In the aftermath of the Health Care Reform bill passage, while the Democrats busy themselves characterizing their own constituents as terrorists, they might want to give some thought to the real terrorists out there they have been more or less ignoring for the last year. It might be prudent to do so since a 200 kiloton air burst over Washington would render the subject of health insurance, and Congress itself, moot.

One can understand, in a Mephistophelean sort of way, the strategy of recasting the legitimate rage of the American people as a mental disorder or worse (very ably described by Rhonda Robinson in her recent NRB post), but like the bill that has spawned all this outrage, it further consumes resources and attention better devoted to actual enemies of this country who forgot more about Death Panels than Zeke Emanuel will ever know.

Remember Iran?  You know, the “sanctions-will-have-them-shaking-in-their-sandals” guys who in concert with Russia are building nuclear reactors as we speak?  They don’t seem to have gotten the memo that the US administration is really, really concerned and have resumed nuclear weapons and delivery systems development — according to that Right-wing think-tank CNN.

By the way, I know Obama was swamped delivering the same “fired up, ready to go” speech over and over, and over, again here at home, but perhaps in exchange for his unilateral surrender of the Eastern European missile defense shield he might have extracted a promise from the Russians that at least we’d get dinner first.

Perhaps he got something like that for the nuclear disarmament deal reached today that is manifestly favorable to the Soviets Russians.  Consider:

And the two militaries will make relatively small cuts in the number of jets and land- or submarine-based missiles that carry nuclear warheads and bombs.

Inasmuch as our nuclear submarines are state of the art, and the Russian idea of a successful tour is “didn’t sink to the bottom with all hands” this seems equitable. Don’t know about you but I would really like to know what “relatively” means, since nuclear submarines, by virtue of their stealth, are the most powerful deterrent in our arsenal.

Never mind Dems – you got Health Care Reform passed! Woo-hoo! (Cue horns and confetti.)

The Israelis, whom we are currently scolding for building code violations, are facing an existential threat from Iran and pretty much any other country that rhymes with “Moving Van.” This, for the benefit of any Congressmen following along, is materially worse than being called a name.

In defiance of our clearly stated wishes it is probable Israel will not consent to become a smoking hole in furtherance of US-Arab-Iranian relations, and will take matters into its own hands.  At that point, Congressman Foghorn, figuring out new ways to extort money for your district will become the very least of your concerns.

So, Democrats, if you think things are hot now, consider life at ten million degrees. While you have been focusing on fool-proof schemes to turn the US into an economic slag-heap, our foes abroad have had carte blanche to develop more direct solutions to the same end. It might be an idea to worry less about the guy “brandishing a sign” and more about the one brandishing someone’s head, if you know what I mean.

You might want to take that up with the guy at the other end of the Mall, and good luck with that.

You’ve heard the narrative from the Beltway punditry: Our Muslims are better assimilated than Muslims in Europe. Our Muslims are more Westernized, less radicalized.

Well, it’s a false narrative.

We are seeing the horns of a Muslim insurgency in this country. We are being Europeanized. And we need a counterinsurgency plan not just in Afghanistan but right here at home.

While our leaders are too politically correct to even think about such a thing, they are starting to at least recognize the problem.

Even President Obama, who still won’t utter the M word, notes the rise in “extremists within our borders.” So does his Homeland Security chief, who just months earlier fixated on white militia groups as the main domestic terror threat.

“We are seeing young Americans who are inspired by al-Qaida and radical ideology,” echoed DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, while still failing to name the source of that ideology. “Home-based terrorism is here.”

And for the first time, a senior Justice Department official has gone on record saying the U.S. is turning into Europe, with Muslim citizens becoming more and more hostile toward the government, and plotting and carrying out more acts of homegrown terrorism.

“If there was ever a subconscious belief in the counterterrorism community that our society is different from Europe and therefore we don’t have to worry about problems like they’ve had, the activities in Minneapolis demonstrate we can’t think that way,” said Patrick Rowan, who led Justice’s national-security division when the government first started investigating the case of the 20 young Somali-American men who quit college and gave up promising careers in Minneapolis to join al-Qaida’s jihad in Somalia.

The FBI fears the recruits — who have U.S. passports — may use their terror training to come back and attack their own country. One of them already carried out a suicide bombing, becoming the first American to do so.

“We should all be on guard,” said Ralph Boelter who heads the FBI’s Minneapolis field office.

As we dig in deeper in Afghanistan, hostility among our own Muslim population will only grow deeper. And as we import more refugees from Muslim countries, demands for Shariah (think: Taliban) law will only grow shriller. Consider that:

* A new Gallup poll finds American Muslims are most likely to report feeling anger compared with the overall population — making even more of them ripe for radicalization.

* 2009 is shaping up to be most dangerous year in domestic terror since 9/11, a grave national security issue overlooked by a national media obsessed with boys trapped (or not) in balloons and golfers trapped in bimbo bunkers.

* In the past 12 months alone, there have been more than 75 arrests in the U.S. and abroad of homegrown terrorists including the Fort Hood shooter — all of them Muslim, almost all U.S. citizens.

* The FBI says Muslim groups have declared war on law enforcement over mosque surveillance and undercover informants — and we just saw the first mosques seized and the first shootout between a Muslim cleric and agents in Detroit.

* USA Today reports six Muslim “honor killings” in America over the past two years.

“Radicalization is clearly happening in the U.S.,” said NYPD intelligence unit chief Mitch Silber. “In years past, you couldn’t say that about the U.S. You could say it about Europe.”

The secularity of the American Muslim community is a myth. In fact, a larger share of American Muslims (80%) say their religion is an important part of their daily lives than British Muslims (70%), according to a recent Gallup poll. And our Muslims are nearly as militant in their faith as Iranians.

The same survey finds a disturbing percentage of American Muslim youth — 26% — are seething with anger compared with the national average among respondents aged 18 to 29.

These findings dovetail with a 2007 Pew Research poll finding an alarming 26%  — or roughly 100,000 — of U.S. Muslims aged 18 to 29 condone suicide bombings against non-Muslim “civilian targets.” That roughly tracks the 35% of young Muslim Brits who told Pew the same thing after some of them bombed the London subway.

Clearly, young Muslim Americans are as prone to radicalization as their European counterparts.

Take Tarek Mehanna, a 27-year-old American from Boston recently arrested on terror charges. Court records show his jihad cell, which allegedly planned to attack a shopping mall, justified suicide attacks against fellow American civilians “because they paid taxes to support the [U.S.] government, and because they were Kufar (non-believers).”

The group traveled to Pakistan to train with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the al-Qaida subcontractor blamed for last year’s bloodbath in Mumbai, India.

LeT also attracted a top official at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a terrorist front group posing as a civil-rights group. Ismail Royer — who worked under CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper at its national headquarters in Washington — is now serving 20 years in the pen. Prosecutors say he trained at LeT camps in Pakistan to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and recruited other Muslims in the D.C. suburbs to join the
anti-American jihad.

Confidential CAIR board meeting minutes first revealed in my new book, “Muslim Mafia,” show Hooper has been tasked as point man to get Royer out of prison, and has worked closely with the convict’s family and lawyers.

Hooper hired an accused terrorist, andthen after he confessed to related charges and was convicted, Hooper treated him as a hero. Even now, as prosecutors call Royer an “inveterate liar” who refuses to cooperate in other terror cases as promised — CAIR’s communications director is doing everything he can to put this dangerous criminal back on the streets.

Royer is no different from the accused jihadist in Boston. Both want to kill Americans.

Only difference: Hooper’s protege worked as a spokesman and civil-rights coordinator at CAIR headquarters.

We don’t need CAIR’s brand of civil rights, something the FBI, which recently cut off ties to it, finally understands.

Royer was ringleader of the so-called Virginia Jihad Network, which the feds thought they’d broken up. But now there’s a new group of Virginia jihadists: five young Muslim men arrested in Pakistan for trying to do the same thing — train to kill U.S. troops. All five are U.S. citizens, and include a dental student described as “cool, and all-American.”

How do Muslims raised in America become so radicalized?

They’re steeped in the anti-American hate of mosques and national front groups (like CAIR, ISNA and the Muslim Students Association) controlled by the radical Muslim Brotherhood and funded by the Saudis. Through sermons and Saudi literature and the media, they teach them that America is the enemy.

This is the jihad factory, fueled by jihadi websites, churning out homegrown terrorists. And the FBI is only now trying to dismantle it.

Arrests of homegrown Muslim terrorists are averaging more than six a month. They are threatening both hard targets, such as military bases, and soft targets, such as hotels and shopping malls. That’s an alarming up-tempo in terrorist activity, belying official spin the problem is confined to a small minority of the Muslim community. The home-based jihad threat is much larger than the administration suggests.

“There are people living among us, in our communities around the U.S., that are honing their skills to carry out acts of murder and mayhem,” warned senior FBI official Owen Harris.

He like other government officials can’t publicly say what kind of “people” would be doing such treacherous things.

But make no mistake, he’s referring to Islamic fanatics. While they may be spread out over different cities — Raleigh, N.C., Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Denver, Washington, Chicago, even sleepy Killeen, Texas — and while they may have different ethnicities — Arab, South Asian, Eastern European, Hispanic, white — they all share a common bond in jihad. While we may call them Americans, they do not. They hate their country and want to destroy it.

Most don’t look like wild-eyed traitors. Some even appear patriotic.

Witness American citizen Daood Gilani. A Chicago businessman, he changed his name in 2005 to David Headley.

But he was trying to fit in for all the wrong reasons. He wanted to escape notice as a Muslim and allow for easy transit through immigration on terror missions to Pakistan, where he attended training camps run by LeT.

Federal prosecutors this month charged Headley with, among other things, conspiracy to murder Americans.

Then there’s Hazam Ali Ahmed, who for years has run a neighborhood convenience store in Knoxville, Tenn.

Authorities last week found two guns inside his store, and say he planned to carry out a terrorist attack at a shopping mall.

“He referred to jihad,” the FBI said in court documents charging the 35-year-old Muslim. “And stated that he was connected to al-Qaida.”

Meanwhile, more and more Muslims in America are trying to assert Islamic rights under Shariah law, a medieval monument to human-rights abuses practiced by the Taliban and Saudis.

Right now in this country, we are seeing a spike in “honor killings” — murders of women by relatives who claim the victim brought shame to the family — something normally seen in Muslim countries. America is now averaging one every four months. And we will see more.

The latest victim is a 20-year-old Arizona girl who died last month after her father, an Iraqi immigrant, ran her and her boyfriend’s mother over in a parking lot. He admits the attack was intentional, explaining his daughter brought shame to the family by living with a man.

Lest anyone think such murders are confined to Muslim immigrants, a New York TV executive earlier this year sawed off his wife’s head in a suspected honor killing.

And there appears to be broad support and acceptance of this barbaric ritual in mainstream Islamic circles in America.

One of the most popular fatwah banks in the U.S. — maintained by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America — does not condemn honor killings. It only discourages men from doing it themselves.

“Imams implement the Shariah punishments,” decrees AMJA. And execution is not the “unvarying” punishment for fornicating daughters or sisters, it adds. They can also be punished by “lashing.” (The sentence for adulterous women, however, is always “stoning.”)

“Would it be permissible for a brother to kill his sister if he saw her committing zina (pre-marital sex)?” a Muslim living in America asked AMJA’s scholars in 2007.

In any other culture, the answer would be an emphatic, resounding: “No, not ever. It’s immoral and against the law, and you’d be prosecuted for first-degree murder.” But in the subculture of radical Islam co-existing in the shadows of the most advanced country in the world, the answer from AMJA was: “It depends.”

Another false narrative says our Muslims demonstrate a “fierce loyalty to America,” as Obama just claimed in Oslo without offering any concrete examples. Apparently he’s giving them credit just for choosing to live here.

He needs to get out more. He can start by driving across the Potomac to Alexandria and Falls Church, Va. FBI agents and detectives who have worked counterterror cases and entered Muslim homes in those Washington suburbs, know better.

Inside, they’ve seen home computers with Osama bin Laden screen savers. They’ve seen refrigerators with children’s drawings depicting Jews and Christians as pigs and apes and hateful anti-Jewish and anti-Christian
poems.

They’ve seen the throngs of Muslims rallying around terrorist defendants at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, even after they’ve confessed to crimes. They’ve heard respect Muslim leaders bash U.S. prosecutors as “Zionists.”

They also know that the Skyline Towers, a luxury apartment complex housing thousands of Muslims in Falls Church, erupted into cheers after the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11. We’re not talking about Gaza or the West Bank. This was just minutes from the Pentagon.

Authorities have made so many trips to the high-rise complex to investigate tenants that they’ve dubbed it “Taliban Towers.”

Just up the street is the still-bustling 9/11 mosque, Dar al-Hijrah, where the hijackers, the Fort Hood shooter and a shockingly long rap sheet of other terrorists have worshipped.

The vast majority of Americans have no idea, but the very capital of our nation is a breeding ground for terrorists. In fact, the Washington area is Ground Zero of the anti-American insurgency being carried out by radicalized American Muslims in plain view of our government.

Yet it’s doing next to nothing about it, still deluded by the notion it can win “hearts and minds” by cow-towing to ISNA and other radical Brotherhood fronts, who simply use outreach events as an opportunity to gather intelligence and tip off targets of terror probes.

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on, we are going to see a much broader participation in jihad by Muslims. Not just Muslims living overseas, but those living here, inside America.

Will we talk honestly about this problem? Or will we turn a blind eye — and continue to be blindsided, like those 42 brave Americans in Texas?

Are we going to defuse this religious powder keg? Or are we going to continue to commit politically correct suicide?

Pauk Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow, is author of “Infiltration” and co-author of the new book, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Email: Sperry@SperryFiles.com

The decade-long attempt to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons may have entered the final round on Sunday when Iran announced to the world it intended to build ten new uranium enrichment sites.

“This is really a statement of defiance,” a former senior Israeli atomic official told The Wall Street Journal, “telling the world we are going to go ahead with our nuclear program.”

The Iranian government’s statement came only two days after the world’s major powers condemned Iran’s nuclear program, which, despite Iranian denials, is believed to be producing nuclear weapons. China and Russia joined the United States, France, Britain and Germany to support an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolution ordering Iran to stop construction on the uranium enrichment plant near Qom, a secret facility whose existence President Obama revealed last September.

Due to the international criticism, Iranians are now threatening to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reduce cooperation with the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. North Korea is the only other country ever to have pulled out of the treaty.

According to news reports, the Iranian decision to thumb their nose at the U.N. and world opinion and construct new nuclear fuel refinement facilities was made Sunday evening at a cabinet meeting chaired by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad. The Iranians will start work on five of the new sites within two months and at an unspecified future time on the remaining five.

It is believed the reason for the extra facilities is to allow Iran to build more nuclear bombs. One military analyst says U.N. weapons inspectors and the U.S. Department of Defense are of the opinion Iran currently has enough enriched fuel for one nuclear weapon. Iran would like to have several more in order to present itself as a “credible threat.”

The Iranian announcement signals a defeat for President Obama’s ‘soft’ approach towards the Islamic Republic’s leadership. In an interview with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television network last January, Obama said Iran’s leaders would find the extended hand of diplomacy if they “unclenched” their fists.

“As I said in my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” Obama said.

But as early as March there were already signs that Iran was in no mood to unclench and drop the rock it was holding in the form of its nuclear weapons program. That month, President Obama released a video, wishing the Iranians a happy New Year, which, in Iran, falls on the first day of spring. In return for his friendly overture, the American president received from the Iranian government nothing but a demand for apologies for America’s past transgressions, real or imagined, against Iran.

Sunday’s statement simply proves what most have suspected all along: One cannot talk to the Iranian leaders and that they are simply stringing out negotiations to complete their nuclear arms program. And the fact the Iranians still celebrate the 1979 American embassy seizure every November, a flagrant and criminal breach of international law, shows they do not want to talk to the United States in particular and are still willing to flout international norms.

Essentially, Iran’s leaders are religious fanatics who believe they have been chosen by God to establish a Shiite hegemony over the majority Sunni Islamic world and then, hopefully, over the whole planet. Of the world’s one billion Muslims, about 220 million are minority Shiites, of whom the largest number, about 62 million, live in Iran. Pakistan contains the next largest community of Shiites at 33 million, while India is third with 30 million and Iraq fourth with 18 million.

Iran’s mullah regime sees possessing nuclear weapons as instrumental to its plans for world domination. Nuclear arms would also add significant muscle to Iran’s security in a part of the world where any sign of weakness or vulnerability could be dangerous. Iranians have not forgotten how Iraq took advantage of Iran’s revolutionary turmoil to launch a devastating eight-year war against it in 1980. And like Russia with its former Eastern European satellites, Iran would also use nuclear weapons to intimidate weaker neighbors.

The Asia Times columnist, Spengler (a literary pseudonym), gives another reason why Iran is not afraid to seek confrontation over its nuclear weapons program. Iranian demographics have sunk to West German levels of about 1.6 children per woman, which would make waging a war in 20 years impossible. Iran currently has enough young men to embark on a military adventure, whether internally for nuclear weapons acquisition or externally against the Sunni world, while in twenty years it won’t.

Iran’s heavily-subsidized economy is also imploding. Like Argentina with its 1982 Falkland Islands’ invasion and Germany in 1939, economically it is now or never for Iran to make a grab for the ring. In a year’s time it may be too late, especially if oil prices drop dramatically again. Besides, again like Argentina, a military adventure would probably cause those Iranian people actively opposed to the regime to put aside their economic and political grievances and rally around the country’s leadership in nationalistic pride.

But if Iran wants a fight, it will most likely get one. The Islamic regime’s Holocaust-denying leadership has openly stated it wants to erase Israel from the map. Facing such a naked threat to their country’s existence, one military publication states the Israelis are now openly discussing using a missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. While Israel’s Jericho missiles can carry nuclear warheads, they also can be equipped with a conventional warhead. An attack by Israeli warplanes is also a possibility.

The Israelis already have American backing for such a strike if negotiations fail, as they appear to have. American Vice-President Joe Biden said in an ABC interview last July America would not prevent an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. And since the only other option would be a nuclear-armed Iran, the Israelis will now likely ensure this last round ends in a knockout.