Aware that there was this legal tussle between the family of the deceased and the religious authorities as to whether Lawrence be buried according to Islamic or Catholic rites, they took his body to Segamat, had the remains cremated, and the ashes buried.

And, so it seems, all hell has broken loose.

Frankly, I don’t blame the friends of Lawrence.

Since the Everest Climber case, in 2005, culminating in the dismissal by the Federal Court of the application for leave to appeal at the instance of the widow, it has become evident that there is no judge in our civil courts, from the lowest rung to the highest court, that has the courage to abide by their oath of office.

When the citizenry lose confidence in the institutions that were set up to protect them, they will take the law into their own hands. Haris Ibrahim. Well, for those who despair, this is a novel solution, you and I know that the law slants one way, their way. Cremation, a speedy one at that is the solution in a hopeless situation, noting, previous cases. My hat's off to these bunch of friends. Well done, you deserve a round of applause.

Before dawn on Sept. 12, 490 b.c., 10,000 mostly Athenian hoplites formed for an assault on the Persian force assembled before them on the Marathon Plain, nearly 25 miles from Athens. At the sound of a single trumpet, the advance began. Eight men deep on the flanks and four deep in the center, the phalanx of bristling spear points and blazing shields began its slow, inexorable march toward the enemy.

Picking up the pace, first to a fast walk and then to a trot, the Athenian hoplites closed on their enemy at what must have appeared to the waiting Persians a dazzling pace. At 600 yards’ distance the mass of men began to scream their fierce and nerve-shattering battle cry: Alleeee!

But the Persians had never before faced an army like this one. Athenian hoplites learned the art of war against other hoplites, and their kind of war was not decided by a hail of arrows. It was settled by a collision of wooden shields and deadly iron-tipped spears, wielded by heavily armored men. It was a horrible and terrifying confrontation of pushing, screaming, half-crazed men, who gouged, stabbed, and kicked at their opponents until one side could bear the agony no longer and broke. The victors would then launch a murderous pursuit of their defeated foes as the bloodlust propelled them forward.

This was the kind of war charging down on the Persians, and it arrived at almost incomprehensible speed, for at 200 yards’ distance the Athenian trot became a sprint. Finally, the Persian archers let fly, but to no effect. Never having seen such a rapid advance, they mistimed their shots, and most of the arrows flew harmlessly over the charging hoplites. Hastily the archers reloaded, and the shield-bearers uneasily began inching backwards, as ten thousand metal-encased killers closed upon them.

In a shuddering instant, the hoplites smashed into the lightly protected Persians and convulsed their defensive line.

Then the killing began.

Before the battle was over, nearly 6,500 of Persia’s elite, and until that day supposedly invincible, soldiers had perished. Athens’ battlefield victory had cost it 192 citizen hoplites.

But the day was not won yet. To the Athenians’ horror, those Persians who had escaped were sailing south — toward an undefended Athens. Although they were near the limits of human endurance, the Athenians hefted their heavy shields and formed in marching order. Racing against time, the exhausted hoplites force-marched the 25 miles to Athens. By the time the Persians arrived off Athens’ western coast, awaiting them on the ridge overlooking the beach were thousands of Athenian hoplites ready to contest their landing. The Persians admitted defeat and sailed for home.

* * *

Almost unremarked in the memorials for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 was the 2,500th anniversary of the first time Western civilization came under assault from the East. (Many say the 2,500th anniversary was last year, but they forget to account for the year 0 — and I use the Athenian calendar, as Herodotus would have.) In the 2,500 years since the Battle of Marathon, the threat from the East has waxed and waned from one century to the next. In the years after the Industrial Revolution the West’s increasing technological superiority caused many to believe the threat from the East had disappeared, or at least was so weakened as to be of little concern. In fact, during the Age of Imperialism the West felt itself strong enough to counterattack. But the Western offensive surge was but a brief interlude, and one much of the West has spent the past two generations in abject apology for.

If the 9/11 attacks demonstrated anything, it is that our collective repentance for imperialism did not bring forth a new era of peace. The threat from the East is diminished, but far from vanquished. Thankfully, between us and those who would do us harm stands the finest military force in the world. Unfortunately, as the budget battles heat up, many in Congress are placing America’s military squarely in their crosshairs. They would do well to remember that, 2,500 years ago, Western civilization’s continuing existence rested on a thin line of bronze-encased men “as hard as oak” who bravely went forward against overwhelming odds, to victory and never-ending glory. This nation’s modern hoplites have followed that tradition for a decade of continuous conflict. Unfortunately, the threat continues. One must sincerely hope that our modern Solons possess the wisdom of the ancients, who would never consider putting away their armor and shields while the enemy remained at the gates. National Review

— Jim Lacey is professor of strategic studies at the Marine War College and the author of a new history of the Battle of Marathon, The First Clash.

Ye’or contends that a concerted effort is being made not only to ensure that Muslim immigrants in Europe remain squarely in the second category, but also that they become the means to transform Europe politically, culturally, and religiously. Leading this effort is the Organization of the Islamic Conference, established in 1969, which, a few months ago, no doubt on the advice of a highly compensated public-relations professional, renamed itself the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The OIC represents 56 countries plus the Palestinian Authority. It claims also to represent Muslim immigrants — the “Diaspora” — in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. It is pan-Islamic: It seeks to unify and lead the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims. In a manual first published in 2001, “Strategy of Islamic Cultural Action in the West,” the IOC asserts that “Muslim immigrant communities in Europe are part of the Islamic nation.” It goes on to recommend, Ye’or notes, “a series of steps to prevent the integration and assimilation of Muslims into European culture.”

The IOC, she argues, is nothing less than a “would-be, universal caliphate.” It might look different from the caliphates of the Ottomans, Fatimids, and Abbasids. It might resemble, instead, a thoroughly modern trans-national bureaucracy. But, already, the OIC exercises significant power through the United Nations, and through the European Union, which has been eager to accommodate the OIC while simultaneously endowing the U.N. with increasing authority for global governance. Among the other organizations that Ye’or says are doing the OIC’s bidding are the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, and the European Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC).

In the eyes of OIC officials, no problem in the contemporary world is more urgent than “Islamophobia,” which it calls “a crime against humanity” that the U.N. and the EU must officially outlaw. Even discussing why so much terrorism is carried out in the name of Islam is to be forbidden. The OIC insists, too, that international bodies ban “defamation of religion,” by which it means criticism of anything Islamic. Defamation of Judaism, Christianity, Bahai, Hinduism, and even heterodox Muslim sects such as the Ahmadiyya is common within the borders of many OIC countries, a fact the OIC refuses to acknowledge.

Instead, the OIC has specifically “warned” the EU and the “international community” of the “dangers posed by the influence of Zionism, Neo-Conservatism, aggressive Christian evangelicalism, Jewish extremism, Hindu extremism and secular extremism in international affairs and the ‘War on Terrorism.’”

Though funding for terrorist groups flows generously from individuals in oil-rich OIC countries, the organization itself is not a supporter of terrorism. Neither, however, is it an opponent. Violence directed against those it views as enemies of Islam is defined as “resistance” — even when civilians, including women and children, are the intended victims.

Whenever Malaysia Day comes around, I remember those who wanted to 'Ganyang Malaysia'. We remember it as "Confrontation". We beat the shit out of the enemy and became Malaysia, warts and all. Here is for all who got maimed and laid down their lives, in defending your nation, which sometimes grates on our sensitivities and sacrifice. Happy Malaysia Day!!

Captured Indonesians guarded by the Malaysian Police in short pants.

‘What went wrong?” That was the title of Bernard Lewis’s landmark book on Islam’s thousand years of global dominance followed by the decline of the caliphate between the 17th century, when Muslim armies were halted at the Gates of Vienna, and the early 20th century, when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. This fall from grace left deep scars — grievances expressed most lethally on Sept. 11, 2001, soon after Professor Lewis’s book was completed.

Ten years later, the question we might be asking is “What has gone wrong with us?” The atrocities of 9/11 were said to be a new Pearl Harbor that would once again “awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

She did, however, note what she imagines to be “the causes and roots” of the many acts of terrorism carried out by Muslim militants in the name of Islam, including, as usual, “the plight of Palestinians” and the belief that the West is “exploiting their oil and supporting dictators.” According to the Guardian newspaper, she added that terrorist campaigns could not be solved militarily, so she “hoped there were those — she implied in Western governments — who were considering having ‘talks with al-Qaida.’”

A second example: National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said in a recent speech that he and President Obama know what the Iranians are against but “what are they for?” Have Donilon and Obama read nothing that Iran’s revolutionaries have written? Have they heard nothing that Ayatollah Ali Khameini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have said? Let me boil it down: They are for restoring to Islam the power and glory it enjoyed a millennium ago. They are for the defeat of the Great Satan and the Little Satan and anyone else who defies Allah’s will as they interpret it.

Manningham-Buller, Donilon, Obama, and so many others — they are smart people. So, again, what has gone wrong? I think they have become disoriented. I use the word advisedly.

The “Orient” is the East. Not so long ago, the study of the Middle East and Islam was a discipline called Orientalism. The greatest modern Orientalist was — and for my money, remains — Professor Lewis, now 95 years old and still sharp as a scimitar.

In more than three dozen books, he has detailed the history and cultures of the great Islamic empire founded by fierce and determined conquerors who, starting in the 7th century, pushed west to Spain and east to the Philippines, defeating, among others, Christians and occupying their lands including, in 1453, the Byzantine capital of Constantinople (now called Istanbul).

These forces marched north into the European heartland as well, but their ambitions were frustrated in two historic battles. The first was the Battle of Tours in 732 when Charles Martel, leading the Franks, stopped the powerful forces of the Umayyad Caliphate from overrunning what is now France as well as other Western European territories.

The second was the Battle of Vienna in 1683 when Jan Sobieski, king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, seeing the Turks close to breaching the walls of the city, led his outnumbered troops in a daring counterattack. The date was September 12. Pope Innocent XI hailed Sobieski as the “savior of Vienna and Western European civilization.” The Ottoman commander, Kara Mustafa Pasha, was strangled with a silk cord by order of the commander of the Janissaries, the home guard of the Sultan.

Strangely, both the media and the public rarely mention some of the most important aftershocks in the decade since 9/11. Here are some representative examples of landmark events that to this day remain mostly undiscussed.

1. No more falling skyscrapers? Few imagined that the United States could go an entire decade without another major terrorist attack — other than freelancing jihadists’ killing members of the American armed forces. Almost monthly, U.S. authorities have thwarted serial attempts to cause mayhem on airliners, bridges, city squares, shopping malls, and high-rises. It was almost as if the more we caricatured the often silly security measures at the airport, blasted Guantanamo Bay, and ridiculed renditions, the more we assumed that our security, initially thought permanently imperiled (“not if, but when”), was once again our birthright. Someone somewhere did something that kept us safe, but we were strangely afraid to acknowledge that there was any utility in the very protocols and foreign operations that had weakened our enemies to the point of an inability to replicate 9/11. If immediately after the attacks in New York and Washington we accepted that the old security was no longer possible, soon thereafter we started assuming not only that it was natural, but that, in organic fashion, it had reappeared through spontaneous regeneration.

3. The taboo enemy dead. After Vietnam, who would wish to count enemy dead? To a 21st-century public, such terrible arithmetic might seem macabre, intrinsically politicized, or simply irrelevant in war. The age-old idea that killing die-hard enemies wins wars and ensures the peace is for some antithetical to the spirit of counterinsurgency doctrine, at least superficially so. Few would ever channel William Tecumseh Sherman’s frightening remarks that to win the Civil War the Union army would have to kill or humiliate several thousands of the Southern “cavalier” class, whose livelihoods depended on slavery, whose zeal had started the war, and whose boasts of martial superiority had galvanized the Confederate belief that its fighters were far better than the Northerners and could trump inferior resources.

Tens of thousands of hard-core jihadists from as far away as Algeria, Chechnya, Egypt, the Gulf monarchies, Libya, Syria, and Yemen obeyed the calls for jihad issued by the likes of Osama bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi. They flocked to al-Qaeda’s “main theater” of jihad in Iraq — and in Baghdad and throughout Anbar Province were killed in droves by the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies. Only off the record will military officers confess that the eventual American success in Iraq was due in some part to doing away with murderous jihadists and impressing the local population with our martial superiority. And even off the record, few will suggest that the absence of such killers from the world’s pool of hard-core terrorists may well have made life safer at home. We are in a new age when we “beat” or “subdue” the enemy but do not admit that we do that often through killing him. The Iraq War has become a story about troop levels, hearts and minds, and training the Iraqis, but not much about a shooting war in which thousands of jihadists lost.

An unprecedented collaboration between the Obama administration and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, formerly called the Organization of the Islamic Conference) to combat “Islamophobia” may soon result in the delegitimization of freedom of expression as a human right.

The administration is taking the lead in an international effort to “implement” a U.N. resolution against religious “stereotyping,” specifically as applied to Islam. To be sure, it argues that the effort should not result in free-speech curbs. However, its partners in the collaboration, the 56 member states of the OIC, have no such qualms. Many of them police private speech through Islamic blasphemy laws and the OIC has long worked to see such codes applied universally. Under Muslim pressure, Western Europe now has laws against religious hate speech that serve as proxies for Islamic blasphemy codes.

But thanks to a puzzling U.S. diplomatic initiative that was unveiled in July, Resolution 16/18 is poised to become a springboard for a greatly reinvigorated international effort to criminalize speech against Islam, the very thing it was designed to quash.

Citing a need to “move to implementation” of Resolution 16/18, the Obama administration has inexplicably decided to launch a major international effort against Islamophobia in partnership with the Saudi-based OIC. This is being voluntarily assumed at American expense, outside the U.N. framework, and is not required by the resolution itself.

On July 15, a few days after the Norway massacre, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton co-chaired an OIC session in Istanbul on religious intolerance. It was there that she announced the initiative, inviting the OIC member-states’ foreign ministers and representatives to the inaugural meeting of the effort that the U.S. government would host this fall in Washington. She envisions it as the first in a series of meetings to decide how best to implement Resolution 16/18.

In making the announcement, Clinton was firm in asserting that the U.S. does not want to see speech restrictions: “The resolution calls upon states to ‘counter offensive expression through education, interfaith dialogue, and public debate . . . but not to criminalize speech unless there is an incitement to imminent violence.’” (This is the First Amendment standard set forth in the 1969 Supreme Court case of Brandenburg v. Ohio.)

With the United States providing this new world stage for presenting grievances of “Islamophobia” against the West, the OIC rallied around the initiative as the propaganda windfall that it is. It promptly reasserted its demands for global blasphemy laws, once again sounding the call of its failed U.N. campaign for international laws against the so-called defamation of Islam. It has made plain its aim to use the upcoming conference to further pressure Western governments to regulate speech on behalf of Islam.