The Islamization of Britain in 2014

by Soeren Kern

December 30, 2014

“Britain remains the world’s leading recruiting ground for al-Qaeda.” — Con Coughlin, Daily Telegraph.

When she sought help from the police and a lawyer, “the family of the defendants were insulted that she had gone to the law. They wanted her back within the family fold… Therefore, it was decided that she should be forced to comply or be killed.” — Prosecutor of Ahmed A-Khatib, who murdered his wife for becoming “too westernized.”

British school teachers are afraid to teach their students about Christianity out of fear of offending Muslims. — Roger Bolton, BBC Radio 4’s Feedback program.

Rather than taking steps to protect British children, police, social workers, teachers… and the media deliberately played down the severity of the crimes [of Muslim sexual grooming gangs] in order to avoid being accused of “Islamophobia” or racism. — From the report “Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery.”

A group of British lawyers launched a website, Sharia Watch UK. The group called Sharia law “Britain’s Blind Spot.”

After Adebolajo, who murdered and tried to behead British soldier Lee Rigby with a meat cleaver, was given a “whole-life” prison term, his brother said his sibling was the victim of “Islamophobia.”

“The problem of honor-based violence and forced marriages in England is “worse than people think.” — Claire Phillipson, Wearside Women in Need

The Muslim population of Britain reached 3.4 million in 2014 to become around 5.3% of the overall population of 64 million, according to figures extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France and Germany.

Islam and Islam-related issues were omnipresent in Britain during 2014, and can be categorized into four broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists in Syria; 2) the continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) the sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; and 4) Muslim integration into British society.

What follows is a chronological review of some of the main stories involving the rise of Islam in Britain during 2014.

In January, an analysis of census data showed that nearly 10% of the babies and toddlers in England and Wales are Muslim. The percentage of Muslims among children under five is almost twice as high as in the general population. By way of comparison, fewer than one in 200 people over the age of 85 are Muslim, an indication of the extent to which the birth rate is changing the religious demographic in Britain.

Also in January, Muslim fundamentalists threatened to behead a fellow British Muslim after he posted an innocuous image of Mohammed and Jesus on his Twitter account. The death threats against Maajid Nawaz, a Liberal Democrat Party candidate for British Parliament, added to the growing number of cases in which Islamists are using intimidation tactics to restrict the free speech rights of fellow Muslims in Europe.

On January 16, a Muslim woman was arrested by counter-terrorism police at Heathrow Airport as she was preparing to board a flight to Turkey. Nawal Masaad, 26, is accused of trying to smuggle £16,500 ($27,000; €20,000) in her underwear to jihadists in Syria. She and her alleged co-conspirator, Amal El-Wahabi, 27—a Moroccan who does not work and claims British social welfare benefits for herself and two young sons—were the first British women to be charged with terrorism offenses linked to the conflict in Syria.

On January 23, the head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism unit, Commander Richard Walton, revealed that 14 British minors were arrested on charges linked to the Syrian conflict in January alone, compared to 24 for the whole of 2013. He said it was “almost inevitable” that some fighters would try to mount attacks in Britain upon their return.

On January 16, British Islamist Abu Waleed outlined his vision of an Islamic state in Britain, and called for Christians to be humiliated so that they would convert to Islam. In a video, he said:

“If the Muslim sees a kaffir [non-Muslim] with nice clothes, the kaffir has to take his clothes off and give them to the Muslim. The kaffir, when he walks down the street, he has to wear a red belt around his neck, and he has to have his forehead shaved, and he has to wear two shoes that are different from one another. He [the non-believer] is not allowed to walk on the pavement, he has to walk in the middle of the road, and he has to ride a mule. That is, my dear brothers, the Islamic state.”

In Bristol, the city council approved a controversial plan to convert a former comedy club into a mosque. In Cambridgeshire, a Muslim group submitted plans to convert a warehouse into a new mosque. In Cambridge, locals opposed a plan to build a £17.5 million ($28.5 million; €21 million) mega-mosque, claiming it could be “a front for terrorism.” In Blackburn, home to nearly 100 mosques, city councilors were urged to reject a plan to open a mosque in a residential neighborhood.

In Southend, local residents celebrated after a four-year battle resulted in the closing of an illegal mosque. In Newton Mearns, south of Glasgow, plans were abandoned to build a mosque within the grounds of a school in one of the most affluent suburbs of Scotland, due to local criticism of the move.

In Catherine-de-Barnes, a tiny village in western central England, local residents objected to plans for a large, Muslim-only cemetery, which will include space for 4,000 followers of Islam to be buried, and 75 parking spaces for visitors. The village has a population of just 613, which means the cemetery could eventually hold six-and-a-half times as many people as Catherine-de-Barnes itself.

In February, official statistics showed that net immigration to the United Kingdom surged to 212,000 in the year ending September 2013, a significant increase from 154,000 in the previous year. The new immigration data cast doubt on a pledge by Prime Minister David Cameron to get net migration—the difference between the number of people entering Britain and those leaving—down to the “tens of thousands” before the general election in May 2015.

Separately, data released by the National Crime Agency showed a 155% rise in British children groomed by sex gangs during 2013.

Also in January, a Muslim extremist who hacked a soldier to death on a London street in May 2013, launched a taxpayer-funded appeal against his murder conviction. Michael Adebolajo, 29, who tried to behead the British soldier Lee Rigby with a meat cleaver, maintained that he should not have been convicted because he is a “soldier of Allah” and therefore Rigby’s killing was an act of war rather than premeditated murder.

Adebolajo and his co-defendant, Michael Adebowale, 22, were found guilty by a jury in December 2013, and were sentenced on February 26. Adebolajo was given a “whole-life” prison term and Adebowale was given a minimum term of 45 years. Adebolajo’s brother saidhis sibling was the victim of “Islamophobia.”

On February 16, The Sunday Times reported that about 250 British jihadists who went to train and fight in Syria had returned to the UK and were being monitored by the security services. Senior officials said the high number of “returnees”—five times the figure that had been previously reported—underlined the growing danger posed by “extremist tourists” going to the war-torn region. MI5 and police said they feared that “returnees” could be preparing a Mumbai-style gun attack on civilians, possibly in a crowded public place in London.

On February 14, three Muslim vigilantes who terrorized innocent members of the public as the self-styled “Muslim Patrol” were banned from promoting Sharia Law in Britain for a period of five years.

In March, British authorities launched an investigation into the source of a document that purportedly outlined a plot by Muslim fundamentalists to Islamize public schools in England and Wales. The four-page document described a strategy—dubbed Operation Trojan Horse—to oust non-Muslim head teachers and staff at state schools in Muslim neighborhoods and replace them with individuals who would run the schools according to strict Islamic principles.

Also in March, a report entitled, “Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery,”showed how officials in England and Wales were aware of rampant child grooming—the process by which sexual predators befriend and build trust with children in order to prepare them for abuse—by Muslim gangs since at least 1988. Rather than taking steps to protect British children, however, police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians and the media deliberately downplayed the severity of the crimes perpetrated by the grooming gangs in order to avoid being accused of “Islamophobia” or racism.

Meanwhile, official figures revealed that record levels of Muslims are serving jail sentences and that the numbers are still growing. Across England and Wales the proportion has risen from 8% one decade ago to 14% now. In London, the figure is 27%, which is more than double the 12% of the capital’s population who are Muslim.

On March 27, ITV News reported that the problem of honor-based violence and forced marriages in England is “worse than people think,” but that many people are afraid of speaking out because they do not want to be branded as being “racist.” Claire Phillipson from Wearside Women in Need said:

“I have no doubt that all over the North East [England] first, second, third generation English young women are being forced into marriage.

“Schools and communities are keeping silent about it, because they are concerned that they would be called racist, Islamophobic. They don’t quite know where the line between culture, religion and human rights should be drawn.”

An image from the video “Right to choose: Spotting the signs of forced marriage – Nayana”, produced by the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office.

On March 13, the Law Society, the main professional association representing and governing the legal profession in England and Wales, issued ground-breaking guidance to help lawyers draft Sharia-compliant wills and estate planning documents. The move effectively enshrined Islamic Sharia law in the British legal system for the first time.

In April, the British government launched a public consultation on whether or not to introduce student loans that are compliant with Islamic Sharia law, which forbids loans that involve the payment of interest.

Critics said that the dispute over interest-bearing student loans follows stepped-up demands for Sharia-compliant banking and insurance as well as credit cards, mortgages and pension funds, which—taken together—are contributing to the establishment of parallel Islamic financial and legal systems in Britain.

Separately, Lloyds Bank was accused of reverse religious discrimination after dropping overdraft fees for Muslims but not for others. The bank said that non-Muslims would have to pay up to £80 (€97, $135) a month for an overdraft, but that for Muslims “there won’t be any charges.”

Meanwhile, the fast food giant Subway removed ham and bacon from almost 200 outlets in Britain and switched to halal (Arabic for “permitted” or “lawful”) meat alternatives, apparently in an attempt to please its Muslim customers.

On April 9, Home Secretary Theresa May published her annual report on the government’s strategy for countering terrorism. The report concluded that battle-hardened British jihadists returning from the war in Syria now pose the most serious threat to British security.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Secret U.K. Report: Britain Not Prepared for Power Outage – Neither is The U.S.

CSP, by Frank Gaffney, Dec. 29, 2014:

Acquittal of the Guilty

Jihad Watch, by Michael Devolin, Dec. 28, 2014:

With every lone wolf terror attack these days there’s always the sequent announcement, either from the press or the local police spokesperson, suggesting that the terrorist was suffering from mental illness. It had nothing to do with the religion of Islam and jihad but everything to do with the perpetrator’s drug addiction, or a stormy marriage, or the fact that he was a new convert and misinterpreted Islam, or…well, you get the picture. And we, as we go about our busy day, accept their compendious overviews probably because, as Neil J. Kressel reminds us, “…most of our insight into why individuals become fundamentalist terrorists is not based on firm research.”

And Heaven forbid someone should come right out and say that the terrorist is a Muslim impelled by the Quran’s prescribed hatred of the infidel and encouraged by his fellow religious to commit terrorist acts. It couldn’t be that Islam, the religion of peace, could produce such vile and contrary personages. During a recent sermon in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Sheik Omar Abu Sara shouted, “Oh, Allah, hasten the day of the [slaughter] of the Jews!” To which his audience responded with a healthy “Amen!” And I mention Jews because Jews, as everyone knows, are Islam’s favourite infidels. It’s written in the Quran.

Jocelyn Belanger, a psychology professor at L’Universite du Quebec a Montreal, was recently quoted in Canada’s National Post as saying that “I think the evidence is very clear about mental health and terrorism: there’s actually no link.” He adds, “We know that people who have mental illness are stigmatized in our society. And now to, on top of that, say that they may be radicals or future terrorists, imagine the label we’re putting on those people.” I’m so glad Professor Belanger pointed this out, because our Western media had me almost convinced that the mentally ill are attracted to Islam. But now it’s clear to me: Islam makes people crazy. “A crooked tree casts a crooked shadow.”

It’s now the custom of Western journalists to forgive Islam the heinous crimes zealous Muslims are committing every day around the world. Such a grand exculpation has become the convenient denouement to the inscrutable problem of terrorist violence. They’d rather blame the mentally ill because such blame is much easier to apply to humanity than to approach the insurmountable reality that such a widespread and ancient religion as Islam is the primary source of the plague of Islamist terrorism. It’s much easier (and safer) to leave the Muslim world undisturbed in their antiquated belief that certain Jews are the descendants of swine and monkeys, for example, than it is to confront their 1.6 billion and flat out tell them that such a belief incites homicidal behaviour in a vast number of their fellow religious in Gaza.

The fact that the religion of Islam is ancient and it followers so many should in no way become a means of removing the guilt both deserve for having become the sole and spectacular example of religious intolerance and terrorism in the contemporary world. Numbers can never justify the means. Not during antiquity and surely not now. And to stay an unbiased condemnation of these egregious transgressions will not only elicit the same religious intolerance and terrorism in Canada and the United States, but it will also cast us in an unfavourable historical light. Our children and our children’s children will surely wonder at what will have been our ghastly imprudence.

Johannes J. G. Jansen writes, “Western writers who give accounts of Islam to a Western public do not stress those elements in Islam that would be offensive or nonsense in the eyes of their Western readers. They rather see it as their duty to present Islam in as acceptable a light as possible to the West. They state the case of Islam with as much coherence as possible and construct the most feasible explanation for various Islamic aspirations. In general, they take on the role of a counsel for the defense.” Hence, the true face of Islam is not being fairly articulated by Western writers, most often journalists and political hacks, who have obscured veridical Islam — the Islam that exists — and given us instead an ersatz Islam — the Islam promised and imagined by its apologists.

Jihadists are now acquitted of their atrocious deeds, as ludicrous as that may sound to the sane of this world, some even repatriated back into their country of origin. Not only damned are those who conceive of such injudicious concepts as the idea that terrorists could ever be integrated risk-free into our society, but more damned are those of us whose silent compromise becomes a sign of consent to such foolish clemencies.

Michael Devolin has been a member of JDL Canada since the 1980s, and has served as the personal bodyguard to Meir Weinstein, National Director of JDL Canada, at several high-profile trials, including the Jim Keegstra hate crimes trial and the Imra Finta war crimes trial.

In Battle to Defang ISIS, U.S. Targets Its Psychology

Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata wants fresh ideas to defeat ISIS. Credit Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Maj. Gen. Michael K. Nagata, commander of American Special Operations forces in the Middle East, sought help this summer in solving an urgent problem for the American military: What makes the Islamic State so dangerous?

Trying to decipher this complex enemy — a hybrid terrorist organization and a conventional army — is such a conundrum that General Nagata assembled an unofficial brain trust outside the traditional realms of expertise within the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence agencies, in search of fresh ideas and inspiration. Business professors, for example, are examining the Islamic State’s marketing and branding strategies.

“We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” he said, according to the confidential minutes of a conference call he held with the experts. “We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”

General Nagata’s frustration is shared by other American officials. Even as President Obama and his top civilian and military aides express growing confidence that Iraqi troops backed by allied airstrikes have blunted the Islamic State’s momentum on the ground in Iraq and undermined its base of support in Syria, other officials acknowledge they have barely made a dent in the larger, longer-term campaign to kill the ideology that animates the terrorist movement.

Four months after his initial session with the outside advisers, General Nagata, one of the military’s rising stars and the man Mr. Obama has tapped to train a Pentagon-backed army of Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, is still searching for answers.

“Those questions and observations are my way of probing and questioning,” General Nagata said in a brief email this month, declining on orders from his superiors to say any more.

The minutes of internal conference calls between General Nagata and more than three dozen experts he convened through Pentagon channels in August and October offer an unusual insight into the struggle to understand the Islamic State as a movement, and where the American military’s top leaders are most focused.

One of the panel’s initial observations that has intrigued General Nagata is the Islamic State’s “capacity to control” a population, according to the minutes.

It is not so much the number of troops or types of weapons the militants use, the experts said. Rather, it is the intangible means by which the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL, wrests and maintains control over territory and its people.

This ability, they discussed, centers on “psychological tactics such as terrorizing populations, religious and sectarian narratives, economic controls.”

The minutes, which are confidential but not classified, reveal disagreements among the experts over whether ISIS’ main objective is ideological or territorial — General Nagata encourages competing views, urging the group to have “one hell of a debate” over his questions.

But the panel raised doubts whether ISIS “has the bureaucratic sophistication necessary to govern.”

“The fact that someone as experienced in counterterrorism as Mike Nagata is asking these kind of questions shows what a really tough problem this is,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired three-star Army general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who has publicly raised similar concerns.

A final report by the group, which draws from industry, academia and policy research organizations, is due next month.

How to defang the Islamic State’s enticing narrative weighs heavily on many other senior administration officials, as well as top leaders in the Middle East and Europe.

This month, Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, said the increasing effort by the Islamic State to branch out to countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Libya “is a huge area of concern.” About 1,000 foreign fighters flock to Iraq and Syria every month, American intelligence officials say, most to join arms with ISIS.

“We have to, I think, as an international community, come to terms with how we’re going to deal with these ideologies and movements that are exploiting the weaknesses of various countries,” John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, said this fall. “We have to find a way to address some of these factors and conditions that are abetting and allowing these movements to grow.”

Enter General Nagata. He has fought in the shadows most of his 32-year Army career, serving in Special Operations forces and classified military units in hot zones such as Somalia, the Balkans and Iraq. Colleagues say he has displayed bureaucratic acumen in counterterrorism jobs at the C.I.A. and the Pentagon, and diplomatic savvy as a senior American military liaison officer in Pakistan during the turbulent period there from 2009 to 2011.

“He’s the rare warrior who is most comfortable in complexity,” said Stanley A. McChrystal, a retired four-star general and former commander of allied forces in Afghanistan.

Complexity is precisely what General Nagata, by then head of American commandos in the Middle East, wanted in July when he asked a tiny think tank within the military’s Joint Staff, known as Strategic Multilayer Assessment, for help in defeating the Islamic State.

In the past year, the group has produced studies on the security implications of megacities around the world and how to apply neuroscience to the concept of deterrence.

When General Nagata first convened the specialists on a conference call on Aug. 20, he described his priorities and the challenges that ISIS posed.

“What makes I.S. so magnetic, inspirational?” he said. He expressed specific concern that the militant organization is “deeply resonant with a specific but large portion of the Islamic population, particularly young men looking for a banner to flock to.”

“There is a magnetic attraction to I.S. that is bringing in resources, talent, weapons, etc., to thicken, harden, embolden I.S. in ways that are very alarming,” General Nagata said.

During the call, General Nagata alluded to the Islamic State’s sophisticated use of social media to project and amplify its propaganda, and insisted the United States needed “people born and raised in the region” to help combat the problem.

“I want to engage in a long-term conversation to understand a commonly held view of the psychological, emotional and cultural power of I.S. in terms of a diversity of audiences,” the general said. “They are drawing people to them in droves. There are I.S. T-shirts and mugs.”

“When I watch Americans use words like cowardly, barbaric, murder, outrageous, shocking, etc., to describe a violent extremist organization’s actions, we are playing right into the enemy’s hands,” General Nagata added. “They want us to become emotional. They revel in being called murderers when the words are coming from an apostate.”

He continued: “We have to remember that most of their messaging is not for us. We are not the target. They are happy to see us outraged, but they are really communicating to people we are being drawn to their banner.”

Six weeks later, in a second conference call on Oct. 3, General Nagata praised the group’s initial efforts, but again noted, “I do not understand the intangible power of ISIL.”

General Nagata scoffed at those who he said had questioned his decision to focus so much on understanding the intangibles of ISIS.

“What we have been asked to do will take every ounce of creativity that we have,” he said. “This may sound like a bizarre excursion into the surreal, but for me it is about avoiding failure.”

Exclusive: Terror Org. Harbored by Pakistani Gov’t Now Backs ISIS

Hafiz Saeed, leader of the Jamaat-ut-Dawa terror network has a $10 million bounty on his head issued by the U.S. government.

BY RYAN MAURO:

The Clarion Project has learned from a first-hand source in Pakistan that the leader of Jamaat-ut-Dawa, a major terrorist group harbored by the Pakistani government, expressed support for the Islamic State in a recent sermon.

The story breaks as Pakistani embassy is condemning the television show Homeland for depicting Pakistani government officials as complicit in terrorism.

The Clarion Project’s source, whose identity has been verified and will be referred to as “Aamir,” recently attended a public sermon by Jamaat-ut-Dawa (JUD) leader Hafiz Muhammad Saeed at the group’s Jamia Markaz al-Qadsi headquarters in Lahore. JUD is a rebranding of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET). The group is best known for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India that killed over 150 innocents.

The U.S. State Department lists JUD/LET as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and says it has links to Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami in Bangladesh, the Indian Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammed. The U.S. Treasury Department says it works with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Haqqani Network and targets U.S. and Afghan forces.

The event was heavily guarded with Saeed’s own security team equipped with assault rifles. The bulk of the sermon was dedicated to promoting jihad against the U.S. and India in order to “save Islam.” Saeed explicitly told attendees to donate to jihad and even recommended registering at a website to fight. Other reports have confirmed the placement of donation boxes for jihad at his events.

Saeed said that the current jihad against America is the same one that was waged against the Soviet Union and that the U.S. is already showing it will suffer the same fate. He boasted that America is so intimidated by him that it is even afraid of his name. Attendees responded with chants of jihad.

Aamir’s report matches Saeed’s bravado. After the U.S. announced a $10 million award for his information leading to his arrest, he held a public rally next to a Pakistani base that is only 40 minutes from the U.S. embassy.

“America should give that reward money to me,” Saeed joked. “I am here. I am visible.”

According to Aamir, Saeed explicitly endorsed jihad against the U.S. in Afghanistan, against India in Kashmir and against the U.S. in Iraq, where American forces are battling the Islamic State.

Saeed’s group is taking a similar stance as other Al-Qaeda-linked groups in endorsing the Islamic State as a group but stopping short of granting legitimacy to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a caliph.

However, Saeed is also on record as criticizing the Islamic State for massacring Muslims as “apostates” and suggested it should focus on destroying Israel. Earlier this month, he said he’d say to the Islamic State, “I invite you, you are sitting near the Israel boarder, go and destroy the Israeli Jewish [sic].”

What Saeed said to an attendee indicates he is privately more supportive of the Islamic State than his public speeches reveal. Someone from the audience approached Saeed about his implied declaration of the Islamic State as an ally and asked about the group’s presence in Pakistan.

The source was shocked at Saeed’s answer. He said that the Islamic State represents pure Islam and predicted that it would take over Pakistan and seize its nuclear weapons. Saeed emphasized that the Islamic State means no harm towards Sunnis and so it should not be feared.

Read more at Clarion Project

The Destruction of the Middle East

by Denis MacEoin

December 27, 2014

The heritage of centuries has been wiped out in little more than a year.

Eventually the need to wipe out all traces of unbelief becomes obsessive. At one time, for instance, Egyptian law demanded that any house found to contain a copy of The Apology of al-Kindi (a book containing a polemical dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian) would be demolished along with 40 houses around it.

Ethics were defined by what Allah said was good or evil in Sharia law. The Islamic State’s behaviour is solidly rooted in Islamic ideology, law and practice. It is only when this fundamental fact is grasped that we will be able to address what confronts us.

There are many wise and sensible Muslims who favour a shift to a more updated way of thinking. It is their mosques and shrines that are being crushed; it is their heritage. Today, such Muslims use the freedoms bestowed on them in the West to write, network and debate their opposition to fundamentalist interpretation of Islam by the Islamic State and other supporters of murder and destruction.

We are living through ferocious times. Stories about the self-proclaimed Islamic State [ISIS/ISIL/Da’esh] abound in the media, in what has now become a daily round of beheadings, suicide bombings, and general mayhem from Nigeria to Malaysia. It seems that wherever there is a Muslim country, there is extreme violence. But one part of the Islamic State narrative has received less attention than the gruesome rounds of killings: the continuing onslaughts on cities such as Mosul, Aleppo, Raqqa and Kobani. The Islamic State and related movements have rampaged across parts of Iraq and Syria, destroying the entire heritage of ancient regions, demolishing historic churches, synagogues, mosques, Sufi and Shi’i shrines, and major archaeological sites. All this vandalism is driven by a relentless passion to enforce religious purity on the regions they now control.

Around the world, art historians, antiquities experts, and archaeologists scarcely dare open their e-mails every day, fearing loss of another irreplaceable site. Physical destruction in the Islamic realms has now reached proportions of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.

In Mosul, the Islamic State set out on an operation of “cultural and historical cleansing” across the city. The group deploys a unit called the Kata’ib Taswiyya, or settlement battalions, who are ordered to identify sites for culling. The unit razes to the ground any mosques, churches or, invariably, shrines that have been built over tombs; such places may attract devotees to pray in them, thereby creating polytheism — in Islam one of the crimes most censured. In addition, the painting or sculpting of the human form is anathema; if man was created in God’s image, to represent man is to presume to know God and therefore to diminish Him.

Graveyards are flattened, headstones are bulldozed, and statues of cultural significance to the people of Mosul are destroyed.

As we face the Islamic State and all the rapidly expanding jihadist movements in the Middle East and beyond, we are starting to recognize that airstrikes have only limited results. If we are to contain or defeat the adversaries in our midst, we have to understand their motivation, their psychology, and their sense of rootedness.

Politicians who proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace do us a disservice; Islam has never been at peace with the world around it. The Islamic State’s behavior is solidly rooted in Islamic ideology, law and practice. Only when this fundamental fact is grasped will we be able to address what confronts us. It is time that not only active jihadists, but their ideological sponsors in Salafi, Wahhabi, Mawdudist, and other classical and modern interpretations of Islam, be discussed openly before they do more harm. They and we do not have the leisure to wait until the oil money runs out and leaves the Saudis or Qataris weak.

We must learn to speak the truth, especially in high places. In the tenth century, Islam abandoned reason and rational pursuits in favor of revelation and revealed law that could not be challenged. Ethics were defined by what Allah said was good or evil in Sharia law. Islam has remained frozen ever since. We cannot go on patronizing this, and nodding acceptance that Muslims know best. Very few grasp the quandary in which non-extremist Muslims, like their ancestors, are captured. Western rationalism, Western ethics, and Western standards of peace and justice need to remain, or the world we know could be trampled underfoot by men and women who prefer death to co-existence, and fundamentalism to tolerance.

There are many wise and sensible Muslims who favour a shift to a more updated way of thinking. Many cannot openly declare their thoughts for fear of reprisals and even execution; others are faithful Muslims who see a desperate need for a valid reinterpretation of their religion.

Today, such Muslims use the freedoms bestowed on them in the West to write, network, and debate their thoughts about the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam by the Islamic State, other Salafis, Wahhabis, Mawdudists, and all other clerics and extremist supporters of murder and destruction. It is their mosques and shrines and ancient monuments that are being crushed; it is their heritage — as much as that of Jews, Christians, Yazidis and Baha’is — that is being wiped from the pages of history.

Losses so far include:

• The statues of Mulla ‘Uthman al-Mawsili (1845-1923), a famous musician and poet, of a woman carrying an urn, and of Abu Tammam (788-845), author of the celebratedHamasa, one of the greatest literary compilations ever made in Arabic.


• The destruction of the greatly venerated tomb of ‘Ali ibn al-Athir al-Jazari (1160-1233), a major landmark that had stood in the centre of Mosul for centuries. Ibn al-Athir is celebrated as the author of The Complete History, one of the most important histories of Islam ever written.


• The Islamic State’s destruction of the Tomb of Yunus (Jonah) Mosque, which was blown to pieces along with all its contents. Even before the explosion, fighters took sledgehammers to ancient tombstones in the building. The mosque was of importance not just to the Muslims of the city, but as a place of pilgrimage for Jews and Christians. St. George’s Monastery church, one of the oldest in the region, has also gone forever.


• In Kirkuk, the Islamic State has destroyed the tomb of the Prophet Daniel, and in Nineveh, the ancient ruins of which lie across the River Tigris from Mosul, sprawl damaged archaeological ruins.


• In Mosul, the 13th-century shrine of Imam Awn al-Din — with a stunning vaulted ceiling, designed to resemble a honeycomb, inside a pyramid-shaped tower on the banks of the Tigris, and among the city’s most precious sites — was one of the very few structures to have survived the devastation of the 13th-century Mongol invasion On July 25, 2014, members of the Islamic State reduced it to rubble.


• In Tikrit, the city’s most famous and most beautiful church of St. Ahoadamah, known as the Green Church, dating from the 7th century, has been erased from history.


• In Syria, the Jabhat al-Nusra’s destruction of the Deir el-Zour Armenian Church, that stood as a memorial to the 1.5 million slaughtered in the Armenian genocide in Turkey, was blown up.


• In Mali, much of UNESCO’s World Heritage Site of Timbuktu (Mali) was destroyed during the battles of Gao and Timbuktu, fought between the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad and the Islamist Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa between June 26 and 27, 2012. Afterwards, the Islamist group Ansar Dine went on a rampage identical to that of the Islamic State. An official for the group, Abou Dardar, boasted that “not a single mausoleum will remain in Timbuktu.”


• Sufi shrines have been pulverized in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, India, and the Balkans.


• In Bahrain, 43 Shi’i mosques and tens of other religious structures have been destroyed and damaged by the ruling Sunni government there.


• Across Syria and Iraq, ancient archaeological sites have been wrecked. They were not just the heritage of those countries, they were central to our understanding of the ancient world, where human civilization first developed in city-states. Apamea, with its famous colonnade and beautiful mosaic, capital of the Seleucid empire, was a major center of Roman rule in the Levant, a leading city in Byzantine Syria, and at one time among the best-preserved archaeological sites in the region. Today, it looks like the face of the moon. Its devastation, the work of demolition done by looters using heavy earth-moving machines, took a mere four or five months.


• In eastern Syria, one of the world’s richest archaeological remains, Dura-Europos, the “Pompeii of the Syrian Desert,” was obliterated. Remarkable finds had been brought to light: temples, wall decorations, inscriptions, military equipment, and tombs. It had been home to a third-century painted synagogue as well as to the oldest example in the world of a Christian house-church, which contained the earliest depictions of Jesus Christ ever found, dating back to 235 AD. The Islamic State looted the site and, as elsewhere, has apparently sold its treasure on the black market of the antiquities trade, presumably using the proceeds to inflate their already swollen coffers for the promotion of jihad.


• Both Shi’i and Sufi shrines and mosques have fallen afoul of the Islamic State’s fanaticism. Jewish sites have been targeted so extensively that UNESCO has held aspecial session on threats posed to them. UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova has described the Islamic State’s activities in this respect as “a form of cultural cleansing.” Many other Jewish sites were also destroyed or under threat from Islamist entities in Libya, where an ancient Jewish heritage was all but wiped out under the regime of Mu’ammar Qadhafi, and where what is left is succumbing to fresh attacks.

Locals survey the hill of rubble that resulted from the destruction of the Tomb of Yunus (Jonah), in Mosul, Iraq. The Islamic State blew up the tomb and mosque on July 24, 2014.

The Islamic State, however, does not restrict its demolition to Christian, Jewish or pagan sites. Its members have also evidently culled what may be thought of as their own heritage. In Tikrit, they demolished the country’s oldest Islamic site, the Arba’in (Forty) Shrine and mosque, where forty of the companions (Salaf) of the Prophet were buried.

In this, there is desperate irony, for the form of Islam followed by the Islamic State is Salafism, based on imitating the ways of Muhammad and his companions.

The heritage of centuries has been wiped out in little more than a year. There will be many who argue that this devastation is, at root, the fault of the West; that its colonization, imperial ambitions, and general interference have forced the people of the Middle East to rise up against Europe and America, and find their only solution in the creation of an Islamic state where Shari’a law will dominate and justice prevail. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Syria was never a French colony, but a mandate territory between 1922 and 1936 — fourteen years. Lebanon was a mandate territory from 1922 to 1943 — twenty-one years. Iraq was a British mandate from 1922 to 1932 — ten years. All were colonies of the Muslim Ottoman empire for centuries: Iraq between 1543 and 1918, Syria from 1516 to 1918, and were, before that, colonies of earlier Islamic empires from the Umayyads to the Abbasids to the Mamluks — and so on.

This alone exposes the reality, that the actions of groups such as the Islamic State have their true roots in Islam itself. The Prophet and his companions fought jihad wars and destroyed pagan idols as well as places they may have been concerned would become centers for cults. During the Arab conquests, many religious centers were destroyed, notably in India, where temples were looted and razed, and whole towns ruined by the Ghaznavids and Timurids.

Eventually the need to wipe out all traces of unbelief became more or less obsessive. At one time, for instance, Egyptian law demanded that any house found to contain a copy of The Apology of al-Kindi (a book containing a polemical dialogue between a Muslim and a Christian) would be demolished, along with forty houses around it.[1]

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Allah in our schools

American Thinker, By Carol Brown, Dec. 28, 2014:

Jihad, in its many guises and forms, is being waged across America. No aspect of our society has been untouched by this relentless attack. Including our schools.

Our education system has been infiltrated by the enemy, as the next generation of Americans is brainwashed with white-washed Islam.

The assault is coming from all directions and it never sleeps.

Muslim Brotherhood front groups have been, and continue to be, integrally involved in the development of Common Core curriculum. They make sure a false picture of Islam is integrated into lessons, from K – 12. Our children are exposed to all manner of “educational” activities that amount to Islamic propaganda, which is now endemic in the school system.

In addition to Muslim Brotherhood front groups, Saudi Arabia exerts outside influence on school curricula. The Saudis spread a lot of money around, giving it to organizations that promote Islam throughout our institutions. Schools receive a hefty sum of brand name sickness called Wahhabism. As Stanley Kurtz wrote in NRO several years ago: “…the Saudis have figured out how to make an end-run around America’s K-12 curriculum safeguards, thereby gaining control over much of what children in the United States learn about the Middle East.” (To learn more about how the Saudi’s achieved this, see here and here.)

Then there are garden variety Muslims bent on advancing Sharia law in our schools who also wield enormous power. Take, for instance, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen is a Muslim committed to the advancement of the Islamic state. He has called for the destruction of the United States and all infidels. And he has set up a network of publically-funded charter schools.

Factor in political leadership that is clueless (at best) or willfully collaborating with the enemy (at worst) along with an electorate that has been marinating in politically-correct-multicultural-moral-equivalence “thinking,” and you’ve got a powerful force mangling the minds of our youth.

I wish I could call what is going on a battle. Or a war. But I can’t. Because thus far America has hardly put up a fight. And so, Islam advances. Marching through the halls of our schools.

To get a taste of what’s going on, please take the abbreviated tour below. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The following all have taken place at one or more schools:

• Students are taught the five pillars of Islam.


• Students recite “all people must submit to Allah,” “there is no God but Allah,” and “Allah is great,” among other Muslim prayers. Sometimes students recite these words in Arabic. Students also recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, saying: “One nation under Allah.”


• Lesson plans promote Sharia law, polygamy, and burqas.


• Classes unrelated to history or religion often morph into Islamic propaganda.


• A Saudi-funded 3-week program on Islam has students living as Muslims, during which time, among other things, they recite Muslim prayers and chants and are prohibited from wearing a cross or saying the name “Jesus.”


• Students are taught that Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews.


• Students must write about how, if they were a travel agent, they would create a travel package promoting the Golden Age of Islam.


• Textbooks include the Muslim call to prayer, whitewash Islam, denigrate Christians and Jews, and describe Muhammad as a wise spiritual leader; a gentle merchant with a strong moral compass; and a man who was deeply concerned about the mistreatment of others.


• Student field trips bring them to mosques where students are given Korans, kneel down and pray to Allah, and are told that Muslims treat those they conquer better than minorities are treated in the United States. One field trip was to the mosque the Tsarnaev brothers attended, where non-Muslim boys joined adult males in prayer and girls were told Islam is pro-woman (among other egregious things).


• A curriculum used a video that framed non-Muslims as bigots and enforced blasphemy laws.


• Lessons teach more about Islam than any other faith.


• Students must write essays about what it would be like to travel to Mecca.


• Fill-in-the-blank assignments include answers that read: “Islam, at heart, is a peaceful religion” and “Most Muslims faith is stronger than the average Christian,” among other lies.


• Korans are introduced into the classroom.


• Muslim clerics, members of CAIR, and representatives from Islamic centers come into classrooms to observe and/or lecture.


• Female students wear burqas as part of a lesson on Islam.


• Lessons teach that terrorists must be called freedom fighters.


• Students are required to study Arabic.


• A teacher is forced to resign after making critical statements about Obama and Islam on a talk radio program. CAIR accuses a teacher of being a “racist” because she drew an analogy between the Taliban and Hamas during lessons on bullying. Christian teachers are harassed by Muslims in the school hierarchy.


• Muslim students are given special privileges that students of other faiths are not afforded, including several times during the school day when they are allowed to leave the classroom to pray.


• Muslim holidays are added to school calendars.

The list above is by no means exhaustive, but you get the idea. Needless to say, everything that is being taught is the taqiyya version. Would that it were the truth, we could take heart that our children were learning about an enemy intent on cutting their lives short. Instead, brainwashing is taking place that will help the enemy advance with even less resistance than it currently faces. (And it faces precious little.)

In many situations parents were kept in the dark about the Islamic propaganda being peddled in their children’s schools and only learned about it after seeing something on their child’s homework assignment.

In some cases, after parents found out about what was being taught, they challenged the school and/or pulled their children out of school. Some have pursued legal action and there have been some victories because parents became informed, took action, and fought back.

On the flip side, many parents appear unaware, unconcerned, or even supportive of this dangerous assault – otherwise known as “soft jihad” – against the minds of our young people. In addition, in many cases power brokers in the school system have stood behind the twisted ways Islam is impacting the education of our youth.

Moral equivalence, ignorance, and dhimmitude have taken hold.

So how are we dealing with this avalanche of jihad reigning down on our children?

Poorly.

In dribs and drabs. Here and there. With a barely perceptible, momentary flicker of light. And then it goes out. While the forces we are up against are organized and gaining ground by the day.

Here’s an example of the kind of slick organization that is operating to advance Sharia. It’s called the Islam Project. Their mission statement is filled with buzzwords so many Americans have come to embrace. It’s Exhibit A for taqiyya-in-action and is an example of the first stage of the 3 stages of jihad:

The PBS films Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet and Muslims are the keystones of the Islam Project, which also includes a national community engagement campaign to raise public awareness, build community bridges, support dialogue, offer educational resources, and explore workplace issues as they relate to Muslims.

The Islam Project is partnering with interfaith and other community-based organizations to focus attention on issues facing Muslims in America and throughout the world. The campaign includes a range of tools — both video and print — for use by community organizations, educators, civil rights leaders, policymakers, journalists, employers, and those in the general public who want to learn more about Muslims and Islam.

Communities in ten cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Wichita, Kansas — have launched campaigns based on the tools of the Islam Project….

The Cliff Notes for the above would be: If you believe any of what you just read, you’re an idiot. Our goal is submission and we will achieve this goal by any and all means. Useful idiots welcome. Until you’re no longer needed.

An army is on the march. Where is our army to beat back this beast?

We cannot afford to lose one more child – and certainly not another generation – to the deadly influence of Islam in our schools.

Speak out. Get involved. You don’t have to start from scratch. You can, for example, join ACT! for America, a large organization dedicated to national security and battling Islamic supremacism. ACA has 280,000 members and nearly 900 chapters across the country. Become a member and help our army swell to millions.

Additional ideas for taking action can be found here (action items at end of article).

To read more about how Islam is taking hold in our schools, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. To read about a 2008 study by the American Textbook Council called Islam in the Classroom, see here.

Hat tip: While I used multiple sources for my research, I’d like to express a special word of acknowledgement to the website Bare Naked Islam which was an extraordinary resource.

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Christians and Churches Attacked in the West: Muslim Persecution of Christians, September 2014

by Raymond Ibrahim

December 24, 2014

You have a cross on… Do you know what we do to people like you?” — Muslim in Denmark.

Muslim Fulani gunmen forced their way into the church, cut [the pastor], his wife and a daughter with a machete, and then tied the hands and feet of the three of them before setting the building on fire… We only found the charred remains of the three of them in the morning. I heard them shouting at the top of their voices, saying they must obliterate any traces of Christianity in the town.” — Eyewitness account, Nigeria.

Each year, approximately 1,000 women in Pakistan are forced to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men. Whenever a case of this nature reaches the law courts, those women, under threat and blackmail, often declare that their conversion and marriage were decisions freely made, and the case is closed.

The Muslim persecution of Christians in September started making prominent appearances not just in the Islamic world, but also in the West—in America, Australia and Europe.

In the United States, in Columbus, Indiana, three churches were vandalized on the same night. The words most frequently sprayed were “Infidels!” and “Koran 3:151.” The verse from the Koran states, “We will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve [or “infidels”] for what they have associated with Allah [reference to Christian Trinity] of which He had not sent down [any] authority. And their refuge will be the Fire, and wretched is the residence of the wrongdoers.”

Father Doug Marcotte of Saint Bartholomew’s Catholic Church, one of those vandalized, said, “There’s a lot of bad stuff being done in the name of Allah and so when people see this happening in Columbus, whether that was truly the person’s intent or there’s something else going on, it makes people nervous. It makes people upset. It makes them scared.”

Meanwhile, in Australia, AAP reported that “Church-goers in Sydney’s west have been left shaken after a stranger shouted death threats from a car bearing the Islamic State flag. The car drove past Our Lady of Lebanon Church at Harris Park on Tuesday and witnesses claim it had a flag similar to those brandished by Islamic State jihadists hanging out the window.” A church official said the people in the car threatened to “kill the Christians” and slaughter their children: “They were strong words and people were scared of what they saw.” Witnesses saw a flag outside the window with the words, “There is only one god and Muhammad is the prophet.” And as happens frequently in Muslim-majority nations, police security was later dispatched to patrol the Harris Park church while hundreds partook of the mass inside.

People in a car bearing a jihadist flag verbally abused parishioners at the Our Lady of Lebanon Church in Sydney, Australia in September, threatening to “kill the Christians” and slaughter their children.

In Denmark—2013’s “happiest country in the world“—Christians of Middle Eastern backgrounds continued to experience “harassment, verbal attacks and in some cases direct violence from Muslims,” reports TV2, especially in Muslim-majority areas, such as Nørrebro. One Christian, “Jojo,” born in Denmark of Lebanese parents, shared her experiences. Once when sitting in her parked car, several Muslims surrounded it, harassing her about her Western attire. When one of them noticed she was wearing a cross, he said “Well, you have a cross on—then you are also a Christian f***ing whore. Do you know what we do to people like you? Do you know what we do to people like you? You get stoned [to death].”

Another Christian woman of Iranian background recounted how she and her son are harassed on the Muslim-majority block where they live—and where she stands out for not wearing ahijab, the Islamic veil: “My son is being called everything. I get called all sorts of things. Infidel. Filthy Christians. They tell me I ought to be stoned to death. My son was beaten at the bus stop. He was called pig, dirty potato (Muslim slang for Danes), and that ‘you and your mother should die.”‘

Islamic dreams of conquering Europe were prevalent. A senior analyst in Spain warned that, because Islamists see the Iberian peninsula as being “under Spanish and Portuguese occupation,” greater risk of terrorism exists there than in other Western areas. Because Iberia—or, in Arabic, Al-Andalus—was under Islamic domination for centuries, many Muslims consider it part of the Islamic world, or Dar al-Islam, which needs to be reconquered, no less than Israel, also seen as occupied Islamic territory.

More pointedly, in the Islamic State [IS], in a lengthy message partially addressed to the “crusaders”—a reference to the West—some members declared, “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah.” Members of the IS also invoked a statement attributed to Muhammad, that Constantinople would be conquered before Rome—and it was, in 1453. The implication was that the Eternal City of Rome would be next.

Around the same time, Rome responded by rejecting a motion to name a street after the late Oriana Fallaci, a veteran journalist who had once written that, “the Muslim world is attempting to conquer the West in the name of Islam.” In explaining their decision, local politicians described Fallaci’s writings as containing “religious hatred,” or “Islamophobia.”

In Canada, while 80 special Muslims went to the trouble of attending a Muslim rally on behalf of persecuted Christians, sadly, another rally, an extremist Al Quds Day Anti-Israel Hate Fest, drew approximately 6,000 participants.

The rest of September’s roundup of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed by theme and country alphabetical order, not necessarily according to severity.

Muslim Attacks on Churches

East Jerusalem: A Christian church was attacked numerous times: On September 29, young Muslim men, with ties to a Palestinian militant group, wired shut the door of the Living Bread Church and sprayed a gaseous substance at those inside. An earlier gas attack had already occurred on September 17. Hours before the second attack, someone threw a rock through one of the windows of the church, and the day before that, Sunday, September 28, a Palestinian and others assaulted a church member as he was emptying trash into a dumpster outside the church.

On Sept. 21, a Palestinian militant, without warning, ran up behind a church leader, Karen Dunham, and knocked her to the pavement: “This guy charged me as fast as he could,” she said. “He came up behind me and just slammed into my back, and I fell and I hit the ground. My face is bruised. There’s bruises on the side of my cheek, on my face, on my head, on my knee, cuts on my head, and my wrist was fractured.”

Egypt: A Christian priest in Egypt appealed to President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to intervene on behalf of yet another church being threatened by “religious extremists.” So far, local authorities have done nothing. Four years ago, the Coptic Church of St. Abram in Shubra al-Khaima received a permit to build an additional building. During those same four years, seven “thugs”—in the words of the report—have prevented it from being built. The “thugs” had mobilized local Muslims to threaten and demonstrate against the church. “The priest lamented that ‘after suffering many long years’ they finally managed to acquire the permit to build, but then the next obstacle presented itself in the person of the aforementioned seven ‘thugs’ who constantly harass, and incite Muslim mobs, against the church, whenever it tries to exercise its right to build the services building. Islamic law forbids the building of new churches or the renovation of existing churches.”

Iraq: Islamic State militants “completely destroyed” the ancient Green Church in Tikrit. They packed the church with explosives and detonated them — completely destroying the ancient church, which belonged to the Assyrian Church of the East. Almost from the time it was built in the seventh century, when Islam overran Iraq, the church had been attacked, ransacked, and destroyed by Muslim rulers and others, but was restored on the orders of Iraq’s late President Saddam Hussein in the 1990s.

Nigeria: Many more churches and a Christian university, Kulp Bible College, were forced to shut down as a result of the advances of the Islamic jihadi group, Boko Haram. In one instance, a pastor reported that “Boko Haram violence has been getting worse every day, and our members are fleeing the area by the thousands. Recent attacks in Borno and Adamawa states where our churches are located have seen Boko Haram take over the Army base. As a result, about 350 Christians have been killed.”

Separately, in Kaduna state, where “Muslim Fulani assailants seem driven to rid the area of Christianity and use the land to graze their cattle,” according to church leaders, 46 Christians, including two pastors, were slaughtered in raids. According to an eyewitness,

“Suddenly we heard sounds of gunshots around our village. The pastor was still in the pastorate when the Muslim Fulani gunmen forced their way onto the church premises. They cut him, his wife and a daughter with a machete, and then tied the hands and feet of the three of them before setting the house on fire. The three of them were burned to ashes in the living room of the pastorate. We only found the charred remains of the three of them the following morning…. The gunmen then came onto the church premises and began shooting. I heard them shouting at the top of their voices, saying they must obliterate any trace of Christianity in the town.”

Although Muslim Fulani have historically had property disputes with Christian farmers, Christian leaders say attacks by the herdsmen constitute a war “by Islam to eliminate Christianity” in Nigeria.

Read more at Gatestone Institute

Raymond Ibrahim is author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War in Christians (published by Regnery in cooperation with Gatestone Institute, April 2013).

Al-Qaeda’s Younger Brother in Florida

Frontpage, By Joe Kaufman On December 25, 2014

Nabil el-Shukri’s terrorist family has been decimated. His father, who was the imam of what has been labeled one of the most dangerous mosques in America and the translator for the spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has long been gone. And now his older brother, a top-ranking al-Qaeda Commander, has been killed by the Pakistani military. With his two biggest influences dead, will el-Shukri choose to lead a similar path? The extremism he has exhibited and is exhibiting today leads one to believe that it is a foregone conclusion.

Nabil el-Shukri is the administrator and the acting imam at the Alazhar School for children, PK – 8th Grade, located in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Tamarac, Florida. He has been with the school, since it was incorporated in September 2008. While he is married with a child, today he no doubt feels quite lonely, as he has lost yet another piece of his radical Muslim family.

On a raid in the tribal district of South Waziristan, which began Friday, December 5^th and ended the following day, al-Qaeda Commander Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah was killed and confirmed dead by the Pakistani military. According to a resident from the area, he had been living there for two weeks, after having been forced out of North Waziristan during a military operation against militants there.

While with al-Qaeda, Adnan had quickly climbed ranks to reach the lofty position of head of external operations, a title once possessed by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In that capacity, he had been indicted by a federal grand jury for his role in the 2009 terrorist plot to blow up New York City’s subway system. At the time of his death, he was 39 years old, born in 1975 to a mother who was merely 16 years of age and a father who was 47.

Adnan had been on the radar of the intelligence community, since he abruptly left town in May 2001. Two years later, his father told the Associated Pressthat the reason Adnan had left was because he disliked the American lifestyle and was offended by women who wore skimpy clothing.

The father, Gulshair Muhammad el-Shukrijumah, had spent much of his life as a missionary for the Saudi Arabian government. In 1986, he was sent to Brooklyn, New York to head a mosque, Masjid Nur al-Islam. He also had involvement with another mosque that was located only blocks away, Masjid al-Farooq, the home for many of those involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Gulshair was a translator for the spiritual leader of the attack, the ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel-Rahman. As well, during the federal trial concerning the attack, Gulshair was a chief/character witness for Clement Rodney Hampton-El, the individual who was believed to be the one who taught the terror cell how to build the bomb used in the attack. Hampton-El was one of the congregants at Gulshair’s mosque.

In a photo taken at Gulshair’s Brooklyn mosque, which was uploaded to the internet by his son Nabil, Gulshair is pictured reading with two young boys. Behind him, on the blackboard, it is written, “The human being is under the oppression of the kuffar [unbelievers, non-Muslims].”

In 1995, Gulshair moved himself and his family to Miramar in South Florida, where the Saudis once again set him up with a mosque to run. That mosque, Masjid al-Hijrah, has the dubious distinction of being named the No. 2 biggest “Sanctuary of Terror” by author Paul Sperry in his book Infiltration. At this mosque, Gulshair counseled the likes of convicted terrorist “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla, who also had dealings with Gulshair’s son, Adnan.

When the subject of his son’s terrorist activity became too hot, Gulshair was released from his duties as imam of al-Hijrah. He did not have to wait long to find a new job, though, as he was soon taken on as a director at the Shamsuddin Islamic Center, located in North Miami Beach. The mosque had recently moved across the street from its original location, at the same address as the American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), a group run by Shukrijumah family friend Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, who was an advisor to the mosque.

Zakkout previously had been the Vice President of the Health Resource Center for Palestine (HRCP), a now defunct Hamas-related group run out of Deerfield Beach, Florida. Earlier this month, Zakkout posted on his Facebook page a photo of late PLO leader Yasser Arafat embracing late Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin.

In June 2004, Gulshair el-Shukrijumah died at the age of 74, following a series of strokes claimed to have been brought on by news related to his oldest son, Adnan.

With both his older brother and father gone, Nabil el-Shukri has been left as the elder male figure in the radical Shukrijumah household. The question is will things be different with him than were with his two predecessors. The answer is probably no.

El-Shukri’s MySpace page is currently locked and restricted from public view. No longer can anyone go on it to see graphics of jihadis brandishing rifles and al-Qaeda black flags or photos of killed U.S. troops. However, his Facebook and YouTube pages are entirely open for scrutiny, and what is found on them is also very disturbing.

On his Facebook site, el-Shukri posted different items associated with the Muslim American Society or MAS, including a MAS produced video, titled ‘Bassem is Trying.’

Last month, it was widely reported that MAS was named a terrorist organization by the UAE, on a list that included al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram. In the recent past, MAS has used its official websites to praise Hamas and to call for violence upon and/or denigrate Jews, Christians, homosexuals and women. The National Executive Director of MAS, Mazen Mokhtar, is a proponent of suicide bombings and has previously served as a web designer for what was then the main website raising funds and recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Qoqaz.net.

In January 2010, El-Shukri posted on his Facebook site a video, titled ‘The Arrivals pt.47 (The Free Human),’ which includes the following anti-Semitic rant from Islamic scholar Imran Hosein:

“What’s the new money that Israel will use to enslave mankind, the way the United States used the dollar? … It will be electronic money. And the strange thing – the dangerous thing – about electronic money is it is controlled by the banking system around the world, and the Jews control the banking system. That’s not an uncharitable statement… That’s the truth. We said that Israel is about to wage a big war. They prepared for this, when the Israeli Mossad and the CIA attacked America on September 11 and put the blame on us, us Muslims.”

In another video el-Shukri posted, titled ‘The Arrivals pt.26 (The Antichrist / Dajjal is Here),’ the same Imran Hosein describes a Satanic conspiracy between Britain, the United States and Israel. The video includes an image of the anti-Semitic fraud Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and states that “9/11 was an inside job.”

El-Shukri has not been shy about voicing his own fanatical views. He has a YouTube page, where he has uploaded a number of extreme speeches he has delivered in front of a mosque congregation. In one speech he posted in February 2010, titled ‘Al-Dajjal (Anti-Christ),’ he discusses his belief that, if Muslims try to become “moderate,” they are rejecting the Islamic religion and, instead, listening to the “Dajjal” or Devil.

He states: “We have to understand that we have to train ourselves – what is acceptable in this dunya [world]? Have we compromised our religion of Allah SWT? How much of our din [religion] has been compromised by this dunya? What is the definition of a moderate Muslim? … A moderate Muslim does not accept the Caliphate [Islamic rule]. A moderate Muslim wants to live under democracy – abolish the Caliphate. A moderate Muslim does not want the Sharia Law.”

Nabil’s radical views appear to be very much in line with that of his father and older brother. As well, his life seems to mimic Adnan’s. Both Nabil and Adnan had cell phone businesses. They both were involved in website design. They both attended classes at Broward College (Nabil is still attending classes there). And they both lectured in Islam, like their dad.

In December 2006, more than two years after the death of his father, Nabil el-Shukri wrote the following message on the MySpace page he created for Gulshair: “As Salaam Alaikum Dad, you’re still living among all of us, will see you later but not that much later.”

What does “not that much later” mean?

Given Nabil’s radical Islamic preoccupations and family history, these four words imply something very sinister which does not portend well for the future. His present, however, as administrator and acting imam of the Alazhar School is also cause for alarm, as he has been handed a forum to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with his toxic Islamist agenda and ideology.

In a June 2011 video interview with al-Hikmat, the media group run by the Darul Uloom mosque located near the home of the Shukrijumahs, where a number of al-Qaeda, including at least one of the 9/11 hijackers, had come to pray, el-Shukri called himself a “role model” for the Alazhar kids.

Question: What kind of parents would wish for their children to have a role model such as this? Those who keep their kids in this school are giving their tacit approval to the extremism that is represented by el-Shukri and his family’s lineage.

Beila Rabinowitz, Director of Militant Islam Monitor, contributed to this report.