...For many or most Islamists, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine are merely Stage One. A "clash of civilizations" is precisely how they perceive what is going on--and not merely in the "occupied" countries or even in the immediate outer ring of Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Morocco, but also in France's suburbs and in Leeds and in Madrid, and in Sarajevo, the southern Philippines, southern Thailand, Nigeria, Sudan. Ask the lawyer who recently shot five "secularist" judges in Turkey; ask the assassin who a few years ago stabbed to death Theo van Gogh, a documentary movie producer in Amsterdam; ask the rioters in Nigeria who killed hundreds and burned down streets because of a beauty pageant. But in public, in the West, when they speak to journalists, the Islamists prefer to speak only of "Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine."

In this thicket of deceit, Islamists present Muslims always as victims, never as perpetrators. (When has there ever been a community with such a litany of grievances?) And they have read the West well, especially Western Europe, with its gnawing discontents, its guilty conscience over a colonial past, its burgeoning Muslim populations, its thirst for oil, its distaste for war, and, yes, its anti-Semitism. The Islamists, perhaps accurately, see the West as weak--and they exploit every fissure and crevice, every greed and appetite, every self-flagellating impulse. And as they privately snicker in their back rooms, they are busy taking the West for a ride: they laugh as the West beats itself over every dead Iraqi (the vast majority of the killings in Iraq are committed by Muslims against fellow Muslims, not by Westerners), and over every impoverished Afghan or Palestinian child (impoverished because their societies and economies have failed to develop, largely for internal reasons, beyond opium production and living on U.N. handouts), and over every human rights abuse to which some Muslims are subject in Guantánamo and Britain and the United States (when these pale in comparison with those perpetrated in every hour of every day in Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Saudi Arabia)...

...the dawa's terrorism-related activities are not limited to indoctrination and propaganda, though these have been crucial in raising a generation of Palestinian suicide-murderers. In his interrogation by Israeli security men in summer 2002, Mustafa Amjad, a doctor at al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, confessed to helping terrorists enter Israel. He was recruited by Hamas and worked for a hospital affiliated with a Hamas charity. In a Hamas kindergarten in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Palestinian security men found hidden thirty-two kilograms of explosives, according to Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajoub. Two members of a Jenin charity organization board, Jamal Abd al-Shamal Abu Hija and Ibrahim Hassan Ali Jaber, helped to plan terrorist attacks and to transport terrorists into Israel, according to Israeli authorities cited by Levitt. Another man, Nahed Rashid Ahmed Attalah, the director of food supplies for Gaza refugees with UNRWA, confessed to using U.N. vehicles to transport arms and terrorists. The Hamas-linked Charity and Contribution Committee of Ramallah-al-Bireh regularly provided funds for the families of suicide bombers, while Abd al-Khaliq al Natsheh, who headed the Hebron Islamic Charitable Society, was jailed for recruiting terrorists. The Hamas-affiliated Jihad Mosque in Hebron had a soccer team that carried out five terrorist operations in the first half of 2003, before the scorers (shooters?) were apprehended.

A similar duplicity informs much of Hamas's overseas fund-raising, which is ostensibly earmarked for good works among a needy population but is in fact also a channel for funding Izz al-Din al-Qassam operations. Terrorist attacks, as Levitt notes, are often expensive. An M-16 A2 assault rifle costs $6,642; bullets for an AK-47 cost $2.20 apiece; a stolen vehicle costs $656 to $1,550. Salah Shehadeh once estimated that operations cost $3,500 to $50,000 each. The bombing at the Hebrew University cafeteria in July 2002 was said by a Jordanian Islamist to have cost $50,000. So a parallel "economic jihad" was necessary to provide the funds. Levitt provides many details of the charitable organizations that raised the money, mainly in the West, and the mechanisms through which it was moved to the occupied territories. He also details the contributions of and from the various Arab states (mainly Iraq, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia).

A great deal of this charity-bound money reached Hamas fighters' families (those of Fatah seem to have done rather poorly), thus helping to motivate young Palestinians from poor families to carry out attacks. The Ramallah-al-Bireh branch of the Islah Charitable Society, a Hamas front, in November and December 2000 paid out $4,990 to martyrs' families, $16,257 to prisoners, and $17,275 to prisoners' families, according to documents captured by Israel and cited by Levitt. Follow-up monthly stipends for the families are also standard practice, apparently. And there are special one-time dispensations on holidays...