(CNSNews.com) – A global effort to counter claims by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) that it is acting in the name of Islam must include a counter-narrative that highlights “our profound respect” for the religion, the administration’s point man in the anti-ISIS coalition said this week.Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen was speaking in Kuwait, where representatives of more than a dozen Islamic and Western met to discuss using public communications to combat ISIS (also known as Da’esh – an acronym for the Arabic rendering of the group’s name, ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fil-Iraq wa ash-Sham).
“As we seek to expose Da’esh’s true nature,” Allen told the gathering on Monday, “we must also tell a positive story, one that highlights our respect – our profound respect for Islam’s proud traditions, its rich history, and celebration of scholarship and family and community.”
“We must work with clerics and scholars and teachers and parents to tell the story of how we celebrate Islam, even as we show that Da’esh perverts it.”
The conference in Kuwait City brought together officials from leading Arab states, Turkey, France, Britain and the U.S. to discuss ways their governments are working to counter ISIS’ message.
The jihadist group, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq and has declared a “caliphate” in those areas, runs a dynamic propaganda and recruitment operation, including a full-color online magazine, video clips, and an active social media presence.
The Qur’an and other Islamic texts, along with viewpoints of historical and modern-day Muslim scholars, are central to its messaging , and the U.S.-led coalition is prioritizing attempts to counter the purported religious justifications for its actions.
Allen said that ISIS propaganda serves both to attract recruits and “perverts the innocent.”
“It is only when we contest Da’esh’s presence online and deny the legitimacy of its message – the message that it sends to vulnerable young people – and as we expose Da’esh for the un-Islamic, criminal cult of violence that it really is, it is only then that Da’esh will be truly defeated.”
He said every member of the coalition had a role to play in combating the image ISIS portrays of itself.
“Da’esh’s online messengers present themselves as the true and victorious representatives of Islam. They seek to portray themselves as winners, true leaders worthy of financial support that attracts and radicalizes foreign fighters,” he said.
“I believe every coalition partner, every one, has a unique and a vital role to play in striking down this image – this image within the context of our respective cultural, religious, and national norms.”
Allen noted that leading religious figures in the region have spoken out against ISIS on religious grounds.
Last August, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia declared that ISIS’ ideas and violent conduct made it “enemy number one of Islam.” The same month, Egypt’s grand mufti launched an Internet-based campaign to discredit ISIS, and urged media to stop using any name for the group that incorporates the word “Islamic.”
More than 120 Islamic figures last month signed a letter to ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – who calls himself “Caliph Ibrahim” and has called on jihadists everywhere to swear loyalty to him – challenging him on religious grounds….
Thursday, 30 October 2014
US Envoy: To defeat the Islamic State, we must “tell the story of how we celebrate Islam”
Wednesday, 29 October 2014
FBI Evidence: CAIR Leaders are HAMAS USA
Tom Trento presents FBI “smoking gun” evidence that the Palestine Committee which oversaw and ran the Holy Land Foundation (convicted on 36 counts of providing material support to terrorism, money laundering, conspiracy and tax fraud) was founded by a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) and HAMAS Leader Mousa abu Marzook along with Senior Executives Nihad Awad and Senior officer Omar Ahmad who both Co-Founded the largest Muslim advocacy group in the United States CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) for the purpose of raising money for the HAMAS and to support a media, public relations, and political campaign to ultimately destroy Israel.
Al Qaeda Targets Oil Tankers, Sea Lanes
Center For Security Policy, By Bill Gertz:
Al Qaeda is urging jihadists to conduct attacks on U.S. and foreign oil tankers and strategic sea lanes in a new global campaign of economic warfare against the United States, according to the terrorist group’s latest English-language magazine.
“Even if a single supertanker (or even an ordinary westbound cargo-vessel) were to be attacked in one of the chokepoints or hijacked and scuttled in one of these narrow sea lanes, the consequences would be phenomenal,” wrote al Qaeda member Hamza Khalid in the recently published, 117-page al Qaeda magazine “Resurgence.”
The magazine is a key recruiting tool and propaganda organ for English speakers from the group once headed by Osama bin Laden, whose death is lamented in one article by current leader Ayman al Zawahiri. The magazine contains articles on al Qaeda’s new drive in Southwest Asia, and recruiting women into its ranks, and makes vague references to al Qaeda’s current feud with the rival Islamic State, that has seized parts of Syria and Iraq.
The article on economic warfare includes maps showing strategic shipping lanes around the world and key oil chokepoints, like the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, where up to 35 percent of the world’s ship borne oil passes, and Southeast Asia’s Strait of Malacca, the strategic passage for oil from the Middle East to Asia.
“It represents the Achilles heel not just of the energy market, but also of western economies dependent on oil from the Muslim world,” Khalid stated.
“A sustained disruption in this supply system would not only increase insurance costs for international shipping, but also affect the price of oil globally.”
Khalid called for attacks on both U.S. military facilities near oil chokepoints and energy supply lines.
Attacks on oil tankers would cause a spike in oil prices, increases in shipping rates and insurance, and a boost in military spending to assure open sea lanes, he stated.
“Simultaneous attacks on western shipping or western oil tankers (a sea-based version of the cargo plane bomb plot) in more than one chokepoint would bring international shipping to a halt and create a crisis in the energy market.”
Khalid also called for attacks on western oil workers in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, as well as more sophisticated and hard-to-carry-out attacks against U.S. Navy facilities in Diego Garcia, Bahrain, and Djibouti.
“A coordinated effort to disrupt enemy shipping in the future in all of these regions would not only hurt the enemy economically, but also stretch their resources further in this global war,” Khalid stated.
American al Qaeda member Adam Gadahn stated in a second article headlined “besiege them” that “it is time for us to fight fire with fire, and impose our own blockade and embargo on the Jews and crusaders, by hitting them where it hurts and striking the heart and lifeblood of their economy, represented by international trade and finance.”
Gadahn said the global economic system currently is “fragile and vulnerable” as the result of unrest in the Arab and Muslim world and debt and budget crises in Europe and the United States.
Al Qaeda plans to use the current “war of attrition” underway against the United States to force the collapse of the global economic system.
Targets for the economic warfare campaign include cargo ships and merchant vessels in “Islamic waters,” actions aimed at closing off canals and straits, and disrupting shipping routes “wherever and however possible.”
“Any of their ships are legitimate targets, but exports are the key to any economy, including the economies of the West,” Gadahn wrote. “The mujahideen must seek to deprive the enemies of the precious oil and mineral resources they are stealing from us and using to fuel their war machine, by sabotaging crusader-run oil wells and mines in Islamic lands and destroying pipelines before the oil reaches the coast and falls into enemy hands, and by sinking their supertankers and sabotaging their oil rigs in enemy waters, and in the process, ruining their lucrative fishing industries.”
Other economic measures include a boycott of U.S. products and retailers including Walmart, McDonald’s, Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft, Nestle, and Unilever. The use of banks also is to be avoided and al Qaeda is advocating reinstating the use of gold and silver as a medium of exchange.
Gadahn stated that al Qaeda wants Muslims to break away from the global financial system.
“The path to victory over our enemies and the establishment of our caliphate isn’t confined to armed action alone, but includes all legitimate ways and means which support, strengthen, and advance the military effort and lead to our success in this battle for the future of the Muslim [world],” Gadahn said. “So don’t delay, and play your part in the jihad today, whether your part be military, financial, economic, educational, motivational, or otherwise.”
Retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, a former Special Forces commando and undersecretary of defense for intelligence during the George W. Bush administration, said Islamic terrorists are keenly aware of American reliance on Mideast oil.
“They know that our economy is fragile and can be devastated by sudden increases in the global oil prices,” Boykin said in an email. “It is obvious that they will try to attack our weaknesses and oil is clearly one of our major vulnerabilities.”
The article is another indication that Islamists “are indeed an enemy and they have in fact declared war on America,” Boykin said.
Kevin Freeman, an expert on economic warfare, said al Qaeda as early as 2005 outlined a timeline for its war against the West that included fomenting an Arab uprising and then launching an economic warfare campaign.
“It has always been an economic war,” Freeman said. “From the first attacks on the World Trade Center until now, al Qaeda has used an economic warfare playbook modeled on the Chinese doctrine of unrestricted warfare.”
Freeman said the al Qaeda magazine articles bolster the findings of a report to the Pentagon in 2009 on economic warfare outlining terrorists’ use of the tactic of attacking oil targets.
“Our enemies know that stopping the flow of oil, crashing our stock market, or collapsing the dollar are the paths to America’s destruction,” he said.
“The al Qaeda timeline has, since at least 2005, planned a new caliphate and Islamic State aimed against the West and Israel,” he added. “To accomplish this, they knew even back then, required an attack on Western economies.”
Freeman said the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems but has ignored repeated credible evidence of economic attacks and threats against our financial infrastructure and power grid.
The al Qaeda threat to oil shipments also underscores the need to end America’s reliance on foreign oil supplies with North American oil production, Freeman said.
“We also have to shore up our financial infrastructure, protect the dollar, and guard our power grid,” said Freeman, author of a book on the subject, Game Plan.
“Individuals must prepare their investment portfolios for resilience in an economic war.”2
Tuesday, 28 October 2014
“Call it Jihad: ‘Terrorism’ Just Doesn’t Define This Threat”
2014’s spate of Islamic terror attacks against Western targets leaves observers grasping for words to describe what’s happening. President Obama doesn’t want to deal with it at all, so after a Muslim convert beheaded a woman in Oklahoma, he thought it appropriate to send the beheader’s mosque (the Islamic Center of Greater Oklahoma City) warm greetings about “shared peace” and “a sense of justice.” (The occasion was the Muslim feast of Eid Ul-Adh, but the timing was awful.) U.S. national security agencies are no help either—under the tutelage of the Muslim Brotherhood, they were purged long ago of any vocabulary useful for dealing with jihad. “Lone wolf” gets a lot of play with the media, but as Michael Ledeen, Andrew McCarthy, and Patrick Poole (here, here, and here) have all pointed out, there’s nothing ‘lone’ about Muslim warriors, self-selected or otherwise, engaging in fard ‘ayn (individual jihad) in obedience to the doctrine of their shared faith.
Nor are these attacks simply “terrorism” in any way that is uniquely descriptive. As Ledeen noted, the Unabomber was a domestic terrorist. The FBI calls the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) terrorist. The Black Liberation Army was accused of murdering more than a dozen police officers in its day. But none of these operates today in obedience to a 1400-year-old ideology that claims a divine commandment to conquer the earth. Nor is any of these other ‘domestic terrorists’ the 21st century embodiment of a force that already has overrun many powerful civilizations, including the Buddhist, Byzantine, Middle East Christian, Hindu, and Persian ones.
It’s time to call this what it is: Jihad.
Jihad is a unique descriptor: it is motivated solely by one ideology—an Islamic one. It encompasses any and all tactics of war, be they the kinetic violence of terrorism, the stealthy influence operations of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian intelligence agencies, or funding, speaking, teaching, and writing. Importantly, the term ‘jihad’ is the one used by its own practitioners—the clerics, scholars, and warriors of Islam. Arguably the most valid qualification of all is that Islamic Law (shariah) defines jihad as “warfare to spread the religion [Islam].” Warfare encompasses many things, though, and not all of them are violent.
Katharine Gorka, President of The Council on Global Security, has an astute new essay entitled “The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy” in which she skewers the Obama administration’s misguided policy it calls “Countering Violent Extremism.” She explains how America’s counter-terrorism ‘experts’ have tried haplessly to apply Social Movement Theory to what actually is a totalitarian ideology cloaked loosely in a handful of religious practices. A decade or more of attempting to apply the language of grievance, poverty, and unemployment laid at the door of Western colonialism or secular modernity has achieved little but the neutering of America’s national security defenses. Yet, even this dead-on analysis doesn’t quite get us where we need to be.
Just as Obama’s bland “violent extremism,” deliberately devoid of meaning identifies neither the enemy nor the ideology that animates him, so in its way, ‘terrorism” likewise falls short. For if “terrorist” can and does mean anyone from a nut job like Ted Kaczynsky to assorted tree huggers, neo-Nazi skinheads, as well as Islamic warriors committing atrocities in the name of Allah, then its scope is just too broad to define precisely the paramount threat to global stability in the 21stcentury: jihad.
The magnitude of the jihad threat demands its own category. Neither Kaczynsky nor animal and environmental activists nor neo-Nazis could threaten the very existence of our Republic. Certain 20th century totalitarian ideologies arguably did, though, and that’s why the U.S. marshaled every resource at its disposal to fight them to defeat. Islamic totalitarianism is such an ideology, albeit one that has survived cyclical periods of defeat and resurgence for many centuries. We constrain ourselves both conceptually and legally, however, when the only way to label an act of violence ‘terrorism’ is when it is carried out against civilians for a political purpose and the perpetrator(s) can be tied to a designated terrorist organization, with no consideration for the ideology that so many of them—and others not on such lists—share.
Islamic terror attacks of recent decades typically involved identifiable Islamic terror groups such as al-Qa’eda, Ansar al-Shariah, HAMAS, Hizballah, and the PLO, but were often funded and supported by jihadist nation states such as Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. As Katharine Gorka described in her white paper, though, the Obama administration’s willfully amorphous term, “violent extremism,” ensured that no enemy threat doctrine called ‘jihad’ that unifies these diverse yet similarly-motivated actors and that actually may threaten the Republic, was ever permitted to be articulated—or confronted.
Now, after the overwhelming post-9/11 Western retaliatory offensives, both al-Qa’eda and more recently, the Islamic State, increasingly have called for acts of ‘individual jihad’ (fard ‘ayn, according to Islamic doctrine). Such attacks by Islamic true believers against armed service members, civilians, and law enforcement officers as well as ordinary citizens duly are proliferating across the West, but the U.S. national security establishment grasps for any term—lone wolf, violent extremist, workplace violence—to avoid saying either ‘terrorism’ or ‘jihadist.’ Granted, as Daniel Pipes noted in his 24 October 2014 essay, “Terrorism Defies Definition,” there are legal consequences under the U.S. Legal Code for “formally certifying an act of violence as terrorist.” But as we see, it’s more than that – and it’s why we need to use “jihad” more often and “terrorism” less.
To properly identify individual jihad attacks is to acknowledge that there is an established ideology behind them that derives its inspiration from Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture. To acknowledge that would mean the threat actually is existential, at a minimum in its objective: universal conquest and enforcement of shariah. Until and unless the entire American citizenry, federal bureaucracy, Intelligence Community, law enforcement, and the U.S. military understand that failing to acknowledge, confront, and defeat the forces of Islamic jihad and shariah indeed do endanger the very existence of our Republic as we know it, and mobilize to meet this challenge, the inexorable advance of shariah will continue. As Pipes notes with some understatement, the current “lack of clarity presents a significant public policy challenge.”
The term “terrorism” will continue to provide useful applications in security categories and lists. But it is much too inclusive and yet restrictive to offer a precise definition of the Islamic threat. The forces of Islamic jihad and shariah are mounting a whole of civilization assault against liberal, modern, representative, secular civil society. Nation states, sub-national terror organizations, transnational alliances, academics and scholars, media conglomerates, networks of mosques and Islamic Centers, so-called ‘charitable foundations’ and their donors, battlefield fighters, and too many individual Muslims are united in a jihad that is not only violent but insidious, inexorable, and sophisticated. Unless we learn to resist in the same way—a whole of civilization way—that list of subjugated civilizations may yet include one more: ours.
Spinning a Terrorist Into a Victim Part 2: Rasmieh Odeh’s Victims
IPT News
October 28, 2014
Part 2 of our series investigating the case against Rasmieh Odeh, and her supporters’ efforts to get the case dropped, looks at the victims of the 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that led to Odeh’s conviction in an Israeli court.
Today’s installment traces the life of Edward Joffe, one of the two college students killed in the bombing. His brothers explain what prompted the family’s move from South Africa to Israel during the 1960s, and describe Edward’s hopes and dreams before his murder.
Rulings issued Monday mean that much of Odeh’s supporters’ arguments – that Odeh’s confession in the bombing was the result of torture, that her case is a selective prosecution aimed at hurting the Palestinian advocacy community – will not be allowed during her immigration fraud scheduled to begin Nov. 4.
Her attorneys have asked for a continuance.
On Wednesday, we’ll examine the immigration fraud case against Odeh. To see part 1, “Who is Rasmieh Odeh?” click here.
IPT Exclusive: Qatar’s Insidious Influence on the Brookings Institution
October 28, 2014
The Brookings Institution bills itself as “the most influential, most quoted and most trusted think tank in the world,” but should it be?
Brookings’ long-term relationship with the Qatari government – a notorious supporter of terror in the Middle East – casts a dark cloud over such a lofty claim to credibility.
A September New York Times exposé revealed Qatar’s status as the single largest foreign donor to the Brookings Institution. Qatar gave Brookings $14.8 million in 2013, $100,000 in 2012 and $2.9 million in 2011. In 2002, Qatar started subsidizing the Brookings outreach program to the Muslim World which has continues today. Between 2002 and 2010, Brookings never disclosed the annual amount of funds provided by the Government of Qatar.
Sources of funding should not automatically discredit an organization, but critical facts and claims about Brookings should be examined in light of them, starting with a harsh indictment by a former scholar.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism has reviewed the proceedings of 12 annual conferences co-sponsored by Brookings and the government of Qatar comprising more than 125 speeches, interviews, lectures and symposia; a dozen Brookings-based programs that were linked to the Qatari financed outreach to the Muslim world; and analyzed 27 papers sponsored and issued by the Brookings Institution and scholars based in Washington and at the Brookings Doha Center since 2002. Our review, which will be detailed in a four-part series beginning with this story, finds an organization that routinely hosts Islamists who justify terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and American troops, who advocate blasphemy laws which would criminalize criticism of Islam, and which never scrutinizes or criticizes the government of Qatar, its largest benefactor.
“[T]there was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” Saleem Ali, who served as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar in 2009, toldthe New York Times.
“If a member of Congress is using the Brookings reports, they should be aware — they are not getting the full story. They may not be getting a false story, but they are not getting the full story.” Ali noted that he had been told during his job interview that taking positions critical of the Qatari government in papers would not be allowed, a claim Brookings vigorously denies.
“Our scholars, in Doha and elsewhere, have a long record of objective, independent analysis of regional affairs, including critical analysis of the policies of Qatar and other governments in the region,” Brookings President Strobe Talbott said in response to theTimes story.
Unfortunately for Talbott, Qatar’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs openly acknowledges that the partnership gives Qatar exactly what it wants: a public-relations outlet that projects “the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones,” a statement announcing a 2012 memorandum of understanding with Brookings said.
Indeed, their close collaboration stretches back more than a decade.
After Islamist terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pa. on September 11, 2001, the Brookings Institution looked to Qatar to answer the question, “Why do they hate us?”
Former Qatari emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani answered Brookings’ call in 2002, providing the think tank with the necessary seed money and resources to initiate its engagement with the Islamic world.
The alliance culminated with the 2002 Doha Conference on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, co-sponsored by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and Qatar. Qatar underwrote the conference’s cost.
Ambassador Martin Indyk, who headed the Saban Center at the time, and other Brookings leaders noted their desire to “build strong bridges of friendship” and avoid a “clash of civilizations.”
Indyk took a leave of absence from Brookings in 2013 and the first half of 2014 to serve as President Obama’s envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Indykplaced excessive blame on Israel for their failure.
At an April 2013 Brookings forum in Washington, Indyk mentioned that he and Qatar’s al-Thani had remained friends for “two decades.” This relationship dates to when Indykserved as special assistant to President Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council.
Indyk noted that he approached the sheik after the 9/11 attacks, informing him that Brookings planned to launch a project focused on American engagement with the Islamic world.
“And he said immediately, ‘I will support it, but you have to do the conference in Doha.’ And I said, ‘Doha, well that sounds like an interesting idea,'” Indyk said at the 2013 forum. “Three years into that, he suddenly then told me we want to have a Brookings in Doha. And I said, ‘Well, okay, we’ll have a Brookings in Doha, too,’ and we ended up with the Brookings Doha Center” (BDC), in 2008.”
Brookings’ Qatar-based scholars see their host country with rosy spectacles, ignoring the emirate’s numerous terror ties.
Monday, 27 October 2014
Qatar Awareness Campaign – Letter to Miramax #StopQatarNow
c/o Miramax Films
375 Greenwich St.
New York, NY 10013
Dear Harvey and Bob Weinstein:
This letter is being sent to you on behalf of the Qatar Awareness Campaign Coalition . The purpose is to inform you and the public of the activities of Qatar. The film company you founded, Miramax, is largely owned by the Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund operated by the Qatari state.Qatar has proven itself the primary sponsor of terror and genocide in the Middle East and North Africa.
In 2010, Disney sold Miramax to Filmyard Holdings, a joint investment group which included the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), private equity company Colony Capital and construction company Tutor-Saliba Corporation. QIA was the largest shareholder. In January 2013, Ron Tutor of Tutor-Saliba sold his stake in Miramax to the Qatar Investment Authority, leaving Miramax in the hands of Colony Capital and Qatar exclusively.
Although you two had left Miramax for a time, in December 2013 Miramax announced a 20 year deal with The Weinstein Company for “a multi-year co-production and co-distribution deal covering movies, TV and stage for titles in the Miramax library.” This reunites the company with its founders; and unites the Weinstein brothers, Miramax and Qatar – a prolific state sponsor of terrorism across North Africa and the Middle East – in one corporate entity.
So the public understands how conflicts of interests occur when terrorist financing commingles with Hollywood, here are some more facts concerning Miramax, Qatar, al Qaeda and other revolutionary and murderous movements:
- In 2010, the Weinstein Company, produced Miral , a movie about a Palestinian orphan. The film was criticized by many as pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel and the journalist Daniel Greenfield called it a“terrorist propaganda flick.”
- In 2004, Miramax released the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11 , which pushed the specious idea that then-President George W. Bush was somehow involved with the September 11 attacks. It’s hard to imagine a better piece of terrorist propaganda and disinformation.
- Miramax has a history of distributing films by the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Miramax distributed two of Almodovar’s movies in the early 1990s, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and High Heels.
- One of Almodovar’s actresses for a period of time was Maria Ayuso. This “chica Almodovar” later married Abu Dahbah, the Al Qaeda mastermind of the Madrid train bombings in 2004.
- Abu Dahbah was also acquainted with Abu Musab al-Suri, a Syrian who once resided in Spain and one of the most prolific authors of jihad for Al Qaeda.
Additionally, Qatar is involved in Taliban narcotics trafficking through a relationship with the Pakistani National Logistics Cell and profits from operating a virtual slave state. The Arab Spring, a Qatari and American-backed program to install Islamists across the Middle East and North Africa, has led to a veritable diplomatic “ crisis ” with Israel. John Kerry’s attempt to force Qatar’s (who backed Hamas) hatched peace terms on Israel, has caused the only democracy in the region to question America’s allegiance to their security.
The QAC Coalition and petitioners ask that you consider the attached sourced report on Qatar’s activities. The links cited are vetted and credible sources. We hope you take the time to verify the truth of the statements for yourself.
After doing so, the Coalition of the Qatar Awareness Campaign calls on you to exert due influence on the Qatari government and the Muslim Brotherhood to cease any type of involvement in all forms of Islamic terrorism, slavery, and drug trafficking!
Sincerely,
Lt. Col. Allen B. West (US Army, Ret)
AllenBWest.com
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Center for Security Policy
Pamela Geller
Atlas Shrugs
Walid Shoebat
Shoebat.com
Charles Ortel
Washington Times
Paul E Vallely, US Army (Ret)
Chairman, Stand Up America
Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch
& the entire Qatar Awareness Campaign Coalition.
Qatar Research Report: http://ift.tt/1vt12on
Sign the Petition! Visit www.stopqatarnow.com
Facebook: Stop Qatar Now
Twitter: @stopqatarnow
** Select signatures as of 9/27. The Qatar Awareness Campaign Coalition is comprised of more than 25 journalists, national security experts, publishers, and independent researchers. To view all Coalition participants, please visit the Campaign’s website .
Spinning a Terrorist Into a Victim – Part 1: Who is Rasmieh Odeh?
IPT News
October 27, 2014
Note: Part 1 includes our previously released 2-minute prologue/trailer.
Starting Nov. 4, federal prosecutors in Detroit present their case against a Palestinian woman who slipped through the cracks. Rasmieh Odeh, 67, has been in the United States since at least 1995.
To her advocates, she’s a peaceful community activist living in Chicago and an asset to her community.
Yet, she has a bloody, dark side that she has kept hidden all these years.
Odeh is a convicted terrorist who spent 10 years in an Israeli prison. She led a 1969 bombing that killed two college students in a Jerusalem supermarket. Odeh confessed. She says that confession only came after she was tortured. She was sentenced to life in prison, but was released unexpectedly as part of a prisoner exchange in 1979.
Her torture claim has never been substantiated—even by the United Nations, to which she reported the alleged torture after her release—and she has yet to deny her involvement in the murders or even her ultimate imprisonment.
Odeh could have discussed the particulars of her situation when she applied for her visa and citizenship—how her sentence was even commuted—if she felt her alleged torture merited special consideration. Instead, she simply told U.S. authorities she had a spotless record.
Prosecutors say that constitutes immigration fraud. A terrorist conviction for an attack causing two deaths is something immigration officials would want to consider before granting an immigrant a visa or welcoming her into American citizenship.
Still, her supporters have launched an aggressive campaign aimed at getting the fraud charges dropped. Odeh, they say, is the real victim here. They claim this case is really about a government conspiracy to attack Palestinian advocates in America.
The campaign is led by Odeh’s colleagues from the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), but has attracted support from the Council on American-Islamic Relations(CAIR), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and even a group of 124 feminist academics.
In the video above, the first installment of a five-part Investigative Project on Terrorism video series on Odeh’s case and the campaign to thwart it, we provide an overview of the case and a look at Rasmieh Odeh and those supporting her.
New installments will be released each day this week. Tomorrow we examine the 1969 Jerusalem bombing Odeh helped orchestrate and learn more about her victims.
Team of Bumblers? Are Susan Rice and Chuck Hagel equal to today’s new national-security challenges?
When President Obama, after months of equivocation over how to respond to the takeover of parts of Iraq and Syria by radical militants, announced in September that the United States would “lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat,” the White House swung quickly into action, sending proposed legislation to train and equip Syrian rebels to Capitol Hill that same day.
Unfortunately, the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon—which would be doing most of the rolling back—on the timing or details of the announcement.
According to multiple sources, behind the scenes a few things went badly awry in the launch of Obama’s new policy. First, the Pentagon was surprised by the president’s timing, according to a senior defense official. “We didn’t know it was going to be in the speech,” he said, referring to Obama’s Sept. 10 address to the nation. Second, the White House neglected to give Pentagon lawyers a chance to revise and approve the proposed legislative language before it went to the Hill, which is considered standard practice. Staffers working for Rep. Buck McKeon, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said they were appalled by what they saw: language so sloppy that it failed to mention adequate protections against so-called “green-on-blue” attacks by trainees on American troops, and effectively left the Defense Department liable for funding the mission against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—even though the president was telling members of Congress he didn’t need money for this new mission, since the Saudis were putting it up. “What came over would have not have been a mission the DoD could have executed,” says a senior Republican committee staffer.
The Armed Services Committee later went directly to the Pentagon and worked out new language, the White House approved it, and Obama signed the legislation as part of a new Continuing Resolution on Sept. 19. But that was hardly the first instance in recent months when the White House failed to consult with the Pentagon. The office of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was taken by surprise as well last July, when national security adviser Susan Rice sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner requesting a withdrawal of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed in 2002 to enable U.S. military action in Iraq. This letter came after Mosul, a key northern Iraqi city, had already fallen to ISIL and the scale of the threat was becoming clear. The letter was never acted on, and in fact the AUMF that Rice wanted withdrawn is now part of the very authority the administration says it is operating under, along with the 2001 AUMF against al Qaeda. The Pentagon was not given a heads-up about that letter either, according to multiple sources. “We didn’t know it was going over there, and there were significant concerns about it,” said the senior defense official. “We had these authorities to go into Iraq under the 2002 AUMF, which is what she wanted repealed. We believed the authorities were still needed.”
National Security Council spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the Pentagon was informed of the new plan against ISIL before it went to Congress, and that in fact Hagel and Dempsey were with the president the morning of the speech. Although he indicated it was not clear exactly what details of the new strategy were shared with the Pentagon and when, Ventrell said that coordination between the NSC and other agencies is ongoing and extensive, that Rice regularly hosts lunches with Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry. They “have a good, solid working relationship,” Ventrell said.
But it’s clear the finger-pointing between the White House and Pentagon reflects no mere technicality. Both examples cited to me by well-placed sources close to the Defense Department offer new evidence of a criticism that has dogged this administration for most of its six and a half years: that Barack Obama’s White House is so insular and tightly controlled it often avoids “outside” consultation—including with its own cabinet secretaries and agencies. That’s especially true when the issue is one of this president’s least favorite things: opening up new hostilities in foreign lands. To his critics—and I spoke with several for this article inside Obama’s administration as well as recent veterans of it—it’s all a reflection of the slapdash way a president so vested in “ending wars” has embraced his new one.
Indeed, the Syrian-rebel incident recalled a more famous instance of White House surprise tactics a year earlier, when after a stroll on the White House lawn with chief of staff Denis McDonough, Obama embarrassed Kerry by abruptly deciding to ask for congressional approval for bombing the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad—only hours after Kerry had publicly declared that Assad was facing imminent action. (Ironically, after Congress quickly balked at approval, humiliating Obama, it was Kerry who rescued the president by securing an agreement with Russian help to force Assad to dismantle the chemical weapons that had prompted the threatened U.S. strike in the first place.)
In their recent memoirs, former defense secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta also have described the White House-centric foreign policy of the Obama administration—in Panetta’s case, a White House that he said was so “eager to rid itself of Iraq” it rejected Pentagon advice about the need for residual troops in Iraq after 2011, opening the way for ISIL. Gates was even more pointed, writing that “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials—including the president and vice president—became a big problem for me.”
Read more at Politico
Sunday, 26 October 2014
Al Hayat Media Center Continues to Saturate North America with its Social Media Outreach for Jihadists
The Al Hayat Media Center is a formidable social media juggernaut that the United States, its European allies as well as its Gulf State allies in the Middle East have had a hard time combating. One of the central figures in the Al Hayat Media Center is Ahmad Abousamra and he may even be the director of operations for Al Hayat Media Center (HMC).
HMC has been able to saturate numerous cities with its social media messaging through Twitter, Youtube, Diaspora, and just about any other social media outlet you can think of. Al Hayat has a full time staff that develops and tests its messaging and they test it on westerners from within their ranks as well as “sample” groups online. The messages work to play on the religious beliefs of the Islamic faithful, but it particularly pushes that message towards the newly converted.
If you look at many of the recent attacks including the OKC perpetrator of the beheading, Ali Mohammad Brown who killed 4 people, and numerous others that have been arrested have been those that converted to Islam recently. When we are talking about recently it is generally within the past 18 months. The incubation period for radicalization varies with some becoming radicalized within a few months and others taking longer. These times can be shorter or longer.
The outreach also targets those that have been practicing Islam longer, but are still trying to “find” their way in the religion. These are the individuals that HMC targets to come to Syria and Iraq to fight in the jihad there. HMC probes and discovers the depth of commitment an individual might have through their savvy use of messaging. They make the person feel a sense of belonging that they have not found where they currently live.
The thing to keep in mind is that HMC doesn’t have to directly target an individual for radicalization. The process is often self-starting through the individual reading or listening to the promulgated media of the Islamic State. The more the individual reads the deeply religious content the more they start feeling a sense of pride in it and that is what they want in life. They start feeling the need to learn more about the Islamic religion if they are new converts or even those that have been practicing longer. Then the outreach starts, usually initiated by the individual looking to “talk” to those individuals involved with the Islamic State.
HMC has a team of individuals that help develop these contacts. The contact is subtle at first focusing on the individual’s life and spirituality. As the recruit is developed the HMC handler begins probing the individual for commitment level and what sort of role they could potentially play. If the individual is a recent convert the Islamic State may start developing the individual for placement as they look at the individual’s access to potential targets or for recruitment to come to Syria and Iraq.
The Islamic State is also working feverishly to develop individuals in countries that are allied with the United States. The purpose for this is target the population or government of these countries in order to erode popular support for taking action against the Islamic State by making them a target of radicalized citizens at home.
Targeting American allies is not a new strategy but is a campaign of intimidation of the citizens of close allies of the United States. The Islamic State is not the first to do such a thing. The Taliban during their resurgence that started in 2005 began targeting the Canadians specifically to try to disrupt support for their efforts in Afghanistan. The idea behind the Taliban attempts to erode allied support was to inflict more casualties rather than through a social media campaign. They would however post about the attacks on the Canadians, just not nearly as sophisticated as Al Hayat Media Center.
HMC pretty much announces areas that will be attacked prior to the attacks actually taking place while not giving any sort of specifics because they are relying on the self-radicalized to conduct attacks on their behalf. Chances are if they are increasing their “chatter” in or about an area they have reasonable confidence in the radicalized individual to conduct an attack. They had increased their media saturation about Ottawa in the weeks leading up to the individual conducting the attack on the Canadian Parliament.
Self-radicalized Ali Mohammad Brown had killed three individuals in the Seattle, Washington area and then killed Brendan Tevlin in New Jersey. His rationale was because of the US actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Mr. Brown was a recent convert that was self-radicalized.
Types and levels of radicalization:
Self-radicalized: This is an individual that becomes radicalized through no contact with the Islamic State or other terrorist organization. These individuals simply read the vast amounts of literature that is found all over the internet. They as previously stated are often people that are interested in the Islamic religion or are newly converted. This is a process that can develop slowly or rapidly depending on the individual. Often the individual is a social outcast from the “normal” society of the US or Canada. This is not always the case, but these individuals are more easily susceptible. These individuals are the most difficult to track or acquire anything on them because they may not have direct contact with any known individual through social media connected to the Islamic State.
The seeker: This is an individual that has recently converted to Islam and has been following ISIS mujatweets, videos and other social outreach. This is an individual that is looking to become more involved on behalf of the Islamic State. Eric Harroun is an example of a seeker. He had converted to Islam and sought out the Islamic State and left to Syria to fight on their behalf and was arrested upon return to the US. These individuals pose great danger as they may have become fully radicalized. They are actively involving themselves with the Islamic State through social media.
The combination radicalization: This is a combination of the first two where an individual has recently converted and starts out reading information about the Islamic State. After a certain period of time they are start talking to Islamic State individuals on twitter or FB. The radicalization process may be slower or accelerated depending on the individual’s own will and values. This may also be an individual that can convinced to conduct a homeland attack.
Any of these radicalized individuals could perpetrate an attack on the US or Canadian homeland. The one common factor in them is that they are often recent converts. The US State Department has launched its #Thinkagainturnaway campaign which has not been a very successful endeavor. In fact, it has been poorly thought out and even more poorly executed.
The fault with the State Department campaign is that it tries to play on the human side of right and wrong with its messaging. This is ineffective messaging when trying to counter a religious based message that is influenced by the politics of the Islamic State. Successfully countering the messaging requires knowledge of basic tenants of Islam and the parts of the Quran that focus on the peaceful aspects and also historical references to merciful Islamic leaders. The focus of the messaging has to be religious based to negate the effects of the Islamic State’s religious based messaging. There are a multitude of other things that could be done to counter that messaging through historical reference as well as modern day.
Al-Qaeda issues call to support Isil in new threat to American strategy
Many rebels were already angry that after refusing to intervene militarily on their side against the Assad regime, the US was nevertheless prepared to bomb Isil positions. The attack on Jabhat Al-Nusra, which had fought closely alongside other rebel factions, including pro-Western ones, was seen as an outright betrayal of the anti-Assad cause.
Now the United States is having difficulty finding rebels to train and arm in accordance with the broader plans outlined by President Barack Obama to support the “moderate” cause in the war.
Thomas Joscelyn:
No explicit denunciation of the Islamic State
“Resurgence” republishes a statement by Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, from earlier this year. Omar says that all American and Western forces must be withdrawn from Afghanistan, and he calls on the entire Islamic world to denounce Israel for its supposedly “savage aggression” against “oppressed Palestinians.”
In “Resurgence,” as in other al Qaeda messages and statements, Omar is called “Amir ul Mominin,” or the Commander of the Faithful, a title that is usually reserved for the leader of an Islamic caliphate. Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State, has attempted to usurp this title for himself.
In its propaganda, al Qaeda has taken a subtle approach to responding to the Islamic State’s claims. The group has pushed its allegiance to Omar, and his presumed role as the rightful caliph.
“Resurgence” does not include any specific denunciations of the Islamic State. But it does reproduce a quote from Zawahiri explaining how a proper jihadist caliphate will be built. After arguing that jihadists are an inseparable part of the ummah, or community of Muslims, Zawahiri writes, “The Islamic State will be established – by the help and will of Allah — at the hands of the free, sincere and honorable Mujahideen. It will be established with their sacrifices, generosity, consent and collective choice.”
This could be read as a thinly-veiled critique of the Islamic State, as one of the pro-al Qaeda jihadists’ chief criticisms of Baghdadi is that he has tried to impose his caliphate on all other Muslims, eschewing the type of consensus that al Qaeda believes is necessary to form first. In the context of their rivalry with the Islamic State, senior al Qaeda leaders have reproduced similar quotes from Zawahiri throughout the year.
Another piece in “Resurgence,” written by Zawahiri’s son-in-law, Muhammad bin Mahmoud Rabie al Bahtiyti (a.k.a. Abu Dujana al Basha), urges Muslims to support the mujahideen in Syria, but also says nothing about the Islamic State. Al Bahtiyti released an audio message warning against the Islamic State in late September. Even though al Bahtiyti clearly sought to undermine Baghdadi’s group, he did not explicitly name the Islamic State in that message either.
Somali example of why federal ‘countering violent extremism’ theory is all wet (and dangerous)
One of the country’s preeminent experts on the Islamist agenda in America, Patrick Poole, in a recent PJ Media post tells us why the federal “lone wolf” extremist concept is bogus and highlights a case he was personally familiar with involving SomaliDahir Gurey in Columbus, Ohio during the height of the Al-Shabaab recruitment of Somali refugees in America.
For background see at least this post from 2008 , here at RRW where you will see that the recruitment issue was covered fairly widely but never really broke into the national consciousness as has the recent ISIS recruitment in the US.
I think the final number of Somali refugees who joined Al-Shabaab, thumbing their noses at the good life in America you gave them, was in the 20s (or at least that…
Terrorism Defies Definition
by Daniel Pipes and Teri Blumenfeld
The Washington Times
October 24, 2014
Defining terrorism has practical implications because formally certifying an act of violence asterrorist has important consequences in U.S. law.
Terrorism suspects can be held longer than criminal suspects after arrest without an indictment They can be interrogated without a lawyer present. They receive longer prison sentences. “Terrorist inmates” are subject to many extra restrictions known as Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs. The “Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002” gives corporate victims of terrorism special breaks (it is currently up for renewal) and protects owners of buildings from certain lawsuits. When terrorism is invoked, families of victims, such as of the 2009 Ft. Hood attack, win extra benefits such as tax breaks, life insurance, and combat-related pay. They can even be handed a New York City skyscraper.
Despite the legal power of this term, however, terrorism remains undefined beyond a vague sense of “a non-state actor attacking civilian targets to spread fear for some putative political goal.” One study, Political Terrorism , lists 109 definitions. American security specialist David Tucker wryly remarks that “Above the gates of hell is the warning that all that who enter should abandon hope. Less dire but to the same effect is the warning given to those who try to define terrorism.” The Israeli counterterrorism specialist Boaz Ganor jokes that “The struggle to define terrorism is sometimes as hard as the struggle against terrorism itself.”
This lack of specificity wreaks chaos, especially among police, prosecutors, politicians, press, and professors.
“Violence carried out in connection with an internationally sanctioned terrorist group” such as Al-Qaeda, Hizbullah, or Hamas has become the working police definition of terrorism. This explains such peculiar statements after an attack as, “We have not found any links to terrorism,” which absurdly implies that “lone wolves” are never terrorists.
If they are not terrorists, the police must find other explanation to account for their acts of violence. Usually, they offer up some personal problem: insanity, family tensions, a work dispute, “teen immigrant angst,” a prescription drug, or even a turbulent airplane ride. Emphasizing personal demons over ideology, they focus on an perpetrator’s (usually irrelevant) private life, ignoring his far more significant political motives.
But then, inconsistently, they do not require some connection to an international group. When Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez shot eight rounds at the White House in November 2011, the U.S. attorney asserted that “Firing an assault rifle at the White House to make a political statement is terrorism, plain and simple” – no international terrorist group needed. Similarly, after Paul Anthony Ciancia went on a shooting spree at Los Angeles International Airport in November 2013, killing a TSA officer, the indictment accused him of “substantial planning and premeditation to cause the death of a person and to commit an act of terrorism.”
This terminological irregularity breads utter confusion. The whole world calls the Boston Marathon bombings terrorism – except the Department of the Treasury, which, 1½ years on “has not determined that there has been an ‘act of terrorism’ under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act.” The judge presiding over the terrorism trial in January 2014 of Jose Pimentel, accused of planning to set off pipe bombs in Manhattan, denied the prosecution’s request for an expert to justify a charge of terrorism. Government officials sometimes just throw up their hands: Asked in June 2013 if the U.S. government considers the Taliban a terrorist group, the State Department spokeswoman replied “Well, I’m not sure how they’re defined at this particular moment.”
The whole world, except of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, sees the Boston Marathon bombings as terrorism.
A May 2013 shooting in New Orleans, which injured 19, was even more muddled. An FBI spokeswoman called it not terrorism but “strictly an act of street violence.” The mayor disagreed; asked if he considered it terrorism, he said “I think so,” because families “are afraid of going outside.” Challenged to disentangle this contradiction, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s New Orleans field made matters even more opaque: “You can say this is definitely urban terrorism; it’s urban terror. But from the FBI standpoint and for what we deal with on a national level, it’s not what we consider terrorism, per se.” Got that?
The U.S. Department of State has yet to figure out whether the Taliban are or are not terrorists.
This lack of clarity presents a significant public policy challenge. Terrorism, with all its legal and financial implications, cannot remain a vague, subjective concept but requires a precise and accurate definition, consistently applied.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum, where Teri Blumenfeld is a researcher. © 2014 All rights reserved by Daniel Pipes and Teri Blumenfeld.
Saturday, 25 October 2014
Citizen Jihadists: ISIS uses ‘lone wolves’ to mount cheap, effective attacks on US soil
The Ottawa gunman had talked of going to the Middle East, but even though ISIS Tweeted out his picture, authorities have not disclosed ties to any terrorist group.
By Perry Chiaramonte:
Al Qaeda spent less than $1 million on its signature 9/11 attack, but Islamic State has found an even more cost-effective way to strike on American soil – inspiring psychotic sympathizers to commit “lone wolf” attacks that blur the line between random crime and terrorism, say experts.
Grisly photos and video of severed heads and mutilated bodies tweeted out and posted on the Internet, combined with explicit calls to kill, have allowed Islamic State to turn American citizens into weapons, say experts. The new technique requires no infiltration by sleeper cells and no planning, coordination or logistics. Yet, it is proving extremely effective at spreading fear, they say.
“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European, especially the spiteful and filthy French, or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever, then rely upon Allah and kill him in any manner or way however it may be,” urged a speaker on a video Islamic State released last month .
A law enforcement bulletin obtained last month by FoxNews.com warned that Islamic State fighters have increased calls for “lone wolves” to attack U.S. soldiers in America.
“You could literally search for soldiers, find their town, photos of them, look for address in Yellowbook or something,” a tweet attributed to Islamic State read. “Then show up and slaughter them.”
Linking seemingly random acts of violence to Islamic State can be difficult or even impossible. Wednesday’s frightening attack in Ottawa, in which a Canadian soldier was gunned down at the National War Memorial, was carried out by a self-styled jihadist, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau. Authorities have not disclosed any known connection to Islamic State, but a Twitter account linked to Islamic State tweeted out an image of Zehaf-Bibeau even as the international media was scrambling to identify him.
Read more at Fox News
Friday, 24 October 2014
‘Lone Wolf,’ or ‘Known Wolf’? The Ongoing Counter-Terrorism Failure
Katie Gorka of the Council on Global Security has released an important report [1], “The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy,” and events of this week show that it couldn’t be more timely. The separate terror attacks in Canada and a long string of terror attacks here in the U.S. show that the counter-terrorism policies of Western governments are fundamentally broken, and are directly responsible for getting their citizens killed. Even as I write this there are breaking reports of yet another attack [2].
The primary targets of Gorka’s new report are the various fictitious narratives and bogus social science models that drive Western counter-terrorism efforts. Chief among these is the “countering violent extremism (CVE)” narrative that has been the centerpiece for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.
CVE has been a colossal disaster because it has no roots in reality. It was always intended as a convenient fiction for politicians, bureaucrats, media and academics to avoid talking about [3] the problem of the ideology that supports Islamic terrorism.
There has never once been a recorded case of anyone on the planet swearing their allegiance to the ideology of “violent extremism” and their willingness to kill others and die in the cause of “violent extremism.” It is a null set. There is nothing to counter, which is the whole point. And yet there are academics and institutions who are the beneficiaries of mountains of taxpayer cash to pursue the elusive CVE unicorn.
CVE has been used to smuggle all kinds of crackpot theories into not just our counter-terrorism policy, but also our foreign policy.
One crackpot theory has been that there are good Islamists that we can use against the bad Islamists. This was the keystone of the Obama administration’s Arab Spring policies. And this theory put into practice in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other places has left the Middle East in even worse shape than Obama found it.
As Gorka observes, the administration’s head cheerleader [4] for this “good Islamist/bad Islamist” approach has been Quintan Wiktorowicz, who served as senior director of the National Security Council under Obama. But the disaster of the Arab Spring has prompted Wiktorowicz and his CVE pals to double-down on this approach. Now we have entirely new categories of actors, such as “vetted moderates,” and even “good bad Islamists,” who presumably are any jihadists not currently wearing a suicide belt.
This rampant idiocy has become so bad that we have the supposed best and brightest in the Washington, D.C. foreign policy elite now calling for engagement with “moderate al-Qaeda” (no, I’m not kidding [5]).
Another theory championed by the CVE crowd is the “lone wolf” syndrome, reportedly where unknown individuals unconnected to any other actor strike without warning. But numerous examples show that terrorist actors are almost always part of a network who were involved in recruiting and tasking terrorist activity. As Max Abrahms at Northeastern University has observed [6]:
Since the advent of international terrorism in 1970, none of the 40 most lethal terrorist attacks has been committed by a person unaffiliated with some terrorist group, according to publicly available data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which is funded by the Department of Homeland Security and stored at the University of Maryland. In fact, lone wolves have carried out just two of the 1,900 most deadly terrorist incidents over the last four decades.
So why “lone wolf”? Simply, it was a mechanism promulgated by the CVE industry, with willing cooperation from law enforcement and intelligence officials, to exonerate themselves when a terrorist attack happened. At its core is terror agnosticism: “There is possibly no way to predict who will turn to terrorism, so therefore we can’t be held responsible when it happens. Oh, and give us more money so we can better improve how we won’t be able to predict terror attacks.”
The two terror attacks in Canada this week, which are already being described by CVE industry practitioners as “lone wolf” attacks, were by individuals already known to Canadian counter-terrorism officials. Reportedly both Martin “Ahmad” Rouleau [7] and Michael Zehaf-Bibeau [8] had their passports taken away by Canadian authorities because they were considered “high risk” to travel overseas to join the Islamic State. We also have reports that Zehaf-Bibeau had contacts with known jihadist sympathizers [9] and at least one individual who had fought in Syria.
Looking at the long string of domestic terror incidents here in the U.S. shows that the so-called “lone wolves,” in virtually every case, were in fact “known wolves.”
In fairness, this “known wolf” phenomenon goes back more than 20 years.
The cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was well known to law enforcement. An FBI informant, Emad Salem, was operating inside their cell and had been repeatedly warning the FBI about the group’s intentions. As far back as 1989, the FBI had been watching [10] these cell members conduct weapons training.
When one of the cell members, El Sayyid Nosair, killed Rabbi Meir Kahane in a New York City hotel in November 1990, law enforcement recovered hordes of information about the cell’s activities and intentions — but, as has been pointed out, it was never translated. My friend and colleague Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted some of the cell members after the 1993 WTC bombing, wrote a whole book about the affair, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad [11] .
Read more at PJ Media
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
ISIS threat: What Team Obama doesn’t want you to know
The vaunted Obama “National Security Team” tells us their “broad-based coalition” is “succeeding” against the savages who variously describe themselves as ISIS, ISIL, IS or “The Caliphate.” That’s according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest in press briefings on October 14 and 15. Don’t believe it.
Here – from friends with “boots on the ground” – are facts about what’s really happening that the Obama administration either doesn’t know, doesn’t want you to know – or both:
First, the number of ISIS “jihadis” in Iraq and Syria is much greater than we are being told. According to multiple sources in Baghdad, Irbil and elsewhere “down-range,” there are upwards of 40,000 IS fighters in Syria and an equal or greater number in Iraq.
The very visible fight for Kobani on the Syria-Turkey border is a “diversion” – a military distraction – created by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – the “Islamic State’s” self-proclaimed “caliph.” He is a vicious butcher, but no fool. He and his underlings understand their neighborhood and our western media.
Expecting reporters to come – and they have – he sent 4,000 ISIS fighters to assault the Kurds in Kobani – while holding another 5,000+ in reserve – with orders not to cross the nearby border with Turkey. Western media outlets flocked to the frontier and lined up their cameras next to Turkish Army tanks and armored vehicles.
American pundits ask, “Why aren’t the Turks intervening to save the Kurds? Al-Baghdadi knows the Kurds desperately holding on in Kobani are predominantly affiliated with the PKK – the Kurdistan Workers Party – against which Turkish governments have been waging bloody civil war for three decades. In Ankara, the Erdogan regime isn’t about to further the cause of an independent Kurdistan – or prevent a sanguinary end for the Kurds in Kobani.
Meanwhile in Iraq, where the real battle is being fought – there are no western cameras to record the serial defeats ISIS is inflicting on the Shiite-led government of Haider al-Abadi. All but unnoticed, Anbar Province – the heart of Iraq’s “Sunni Triangle” – has fallen to highly mobile IS units.
During the past month, while we focused our lenses on Kobani, Al Baghdadi’s terror army killed, captured and murdered more than 3,500 Iraqi soldiers – all those unable to flee. Now, ISIS is poised to seize Haditha Dam, source of nearly one third of the nation’s hydroelectric power and Al Asad, the Iraqi government’s last remaining airbase west of Baghdad.
ISIS forces have invested Baghdad on three sides and Sunni jihadists are conducting near daily suicide bomb attacks in the capital city’s Shiite neighborhoods. One U.S. officer told me, “These SVBIEDs (Suicide Vehicular-borne Improvised Explosives) in Baghdad are ISIS probes and rehearsals for the attack they plan to launch on the U.S. embassy.”
“Worse yet,” says a retired senior intelligence official, “nobody in Washington seems to comprehend this is all part of the bloody ‘holy war’ between Sunnis and Shiites that’s been going on since the seventh century. ISIS is gaining ground, recruits and military prowess because al-Baghdadi has succeeded in portraying himself as the ‘protector of Sunni Islam.’ He claims his ‘Sunni Caliphate’ will prevent Shiites from establishing a hegemon from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. His propaganda not only shows IS fighters as brutally victorious, it also depicts the U.S. and the ‘Obama coalition,’ as allied with the Shiites in Baghdad, al-Assad’s Alawite dynasty in Damascus, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Ayatollahs in Tehran. That’s why al-Baghdadi continues to attract Sunni militants by the thousands from every part of the planet – including the United States.”
All with whom I have recently communicated about these matters agree it’s unlikely ISIS can seize and occupy Baghdad – at least for now. But they also say too little attention is being paid to the risk of an attack on the largest U.S. embassy in the world; that “ISIS ethnic and religious cleansing” cannot be stopped by undirected airstrikes alone; and “the Kurdish Peshmerga are not receiving sufficient help to make a difference.”
Meanwhile, Americans here at home are preoccupied with whether we can “defeat” Ebola as if a pandemic was about to sweep the nation. Though the virus has killed fewer people around the planet this year than ISIS has murdered in Syria or Iraq this month, it’s clear the O-Team wants us to believe Ebola is our greatest peril.
Commander-in-Chief Obama has already dispatched nearly 4,000 U.S. military personnel to West Africa to battle Ebola – almost four times as many as he has sent to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. We can only pray none of those committed to the “Ebola Battle” become infected or get taken hostage by Boku Harum terrorists.
POTUS and fellow travelers in the so-called mainstream media keep telling us Ebola is our most imminent threat. But Defense Secretary Hagel is more concerned about a more lethal adversary. In a speech on Monday, Oct. 13 to the “Conference of Defense Ministers or the Americas” in Peru, Mr. Hagel described “Climate Change” as our primary enemy.
Confused? You’re not alone. So is our president. On October 14 he attended a mini-military “summit” at Joint Base Andrews. After 2 hours at this “How To Fight” gab-fest with “more than 20 leaders of the Anti-ISIL Coalition” cameras were allowed in so POTUS could inspire us by saying, “…There will be days of progress and days of setbacks.” He was apparently speaking without the aid of a Tele-Prompter.
News flash, Mr. Obama: The barbarians are at the gates of Baghdad. They are coming for us.
Oliver North is the host of “War Stories” in FOX News Channel, the bestselling author of
Monday, 20 October 2014
THE UNITED WEST: FBI WARNING: CAIR Organized by HAMAS
In 2008 the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned America that the self-proclaimed “Muslim civil-rights” group, CAIR, was really part of the Palestinian terrorist organization the HAMAS.
In fact, as we have proven, CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations actually functions as the “Special Operations Division” (SOD) of the political department of the HAMAS. Part of the CAIR “SOD” functions is to attack with media propaganda any person or organization who analyzes or criticizes CAIR.
For several years now, CAIR has been able to maintain their non-terrorist Islamic “hue,” that is, until they have become a subject of our ground-breaking series, “Enemies of the State.” Stay tuned to this unique series as we send our research investigators deeply into the federal files on CAIR and present factual conclusions that will disrupt, disable and destroy the operations of CAIR/HAMAS USA.
Former Iraqi MP Ayad Jamal Al-Din: A Civil State Is the Only Solution to Combat ISIS
In a recent TV interview, former Iraqi MP Ayad Jamal Al-Din called for the establishment of a civil state in Iraq based on man-made law and equality, rather than on Islamic jurisprudence, as the only way to combat ISIS. He further said that there were thousands of mosques in the U.S. and worldwide that incited and prepared people to join ISIS. “Islam has been politicized and is used as a sword,” he said in the Al-Iraqiya TV interview, which aired on October 17.
Friday, 17 October 2014
Islamic Burial Rituals Blamed For Spread Of Ebola
Islam isn’t just at the heart of the terror threat posed by the Islamic State. The religion is also contributing to the other major crisis plaguing the globe: the spread of Ebola.
Washington and its media stenographers won’t tell you this, lest they look intolerant, but Islamic burial rituals are a key reason why health officials can’t contain the spread of the deadly disease in West Africa.
Many of the victims of Ebola in the three hot-spot nations there — Sierra Leone and Guinea, as well as neighboring Liberia — are Muslim. Roughly 73% of Sierra Leone’s and about 85% of Guinea’s people are Muslim. Islam, moreover, is practiced by more than 13% of Liberians.
When Muslims die, family members don’t turn to a funeral home or crematorium to take care of the body. In Islam, death is handled much differently.
Relatives personally wash the corpses of loved ones from head to toe. Often, several family members participate in this posthumous bathing ritual, known as Ghusl.
Before scrubbing the skin with soap and water, family members press down on the abdomen to excrete fluids still in the body. A mixture of camphor and water is used for a final washing. Then, family members dry off the body and shroud it in white linens.
Again, washing the bodies of the dead in this way is considered a collective duty for Muslims, especially in Muslim nations. Failure to do so is believed to leave the deceased “impure” and jeopardizes the faithful’s ascension into Paradise (unless he died in jihad; then no Ghusl is required).
Before the body is buried, Muslims attending the funeral typically pass a common bowl for use in ablution or washing of the face, feet and hands, compounding the risk of infection.
Though these customs are prescribed by Shariah law, they’re extremely dangerous and should be suspended. Mosque leaders must step in to educate village Muslims about the dangers of interacting with corpses.
Ebola victims can be more contagious dead than alive. Their bodies are covered in rashes, blood and other fluids containing the virus.
“Funerals and washing dead bodies in West African countries have led, to a great extent, to spread the disease,” a World Health Organization spokeswoman recently warned.
WHO has issued an advisory to Red Cross and other relief workers in African Muslim nations to “be aware of the family’s cultural practices and religious beliefs. Help the family understand why some practices cannot be done because they place the family or others at risk for exposure.”
Thursday, 16 October 2014
The Strong Horse
The statue of Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Maude, KCB, CMG, DSO that stood in Baghdad until the Iraqi revolution in 1958
By Mark Steyn:
On March 11th 1917, General Maude’s British Indian army marched into Baghdad and took as prisoners almost 10,000 Ottoman troops. If you had to locate the birth of the modern, post-caliphate Arab world in a single event, that would be it. Over the next few years, London and Paris drew lines in the sand and invented the western Middle East, and the states we treat with today – Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. The British certainly understand the significance of March 1917: When they returned to Baghdad to topple Saddam a decade ago, they named their new military headquarters in the Green Zone “Maude House”.
Likewise, if one were to pick a single, decisive event that would mark the end of the modern, western Middle East and the dawn of the post-western pre-modern Middle East, it would be the fall of Baghdad to ISIS or ISIL or, as they prefer to be known, “the Islamic State”.
Is that likely? According to General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, speaking on ABC News at the weekend, the head hackers were within 15 miles with “a straight shot to the airport“. As I write, they’re apparently within eight miles. The Iraqi Army do not seem minded to put up much of a fight – unlike, say, the Kurds in Kobani. And naturally, heady on its usual cocktail of treachery and delusion, Washington has chosen to stiff the Kurds but prop up the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Desertion.
Can American air support delay the inevitable? Or will the jihad boys soon be poking around not only the abandoned Maude House but also the largest and most expensive US embassy on the planet, laughing it up for the cameras in front of askew portraits of Joe Biden? One assumes the Administration is at least rehearsing some spin for this eventuality, although with the Obama crowd nothing can be taken for granted. Still, no doubt Susan Rice will be sent out on the Sunday talk-shows to declare that Baghdad is of no strategic significance, and the court eunuchs of the American media will helpfully explain how this shows Obama’s commitment to fulfilling his election promise of decisively ending Bush’s Iraq war – or, alternatively, that Obama is too sophisticated to be trapped by outmoded paradigms such as victory and defeat.
Read more at SteynOnline
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
The Road from Qatar to the Gaza Strip #StopQatarNow
by Reuven Berko
Special to IPT News
October 15, 2014
Qatar’s funding for Islamist terrorist organizations all over the world is an open secret known to every global intelligence agency, including the CIA. It was exposed by Wikileaks, which clearly showed that funds from Qatar were transferred to al-Qaida. Qatar also funds the terrorist movements opposing the Assad regime in Syria, such as the Al-Nusra Front, encourages anti-Egyptian terrorism in the Sinai Peninsula and within Egypt itself, and is involved in Islamic terrorism in Africa and other locations. It accompanies its involvement in terrorism targeting Israel and Egypt (through the Muslim Brotherhood) with vicious and inflammatory propaganda on its Al-Jazeera TV channel.
Qatar also spends millions of dollars supporting the Islamic Movement in Israel, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood headed by Sheikh Ra’ed Salah. The Islamic Movement is responsible for ongoing acts of provocation on the Temple Mount and in Judea and Samaria, and incites the entire Islamic world against Israel, claiming that the Jews are trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque and replace it with the Jewish Temple. The incitement continued even as the Islamic Movement’s sister movement, Hamas, fired rockets at Jerusalem and endangered both the mosques on the Temple Mount and Jerusalem’s sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
As Qatar’s representative, the Islamic Movement, which has not yet been outlawed in Israel, contributed to Hamas what it could during Operation Protective Edge by instigating riots, blocking roads and seeking to foment a third intifada which, according to the plan, would be joined by Israeli Arabs to augment the deaths of thousands of Israelis killed by rockets and the mass murders through the attack tunnels planned for the eve of the Jewish New Year.
In his recent UN speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rebutted Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ accusations of Israeli “genocide” of the Palestinian people. He reminded his audience of Hamas’ use of Gazan civilians as human shields and of the rockets fired to attack specifically civilian Israeli targets. Unfortunately, he did not mention the Hamas charter, which calls for the murder of all the Jews. The fact that Abbas now heads a national consensus government in which Hamas is a full partner commits him to the slaughter of the Jewish people – a true genocide – and it is to the disgrace of the international community that such an individual was permitted to address the UN instead of being tried for war crimes.
In fact, the similarities between Hamas and ISIS are clearly stated in the Hamas charter, which defines Hamas as part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s global Islamic movement. One of its objectives is to fight “infidel Christian imperialism” and its Zionist emissaries in Israel in order to impose the Sharia, Islamic religious law, on the world. According to the charter’s paragraph 7, Hamas’ intention is to slaughter every Jew, as ordered by Muhammad and those who accept his legacy. That is the basis for the threat issued by ISIS “Caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, that under his leadership, Islam will “drown America in blood.”
Throughout its history, Hamas, like ISIS, has been committed to the concept of the global caliphate, which it plans to help construct by creating its own Islamic emirate on the ruins of the State of Israel. Since its founding, Hamas has attacked Israel and murdered thousands of its citizens exactly as ISIS has attacked and murdered “infidels.” They share the same slogans, with “There is no god but Allah” and “Allah, Prophet Muhammad” inscribed on their flags and headbands. Hamas terrorists have blown themselves up in Israel’s coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, buses, malls and markets, wherever there are large concentrations of civilians. The way Hamas executed suspected collaborators during the final days of Operation Protective Edge bore the hallmarks of the al-Qaida execution of Daniel Pearl and the ISIS beheading of James Foley and others.
In the decades during which Hamas has carried out a continual series of deadly terrorist attacks against Israel, wearing the same “Allah, Prophet, Muhammad” headbands as ISIS terrorists, the international community rarely voices its support for Israel, or takes into account that by defending itself Israel also defends the West, which has failed to understand that “political Islam” inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood was setting up shop in the free world’s backyard and that the ticking bomb was set to go off sooner than expected. The West has not clearly condemned Qatar for openly supporting Hamas and its terrorist activities against Israel or demanded that it stop.
While Israel responded to Hamas’ rocket attacks on civilian targets to keep thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Israeli civilians from being killed, the international community demanded “proportionality.” That requirement kept Israel from responding as it should have and encouraged Hamas to fire ever more rockets at “military targets” such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. When Israel built its security fence to keep Hamas suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israeli territory to blow themselves up in crowds of civilians, the international community opposed it, rushed to embrace the Palestinians’ vocabulary of “racism” and “apartheid,” and willingly played into the hands of Hamas and Abbas. This reaction occurred although Israel is the only truly democratic country in the Middle East, where Jews and Arabs can live in peace without “apartheid.”
Today President Obama says he “underestimated” the threat posed by ISIS, while Israel has been warning the world of extremist military Islam for at least a decade, as Netanyahu warned the world of a nuclear Iran in his UN speech.
The international community has been curiously silent about the genuine apartheid in the Arab states neighboring Israel. There, descendants of the original 1948 Palestinian refugees, by now in their fourth generation, still live in refugee camps, do not have citizenship, and are excluded from jobs and social benefits. Israel, however, absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, many of them destitute, who fled Europe and were expelled from the Arab countries when the state was founded, and were given citizenship and enjoy full rights, as do the Arabs who remained in Israel after the War of Independence.
Israel, which has nothing against the Palestinian people, would like to see the Gaza Strip rebuilt for both humanitarian reasons and to give Hamas something to lose. Radical Islamic elements around the globe, however, including Hamas, ISIS, al-Qaida, the Al-Nusra Front and Hizballah, all financed by Qatar, do not want to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved. They all have the same global agenda, based on fueling the conflict to unite Islam around it, under their leadership.
Therefore, Qatar continues to support global Islamic terrorism. On Sept. 13, Qatar paid the Al-Nusra Front a ransom of $20 million to free abducted UN soldiers from Fiji. The world praised Qatar for its philanthropy, but in effect, it was a brilliant act of manipulation and fraud, both filling the Al-Nusra Front’s coffers and representing itself as the Fijians’ savior. Qatar is using the same underhanded trick in the Gaza Strip. After sending Hamas millions of dollars to fund its anti-Israeli terrorist industry, itpledged $1 billion to help rebuild the Gaza Strip during last weekend’s conference in Cairo.
While the world hopes Operation Protective Edge was the last round of Palestinian-Israeli violence, senior Hamas figures reiterate their position of gearing up to fight Israel again. Not one Hamas leader is willing to agree to a full merger with the Palestinian Authority to establish a genuine unified Palestinian leadership. Hamas rejects even the idea of disarming or demilitarization as part of an agreement to rebuild the Gaza Strip and promote the peace process. Unfortunately, no one has suggested it as a pre- condition for any U.S. dollars that will be contributed to the reconstruction of Gaza.
All that is left now is to hope that the billions of dollars poured into the Gaza Strip for its rebuilding will be accompanied by the disarmament of Hamas and the establishment of an honest mechanism for overseeing the money and materials Egypt and Israel allow into the Gaza Strip. It is imperative that they not be diverted to rebuild Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure and tunnels, or to bribe UNRWA officials to look the other way, as has happened so often in the past. There is every indication that only Hamas and Qatar know whether there is anything to justify that hope.
Dr. Reuven Berko has a Ph.D. in Middle East studies, is a commentator on Israeli Arabic TV programs, writes for the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom and is considered one of Israel’s top experts on Arab affairs.