Category Archives: Libya Benghazi Muslim Brotherhood murder

Al Jazeera Trouble, al Qaeda and Anti-Semitism

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The news outlet from the Middle East, al Jazeera which is the primary news source in the region also reaches into the United States with journalists and a television division. But lately they are in real trouble, ethically and financially. What is worse it appears they have al Qaeda on the payroll.

The embattled CEO of Al Jazeera America was pushed aside Wednesday, ending more than a week of public turmoil that included the resignations of three top female executives.
The announcement capped a turbulent week for Ehab Al Shihabi. His company was sued for $15 million, AJAM was cited for alleged sexism and anti-Semitism and al Shihabi was blamed by one departing executive for presiding over a ‘culture of fear’. Full article here.

But it gets worse.

U.S. Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda”

The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata.

The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.

A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears his photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.”

The presentation was among the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In a brief phone interview with The Intercept, Zaidan “absolutely” denied that he is a member of Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. In a statement provided through Al Jazeera, Zaidan noted that his career has spanned many years of dangerous work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and required interviewing key people in the region — a normal part of any journalist’s job. 

“For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information. Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.” 

A spokesman for Al Jazeera, a global news service funded by the government of Qatar, cited a long list of instances in which its journalists have been targeted by governments on which it reports, and described the labeling and surveillance of Zaidan as “yet another attempt at using questionable techniques to target our journalists, and in doing so, enforce a gross breach of press freedom.”

The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns.

In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors.

According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata.

It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.

The presentation contains no evidence to explain the designation.

Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.”

“He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.

The NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to answer questions about the basis of Zaidan’s inclusion on the watch list and alleged Al Qaeda affiliation. The NSA also declined to answer a set of detailed questions about SKYNET, and how it uses the information about the people that it identifies.

What is clear from the presentation is that in the NSA’s eyes, Zaidan’s movements and calls mirrored those of known Al Qaeda couriers.

According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”

That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained.

The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.”

For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states.

The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.

The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.”

As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.”

Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.

Yet U.S. drone strikes have killed many hundreds of civilians and unidentified alleged “militants” who may have been marked based on the patterns their cell phones gave up.

People whose work requires contact with extremists and groups that the U.S. government regards as terrorists have long worried that they themselves could look suspicious in metadata analysis.

“Prominent American journalists have interviewed members of blacklisted terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It would surprise me if journalists in Pakistan hadn’t done the same. Part of the job of journalists and human rights advocates is to talk to people the government doesn’t want them to talk to.”

A History of Targeting Al Jazeera 

The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda.

During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.”

That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.

During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets.

So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003.

But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”

A Journalist and Al Qaeda

Zaidan first came to international prominence after the 9/11 attacks because of his access to senior Al Qaeda leadership. Zaidan wrote an Arabic-language book on bin Laden, and interviewed him in person multiple times.

“He covered the wedding of bin Laden’s son which was shortly after the [U.S.S.] Cole attack, and I think it was a very useful piece of journalism, because bin Laden declaimed a poem about the Cole which implied him taking responsibility for the attacks, which of course he later did,” said Bergen.

Zaidan also received a number of bin Laden’s taped messages to Americans, which were broadcast on Al Jazeera.

In 2002, he met a mysterious man with a “half-covered face,” who handed him a cassette tape with bin Laden’s voice, Zaidan told Bergen in an interview. In 2004, another bin Laden tape was dropped off at the office gate, Zaidan told the Associated Press. “The guard brought it to me along with other mail. It was in an envelope, I opened it and it was a big scoop,” Zaidan recounted.

Zaidan, right, in a 2011 Al Jazeera documentary he made about bin Laden.

Files collected from bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound after his death — a portion of which were released this year — indicate that Al Qaeda members viewed Zaidan as a journalist they felt comfortable dealing with.

In an August 2010 missive, discussing Zaidan’s plans for a documentary, bin Laden directs his deputies to get “brother Ahmad Zaydan’s” questions and “tell him it would be good if it was on the tenth anniversary of September Eleventh.” Any other input should come in “an indirect way,” bin Laden cautions. “If we want this program to be a success, then we should not get involved in the details of how it is run, except that I don’t want him to interview any of my family,” he wrote.

Zaidan released his documentary on Al Jazeera in December 2011, an oral history of bin Laden’s years in Pakistan and Afghanistan comprised of interviews with a range of people who had known him, including Taliban fighters, government officials, and many journalists.

Bin Laden had also grown paranoid about meetings with Zaidan, although he did not think the U.S. government had managed to kill anyone “from surveying Ahmad Zaydan,” he wrote in May 2010.

He continued, “keep in mind, the possibility, though remote, that the journalists may be involuntarily monitored in a way that we or they do not know about, either on ground or by satellite, especially Ahmad Zaydan of Al Jazeera, and it is possible that a tracking chip could be put into some of their personal effects before coming to the meeting place.”

Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”

 

ThreatCon Bravo and Background Information

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Today, the military bases across the homeland have taken an extraordinary measure not seen since 2011, declaring ThreatCon Bravo.

Terrorist Threat Conditions

A Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-approved program standardizes the military services’ identification of and recommended responses to terrorist threats against U.S. personnel and facilities. This program facilitates interservice coordination and support for antiterrorism activities. Also called THREATCONs. There are four THREATCONs above normal:

THREATCON ALPHA THREATCON BRAVO THREATCON CHARLIE THREATCON DELTA
This condition applies when there is a general threat of possible terrorist activity against personnel and facilities, the nature and extent of which are unpredictable, and circumstances do not justify full implementation of THREATCON BRAVO measures. However, it may be necessary to implement certain measures from higher THREATCONS resulting from intelligence received or as a deterrent. The measures in this THREATCON must be capable of being maintained indefinitely. This condition applies when an increased and more predictable threat of terrorist activity exists. The measures in this THREATCON must be capable of being maintained for weeks without causing undue hardship, affecting operational capability, and aggravating relations with local authorities. This condition applies when an incident occurs or intelligence is received indicating some form of terrorist action against personnel and facilities is imminent. Implementation of measures in this THREATCON for more than a short period probably will create hardship and affect the peacetime activities of the unit and its personnel. This condition applies in the immediate area where a terrorist attack has occurred or when intelligence has been received that terrorist action against a specific location or person is likely. Normally, this THREATCON is declared as a localized condition. See also antiterrorism.

Texas incident fuels concern about lone-wolf terror attacks

DAVID CRARY and ERIC TUCKE, Associated Press
By DAVID CRARY and ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — The attempted attack on a provocative cartoon contest in Texas appears to reflect a scenario that has long troubled national security officials: a do-it-yourself terror plot, inspired by the Islamic State extremist group and facilitated through the ease of social media.

Trying to gauge which individuals in the United States pose such threats — and how vigorously they should be monitored — is a daunting challenge for counterterrorism agencies. Some experts caution that a limited number of small-scale attacks are likely to continue.

Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said federal authorities are aware of “thousands” of potential extremists living in the U.S., only a small portion of whom are under active surveillance.

Concerns have been intensifying since the rise of the Islamic State group and were heightened this week after two gunmen were shot dead while trying to attack the event in Garland, Texas, that featured cartoon images of the Prophet Muhammad. One of the men, Elton Simpson of Phoenix, was charged in 2010 after being the focus of a terror investigation; investigators are trying to determine the extent of any terror-related ties involving him or his accomplice, Nadir Soofi.

At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said intelligence officials would be investigating Islamic State’s claim of responsibility.

“This is consistent with what has previously been described as a lone-wolf attack,” Earnest said. “Essentially you have two individuals that don’t appear to be part of a broader conspiracy, and identifying those individuals and keeping tabs on them is difficult work.”

Terrorism experts say the spread of social media, and savvy use of it by extremist groups, has facilitated a new wave of relatively small-scale plots that are potentially easy to carry out and harder for law enforcement to anticipate.

While plots orchestrated by al-Qaida have historically involved grandiose plans designed to yield mass carnage — including airline bombings or attacks on transportation systems — the Islamic State group has endorsed less ambitious efforts that its leaders say can have the same terrorizing effect.

“If you can get your hands on a weapon, how is the state security apparatus supposed to find you?” said Will McCants, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “It’s attractive because it gets just as much attention as a small- to mid-size bomb.”

A public forum like Twitter, with its millions of users, means those who might otherwise have had limited exposure to terrorist ideologies now have ample access to what FBI Director James Comey has described as the “siren song” of the Islamic State. Social media provides a venue for agitators to exhort each other to action, recruit followers for violence and scout locations for potential attacks.

A former Minneapolis man who goes by the name Mujahid Miski on Twitter was among those urging an attack on the event in Garland. A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation confirmed to The Associated Press that Mujahid Miski is Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan, who left the U.S. in 2008 to join al-Shabab in Somalia. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the investigation are not public.

Hassan has been prolific on social media in recent months — urging his Twitter followers to carry out acts of violence in the U.S., including beheadings — commending attacks elsewhere, and using protests of police activity in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, to try to recruit others.

The phenomenon poses a challenge for investigators as they sift through countless online communications.

“Where is the threshold of saying this is more than just an avid consumer of propaganda?” asked William Braniff, executive director of a terrorism research center at the University of Maryland and a former instructor at the U.S. Military Academy‘s Combating Terrorism Center.

“It’s exceptionally difficult to estimate of the number of people who’ve considered becoming foreign fighters,” he said. “Often you’re not dealing with specific behaviors, but with expressions of belief, which are constitutionally protected.”

U.S. officials say that more than 3,400 people from Western countries — including nearly 180 from the U.S. — have gone to Syria or Iraq, or attempted to do so, to fight on behalf of Islamic State or other extremists groups.

Although there is concern that fighters returning to the U.S. might pose a terrorism threat, some experts say a more immediate danger is posed by individuals in America who are inspired by these extremist groups yet have no direct ties to them.

Such individuals “can be motivated to action, with little to no warning,” National Counterterrorism Center director Nicholas Rasmussen told the House Committee on Homeland Security in February. “Many of these so-called homegrown violent extremists are lone actors, who can potentially operate undetected and plan and execute a simple attack.”

He predicted that the threat posed by these individuals will remain stable, “resulting in fewer than 10 uncoordinated and unsophisticated plots annually from a pool of up to a few hundred individuals.”

The online propaganda can be alluring, even to U.S. residents leading comfortable lives, said Peter Bergen, director of International Security Program at the public policy institute New America.

In testimony Bergen planned to give Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, he says some Islamic State group recruits are motivated by the same level of idealism as young people who join the Marines or the Peace Corps. In their view, Bergen asserts, the extremist group “is doing something that is of cosmic importance.”

Daniel Benjamin, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department and now director of a global issues center at Dartmouth College, said the lone-wolf terrorist phenomenon is not new, but has taken on a new character due to the aggressive military and propaganda activities of the group also known as ISIS.

“What is new is the level of excitement among extremists,” Benjamin said. “The feeling is that ISIS has done what al-Qaida couldn’t — it has held territory, it has damaged armies much larger than it is.”

Benjamin cautions that low-level, lone-wolf attacks may be difficult to stamp out, and said Americans should not let such attacks demoralize them.

Long before this week, the lone-wolf scenario manifested itself when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who had been inspired by a radical Yemen-based preacher, killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.

Government officials have acknowledged that surveillance programs, however diligent, aren’t the full answer to thwarting terrorism. Among the preventive strategies is a federal program launched last fall called Countering Violent Extremism, which aims to encourage community engagement to thwart radicalization. It’s been tested in Los Angeles, Boston and Minneapolis-St. Paul.
[3:24:28 PM] The Denise Simon Experience: Bergen, in his prepared testimony for the Senate committee, said relatives of potential Islamic state group recruits might be more willing to inform authorities if the family member faced options other than a long prison term. He suggested some sort of mix of a token prison term, followed by probation and counseling services.

 

 

 

 

Garland Jihadi’s Inspired by ISIS, Cats Included

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I watched this matter unfold myself on social media, then I worked the connections and tracked their posts carefully. Elton Simpson, born in Illinois was radicalized and was on his way to the jihad battleground until the FBI executed a sting operation a little more than a month ago. Elton got scared and concocted the Garland operation which too, the FBI knew about and broadcasted an alert.

The FBI had a rock solid case in 2006 against Simpson, but a liberal judge did not believe their case or investigation. The FBI continues to investigate at jihadis in all 50 states as noted by the director James Comey.

The information about Elton Simpson of Phoenix surfaced hours before the contest in Garland, Texas, which the FBI had already identified as a potential target for violence, Comey said.

The director said the agency then sent an intelligence bulletin to the Garland Police Department, including a picture and other information about Simpson, “even though we didn’t have reason to believe that he was going to attack the event. In fact, we didn’t have reason to believe that he had left Phoenix,” Comey said.

Other parts of the FBI uncovered the following leading up to the Garland attack.

Texas Attackers Communicated With Islamic State (ISIS) Operatives On Twitter

One of the two gunmen involved in the Garland, Texas shooting on May 3, 2015, targeting the “Draw Muhammad” event, telegraphed his intentions on Twitter. In the last message that one of the alleged gunmen posted to his account, he suggests that he was operating in the name of the Islamic State (ISIS). Other Twitter messages posted by known Islamic State members indicate that he was in contact with ISIS operatives. While the ISIS link remains uncertain at this moment, ISIS supporters were quick to praise the attack and honor the perpetrators as martyrs for the cause of jihad.

This screenshot shows the Twitter profile of one of the alleged perpetrators, with the social media handle of “Mutawakil” (“one who places his faith in Allah”). In his last tweet, he claims that both attackers had pledged allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi and uses the hashtag #texasattack just hours prior to the event itself. His Twitter account shows him to be an online supporter of ISIS whose account had been frequently shut down for spreading jihadi content. He was followed by over 1,000 accounts, and tweeted regularly. He uses a picture of the late Yemeni-American preacher and Al-Qaeda operative Anwar Al-Awlaki, killed in an American drone strike, as his profile.

His social media contacts include several known ISIS operatives. One possible direct contact, the Minnesotan Somali-American Mohamed Abdullahi Hussein, known as Mujahid Miski,[1] who is currently fighting with the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabab Al-Mujahideen in Somalia, tweeted immediately following the attack: “I’m gonna miss Mutawakil, he was truly a man of wisdom. I’m gonna miss his greeting every morning on Twitter.” Miski added “I’m gonna miss how he always used to talk speak of the Hoor Al Ayn [virgin of paradise promised to martyrs]. How he always said he wanted to meet her.” In a May 4 tweet, Miski wrote: “Our brother Mutawakil in 2008 wanted to Make #Hijrah to Somalia but a Murtad spied on him. Allah swt was preparing him for something better.”[2]

Mujahid Miski also claimed awareness of what the perpetrator had dreamed about prior to the attack. “Mutawakil saw himself in a dream walking in a road and a woman looking from the sky with a niqab. He was frightened the interpretation of his dream was that the #hoor Al-Ayn [virgins in paradise] were waiting for him eagerly and that he should hasten to meeting them too.” Such dreams are commonly told by jihadi fighters, and are often used to reinforce the operatives’ morale and resolve before they embark on suicide missions.

Also tweeting about Mutawakil and #hoor_al_ayn were Irish ISIS supporter “Abu Khalid” and another Western supporter, “Ibn Rushd AlLubnani.” Abu Khalid wrote: “brother @atawaakul was talking about #hoor_al_ayn for several days, he surely was planning for this. he was a revert [i.e. convert to Islam] (so far as I know).” Ibn Rushd AlLubnani wrote: “Just a few days ago @atawaakul was talking about Hoor al ayn on twitter and the sisters were getting upset with him. Little did they know…”

British ISIS fighter Junaid Hussain, who is known as Abu Hussain Al Britani, tweeted ominously hours before the attack and praised the two perpetrators after it occurred: “The knives have been sharpened; soon we will come to your streets with death and slaughter! #QaribanQariba [soon, soon] … Allahu Akbar! Two of our brothers just opened fire at the Prophet Muhammad art exhibition in Texas! #TexasAttack” He also advocated and threatened further attacks: “Kill Those That Insult The Prophet – #GarlandShooting … They Thought They Was Safe In Texas From The Soldiers of The Islamic State – #garlandshooting #TexasAttack … If there is no check on the freedom of your speech, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions #GarlandShooting #TexasAttack.”

Another American ISIS operative with the alias Abu Khalid Al-Amriki upon learning of the attack on Twitter, praised the attempt and threatened more to come. He tweeted: “This one should hit the front page! Dawlah [ISIS] is in America! Allahu akbar … How much do you love the Prophet? I’m sure the brothers earned their spot next to the messenger of Allah … The drawn Sword on the one that Insults the messenger of Allah. Let this be a wakeup call for all cartoonists. We are coming for you.” On March 29, Abu Khalid had claimed on Twitter that he was in contact with ISIS supporters in the USA and that one of them was prepared to carry out an operation.[3]

ISIS operative Abu Hamza Al-habashi tweeted after the attack: “Allahu Akbar The two Brothers attained shadah[martyrdom] in texas! The disbelievers will never understand our love for death. May Allah accept them.”

Online ISIS supporters immediately reacted to the Texas attack by praising the perpetrators and elevating them to the rank of martyrs in the cause of jihad. For example, ISIS supporter “Australi Witness,” who recently called for targeting Australian cartoonists,[4] tweeted: “May Allah reward the Garland mujahideen with a seat right next to the Prophet in Jannah [heaven].”

The pro-ISIS London-based sheikh Anjem Choudary also reacted to the event on Twitter, by justifying the attack as retribution for the insult to the prophet Muhammad: “Once again we see that people refuse to learn the lesson that insulting the Prophet Muhammad is a deadly pursuit … #garlandshooting the world should know that, for Muslims, the honor of the Messenger Muhammad is dearer to them than their own lives! … #garlandshooting we must learn the lessons from Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, Theo Van Gogh & Chalie Hebdo not to insult the Messenger Muhammad! … #garlandshooting Freedom of speech does not extend to insulting the Messenger Muhammad (saw) & hence provoking the anger of 1/4 of the world.”

“Muslimah 1,” a Dutch ISIS supporter, tweeted a photo of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who was keynote speaker at the Garland, Texas event, to “Al Ghareeb,” an American ISIS supporter, with the comment “Does Geert Wilders look like he is feeling ‘safe’ at the event??” Al Ghareeb had written: “They spend 10000 on security for this blasphemous event but then say they will not be scared. Lol. Your scared, the brothers made a point.”

Pam Geller and those Before Her

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Did the Yazidis draw cartoons? Did James Foley draw cartoons? Did Daniel Pearl draw cartoons?

How is it that Islam has assumed exclusive power with the declaration they are the judge, jury and executioner of what is blasphemy?

The Southern Poverty Law Center has this on Pam Geller. Ah but, they do have a right to do so as noted by the Supreme Court decision in 2011 in the case of picketing a funeral.

All media, even global media has become Sharia compliant for not standing long ago on free speech and now for blaming the Garland, Texas attack on those who are taking a stand.

Pam Geller, Tom Trento, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and Louis Gohmert are all declaring a call to action, a clarion call and offering sage advise. Are we as a nation listening? Two hundred plus years later why they forced to do this? They are telling you the same as many historical figures before them. LISTEN

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
― George Orwell

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
― George Washington

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman

Article the third… Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So Geller is taking a stand with her organization noted here.

Robert Spencer is doing the same here, offering books and lesson plans.

Tom Trento is tireless in his efforts as noted here.

Geert Wilders has been at the mission for a very long time in Europe.

Koran says the following about the Jews, Christians, and other “unbelievers:”

“O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.” (Sura 5, verse 51).

“And the Jews say: Uzair is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah DESTROY them; how they are turned away!” (Sura 9, verse 30).

“And the Jews will not be pleased with you, nor the Christians until you follow their religion. Say: Surely Allah’s guidance, that is the (true) guidance. And if you follow their desires after the knowledge that has come to you, you shall have no guardian from Allah, nor any helper.” (Sura 2, verse 120).

“And KILL them (the unbelievers) wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.” (Sura 2, verse 191).

“Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends rather than believers; and whoever does this, he shall have nothing of (the guardianship of) Allah, but you should guard yourselves against them, guarding carefully; and Allah makes you cautious of (retribution from) Himself; and to Allah is the eventual coming.” (Sura 3, verse 28).

“And guard yourselves against the fire which has been prepared for the unbelievers.” (Sura 3, verse 131)

“And when you journey in the earth, there is no blame on you if you shorten the prayer, if you fear that those who disbelieve will cause you distress, surely the unbelievers are your open ENEMY.” (Sura 4, verse 101).

“O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).” (Sura 9, verse 123).

“Surely We have prepared for the unbelievers chains and shackles and a burning fire.” (Sura 76, verse 4).

“O you who believe! if you obey a party from among those who have been given the Book (The Jews and Christians), they will turn you back as unbelievers after you have believed.” (Sura 3, verse 100).

“And their taking usury (interests on money) though indeed they were forbidden it and their devouring the property of people falsely, and We have prepared for the unbelievers from among them a painful chastisement.” (Sura 4. verse 161).

“Surely Allah has cursed the unbelievers (Jews, Christians and followers of other faiths) and has prepared for them a burning fire.” (Sura 33, verse 64).

“And whoever does not believe in Allah and His Apostle, then surely We have prepared burning fire for the unbelievers.” (Sura 48, verse 13).

 

Challenge: What the U.S. has in Common with UK

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It only happens somewhere else, some other country, some other people. Militant Islam is over there somewhere…well not so much as noted with the Garland, Texas attack on free speech and a planned attack on Ft. Riley.

 New Jersey

Here is your challenge, as you read below, replace ‘those’ places with what you know has occurred in America just in the last five or six years. Then ask yourself if we have a national security problem, where jihad is in our front yard.

Here are some tips:

Teens from Colorado

From Louisiana to Jihad

Kansas to bomber

Born in Illinois

How to Radicalize an Entire London Borough

by Samuel Westrop

  • Schoolchildren in Tower Hamlets grow up under the shadow of non-violent but extremist ideology, funded by the British government. Meanwhile, the British media and politicians are busy debating the causes of radicalization.
  • “Non-violent” but extremist Islamic movements seek to offer their own networks as alternatives to the jihadists.

In February, three London schoolgirls flew to Istanbul, from where they travelled by road to Syria to join the Islamic State. British police have confirmed that at least 700 Britons have now joined the terrorist group as fighters. Over the past year alone, 22 British women, most under the age of 20, are believed to have travelled to Syria to become “jihadi brides.”

In February, three girls from Bethnal Green Academy, in London’s Tower Hamlets, travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State as “jihadi brides”: 15-year-old Amira Abase (left), 15-year-old Shamima Begum (middle), and 16-year-old Kadiza Sultana (right).

These three London schoolgirls, who lived in the borough of Tower Hamlets, were not the first from there to travel to Syria. They were not even the first Islamic State recruits from their school — nor, it seems, will they be the last.

In December 2014, a friend and fellow pupil of the three London schoolgirls travelled to Syria after being “in covert phone contact with an unknown woman.” These four 15- and 16-year-old Islamic State recruits were all pupils at the Bethnal Green Academy in Tower Hamlets.

The Telegraph recently revealed that a fifth Bethnal Green Academy pupil also attempted to leave Britain to join the Islamic State, but was stopped after police boarded the aircraft as it was about to take-off.

Then, in March 2015, a British court made four more pupils of Bethnal Green Academy “wards of the court” and confiscated their passports. The four girls, also age 15 and 16, were “barred from travel after showing an interest in going to Syria.”

What made a total of nine young girls, from the same London school, attempt to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State?

For one of the girls, The Guardian cited “upheavals at home… 18 months of sadness following death of mother from cancer and father getting remarried.”

Muhammad Abdul Bari, a prominent British Islamist leader, based in Tower Hamlets, claimed the girls were “definitely convinced by the slick IS media. I think it was online radicalisation.”

The Daily Mail has reported, meanwhile, that Abase Hussen, the father of one of the girls, was previously filmed “at the head of an Islamist rally led by hate preacher Anjem Choudary and attended by Michael Adebowale, the killer of soldier Lee Rigby.”

These claims perhaps illuminate the motivation of one or two of the girls, but they do not explain how nine young girls, all from the same school, attempted, with some success, to join the world’s most ruthless terrorist movement.

Bethnal Green Academy has denied that its students could have been radicalized at school. The principal, Mark Keary told the BBC that, “Police have advised us there is no evidence radicalisation took place at the academy.” He added that, “Students are unable to access Facebook and Twitter on Academy computers.”

A number of teachers at the Bethnal Green Academy, however, do seem to harbor extremist views. Tasif Zaman, a “Graduate Achievement Coach” at Bethnal Green Academy, has expressed support for Babar Ahmad, a British Islamist convicted on terrorism charges by a U.S. court in 2014. After the September 11 attacks, Ahmad ran a website that urged recruits to take martial arts courses, read books on military warfare and train with weaponry. Ahmad’s website called for jihad against “infidels” and explained how to send funds to named Taliban officials in Pakistan. Tasif Zaman has also called for the release of Shaker Aamer, whom the senior Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah once described as an “extremely active” recruiter for the terror group.

Another staff member at Bethnal Green Academy, Nabila Akthar, serves as the “Student Voice and Events Coordinator.” Akthar is also “Head of Membership Services” for the Leaf Network, an Islamic group that regularly hosts extreme Islamist activists, including:

  • Muddassar Ahmed, who works closely with Tablighi Jamaat, an extreme Islamic sect, which security officials have named as a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda;
  • Anas Al-Tikriti, a leading British Muslim Brotherhood operative and a vocal supporter of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas; and
  • Farooq Murad, the son of the “Supreme leader” of Jamaat-e-Islami and a trustee of the Islamic Foundation. The Foundation’s other trustees, in 2003, were reported to be on a UN list of people associated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The assumption that radicalization is an online process has been widely cited, but little evidence is ever offered. That local Islamist leaders, such as Muhammad Abdul Bari, echo these claims, only serves the interests of “non-violent” but extremist Islamic movements, which seek to offer their own networks as alternatives to the jihadists.

The Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim counter-extremism think tank, has concluded that, “the vast majority of radicalized individuals come into contact with extremist ideology through offline socialisation prior to being further indoctrinated online.” In 2008, a briefing note written by the British security services noted: “personal interaction is essential, in most cases, to draw individuals into violent extremist networks.”

Islamist movements such as Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood have been keen to attribute support among British Muslims for the Islamic State to “slick IS media.” They do so to downplay evidence that their own “non-violent” Islamist groups are part of the conveyor belt theory of radicalization, in which some extremists gradually become terrorists.

The role of “non-violent” extremists within the conveyor belt, however, is not solely the influence of a single preacher, activist or group. The teachers at Bethnal Green Academy, despite their extremist views, were not directly responsible, of course, for the radicalization of nine young schoolgirls. These teachers are, however, part of a culture of extremist Islamic thought, under which these young girls grew up.

The dominance of Islamist ideology is a systemic problem in certain areas of Britain. Tower Hamlets offers a particularly vivid example of the pervasive influence of Islamist ideology over a local Muslim population.

In a recent speech, Home Secretary Theresa May said the borough of Tower Hamlets was beset with “corruption, cronyism, extremism, homophobia and anti-Semitism.” The Mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, was recently removed from office after a High Court hearing found him guilty of electoral fraud. The journalist Andrew Gilligan reports that Rahman, “achieved power with the help of the Islamic Forum of Europe, an extremist group that wants a sharia state in Europe.”

The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) is a key Islamist institution in Tower Hamlets. Undercover filming in Britain has revealed IFE activists explaining that they exercised “consolidated… influence and power” over the local government of Tower Hamlets.

Speakers invited by the IFE have included the late Al Qaeda leader, Anwar Al-Awlaki, as well as Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose forces have fought alongside the Taliban against British troops.

The IFE was originally established by the Jamaat-e-Islami operative Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, sentenced to death in November 2013, by the Bangladeshi War Crimes Tribunal, for his role in the abduction and murder of 18 journalists and intellectuals when he led the Al-Badr killing squad during Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Liberation.

In 1995, a British television documentary reported that another leading Tower Hamlets Islamist, Abu Sayeed, was also a senior member of the Al-Badr death squad, and had similarly fled Bangladesh to live in Britain. In Britain, Sayeed became a “head teacher of a Muslim school and a co-opted member of Tower Hamlets Education Council.”

As yet another example, in 2013, Tower Hamlets Councillor Lutfa Begum stated, at a council meeting, that the “IFE do lots of jobs for Tower Hamlets local people. They are working with… local schools. They are working with teachers.”

The Islamist-dominated local government and schools, and extremist groups, appear to be all heavily intertwined.

These problematic institutions in Tower Hamlets have been propped up with taxpayer’s money that was designated for counter-extremist purposes. In 2013-14, Tower Hamlets council allocated 451,000 euros (about $500,000) to the Al-Huda Mosque and Cultural Centre, which manages its own “supplementary school.”

During that period, the mosque hosted an event with Abu Suhaib Bassam, an Islamist preacher who has called for the killing of blasphemers; encouraged Muslims to commit to jihad, and who has said: “The love of this worldly life and the hatred of death — this is the symptom of the disease of the Jews.”

In 2011, Lutfur Rahman’s Tower Hamlets Council granted £105,887 (about $170,000) to the Osmani Trust, a charity run by trustees of the IFE. According to the journalist Andrew Gilligan, some of this money was paid as part of the government’s “preventing violent extremism” program. The Osmani Trust runs weekend schools, organizes workshops in Tower Hamlets primary schools and works to “help young people into education.”

One of the managers at the Osmani Trust, Muhammad Rabbani, also trained recruits for the IFE. In 2009, Rabbani told his recruits: “Our goal is to create the True Believer, [and] to then mobilise these believers into an organised force for change who will carry out dawah [preaching], hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad.”

Rabbani is now the Managing Director of CAGE, a pro-terror lobby group linked by the media to the Islamic State executioner “Jihadi John.”

The East London Mosque, another important Tower Hamlets Islamist institution, is an affiliate of the IFE. The mosque has a long history of promoting extremist speakers. In October, the mosque hosted Imam Abdullah Hasan, an Islamist preacher and IFE activist who describes Jews as “devil-worshippers” and has praised Osama Bin Laden.

Since 2006, the East London Mosque has received at least £3 million (over $4.5 million) of taxpayers’ money, some of which was funded by the government’s counter-extremism program.

More importantly, the East London Mosque manages its own school, the London East Academy. In March, the Evening Standard reported that Zubair Nur, a 19-year old graduate of the school, was believed to have joined the Islamic State.

There had been warnings. In October 2014, after emergency inspections by the education regulator Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, stated that students at the school were at risk of “extremist influences and radicalisation.”

Furthermore, one of London East Academy’s governors, Gulam Robbani, was Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s election agent. Robbani’s fellow governors at the school included other local government officials as well as Abdul Qayyum, the Imam of the East London Mosque. Qayyum was also a signatory to the Istanbul Declaration, a document that advocates attacks on Jewish communities and British troops.

Schoolchildren in Tower Hamlets grow up under the shadow of extremist ideology, much of it funded by the British taxpayer. Meanwhile, British media and politicians are busy debating the causes of radicalization. Factors they cite include: online propaganda, institutionalized Islamophobia, British foreign policy, poverty, or even the pressure of police scrutiny. None of these claims, however, has ever been substantiated.

The most important influence, in fact, seems to be the prevailing extremist culture imposed on British Muslims by “non-violent” Islamist networks, and which successive British governments have allowed to cultivate. By permitting Islamist groups to represent British Muslims, and then equipping them with funds and political recognition, Britain has actually advanced intolerance — and for far too long.

Over the past decade, a considerable number of commentators, moderate Muslim activists and the occasional journalist have warned of the dangers of allowing extremist preachers and terror-connected groups to exert such extensive influence over local government, schools, universities, charities, prisons and even interfaith groups.

Although these issues have consumed national debate for years, very little has been done in response. It is not surprising that British Muslim schoolchildren are now rushing off to fight with terrorist groups such as the Islamic State. Tower Hamlets is only a microcosm of a much larger problem of radicalized Muslim communities all across Britain. The question of the extremist grip over British Islam is still waiting to be properly addressed.