Jihad-by-Forest-Fire?

I was watching NBC News tonight to see if Brian Williams or anyone else would mention a story making the rounds today on the web referencing an Australian news report dated 7 September 2008 about the call by the imprisoned "architect of the new al Qaeda" Abu Musab Al-Suri (background information here) to wage jihad-by-fire in Australia. Not a word from NBC News. When the program ended, I went to my PC and called up the page with the story, under the by line of Josh Gordon, that I had read in the morning. Guess what? It's gone! It was here. And if you Google it you'll still get the headline: "Islam group urges forest fire jihad theage.com.au" I suppose they pulled it because it had suddenly become too "incendiary." If the Aussies started to think that Jihadists were responsible for the fires that have killed over 170 people, well, things could get ugly. Nevertheless, you can still find a copies of the same Josh Gordon story here on a Canadian web site and here.

A little more searching revealed other stories that also pre-date the fires. Here's one from the World Tribune dated 15 January 2008. My bolding.

U.S. officials monitoring terrorist web sites have discovered a call for using forest fires as weapons against “crusader” nations, in what may explain some recent wildfires in places like southern California and Greece.

A terrorist website was discovered recently that carried a posting that called for “Forest Jihad.” The posting was listed on the Internet on Nov. 26 [2007] and reported in U.S. intelligence channels last week.

The statement, in Arabic, said that “summer has begun so do not forget the Forest Jihad.”
The writer called on all Muslims in the United States, Europe, Russia and Australia to “start forest fires.”

You can find another story here.

The news reports about the fire indicate that high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds present "perfect conditions" for these raging fires. But it is also true that the Australian government is now saying that they are beginning to suspect arson. Does that mean that Muslims set these fires? Of course not. We have forest fires in the US all the time and when it's a case of arson I can't ever recall a Muslim being involved.

Nevertheless, when you have jihadist leaders calling on Muslims to carry out fire jihad, you have to take that into consideration the next time you're looking at a major forest fire.

What happened to the public's right to know?

I wonder: if a building loaded with refugees in Gaza just blew up this evening without any clear evidence of who was responsible, would the Western media not report the incident because Muslims around the world would probably blame the Israelis and innocent Jews in Europe and elsewhere in the world might become the targets of hate-crimes? Of course they'd report it. But here we have a case where a leading al Qaeda type calls for Muslims to set forest fires, especially in Australia, we have major fires break out unlike any others known in Australian history, arson is suspected, and not only does the media refuse to report the story, they actually go out and delete earlier reports that suggest a connection.

I hope the fires are natural and that no arson is invovled. And if there are arsonists, I pray they're not Muslims.