struggle (jihad) to subjugate "infidel" nations and peoples.

The implications of the Islamofascists' concerted, highly disciplined and organized and well-financed efforts are ominous. Unfortunately, this is true not only for places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Islamists have held sway for some time. Or in Saudi Arabia, the financial and ideological wellspring of modern Islamofascism. Islamism is on the march in such disparate places as Western Europe, Bosnia, Indonesia, Latin America and Africa.

Worse yet, Islamofascists are also increasingly a force to be reckoned with in the United States, as well. A chilling new book by noted author and investigative reporter Paul Sperry makes clear that the Islamists are well advanced in their efforts to bring jihad to a country near you.

In "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," Mr. Sperry describes in well-documented detail the inroads being made by mostly Saudi-funded Islamist operations in the United States. Many of these operations are headquartered in what he calls the "Wahhabi corridor" -- communities in Northern Virginia within a few miles of the nation's seat of government. Evidence of their progress to date includes:

• The takeover of non-Islamist mosques throughout the United States. Typically, this is accomplished by way of mortgages provided on favorable terms by Saudi financial institutions. Along with the financing come Wahhabi clerics, textbooks and other materials and the transformation of religious schools into Saudi-style madrassas.

• Islamist recruitment in U.S. prisons. Mr. Sperry describes how Sister Susan VanBaalen, who administers the federal prison ministries, has naively allowed problematic organizations tied to Saudi Arabia to proselytize in unsupervised meetings with inmates.