Category Archives: Terror

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.

Moving Parts Behind the Garland, Texas Attack

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The FBI began investigation Elton Simpson, one of the 2 shooters in Garland, Texas. The other shooter is Nadir Soofi. They were roommates in Phoenix. Nadir Soofi graduated from the University of Utah and the International School of Islamic Studies in Pakistan. He was a Palestinian sympathizer and published anti-police propaganda.

The FBI paid an informant to gather information on Elton Simpson going back to 2006 and used wires to record conversations. The case was proven (trial memorandum here) as Simpson was well connected to al Shabaab and Simpson had purchased a ticket to travel to South Africa and had a visa to do so.

The case against Elton Simpson, nom de guerre, Ibrahim failed to gain any sentencing other than probation from an Arizona judge, Mary H. Murguia. She is a Clinton appointee and has a twin sister who is president of La Raza.

Hold on there is more. Not only is the Obama administration aggressively resettling refugees in America from Syria, Kenya, Iraq but the worst is Somalia. This speaks to real failed foreign policy. In fact Kenya just received $45 million for refugees. If you think there is a problem controlling the insurgency at the Southern border, this Refugee/Asylum problem is much bigger.

So, while the two dead Islamists from Arizona that were shot by a single officer in Garland, they were not refugees but lived with them in an apartment complex in Arizona, one of many across the country that are part of an approved contracted system by Health and Human Services in collaboration with the U.S. State Department. There is likely one in a town where you live.

Here is what you need to know.

The Garland shooters lived at Autumn Ridge Apartments in Phoenix, Arizona. That complex is owned by BH Management which holds properties across the country and works in tandem with HHS. There are several communities in Arizona, which is the same model as in Iowa, Idaho, S. Carolina, Maryland…all heck every state. These locations are all part of the Obama administration.

Contractors

RRP supports and advances successful refugee resettlement through the coordination of public and private resources.  Contractors are required to provide services in ways that respect the cultural and linguistic needs of clients.
Click here for a list of current contractors (47 KB PDF)

Federal Partners

Three federal agencies play key roles in the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program.

Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is responsible for the domestic program of refugee resettlement services – including cash and medical assistance and a broad range of social services.
ORR State Letters

Information for asylees seeking services supported by ORR is now available on the ORR website.

The U.S. Department of State coordinates resettlement policy, overseas processing, cultural orientation, transportation to the U.S., and the Reception & Placement program for newly arrived refugees.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security determines which applicants meet the requirements for refugee status and are admissible to the United States under U.S. law

 

A “Refugee” is defined in the Immigration and Nationality Act as: 

“…any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”  

Asylees, Cuban / Haitian entrants, certain Amerasians, Special Immigrant Visa holders and victims of severe forms of human trafficking are among the other humanitarian immigrants eligible for assistance and services under the Refugee Act. 

Okay, sorry but there is more. You may need a seat belt for this.

Garland, Texas: There’s Some History Here

 

Last night a free speech event in Garland, Texas was attacked. As this is written, two suspects are dead. One security guard was shot and released from the hospital after treatment for a minor wound.

The event, the “Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest,” was reported here by Breitbart and here by the Dallas Morning News. It was sponsored by Pamela Geller of the American Freedom Defense Initiative and featured keynote speaker Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician and free speech advocate. Both were safe, with Geller finally contacted by Fox News where she was interviewed by anchor Kelly Wright.

The AFDI event was proceeded by another gathering in the same venue — the Curtis Culwell Center — in January. That event? It was titled the “Stand with the Prophet” rally, and was reported here as follows by the Washington Free beacon. Wrote the Free Beacon:

Muslim leaders from across America will gather in Texas this weekend to hold the annual Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect conference, a weekend forum that is being billed as a “movement to defend Prophet Muhammad, his person, and his message,” according to event information.

The Saturday event, which seeks to combat “Islamophobes in America” who have turned the Islamic Prophet Muhammad “into an object of hate,” according to organizers, comes just a week after radicalized Islamists in France killed 17 people.

The victims died in events that began with the shooting attack on French newspaper Charlie Hebdo for its satirical cartoons that skewered the prophet.

Organizers of the event place the blame for Islam’s bad reputation on the media and so-called American Islamophobes who have “invested at least $160 million dollars to attack our Prophet and Islam,” according to the conference web page.

Keynote speakers at the event will include Georgetown University professor John Esposito, founding director of the school’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which has come under fire for, among other things, hosting 9/11 Truthers and a member of Egypt’s Nazi Party.

 

Also scheduled to attend the forum is controversial New York-based Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings trial. Wahhaj has called the FBI and CIA the “real terrorists” and expressed a desire for all Americans to become Muslim, according to the New York Post.

The “Stand With the Prophet” event was, in typical American style, protested by the AFDI free speech group, as announced here at the time on the Jihand Watch site of Robert Spencer. The site published a press release from AFDI that said in part of the protest:

NEW YORK, January 13: The human rights advocacy group the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) today announced that it will be holding a demonstration in defense of the freedom of speech on Saturday, January 17 in Garland, Texas, outside a conference on “Islamophobia” that seeks to stifle opposition to jihad terror and restrict the freedom of speech, working to further the same Islamic law that led to the Charlie Hebdo jihad massacre.

… AFDI President Pamela Geller said in a statement: “Saturday’s Stand With the Prophet event seeks to combat ‘Islamophobes in America’ — in line with Islamic supremacist groups’ longstanding objective of defaming, smearing and marginalizing anyone who opposes the jihad agenda. They say they want to defend Muhammad — which means to silence those who notice that defenders of Muhammad just murdered sixteen people in Paris, and tens of thousands worldwide since 9/11.”

“Our AFDI rally,” Geller added, “will stand for the freedom of speech against all attempts, violent and stealthy, to impose Islamic blasphemy laws on Americans and stifle criticism of Muhammad and Islam. As Muhammad’s followers kill more and more people, we need critics of him more than ever — and free people need to stand up against these underhanded attempts to stifle all criticism of Islam, including honest investigations of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify Jew-hatred, violence, supremacism and oppression.”

Sunday night, the AFDI counter-event was held. In the same place. The event was described as follows by Breitbart:

Pamela Geller is planning a “Draw the Prophet” event in Garland, Texas in the same location as a Muslim group held a “Stand with the Prophet” conference in January. The First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest will be hosted by the Curtis Caldwell Center, which is owned and operated by the Garland Independent School District.

And up pulled a vehicle with two gun-wielding men, both now dead at the hands of the Garland police. Police were investigating whether there was a bomb in their vehicle, thus far with none found.

Contacted amid the chaos by Fox News, among other things Geller noted what one would think is the obvious: “A free speech conference is not controversial, shooting people is controversial…” As she also pointed out, that when the image of Jesus Christ on the cross is immersed in a jar of urine and presented as “art” in America — no one seeks to kill the artist.

Exactly.

It is impossible to look at this shooting as anything else than an attempt on Ms. Geller’s life and that of Geert Wilders, the founder of the Dutch Party for Freedom that has won seats in the Dutch parliament. As the attack unfolded, Geller said, audience members stood and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Question? Is this America anymore? Or is this now to be government by lynch mob? Whether in Baltimore or Garland, Texas?

And what will President Obama say? Will he stand up for the free speech of Americans? Not with some mealy mouthed if-this-than-that attempt at moral relativity — but with flat out, stand-up support for the Constitution and the right of free speech? News reports say the Garland police were prepared in case this kind of thing happened — but the question really should be: Why should police or anyone else have to prepare for a murderous assault on a free speech event?

The “Stand With the Prophet” rally participants had a right to hold their rally — just as the people of Baltimore had a right to peacefully protest the death of Freddie Gray. But no one has the right to burn and loot private property, much less to attack a peaceful event with the intent of killing the participants — in this case targeting Pam Geller and Geert Wilders.

When reached last night by Fox Pam Gellers said something else: “This is our most basic right…. [Now] this is a war… it’s here. It’s not Paris, it’s not Copenhagen — it’s Texas.”

And so it is. The question now is whether the American people — and the President of the United States — will sit by quietly and not speak out. The Islamists don’t get to judge.

*** Free Speech Matters:

 

 

ISIS Sympathizers in U.S. Activated to Attack

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Geller threatMake Dua in Texas, 2 Muslim convert roommates armed with AK-47’s originating from Phoenix, Arizona. This ‘winning the hearts of minds of our known enemies is NOT a working or effective strategy.

No bombs were found, however Garland Police had to detonate some luggage found in their vehicle. But the threats continue in social media against Pam Geller.

The dead shooter, Elton Simpson:

The jihadis were well known to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also continues to hold hearings on the circle of sympathizers in America and the threats they pose to our national security.

Garland, Texas ~ Police officers shot and killed the man, identified as Elton Simpson of Phoenix, and his companion Sunday evening, outside the Curtis Culwell Center, at an event organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, a New York-based group that also uses the name Stop Islamization of America. The gunfire, which began shortly before 7 p.m., left a security guard wounded.

In 2010, federal prosecutors in Arizona charged Mr. Simpson with plotting to travel to Somalia “for the purpose of engaging in violent jihad,” and then lying to a federal agent about his plans. A judge found him guilty of lying to the agent, but said the government had not proved that his plan involved terrorism, and sentenced him to three years’ probation.

The police and F.B.I. agents in Phoenix searched an apartment believed to be connected to Mr. Simpson, with much of the Autumn Ridge apartment complex cordoned off through the night. At the same time, the F.B.I. office in Dallas confirmed that it was providing investigators and a bomb technician to aid the police in Garland, a city just outside Dallas.

Officials did not give a motive for the attack Sunday evening, but drawings of Muhammad, considered offensive by many Muslims, have drawn violent responses in the past. Shortly before the shooting, messages were posted on Twitter with the hashtag #texasattack, including one saying, “May Allah accept us as mujahideen.”

The hosts of the event include Robert Spencer and Pam Geller declared this attack a ‘war on free speech’ in America where the media has become Sharia compliant at the demands of Islam where Muslims declare only they have the ability to declare what is free speech and what is not.

The event in Garland had more than 200 attendees including Tom Trento of United West, Geert Wilders and Congressman Louis Gohmert (R-TX) who actually invited Wilders to the United States.

Geert Wilders had this message after the event:

Dear friends,

Thank you all for being here. It’s great to be in Texas, the Lone Star State. The one star in the Texan flag represents all the free Western world needs today: defiance, pride and independence.

It is no coincidence that we are in Garland, Texas, tonight. It is here that, three months ago, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Islamic activists convened to demand that free speech be curtailed. They want to prohibit cartoons, books and films which they find insulting.

Our answer is clear:
Don’t mess with Texas!
Don’t mess with the free West!
Don’t mess with our freedom of speech!

Friends, allow me to thank Pamela Geller for organizing this exhibition.
Pamela is an extraordinary woman. I only have a few heroes, but Pamela certainly is one of them. Let us give her a big applause!

My friends, you are all winners. Everybody present here tonight deserves respect, just for being here.
The cartoonists, the participants in this Muhammad contest all did fantastic work. All of you are not only talented but also very brave. For Islam has put a death sentence on depicting Muhammad. But this has not frightened you. And even if it did, it has not stopped you. Because you believe in freedom of speech.
I applaud you for that.

However, there can be only one winner of the contest. And that is, as you already know, Bosch Fawstin.
Bosch knows what he is talking and cartooning about, being a former – or in his own words recovered – Muslim.
I have known the fantastic work of Bosch – who also created the anti-jihad superhero Pigman – for many years already and I want to congratulate him for his bravery and excellent work and winning the contest today.

Your statement, my statement, the statement of every single person present in this room here tonight is clear: We will never allow barbarism, we will never allow Islam to rob us of our freedom of speech! Never!

I know from my own experience how dangerous it is to stand for this freedom. I know how dangerous it is to speak the truth about Islam.

I am on death lists of Al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban and terrorists from ISIS because I tell people the truth about Islam. Islam has declared war on us, on our Judeo-Christian civilization. Islam wants to rob us of the freedoms and liberties. Islam and freedom are totally incompatible.

I am a politician, but cartoonists, like my good friends the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, are also on the death list. Both Kurt and Lars have already been the victims of murder attempts.

Another man on this list was the cartoonist Charb, editor of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. As we all know, he and 9 of his colleagues were murdered last January in Paris by followers of the religion of hate. According to Islamic Sharia law, they were all guilty of the same crime.
The crime of depicting Muhammad, the crime of defaming the so-called Prophet of Islam.
A crime punishable by death by the religion of death.

In order to show them that we will not have Islam dictate us the law, we are here with an exhibition of Muhammad cartoons.
We are here in defiance of Islam.
We are here to defend our rights and stand for freedom of speech.
That is our duty.
As Ronald Reagan, your greatest president ever, said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

I am happy to say that nobody died while watching these cartoons.
This proves that, unlike jihadis, cartoons do not kill people.
Cartoons do not kill jihadis, but jihadis kill cartoonists.
That is a huge difference which we should never forget.

Huntington was wrong. It is not a clash of civilizations, but a clash between civilization and barbarism.

Our Judeo-Christian culture is far superior to the Islamic one.
I can give you a million reasons. But here is an important one.
We have got humor and they don’t.

There is no humor in Islam.
In 1979, ayatollah Khomeini devoted an entire radio broadcast to this topic: “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun,” the ayatollah said. “There are no jokes in Islam,” he added. “There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam.”
For once, the ayatollah was right.

Islam does not allow free speech, because free speech shows how evil and wrong Islam is.
And Islam does not allow humor, because humor shows how foolish and ridiculous it is.

Friends,
You are extremely fortunate to live in America. Because you have a first amendment.
In Europe, it is not just the jihadis who go after you. The authorities do so, too.
In the Netherlands, I have been dragged to court on hate speech charges for speaking the truth about Islam. I was acquitted, but now the authorities are prosecuting me again.

We are harassed, but sympathizers of the Islamic State are left in peace. Last Summer, they took to the streets in The Hague. They carried swastikas and ISIS flags. They shouted “Death to the Jews.” And you know what? The authorities did nothing. We have weak leaders. Appeasers are ruling The Netherlands, Europe and the USA. We have to turn the tide and we will. New leadership is what we need to defend our freedom of speech and resist the ongoing Islamization of the West.

Today, many of our Western leaders want us to shut up.
When we tell the truth about Islam, they call it Islamophobia.
When cartoonists make drawings of Muhammad, they are accused of provoking people.
A few years ago, in my country, the Netherlands, the police even raided the house of a cartoonist.
In his address to the United Nations in 2012, President Obama said: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

But we say: The future must not belong to Islam!
Do you hear, Mr Obama? We say: No to Islam!!

Unlike President Obama and his European colleagues, we are not willing to sign away our freedom and independence.
The day we give away humor and freedom of speech is the day that we cease to exist as a free and independent people.
And that day will never come.
That is what this exhibition is all about!
From here we send a message to President Obama and all his colleagues: We will never submit!

We are not intimidated by Islam.
We will not be picking up swords and axes and breaking into people’s homes. But we will not remain silent either.
Moderation in the face of evil is evil. This is not what our age needs. We must uncap our pens; we must speak words of truth. We are facing a determined enemy who is striving through all means to destroy the West and snuff out our traditions of free thought, free speech, and our Judeo-Christian values. Make no mistake: if we fail, we will be enslaved. So the only option is to defend our freedom with all the energy we have. It’s time to be brave. It’s time to do our duty.

Instead of giving in to fear and adopt the Islamic taboo on depicting Muhammad, I propose that we draw another conclusion:
Lift the cause of the fear!
Let us de-islamize our societies!
No more Islam, no more mosques, no more Islamic schools. It is time for our own culture and heritage.

Let us liberate ourselves from tyranny.
That is another good reason why we are having this exhibition here today.
Depicting Muhammad is an act of liberation!

Let us hold similar exhibitions all over the United States and all over the free world. From Canada to Australia to Europe.
We need Pamela Geller everywhere in the world.
I invite you to come to the Netherlands with this exhibition. I will help you exhibit these cartoons in the Dutch parliament building.

We will never allow Islam to restrict freedom!
And we will never bow in the direction of Mecca!

I am not saying that there are no moderate Muslims. Fortunately, there are Muslims who do not live according to the Islamic commands. But there is no moderate Islam!
Not all Muslims are terrorists. But most terrorists today are Muslims.

That is why we say: The less Islam, the better!

The Islamic creed obliges one and a half billion people around the world to take Muhammad as their example.
He led a gang of robbers, who looted, raped and killed hundreds of people.
Historic sources describe orgies of inhumanity. An example is the genocide of the Jews of Medina in 627. One of the head choppers was Muhammad himself. Confronted with the lunacy of Islamic terrorists today, it is not hard to find out whom they get their inspiration from.
It is from Muhammad who – we have to tell the truth – was a warlord, a murderer and a pedophile

There is no turning back once one has become a Muslim. For even though article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has the right to “change his religion or belief,” in Islam there is only a death penalty for leaving the faith.

So, let us expose Muhammad. Let us show the world what Islam truly is.
And let us support Muslims, like Bosch, who wish to leave Islam and liberate themselves from fear.
Apostates are heroes and more than ever they deserve the support of freedom loving people all over the world.

Muhammad fought and terrorized people with the sword.
We fight Muhammad and his followers with the pen.
And the pen will prove mightier than the sword.

Muhammad’s followers fight us with bloodbaths, but today here in Garland we fight them with humor.
Because bloodbaths enslave, while humor liberates.

Let me end by quoting Sam Houston, the founding father of this great state of Texas:
“Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may.”

May his words inspire us all today never to submit to Islamic barbarism.

Thank you very much.

Is Jimmy Carter Still Relevant? Yes, for Iran

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Hamas was placed on the U.S. terror list in 1997. Since 2009, Jimmy Carter has been calling for Hamas to be removed. The European Union from Hamas from their terror list in late December of 2014. Does anyone remember the dead U.S. Marines?

Seems that this past March, Obama forced ODNI Chief James Clapper to either fully remove Hamas from the U.S. list of terror organizations or to re-classify them to some other status. Clapper presented an annual report titled the “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community’. This also includes Hezbollah.

The  2015 report only mentions Hezbollah once, and it’s in passing.

Still, we should note that the 2015 report hardly lets Iran off the hook. The report accuses Iran of:

• “Preserving (the) nuclear weapons option,”

• Remaining “an ongoing threat to US national interests because of its support to the Asad regime in Syria, promulgation of anti-Israeli policies, development of advanced military capabilities, and pursuit of its nuclear program,”

• “Pursuing policies with negative secondary consequences for regional stability and potentially for Iran,”

• And pursuing actions to protect and empower Shia communities that “are fueling growing fears and sectarian responses.”

Administration officials cautioned against over-reading the choices made in Clapper’s written report.

“There is no change in the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of the threat posed by Iran or Hezbollah,” said Brian P. Hale, the director of public affairs in the office of the director of national intelligence. The report, Hale said, “was written to be an overview of top threats. … There were a lot of topics to consider this year — ISIL, cyber, Ukraine-Russia, etc. Iran was included, too.”

Hale added that Clapper fleshed out the national-security concerns about Iran and Hezbollah during testimony at the Senate hearing. Responding to a question from Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., Clapper cited several entities linked to Iran, including Hezbollah, as methods for Iran to use as “a physical manifestation of their spreading their influence in the region.”

And Nick Rasmussen — director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the principal adviser to Clapper’s office on intelligence operations and counterterrorism analysis — testified on Feb. 12 that “beyond their role in Syria and Iraq, Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah remain committed to conducting terrorist activities worldwide, and we are concerned their activities could either endanger or target U.S. and other Western interests.”

Iran is asking and graciously receiving gifts at the hands of the White House and from John Kerry, Secretary of State. The Iran talks over their nuclear program is producing nothing for the West but everything for Iran.

Former US President Jimmy Carter calls post-war situation in the Gaza Strip ‘intolerable’

JERUSALEM –  Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter says eight months after a bloody war in the Gaza Strip that the situation there is “intolerable.”

Carter’s delegation called off a planned visit to Gaza earlier this week, giving no explanation. Speaking Saturday, Carter says he is still determined to work for a Palestinian state. But he lamented that “not one destroyed house has been rebuilt” in Gaza since the war.

Carter, 90, visited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas but was shunned by Israeli leaders who long have considered him hostile to the Jewish state.

Although he brokered the first Israeli-Arab peace treaty during his presidency, Carter outraged many Israelis with his 2006 book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” He’s also repeatedly reached out to Gaza’s Islamic Hamas leaders, considered terrorists by much of the West.

Jimmy Carter and Abbas Call for Fatah-Hamas Elections

Pro-Hamas ex-president calls for joint Hamas-Fatah elections in Ramallah after canceling Gaza stop, in bid to save floundering ‘unity.’

Jimmy Carter on Saturday urged Palestinian Arabs to hold elections to end the rapidly growing fierce enmity between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in Judea and Samaria.

He was speaking at a joint news conference with PA president Mahmoud Abbas in the PA’s governmental seat of Ramallah in Samaria, after cancelling his stop in Gaza where he was supposed to meet top Hamas terrorists such as Ismail Haniyeh.

“We hope that sometime we’ll see elections all over the Palestinian area and east Jerusalem and Gaza and also in the West Bank,” said Carter, a member of the independent Elders Group of global leaders.

His reference to eastern Jerusalem comes despite the fact the area is part of Israel, having been annexed after the Jewish state liberated the eastern part of the ancient Jewish capital during the 1967 Six Day War.

No Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections have been held in over a decade, even though Abbas’s term in office expired in January 2009.

In 2006, a year after Abbas was elected, Hamas overwhelmingly won the most recent PLC elections. A year afterwards, Hamas violently ousted Abbas’s Fatah faction from Gaza and seized control.

Despite the rivals signing a reconciliation agreement a year ago, Hamas is reluctant to hand over power in Gaza to an independent PA unity government the two formed.

As noted Carter had also planned to go to Gaza, but the visit was cancelled at the last moment.

He said it would be “very important” for “full implementation of the agreement reached between Hamas and Fatah.”

Carter was accompanied by Norway’s former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.

She said that despite not being able to visit the Hamas terrorist stronghold of Gaza, “we have had a chance to discuss with people who know the issues in Gaza.”

The Elders Group said ahead of the trip by Carter and Brundtland that they were visiting “in a renewed push to promote the two-state solution and to address the root causes of the conflict.”

Ahead of Carter’s three-day visit, both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin said they will refuse to meet him due to his blatant anti-Israel and pro-Hamas stance.

During Operation Protective Edge last summer, a counter-terror operation undertaken after Hamas launched a terror war with thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilian centers and attacks via terror tunnels, Carter urged the US to remove Hamas from its terror list.

He said at the time there is “no justification in the world for what Israel is doing,” castigating the IDF for its defensive efforts while not offering any condemnation of Hamas’s countless terrorist attacks on civilian populations launched from civilian centers.

Hamas is currently rebuilding its capabilities to attack Israel, digging attack tunnels around the clock and developing new rockets, even as Israel ships in massive amounts of building materials being used to reconstruct the tunnels.

Court Case Reveals What Google Does to You

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There are countless companies across America that are harvesting your online data without your knowledge or permission. Once the data is collected, it is analyzed and it is sold. Institutions know more about you than you know about you as even predictions are made about your life and family. Hide the kids, well you cant do that either. Can you opt out? Kinda. Can you find alternatives for a search engine? Kinda. Is this legal? Kinda.

Courts docs show how Google slices users into “millions of buckets

Jeff Gould

Jeff Gould, CEO Peerstone Research

The online giant probably knows more about you than the NSA — including things you might not even tell your mother

The first law of selling is to know your customer. This simple maxim has made Google into the world’s largest purveyor of advertisements, bringing in more ad revenue this year than all the world’s newspapers combined. What makes Google so valuable to advertisers is that it knows more about their customers — that is to say, about you — than anyone else.

Where does Google get this knowledge? Simple. It watches most everything you do and say online — reads your email (paying special attention to purchase confirmations), peers over your shoulder while you browse, knows what you watch on YouTube, and — by tracking your devices — even knows where you are at this very moment. Then it assembles all these bits of information into a constantly updated profile that tells advertisers when, where and what you may hanker to buy.

Your Google profile contains far more than basic facts such as age, gender and product categories you might be interested in. It also makes statistically plausible guesses about things you didn’t voluntarily disclose. It estimates how much you earn by looking up IRS income data for your zip code. It knows if you have children at home — a trick it performs by surveying hundreds of thousands of parents, observing their online behavior, then extrapolating to millions of other users. Google also offers advertisers over 1,000 “interest-based advertising” categories to target users by their web browsing habits. When advertisers are ready to buy ads they can review all these attributes in a convenient browser interface and select exactly the users they want to target.

But these explicit attributes only scratch the surface. The online ad giant knows much more about you than it can put into a form easily understandable by humans. Just how much it knows came to light last year, when a Federal judge ordered the publication of some remarkable internal Google emails discussing how Gmail data mining works. Google’s lawyers fought the disclosure tooth and nail, but they were ultimately overruled. The emails reveal that Gmail can sort users not just into a few thousand demographic and interest categories, but into literally millions of distinct “buckets”. A “bucket” is just a cluster of users, however small, who share some feature in common that might interest advertisers.

Gmail profiling is performed by a mysterious device known as the Content OneBox, or COB for short. The COB’s inner workings are shrouded in mystery — the court documents describing it are heavily redacted. But we know that it deploys many distinct data mining methods to place users into these “buckets”. In addition to exploiting demographic or interest-based observables, the COB tries to understand the actual meaning of email messages with advanced “machine learning” algorithms.

The COB lets Google peer into the most intimate aspects of your life. To see why, think about the math. Gmail has a billion users who collectively receive several trillion messages per year (not counting spam). The COB analyzes every one of those messages, even the ones it classifies as spam and the ones you delete before opening. With such a vast sea of data pouring into its algorithms every day, Google can make incredibly fine-grained distinctions among users. Inevitably some of these distinctions will correspond to sensitive personal attributes that few of us would voluntarily disclose. Most “buckets” that Google creates have no names — they are just nodes in a vast network of associations. But Google can also sort advertising messages into the same buckets and then match them to similar users, without the need for overt labels. All it takes to connect an advertiser to the right customer is a fleeting pattern of affinity between some group of users and a particular sales pitch.

Google doesn’t allow advertisers to target explicitly on sensitive categories such as race, religion, health status or sexual preference. But nothing prevents the COB’s matching algorithms from performing such targeting implicitly. When you have millions of target buckets and can perform thousands of statistical experiments every day, you can achieve the same result. Want to attract young gay men of color in certain tough urban neighborhoods to your new line of expensive athletic shoes? Google won’t let you target those keywords directly, but millions of buckets can do it for you — implicitly. Want to offer fast food discount coupons to overweight single women with children, heart surgery to middle-aged men with chest pain and high incomes, or steroid pills to teenage body builders? Millions of buckets can do that too.

In the ten years since it was launched Gmail has morphed from a simple email service into a gigantic user profiling machine. The power of its profiling algorithms increases each year as new ideas from machine learning research are made operational. At the same time, the amount of data the algorithms have to work on swells constantly. Google execs say that Gmail will soon reach one billion users.

Today the market for such data-mined personal profiles is essentially unregulated. Neither Congress nor the FTC know what to do about it. A few state legislatures, notably California, have put stakes in the ground trying to protect consumers and especially vulnerable populations such as school children. The European Union is also debating new, stricter regulations. At the same time, surveys shows that consumers care about privacy but are easily lured into giving it up for free services.

This wild west of unrestrained online profiling can’t go on indefinitely. It is particularly ironic that the National Security Agency — despite all the recent controversy — is subject to far tighter legal oversight than online advertisers like Google or Facebook. Sooner or later regulation must come to online profiling. Europe is likely to lead the way, though not necessarily in a manner that meshes well with American views on innovation and freedom of expression. In the United States, considering Congressional gridlock and the risk of inconsistency among state legislatures, the best near-term hope for regulation that is both reasonable and effective may lie with the FTC or perhaps even the White House. Time will tell, but time is growing short in a world where machines grow more intelligent every day.