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The Lonesome Death of Aqsa Parvez
By Robert Spencer
Justice was done last Wednesday when Muhammad and Waqas Parvez, the father and brother of Aqsa Parvez, received life sentences for strangling her to death in their home in Mississauga, Ontario, on December 10, 2007, when she was sixteen years old. But denial as to how a father and brother could have been moved to murder what should have been a beloved daughter and sister remains all-pervasive. If Canada, the United States, and Europe are not going to be the sites of many more Islamic honor killings, that has to change.
Muhammad and Waqas Parvez murdered Aqsa because she would not conform to Islamic behavior codes for women. The Qur’an commands women to “draw their veils over their bosoms” (24:31), and in a hadith, Aisha, the favorite wife of Islam’s prophet Muhammad recounts that he commanded that once a woman “reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands” (Sunan Abu Dawud 32.4092).
Muhammad Parvez was determined to enforce this command on Aqsa, as well as to force her into an arranged marriage, and she was just as determined to resist. Ultimately she ran away, telling friends that Muhammad Parvez had sworn on the Qur’an to murder her if she did so. But on December 10, 2007, Waqas Parvez showed up at Aqsa’s bus stop, and took the girl home.
Less than an hour later Muhammad Parvez called 911 to tell them he had killed his daughter. His calm after the killing, and his turning himself in, is common with Islamic honor murders and other killings and attempted killings: one notable example came in February 2009, after moderate Muslim leader Muzzammil Hassan beheaded his wife. He went to a police station, shook an officer’s hand, and then shocked the unsuspecting policeman by telling him: “I want to tell you that I just killed my wife and I’m here to turn myself in.” Similarly, when Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar drove an SUV onto the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attempted to run over and kill as many students as possible (he killed none but injured nine), he appeared serene and even happy after the attack.
This calm may emanate from a sense that the perpetrators have performed an act pleasing to Allah, and will be rewarded for it. And that also may lead us to where Muhammad Parvez got the idea that Aqsa deserved death for her non-Muslim attitudes, and that it was his right, even his responsibility, to kill her. For the fact is little recognized but unmistakable:
Islam provides a broad justification for honor killings, such that a man like Muhammad Parvez would most likely believe that in murdering his daughter, he is not committing a heinous crime, but serving his god in a way that that god would regard as a positive good.
A manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).
In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.
But not being subject to a penalty is one thing, and actually being tolerated is another. Indications of the latter come from Syria, which in July 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’“
That’s right: two years for murder. Such a light penalty sends a clear signal that honor killings, while still crimes, are understandable and even justifiable: killing a wife or daughter to preserve the honor of the family extenuates the crime of murder to such an extent that it moves cold-blooded killing to the level of minor credit card fraud or less.
In Jordan in 2003, the Parliament voted down, specifically on Islamic grounds, a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservative [Muslim leaders] said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”
This is why honor killings keep happening — because they are broadly tolerated, even encouraged, by Islamic teachings and attitudes. Yet no authorities are calling Islamic leaders to account for this. The main thing that many analysts want you to know about the death of Aqsa Parvez and other honor killing victims is that they had nothing to do with Islam. Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, declared: “The strangulation death of Ms. Parvez was the result of domestic violence, a problem that cuts across Canadian society and is blind to colour or creed.” Sheikh Alaa El-Sayyed, imam of the Islamic Society of North America in Mississauga, Ontario, agreed: “The bottom line is, it’s a domestic violence issue.”
Muhammad Parvez himself didn’t see it that way after killing Aqsa. He grounded his act specifically in the mores of his Islamic community, and clearly believed that that community would regard his killing his own daughter more lightly than they would her un-Islamic behavior: “This is my insult. My community will say you have not been able to control your daughter. This is my insult. She is making me naked.”
The life sentences given to Muhammad and Waqas Parvez give Muslim spokesmen in Canada and the United States a new opportunity. They have a new chance to acknowledge that Islam’s shame/honor culture and devaluation of women has created communities in which abuse of women is accepted as normal. They could call for a searching reevaluation of the meaning and continued relevance of material from the Qur’an and Sunnah that devalues and dehumanizes women, and call in no uncertain terms for Muslims to reject explicitly and definitively the literal meaning of such texts, now and for all time to come. They could call for sweeping reform and reexamination of the status of women in Islam. They could call upon every mosque in the West to institute classes teaching against honor killing and directly challenging the teachings and assumptions that give it justification.
For any of this to happen, Muslim leaders in the West would have to adopt an utterly unfamiliar and uncharacteristic stance: that of self-reflection and self-criticism, rather than excuse-making, finger-pointing, and evasion of responsibility. But with the mainstream media and law enforcement continuing to abet that evasion, this is unlikely in the extreme. Much more likely is that many, many more Muslim girls in the West will die miserably like Aqsa Parvez. No one is speaking up for them or defending them.
No one, that is, except my colleague in the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, Pamela Geller, who discovered late in 2008 that Aqsa was buried in an unmarked grave. She began an initiative to obtain a tombstone for Aqsa, but encountered resistance from Aqsa’s family and the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which owns the land in which Aqsa is buried. They refused to approve Geller’s headstone for Aqsa, which gave only her name, dates, and “Beloved, Remembered, Free” – although after all the public attention this initiative brought to the unmarked, they did ultimately provide a modest headstone themselves.
The whole affair showed yet again the tacit approval given to honor killing in all too many Islamic circles. But Geller was not inclined to acquiesce in the multicultural West’s hypocritical tolerance of this horrific practice, and succeeded in getting memorials for Aqsa in another town in Canada, as well as in American Independence Park in Jerusalem. Pamela Geller’s efforts in this epitomized what should be any free person’s reaction to honor killing – moral indignation, efforts to raise awareness of this practice among Westerners, and action to signal to the Muslim community that Westerners will no longer stand idly by as this practice spreads in the West.
For Aqsa’s sake, may there be many more such initiatives.
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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch.
The World’s Oldest Sickness
By David Solway
The world is sick again with an old disease for which no cure has ever been found. It tends to go into remission here and there at various times but it invariably reappears, as virulent as ever, developing new strains as the bacillus adapts to the antibiotics of reason, shame or distraction. The disease is called anti-Semitism and it can afflict even those who would seem best prepared to resist it. Few are immune.
It can assume racial forms, the Jew regarded as a quasi-human deformity, as rodent, monkey or untermensch. International jurist Jacques Gautier, who finds it “shameful” that under the dispensation of the Human Rights community it is understood that Arabs will have legal and political rights in Israel while it is accepted that Arab countries can be judenrein, concludes that Jews do not enjoy human rights because they are not reckoned as human. Why extend the norms and principles that presumably govern human behavior and the relations between states to a people and a state tacitly considered as beyond the pale, as not quite “like us”? This is how double standards are implicitly justified. Judaism has also been condemned as a cultural and economic perversion that contorts the structure of society. This is a very old story. Indeed, whatever manifestation it assumes, anti-Semitism has been with us almost as far back as human memory goes. What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness.
It is, in fact, best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. Ironically, their victims are precisely those who do not suffer from the plague that has contaminated its bearers—except, of course, for those apostate Jews who are sick with the same morbid distemper. The list of such despicables would fill the devil’s Rolodex. But they too must eventually succumb to the fury of the demented carriers of the pathology. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.
In Anti-Semite and Jew, Jean-Paul Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. For Sartre, anti-Semitism is founded in the “fear of the human condition”—of solitude, responsibility for oneself, and the terror of contingency. The Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human along the entire spectrum from the empirical to the ontological—an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution and a convenient repository of all we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. As such he has been zoned for apartheid, whether metaphysical or social. Sartre concludes that “If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.”
For all his innovative phrasing, Sartre is really playing variations on the grizzled notion of the Jew as scapegoat, derived from Leviticus 16, which is true enough—witness the current U.S. administration’s treatment of Israel which, as historian Moshe Dann suggests, is a species of collective scapegoating to cover its own foreign policy failures. Philosopher René Girard adds a certain twist to the etiology of this recurrent sickness and proposes the concept of “ritual mimesis” or “mimetic victimage,” an ironic conflict-management elucidation of the scapegoat philosophy. In Girard’s thinking, the violence between groups in a given society is resolved by projecting it upon a third party—the Jew—who is then expelled.
In T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, Anthony Julius suggests an interesting comparison/contrast between Homeric mythology and anti-Semitism. They both “offer explanations intended to make sense of puzzling misfortunes in human life, the one by the intervention of the gods, the other by the intervention of the Jews.” The trouble is that “Jews are not malign Olympians who dispose of humankind by manipulative wizardry.” But tell that to the anti-Semite, who craves an easy explanation for what he does not comprehend in the larger world or cannot resolve in his own circumscribed life. By making the Jew responsible for all he cannot clarify, come to terms with or vanquish, the anti-Semite forfeits both courage and morality. What will he do when the Jew is no longer there? He would be like the parasite that has devoured its host and now faces starvation.
This suggests another definition of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a form of spiritual parasitism, the always tempting resort of the human leech who feeds his appetite for security, justification and self-acquittal from the life-blood of others—in this case, of course, from the body of the Jewish people. Put less offensively, anti-Semitism is blind ignorance, both of the world and the self. Psychologists like to call this psycho-reflex “projection” or “cathexis,” but these terms don’t even begin to cover the malice inherent in so invidious an emotional investment or to parry what Wistrich in his recent book, A Lethal Obsession, has identified as a “Judeophobic virus.”
Today, anti-Semitism has adopted a new expression, dubbed by Robin Shepherd in A State Beyond The Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel as “neo-anti-Semitism” which is “virulently anti-Israeli”. The Neurozone is gravely compromised, but the syndrome is making significant inroads on this side of the Atlantic as well. While not entirely ridding itself of its racial and socioeconomic baggage, neo-anti-Semitism converges on the Jew-as-Zionist, associated with the state of Israel as the modern embodiment of a discredited colonial enterprise. The purveyors of this claim affect not to be anti-Semitic, but their protestations are not convincing. It looks more like lying by ancillary focus.
The proof resides not only in the fact that Israel is unfairly and disproportionately singled out for opprobrium while flagrant and undoubted human rights offenders are generally given a free pass. It is also evident in the fact that Israel is conceived as no ordinary colonialist power. Israeli Jews are regarded as reviving the pestilence of Nazism, cleansing, or approving of the cleansing, of ethnic populations, aka the Palestinians—which is nothing short of a gross misreading of the historical archive and a wrenching misrepresentation of the present circumstance. For despite the fictions of a perjurious world, there can be no question that the Jewish people enjoy a religious, historical and legal right to their homeland, as Jacques Gautier, who spent twenty years studying the issue of ownership, as attorney and legal specialist Howard Grief in his The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law, and as many others have established beyond the slightest doubt.
The effort to deny what is the cadastral address of the Jewish people is a pattern of what Melanie Phillips has called, in her new book of that title, The World Turned Upside Down.
Interestingly, the accusation that Israel is the new SS is the contemporary distortion of the theme of Albert Camus’ The Plague, an obvious allegory of the Nazi invasion of Europe and North Africa. The wrinkle added to this fabric of defamation is that Jews have no right to any kind of power or authority. As Bernard Lewis writes in Semites & Anti-Semites, Jews have no business being anything other than, at best, “a tolerated subject minority.” Therefore, “by appearing as conquerors and rulers the Jews have subverted God’s order in the universe.” This calumny, says Lewis, is both the Muslim and “the fashionable leftist or progressive line.” But it is only a symptom or manifestation of the same old sickness. To paraphrase Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis, it is, in effect, “the narrative of a past episode reflected in a more recent mirror.”
And yet the mystery persists. But whatever theory we advance to decrypt what may be largely unfathomable or at least not wholly explicable, one thing is certain. Anti-Semitism is here to stay. Jessica may elope with Lorenzo but she or her children or grandchildren will one day be forced to accept the indelible fact of origins. Anti-Semitism is not a contagion that, like Daniel Defoe’s description in A Journal of the Plague Year of the catastrophe that visited London in the year 1665, will ever be “enervated and its malignity spent.” This is because anti-Semitism is unlike other forms of irrational hatred and operates under a different set of laws, which appear to be immutable.
Indeed, today once again, as we confront a new world-generation of venomous and commissurotomized anti-Semites, we might plausibly conclude that anti-Semitic sentiments and irruptions, in virtue of their millennial repeatability, have become entrenched in human consciousness as a natural inevitability. As I have written before, “It is something that it is perceived in the depths of the psyche to have moved from the dimension of history over into the structure of nature. It is as if anti-Semitism has now become part of our synaptic equipment.”
As a result, the destiny of the Jew is to be eternally unsafe in this world, despite the narcotic of assimilation or the illusion of self-rejection. The time seems invariably to come when the Jew is thrown back on his identity and regarded not as a human being or as an ordinary citizen but as, ab ovo, a Jew. After which, measures are adopted. Of no other people can this be said. And this is why the Jewish people cannot afford the luxury of historical amnesia, self-betrayal or the hallucination of ultimate security, but must remain vigilant, conscious and always prepared for the resurgence of the plague.
See No Qur’an, Hear No Qur’an
By Robert Spencer
What’s that? The “gunman” was a Muslim? He said something about the Qur’an? Surely not! None of that is in the AP story, which is an object lesson in journalistic bias and obfuscation: “Source: Chicago gunman heard voices to kill family,” by Don Babwin for Associated Press, April 14 (thanks to Paul):
CHICAGO – A person close to the investigation of a shooting in Chicago that left a woman and three children dead says the gunman told police that he committed the crime after hearing voices telling him to kill his family.
Compare that to the Chicago Tribune story I discussed here. It says that “the man had converted to Islam several years ago while serving time in prison and had a dispute with his wife — one of the victims — because she would not adhere to his faith. He told police that he needed to take his family back to Allah and out of this world of sinners, a source said….The wife’s sister, Shirina Thompson, said the suspect had been talking about “going to Allah.” Both Thompson and a neighbor in Wisconsin said the man had fought with his wife in recent days because she refused to wear Muslim garb….Letisha Larry, one of the suspect’s sisters, said her brother had been acting strange, carrying around the Quran and telling family members that something in the book told him to kill someone.”
But AP has none of that. He was just “hearing voices.”
This is one of the reasons why we always post at Jihad Watch the names of the reporters who write the stories. These whole process of news gathering and news reporting needs to be demystified, even in this Internet age, and news reports recognized not as objective, dispassionate accounts, but as the work of human beings with agendas. While it is possible that Kristen Schorsch, Annie Sweeney and Cynthia Dizikes of the Tribune are simply better, more thorough reporters than Don Babwin of AP, it is more likely that Babwin had access to exactly the same information that showed up in the Tribune report, but chose not to go with it.
He probably thought it would be “Islamophobic” to do so, or that to do so would fuel one of those fabled but nonexistent “backlashes” against innocent Muslims. So he probably decided it was better to cover up key facts about this incident. And the thing is, Don Babwin is no worse a journalist than thousands of others working today. He was just doing what they all do, in large and small ways, every day.
To expose them as they do this, and to inform you about what is really going on, is one of the main reasons why Jihad Watch exists.
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Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, is available now from Regnery Publishing, and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).
Code Pink "activist" confronts First Lady Michelle Obama.
Code Pink’s Support for the Enemy
By Ryan Mauro
Code Pink members became known during the Bush Administration as confrontational anti-war protestors, but the group is actually worse than that. Code Pink’s leadership has aligned with almost every tyrannical force opposing the U.S., from Chavez to Ahmadinejad to Hamas to Iraq insurgents. Code Pink is acting more like the ambassador for enemies of the free world than an advocate for peace.
Kristinn Taylor and Andrea Shea King over at BigGovernment.com are doing an excellent job chronicling the outrageous activities of Code Pink and its leadership over the years. Most recently, Code Pink has organized a “Gaza Freedom March” to call for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, currently controlled by Hamas. The organization boasts that they have provided humanitarian aid to the territory, and has done so under the protection of Hamas. The terrorist group often diverts such aid for its own purposes, and it should be suspected that this is no different. Hamas also builds support by providing social services, so if such aid didn’t directly go to supporting the group’s violent operations, it certainly did go to support its recruiting efforts.
Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamic organization whose goal is to wage “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In other words, it wants to create a worldwide Islamic state. Code Pink has also teamed up with this extremist organization, placing ads on its website asking them to “join us in cleansing our country.”
Code Pink has been embraced by the Iranian government as well. Jodie Evans, one of the group’s leaders, met with Ahmadinejad in New York in September 2008, resulting in a trip to the country two months later. The group met with high-level government officials, and offered to help fund a “peace park” and environmentally-friendly businesses in Tehran. Co-founder of Code Pink Medea Benjamin praised the prices of public transportation in Iran and said she was “struck by how much more open Iran is than I had thought.”
To their credit, Code Pink did express sympathy for the protestors confronting the regime this summer, but called on the U.S. to lift sanctions and end threatening language and supported President Obama’s initial silence. In other words, Code Pink said they supported the Iranian people, but did not want do anything to support the Iranian people.
In January 2006, Evans and other colleagues including Cindy Sheehan met with Venezuela’s President Chavez. Benjamin had previously described Chavez as a “doll,” and said “George Bush—and John Kerry for that matter—could learn a thing or two from Hugo Chavez about winning the hearts and minds of the people.”
Jodie Evans’ reaction to the 9/11 attacks shows a complete ignorance of the ideological element of the terrorists, instead linking the disaster to Middle Eastern anger over U.S. foreign policy. She agreed in an interview that Bin Laden had a valid argument against the U.S., and said, “Why do we have bases in the Middle East? We totally violated the rights of that country,” referring to Saudi Arabia. Apparently, Evans is unaware that those bases were constructed with the permission of the Saudi government and are meant to protect the country from the very people she defends, like Saddam Hussein.
In 2003, Saddam hosted Evans and other Code Pink members in Iraq, aware that their anti-war activism had crossed the line into propaganda efforts on his behalf. As long as a regime redistributes wealth and is socialistic in how it governs, the country is praised by Code Pink, who seems to have little passion for promoting democracy, free markets or the human rights of oppressed citizens overseas. This type of thinking was apparent when she praised Saddam Hussein’s social services, saying “there was a good education and health care system, food for everyone. That system didn’t belong to Saddam, it belonged to the Iraqis, it belonged to year of creating what a civilization needed. If your parents didn’t send you to school, they could be put in jail.”
After Saddam’s toppling, Evans supported the insurgents fighting American soldiers, ignoring the fact that many of these were foreign jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda-type groups, and were former members of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards, Fedayeen militia, and intelligence service. To Code Pink, these forces of oppression and evil were the representatives of the Iraqi people fighting for liberation. They are completely unaware that the insurgents fight not only against American forces, but target Iraqi civilians and want to overthrow Iraq’s elected democratic government.
“We must begin by really standing with the Iraqi people and defending their right to resist. I can remain myself against all forms of violence, and yet I cannot judge what someone has to do when pushed to the wall to protect all they love. The Iraqi people are fighting for their country, to protect their families and to preserve all they love. They are fighting for their lives, and we are fighting for lies,” Evans wrote on June 26, 2005.
When Coalition forces began an offensive into Fallujah when it was the primary safe harbor of the insurgents, Code Pink reacted by delivering tens of thousands of dollars in humanitarian aid to its residents. This act sounds noble on the surface, but when you consider the group’s sympathy for the insurgents, it is quite possible that this aid was given to the enemy side. Furthermore, Evans and her delegation met with Iraqi politicians connected to the extremist Iranian-backed militia leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, and other supporters of killing American soldiers.
Evans has even, according to her friend, Jane Fonda, met with members of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Benjamin has tried to paint them as being motivated by lack of employment.
“Everybody we talked to said that most of the Taliban are poor rural people, $10-a-day Taliban, who are doing this for economic reasons. If you want to encourage people to stop fighting, encourage them to work,” Benjamin said.
According to an account posted on the Free Republic forum, a group of counter-protestors were confronted by Evans on August 30, 2004. During the exchange, Evans reportedly said, “We have nothing against communism.” This shouldn’t be surprising considering Medea Benjamin’s ties to the Workers World Party and described her life in Cuba as feeling like she had “died and went to heaven.”
Today, Code Pink is campaigning against President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan and against the use of drones in Pakistan. Politics seems to pull more weight than principle though, as Code Pink is against an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan for the exact same reasons as such a move would be wrong in Iraq. President Obama can pursue a similar type of policy that Code Pink lambasted under the previous administration, but they aren’t calling for citizens’ arrests of him and his officials like they are doing for members of the Bush Administration.
Code Pink’s embracing of anti-American actors is part of a calculated strategy. Medea wrote in 2003 that members of the movement she belonged to needed to “link up with appropriate local and regional groups” overseas to “channel the bursting anti-American sentiment overseas.” Forces supporting America are left out as part of the equation.
Code Pink is not a group genuinely promoting peace and human rights. The organization links up and supports virtually any anti-American actor, ignoring their oppression of their citizens that can hardly qualify as “peace” and the threat that they pose. In choosing its friends, Code Pink’s leadership has decided that the sole standard is that they must be an enemy of the United States.
Homeland Security Alert: Somali Terrorist on the Loose in Texas
The al-Shabaab operative, who may be part of a group of 270 Somalis who entered the country illegally via Mexico, should become part of the discussion over immigration enforcement.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security warned Houston law enforcement that a Somali terrorist named Mohamed Ali could be in their area. Ali is a member of al-Shabaab, the terrorist group currently fighting for control of Somalia. Al-Shabaab has proven to be frighteningly effective at recruiting Westerners, including Americans.
Al-Shabaab has pledged its allegiance to al-Qaeda and should be seen as branch of the organization. It is reinforced with arms and recruits from Yemen and is al-Qaeda’s best hope to score a battlefield victory and resurrect the safe haven it treasured prior to October 2001. If al-Shabaab succeeds in taking Somalia, it will be the first time that al-Qaeda controlled its own country. This affiliate’s networks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe provide the group with the capacity to launch attacks on our soil. It likely only chooses not to do so because of the fear that it would compromise the organization’s presence.
The alert says that Ali is thought to have arrived via Mexico. He is likely part of a group of hundreds of Somalis that have snuck in through the open borders. This information needs to be inserted into the debate over border security that is now raging because of Arizona’s bill to combat illegal immigration.
In February, the authorities arrested a man in Virginia named Anthony Joseph Tracy, who has admitted to having contact with al-Shabaab. Tracy is believed to have smuggled 270 Somalis into the U.S. through Mexico. Let me say it again: An associate of al-Shabaab has snuck in nearly 300 Somalis from where they operate into the country. They remain here and we don’t know what they are up to.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeanine Linehan admitted, “We have not identified anyone. We believe all the individuals are present in the United States. But by the virtue of [the] successful smuggling scheme, we are having difficulty finding them.”
Two weeks ago, a Somali in San Antonio named Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane was indicted for leading a “large-scale smuggling enterprise” that brought in hundreds of people from Brazil, including “several AIAI-affiliated Somalis,” in reference to al-Ittihad al-Islami, a radical Islamic group that is tied to al-Qaeda. The government has not stated if Dhakane is connected to Tracy.
Tracy and/or Dhakane are likely connected to another batch of Somalis that were arrested in Mexico in January on their way to the United States. The Mexican authorities arrested them for illegally being in the country, but released them on January 21 after only 16 were identified. One of those was Mohamed Osman Noor, who is believed to be an al-Shabaab operative.
Al-Shabaab’s networks in the U.S. first came to light when over 20 young Somali-Americans in the Minneapolis area suddenly disappeared. Some were later found to have gone back to their homeland to fight alongside the terrorist group. Six of them have since died in Somalia. Among those killed is Shirwa Ahmed, who became the first American suicide bomber in 2008. At least 14 Americans have been indicted for their role in the group’s infrastructure in the United States, although recruiting has also gone on in Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and elsewhere.
In November 2007, terrorism expert Patrick Poole warned here at Pajamas Media of the sophistication of al-Shabaab’s American network: “[T]here exists an active recruiting and transportation network in the U.S. … In many instances, these same Somali leaders purporting ignorance and innocence for the local media are not only aware of these recruiting operations, but have actively participated in them,” he wrote.
The deputy chairman of the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia, a group aligned with al-Qaeda, even attended a fundraiser in Minneapolis on November 24, 2007. The group that hosted him held a second fundraiser the next week near Falls Church, Virginia. Remarkably, the first fundraiser was attended by Mahmud Nuur Wadheere, then-Senator Norm Coleman’s constituent policy liaison.
Al-Shabaab’s reluctance to launch attacks on the United States shouldn’t be seen as an indication that the al-Qaeda affiliate is only concerned with Somalia. Al-Shabaab operatives have been involved in a terrorist plot in Australia and one tried to kill the Danish author of the infamous Mohammed cartoons. It has the West in its sights, and it must be seen as being no different than al-Qaeda.
The terrorist group is waiting to strike because it is using its network in the United States to recruit and fundraise for its overseas fight. Its activity in the U.S is seen as an investment that will pay higher returns if cashed out later. As al-Shabaab’s network in America grows, it will become more and more tempting to use its resources here to carry out a major attack. Remember, it only took 19 terrorists to execute the 9/11.
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Ryan Mauro is the founder of WorldThreats.com, national security advisor to the Christian Action Network, and an intelligence analyst with the Asymmetrical Warfare and Intelligence Center (AWIC). He can be contacted at TDCAnalyst@aol.com.
The Joke’s On Us
The Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. We are.
By Mark Steyn
On Christmas Day, a gentleman from Nigeria succeeded (effortlessly) in boarding a flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. Pretty funny, huh?
But the Pantybomber wasn’t the big joke. The real laugh was the United States government. The global hyperpower spent the next week making itself a laughingstock to the entire planet. First, the bureaucrats at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) swung into action with a whole new range of restrictions.
Against radical Yemen-trained Muslims wearing weaponized briefs? Of course not. That would be too obvious. So instead they imposed a slew of constraints against you. At Heathrow last week, they were permitting only one item of carry-on on U.S. flights. In Toronto, no large purses.
Um, the Pantybomber didn’t have a purse. He brought the bomb on board under his private parts, and his private parts weren’t part of his carry-on (although, if reports of injuries sustained in his failed mission are correct, they may well have been part of his carry-off). But no matter. If in doubt, blame the victim. The TSA announced that for the last hour of the flight no passenger can use the toilets or have anything on his lap — not a laptop, not a blanket, not a stewardess, not even a paperback book. I can’t wait for the first lawsuit after an infidel flight attendant confiscates a litigious imam’s Koran as they’re coming into LAX.
You’re still free to read a paperback if you’re flying from Paris to Sydney, or Stockholm to Beijing, or Kuala Lumpur to Heathrow. But not to LAX or JFK. The TSA were responding as bonehead bureaucracies do: Don’t just stand there, do something. And every time the TSA does something, you’ll have to stand there, longer and longer, suffering ever more pointless indignities. Last week, guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show, I took a call from a lady who said that, if it helps keep her safe, she’s happy to get to the airport “four, five, whatever hours” before the flight. Try to put a figure on “whatever” and you’ll get a sense of where America’s transportation system is headed. Ten years ago, you got to the airport 45 minutes, an hour before the flight. Now, thanks to the ever more demanding choreographers of the homeland-security kabuki, it’s two, three, four, whatever. Look at O’Hare and imagine the size of airport we’ll need. And by then the Pantybomber won’t even need to get on the plane; he can kill more people blowing up the check-in line.
And remember, this was a bombing mission that “failed.” With failures like this, who needs victories?
Joke, joke, joke. The only good news was that the derision was so universal that the TSA promptly reined in some of their wackier impositions a couple of days later. But by then Janet Incompetano, the homeland-security secretary, had gone on TV and declared to the world that there was nothing to worry about: “The system worked.”
Indeed, it worked “smoothly.” The al-Qaeda trainee on a terrorist watch list, a man banned from the United Kingdom and reported to the CIA by his own father, got on board the plane, assembled the bomb, and attempted to detonate it. But don’t worry ’bout a thing; the system worked.
Twenty-four hours later, Secretary Incompetano was back on TV to protest that her words had been taken “out of context.” No doubt, the al-Qaeda-trained CIA-reported cash-paying crotch-stuffed watch-list member’s smooth progress through check-in was also taken “out of context.”
But by then the president of the United States had also taken to the airwaves. For three days, he had remained silent — which I believe is a world record for the 44th president. Since Jan. 20, 2009, it’s been difficult to switch on the TV and not find him yakking — accepting an award in Oslo for not being George W. Bush, doing Special Olympics gags with Jay Leno, apologizing for America to some dictator or other . . . But across the electric wires an eerie still had descended. And when the president finally spoke, even making allowances for his usual detached cool, he sounded less like a commander-in-chief addressing the nation after an attempted attack than an assistant DA at a Cook County press conference announcing a drug bust:
“Here’s what we know so far. . . . As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device. . . . The suspect was immediately subdued. . . . The suspect is now in custody and has been charged.”
Etc, etc, piling up one desiccated legalism on another: “Allegedly . . . ” “suspect . . . ” “charged . . . ”
The president can’t tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy-land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it’s hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: The president referred to the Knickerbomber as an “isolated extremist.” By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a Westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.
But, if it takes the White House three days to react to an attack on the United States, their rapid-response unit can fire back in nothing flat when Dick Cheney speaks. “It is telling,” huffed the president’s communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, “that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the administration than condemning the attackers.”
“Condemning the attackers”? What happened to all the allegedly alleged stuff? Shouldn’t that be “condemning the alleged isolated attacker”? The communications director seems to be wandering a bit off-message here, whatever the message is: The system worked, so we’re inconveniencing you even more. The system failed, but the alleged suspect is an isolated extremist, so why won’t that cowardly squish Cheney have the guts to condemn the attacker and his vast network of associates?
The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration’s foreign policy in the Wall Street Journal: “No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue.” True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year’s Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.
And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dimestore jihadist got that message loud and clear — and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy twelve months ahead. Happy New Year.
The chief lesson of the attempted jihad attack on Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day is that our entire anti-terror strategy is a huge and abject failure. Of course, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would beg to differ, as she has said that the stopping of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempt to set off an explosive on the airplane showed that “the system worked” and “everything happened that should have.”
The “system worked”? So the “system” now involves hoping that other passengers will tackle the jihadist? After all, a passenger on Flight 253, Jasper Schuringa, subdued Abdulmutallab. The “system” now relies on all of the jihadis’ detonators failing, as did Abdulmutallab’s? Napolitano’s optimism was based on an appalling disconnect from reality that in saner times would result in her dismissal. Barack Obama, by contrast, would be more likely to issue her a commendation, if he weren’t too busy golfing and shooting hoops during his Hawaii vacation.
In contrast to Napolitano’s fantasies, Flight 253 revealed a massive failure not only of airline security procedures, but also of the larger strategy that America and the West has been pursuing against jihad terrorism.
As for airline security procedures, Abdulmutallab was able to get on the airplane without a passport, and with ingredients for an explosive that would have destroyed the plane and killed everyone in it. TSA officials are busy tightening security procedures with new Abdulmutallab-inspired rules such as forcing passengers to stay in their seats for the last hour of the flight, but these new measures will do nothing to prevent another attack. One thing we have seen over the years since 9/11 is that airport security is always one step behind the jihadists: after jihadist Richard Reid attempted to set off a bomb hidden in his shoes, we all have to take off our shoes and send them through security scanners. After a group of jihadists tried to sneak onto planes explosive chemicals hidden in drink bottles, we can’t carry drinks through airport security terminals. Because Abdulmutallab attempted his jihad attack just before the plane landed, now we can’t get up during the last hour of the flight. The one thing that the TSA should have learned, but hasn’t, is that next time the jihadists will do something else, not just repeat what they did before. And even if every passenger were given a full body cavity search, they will find some way to get around it. But attempt a new approach based on sensible profiling? The TSA would rather fold up shop altogether.
Flight 253 also shows that long-term anti-terror strategies have failed miserably. Abdulmutallab was a classic recipient of Western largesse designed to win over the loyalties of Muslims – he was educated at the British International School in Lome, Togo. Yet contact with solicitous and friendly non-Muslim Westerners obviously did nothing to quell his jihadist fervor. And the son of a rich man (who notified American authorities about his jihadist sentiments, to no avail), Abdulmutallab once again proves false the idea that poverty causes terrorism. The myriad aid programs that are based on this false assumption have done nothing to stop or even slow jihad terrorism, and they never will.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has told the FBI that there are more Muslims training in Yemen now for jihad attacks against American airplanes. British intelligence has confirmed that at least twenty-five Muslims from Britain are in Yemen for that purpose now. What will be the outcome if and when these men make their way onto an aircraft bound for the United States? If the DHS and Janet Napolitano were honest, they would admit that Flight 253 represents the crumbling of their entire anti-terror edifice, and set to work building a more effective model. For the failure of the existing strategy is colossal and far-reaching; until it is scrapped, nothing is more certain than that there will be many, many more incidents like the one on Flight 253. But instead of beginning the hard work that needs to be done now, Napolitano is congratulating herself – and the President is trying for a hole in one.
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Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)", "The Truth About Muhammad," "Stealth Jihad," and most recently "The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran" (all from Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).
What Can Israel Teach the U.S. About Airport Security?
It's not what's in their shoes or underwear. It's what's in their minds.
By Allison Kaplan Sommer
For eight years, travelers in the United States getting ready to head to the airport have had to think hard about their footwear. Knowing that we’ll be forced to remove our shoes to go through the X-ray machines, we make sure that they are an easily removed pair — and that socks have been recently washed to prevent embarrassment. In warm weather, the ordeal can’t be prevented by a clever choice to wear open sandals that expose the feet, as the TSA employees are under strict orders to closely examine even the strappiest shoes.
But Israelis heading for Ben-Gurion Airport need not worry about donning even the most complicated pair of lace-up boots, as passengers are never asked to take off their shoes as part of the security process.
Airport security in Israel is not about what’s on your feet, or in your pockets, or — god forbid — in your underwear. It’s about what’s in your head.
While the Israeli security system is certainly not perfect, it is unlikely that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab could have successfully boarded a plane without being detained, questioned in-depth, and hopefully caught — even if his risk level hadn’t been so clearly documented.
The secret of Israeli airport security doesn’t just lie in super-sophisticated technology. Simply put, in Israel’s airport, there are simply far more opportunities to get caught. As Rafi Sela, an expert on security, outlined for the Toronto Star, the security system at Ben-Gurion Airport is multi-layered, comprised of the following elements:
*Roadside check: Drivers are stopped and asked who they are and where they came from. Even at that early stage, they are examined for behavioral giveaways that would mark them as suspicious.
*Armed guards at the entrance to the terminal and the entrance of the airport give you the visual once-over as you enter. They can pull you aside for a random check.
*Before you arrive at the main check-in counter, you stand in a security line where a young, clearly intelligent young man or woman examines your passport and ticket, looks straight into your eyes, and asks you about who you are, where you came from, where you are heading, who packed your luggage, and whether you are carrying any packages for anyone. If you offer an ambiguous answer, or raise any red flags by your behavior, the grilling continues, and the questions can frankly become irritatingly personal. My ire was up in an airport stop pre-9/11, when, to check whether I was in fact an American Jew, I was asked questions about my Bat Mitzvah. Suspicious behavior results in closer examinations.
*Luggage is X-rayed before check-in. Suspicious items are put in blast-proof containers and moved away to a safe area. The airport doesn’t shut down over a suspicious object.
*Only then comes the walk through the X-ray machine (with your shoes on) and the check of your hand luggage. Yes, they are checking out your bags, but again, they are mainly checking you out. Nobody cares about your bottle of water, baby formula, moisturizer, nail scissors, or tweezers.
The journey through this process, with multiple stations at every stop, is usually fairly rapid for low-risk travelers, even at the height of holiday season.
So, as the Star points out, the Israeli way is both more efficient and more effective. So why not adopt it in the U.S.?
Atlantic journalist/blogger Jeffrey Goldberg, who has flown in and out of Israel frequently, doesn’t believe it will ever work in the United States:
"The Israeli system, which features individual interviews with each traveler, also wouldn’t work because, cow-like though we are, Americans are not going to stand for the invasive questioning that is the most crucial component of the Israeli system. Also, we’d have to show up at the airport five hours ahead of our flights to be processed at the more overcrowded American airports. I’m having a hard time imagining this happening."
But Goldberg just touches on the tip of the iceberg. In addition to its multi-layered approach, Israeli security is deeply dependent on a word that is anathema to the American ear.
Profiling.
Israeli security experts argue that their profiling is based on background and past behavior — not on race.
“We are looking for behavior. We are looking for certain patterns in a person’s background,” security consultant Rafi Ron told CNN, explaining the practice in 2006.
But in reality, it’s hard to tell the difference. While Europeans and Israeli Jews who have spent time in Arab countries hostile to Israel and known to contain terrorists are also intensively questioned — the infamous Hindawi affair demonstrates why this is necessary — the vast majority of those who fit the high-risk “behavioral profile” are, of course, Arabs.
Those who are clearly not security risks — in Israel, that means Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews — sail through the airport at record speed. Frequent business travelers can even have their fingerprints recorded and bypass much of the security apparatus.
The differentiation in treatment has caused social and legal controversy, even in a society as security conscious as Israel.
But it’s not only the fear of a legal and political backlash that makes bringing Israeli standards to the U.S. problematic. The tremendous costs of doing so on such a massive scale is also a factor.
Nowhere is that more clear than when it comes to the question of manpower. From the minute your car pulls into Ben-Gurion Airport, you not only know that you are under surveillance. You also know that you are being watched by trained, intelligent, and motivated young people. This contrasts with the often bored and frustrated low-wage workers who man the X-ray stations in the U.S. and who joke with their friends as they stare at the screens and wand the unhappy passengers.
Israel’s universal army service offers a large pool of candidates for such jobs. The vast majority of security personnel at Ben-Gurion and at El Al counters across the world are students earning money to put themselves through school and build their resume. The El Al personnel working abroad are subsidized by the Israeli government.
Much creative thinking and funding would have to be applied to bring the TSA ranks in American airports to that level.
While mimicking Israeli security in detail may be impractical at the moment, there are certainly lessons to be learned, and Israeli consultants have been happy to teach them. Ron, working as a security consultant to the Miami and Boston airports in the wake of 9/11, has demonstrated that the principles of the Israeli approach of “get inside their heads, not inside their bags” can be used to improve security, as he told a Tampa newspaper.
Law enforcement officers are trained to identify suspicious behaviors and engage passengers in “constructive conversations” that can elicit valuable information about where a person has been, where he’s going, and what he might be up to.
Though no terrorists have been found at either airport, Ron says the program has led to the arrest of people who have “certain common denominators” with terrorists such as traveling under false identities or concealing weapons or substances.
“This is a very good indication to us that the program actually works,” he says, “and that when terrorists arrive there is a fair chance we’ll be able to pick them up.”
Israelis won’t settle for “a fair chance.” But traditionally, in Israel, when it comes to the inevitable tension between civil liberties and national security, it’s security that wins out, and legal challenges to airport profiling have been generally unsuccessful in changing the reality on the ground. This could change following Israel’s Association for Civil Rights petitioning the Supreme Court to outlaw “racist, humiliating airport checks against Arab citizens” — but the odds are slim.
The question is whether the time has come when a large and powerful democracy like the U.S. must take a page from the playbook of the small and vulnerable Israel.
Resistance to adopting the Israeli model in the U.S. is understandable. The idea of subjecting profiled airline passengers to Israeli-style intensive questioning in the U.S. may not seem pretty.
But then again, the idea of every airline passenger in the U.S. being physically searched as a potential crotch bomber is even more unappealing. Taking account of our footwear before flying is one thing. Being forced to contemplate our choice of underwear is quite another.
Preventing the Next Terrorist Attack
By Andrew Cline
Additional security measures reported in the aftermath of the Christmas bomber’s failed attempt to down a U.S. airline will amount to naught because they don’t address the central security failure.
Keeping international passengers in their seats for the last hour of a flight will do nothing but create wet seat cushions, as those who need “to go,” including children, are prohibited access to the toilet. Any terrorist who sneaks an explosive on a plane will simply detonate it mid-flight or after takeoff. Limiting passengers to a single carry-on bag will have no effect. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had only one carry-on, and apparently strapped the explosive device to his leg.
Will additional pat-downs work? Not if a terrorist hides the explosive in his underwear.
Measures that might have prevented Abdulmutallab from getting his explosive aboard Flight 253 – air puffers and swabs that detect traces of the explosive he reportedly used, and full-body scanning – take time and money to deploy and won’t be used on all passengers. If security officials are not screening the terrorists, these measures will fail, too.
And that’s the central issue. The security system failed to screen out the terrorist.
“We will not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable,” President Obama said in his brief press conference from his vacation in Hawaii on Monday. “This was a serious reminder of the dangers that we face.”
That’s important, but it misses the point. The White House has announced a review of all security procedures. But based on what we already know, it is obvious that the United States effectively ignores, from an operational standpoint, the vast majority of intelligence it receives regarding terror suspects.
According to the administration, the government receives 18,000 tips a day. When Abdullmutallab’s father reported him to the U.S. embassy as a potential Muslim terrorist, it was treated as just another bit of “noise” in the system. It was just one of 18,000 bits received that day, the administration has said. And that is the problem.
Before 9/11, the government collected enough information on the plot to stop it, had anyone put the pieces together. “Connecting the dots” became a buzz phrase in the next year. We would not rest until we had the ability to do that. But in 2009 we still don’t, in part because we don’t have enough resources devoted to doing so.
A dedicated group of suicide bombers can beat even the beefed up security measures now being slowly put into place. For all of his flaws, President Bush understood that when dealing with terrorists, the best defense is a good offense. We shouldn’t be waiting until a terrorist gets to the airport. We should be going after them aggressively.
That means putting more resources into intelligence gathering and “connecting the dots” so we find them before they find us. Unfortunately, this president doesn’t seem interested in taking the war to the terrorists. He seems dedicated to the proposition that this is not a war at all, but a diplomatic problem first, a criminal justice problem second. That approach will work just as well as it did before 9/11.
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Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.
Battleground Yemen
By Ryan Mauro
The narrowly missed terrorist attack on Christmas Day is causing the West’s attention to shift to Yemen, a country currently fighting two insurgencies led by different extremists of different ideologies but with common linkages to Iran. The Al-Qaeda portion of the forces fighting the Yemeni government has been strengthened by the release of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, making any move to send Yemeni detainees held there back to their homeland a very dangerous move.
Al-Qaeda has been building a base in Yemen for many years, facilitated by the willingness of the government to cut deals and negotiate truces with the organization in a way not dissimilar to Pakistan. President Saleh has used Arabs that fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets as soldiers in the 1994 civil war and against the extremist Shiite Houthi rebels in the north and has recruited from Salafi tribes, and many of these fighters have since received positions in the government and security forces.
Terrorism experts have suspected that prison breaks by Al-Qaeda members in Yemen are an inside job done to appease the group. For example, in February 2006, 23 members of Al-Qaeda including those involved in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the 2003 bombings in Riyadh escaped from a high-security prison. Those that were caught were pardoned as long as they promised not to return to jihad. In February of this year, Yemen released 170 suspected Al-Qaeda members after they also pledged not to go back to a life of terrorism.
The Arab press has reported that two Al-Qaeda camps are operating in Yemen, presumably with the government’s knowledge. One recently opened in Al-Jaza in Abyan Province housing 400 terrorists, and another open opened up in the spring, also in Abyan Province. The Yemeni government may be trying to make common cause with Sunni extremists to fight the Shiite extremists in the north.
Yemen has received increasing attention from the United States. The Defense Department is going to spend over $70 million in the next year and a half to train and arm Yemeni military and security forces, more than double the amount of previous aid provided.
The Obama Administration has looked at the possibility of sending the rest of the Yemeni nationals held at Guantanamo Bay back to their homeland, but the aforementioned issues with Yemen’s handling of Al-Qaeda makes such a move unlikely. Al-Qaeda in Yemen has been significantly strengthened as former Gitmo detainees have returned to jihad following their release and have risen to leadership positions. With nearly half of the 200 suspected terrorists held at Gitmo being Yemeni, Al-Qaeda can expect to see many of its old colleagues rejoining their ranks if such a move is made.
For example, Said Ali al-Shihri left Gitmo in 2007 and became a patient in Saudi Arabia’s terrorist rehabilitation program. Upon graduation, he went to Iran, and then became the deputy leader of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. Abdullah al-Qarawi following a similar path, also traveling to Iran after finishing the program, where he know oversees over 100 Saudi Al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed al-Oufi, a former Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula commander, also was released from Gitmo. Luckily, he defected later and informed the Saudis about Iran’s secret involvement with Al-Qaeda in Yemen and a plot to bomb the Saudi oil infrastructure.
The Saudis have had at least 14 former Gitmo prisoners who entered their “rehabilitation” program make it back onto their list of wanted terrorists. In early February, when a list of 85 wanted terrorists was made, 35 were last seen in Iran or were believed to currently be there. The Saudis believe that the Al-Qaeda network in Iran is supporting the group’s efforts in Yemen. One former detainee was even killed in Yemen. It is clear that released prisoners from Gitmo are an important part of Al-Qaeda’s infrastructure.
The second insurgency in Yemen is of a more immediate threat to the Yemeni government’s survival and is stretching out its resources that could otherwise be used to fight Al-Qaeda. The extremist Shiite Houthi rebels in the north have been used by the Iranian government as a way of waging a proxy war against the Yemenis in order to create a pro-Iranian Shiite enclave. The Revolutionary Guards are training Houthi rebels in Eritrea, and is shipping weapons to them through the African country’s Asab harbor. A former Houthi official has confirmed that the Revolutionary Guards’ Al-Quds Force and Hezbollah are funding, training and arming them, and the Yemeni government says that Yemeni students studying in Cairo are being recruited to train in Iran before being dispatched to join the Houthi forces.
The violence has spilled over the border into Saudi Arabia and according to various reports, the Egyptians, Jordanians and even the Moroccoans are secretly come to Yemen’s rescue. The Iranians did not back down in the face of the Saudi intervention. Arms shipments to the Houthis continued, and the Saudis launched a naval blockade of the border area to prevent their arrival. The Iranians reacted by sending their own warships to the Gulf of Aden, ostensibly to fight Somali piracy, and tried to instigate riots during the hajj in Saudi Arabia.
The Iranian government is quickly escalating the conflict on the Arabian Peninsula and is devoting a large amount of resources to it. A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps official is said to have held a meeting in November with members of Hezbollah and the Houthis to prepare a new offensive along the Saudi-Yemeni border. The Iranian Army Chief of Staff is warning the Saudis that violence will spread to their country for their attacks on the Houthis, and a newspaper run by the Revolutionary Guards predicts that the Saudi government will fall if they don’t retreat. It’s also been reported that Ayatollah Khamenei has asked the Revolutionary Guards to draw up a plan to seize the Yemeni and Saudi embassies in Tehran. The Basiji militia actually already attacked the Yemeni embassy on November 24.
The Iranians even named a street in Tehran after Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, the former leader of the extremist Shiites in Yemen. The Yemenis retaliated by naming a street called Iran Boulevard to Neda Soltan Street, in honor of the young female protestor whose brutal death at the hands of the Iranian security forces this summer was videotaped and seen around the world.
The attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day brought some much-needed attention to Yemen. Although the government has a mixed record on fighting terrorism and is far from democratic, it is trying to fight back a bold Iranian offensive in the region on one hand, and faces a threat from Al-Qaeda on the other. If the U.S. does not become sufficiently engaged in the fight, the Yemeni government will embrace the former in order to fight off the latter. The U.S. must make clear that it will give Yemen all the help in fighting both enemies as long as it purges its ranks of sympathizers and does not try to make a deal with the devil.
Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by U.S.
By BRIAN ROSS, JOSEPH RHEE and REHAB EL-BURI
Two of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit were released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Northwest bombing in a Monday statement that vowed more attacks on Americans.
Guantanamo prisoner #333, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi, and prisoner #372, Said Ali Shari, were sent to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 9, 2007, according to the Defense Department log of detainees who were released from American custody. Al-Harbi has since changed his name to Muhamad al-Awfi.
Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.
In its Monday statement claiming responsibility for the Northwest bombing, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula called bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a "hero" and a "martyr" and lauded him for beating U.S. intelligence.
The two-page written claim included a photo of Abdulmutallab and boasted of Al Qaeda's success in designing "advanced explosive packages" that can pass through airport screening undetected.
The statement also asks for attacks upon Americans in the Arabian peninsula, and promises further attacks on the American people.
The suspected bomber, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told FBI agents he was trained for his Christmas Day mission in Yemen by top leaders of al Qaeda who provided him with the explosive materials.
"The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke," a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees.
Saudi officials concede its program has had its "failures" but insist that, overall, the effort has helped return potential terrorists to a meaningful life.
One program gives the former detainees paints and crayons as part of the rehabilitation regimen.
A similar rehabilitation program in Yemen was stopped because so many of the detainees quickly joined with al Qaeda or its affiliates, the official said.
The increased role of al Qaeda in Yemen, which joined with the Saudi al Qaeda unit, has underscored the problem of how to best handle the repatriation of detainees at Guantanamo.
'Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants planning attacks from Yemen'
From Times Online
Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants are planning terror attacks from Yemen, the country’s Foreign Minister said today.
Abu Bakr al-Qirbi appealed for more help from the international community to help to train and equip counter-terrorist forces.
His plea came after an al-Qaeda group based in Yemen claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day airliner bomb plot.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, alleged to be behind the attempt to blow up an American-bound aircraft, spent time in Yemen with al-Qaeda and was in the country only days before the failed attack.
Dr. al-Qirbi said: “Of course there are a number of al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders. We realise this danger."
“They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit. There are maybe hundreds of them — 200, 300.”
Dr. al-Qirbi said it was the “responsibility” of countries with strong intelligence capabilities to warn states such as Yemen about the movements of terror suspects.
The United States, Britain and the European Union could do a lot to improve Yemen’s response to militants on its own soil, he added.
“We have to work in a very joint fashion in partnership to combat terrorism,” he said. “If we do, the problem will be brought under control."
“There is support, but I must say it is inadequate. We need more training, we have to expand our counter-terrorism units and provide them with equipment and transportation like helicopters.”
Mr. Abdulmutallab is said to have told US agents that there were more people “just like him” ready to carry out attacks.
An al-Qaeda group based in Yemen claimed responsibility yesterday for the failed attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit as US President Barack Obama pledged to hunt down the plotters.
The American government pictures show the singed underwear with a six-inch packet of a high explosive called PETN sewn into the crotch, the US network reported.
Mr. Abdulmutallab was reported to be carrying about 80g of PETN, more than one-and-a-half times the amount carried by Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, in 2001 and enough to blow a hole in the side of an aircraft.
Mr. Abdulmutallab’s former tutors at University College London, where he was a student between 2005 and 2008, described him as “well-mannered, quietly spoken, polite and able” and said that he never gave any cause for concern. He was president of the institution’s Islamic society between 2006 and 2007.
Nigerian-born Mr. Abdulmutallab is being held at a federal prison in Michigan on a charge of trying to destroy an aircraft.
He apparently wrote of his loneliness and struggle between liberalism and Islamic extremism in a series of postings on Facebook and in Islamic chatrooms, The Washington Post reported today.
In January 2005, when he was attending boarding school, he wrote: “I have no one to speak too. No one to consult, no one to support me and I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems.”
Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, said it was unlikely that Mr. Abdulmutallab acted alone and revealed that he was banned from entering Britain and placed on a “watch list” this year.
Mr. Johnson said that the alleged terrorist was refused a new visa and had been monitored since May after applying for a bogus course.
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009, for a series of votes.
Sen. Dodd, D-Conn., Slashed Aviation Security Funding For Pet Constituency
By MARK HEMINGWAY
Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009, for a series of votes.
Now that our attention is focused on airline security measures thanks to the failed airline attack on Christmas Day, it's worth mentioning that one senator took money away from aviation security to line the pockets of a constituency that supported his presidential campaign in a big way.
Back in July, Senator Chris Dodd, D-Conn., proposed an amendment reducing aviation security appropriations by $4.5 million in favor of firefighter grants -- a notoriously inneffective program. In fact, the money was specifically "for screening operations and the amount for explosives detection systems." The amendment was also sponsored by Sen. Lieberman, D-Conn., and Sen. Carper, D-Del., but Dodd deserves to be singled out here because the firefighters union is a pet constituency of his. In 2007 he campaigned all through Iowa with the firefighters union. It was one of the few distinguishable features of Dodd's ill-fated presidential bid.
The text of the amendment is below:
(Purpose: To provide additional funds for FIRE grants under section 33 of the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974)
On page 77, between lines 16 and 17, insert the following:
SEC. X
(a) The amount appropriated under the heading "firefighter assistance grants'' under the heading "Federal Emergency Management Agency'' under by title III for necessary expenses for programs authorized by the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 is increased by $10,000,000 for necessary expenses to carry out the programs authorized under section 33 of that Act (15 U.S.C. 2229).
(b) The total amount of appropriations under the heading "Aviation Security'' under the heading "Transportation Security Administration'' under title II, the amount for screening operations and the amount for explosives detection systems under the first proviso under that heading, and the amount for the purchase and installation of explosives detection systems under the second proviso under that heading are reduced by $4,500,000.
(c) From the unobligated balances of amounts appropriated before the date of enactment of this Act for the appropriations account under the heading "state and local programs'' under the heading "Federal Emergency Management Agency'' for "Trucking Industry Security Grants'', $5,500,000 are rescinded.
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Source: Beltway Confidential
Calls for Full-Body Screening Devices Grow After Terror Attempt
By Angela Greiling Keane
Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- A suspected terrorist’s attempt to blow up a U.S. airliner may override privacy concerns and intensify a push for full-body scanning equipment at airports.
U.S. officials charged a 23-year-old Nigerian man with trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it prepared to land in Detroit on Christmas Day. President Barack Obama said yesterday he ordered a thorough review of the episode and called for new scrutiny of screening policies and technologies.
Metal detectors currently used to screen passengers wouldn’t have found the explosive allegedly carried aboard by the suspect, said former Federal Aviation Administration security chief Billie Vincent. Only more sophisticated devices such as low-level X-rays and millimeter-wave technology would work, Vincent said.
Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, called for more widespread use of the full-body scanners after the aborted attack. “We were very lucky this time but we may not be so lucky next time, which is why our defenses must be strengthened,” Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement yesterday.
The committee said it would hold a hearing next month on airline security and how the alleged terrorist got onto the plane.
Advanced Equipment
Companies such as OSI Systems Inc., Smiths Group Plc, Safran SA and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. may benefit from any requirement that airports get more security equipment. London-based Smiths is the world’s biggest maker of airport scanners. Safran, based in Paris, is the world leader in biometric technologies, such as fingerprint scanners. New York- based L-3 also makes scanners for airport use.
L-3 has “developed a more sophisticated system that could prevent smuggling of almost anything on the body,” said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., who has a “hold” rating on the stock. “Speed and privacy issues have slowed its introduction.”
Jennifer Barton, a spokeswoman for New York-based L-3, didn’t respond to a phone call seeking comment.
L-3 rose $1.17, or 1.4 percent, to $86.80 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading yesterday. That was the highest closing price since October 2008. OSI jumped $2.45, or 11 percent, to $24.47 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The percentage gain was the biggest since Jan. 29.
OSI’s Rapiscan unit makes machines that can detect liquids and other potential explosives beneath passengers’ clothing. In October, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration placed an order valued at $25 million for Rapiscan’s imaging equipment, the Hawthorne, California-based company said.
Expediting Delivery
“We are starting to implement and put them in at TSA’s direction at U.S. airports,” Peter Kant, an executive vice president for Rapiscan, said yesterday in an interview. “We’ve been on the phone a lot with TSA about how to expedite delivery.”
The company has delivered about 40 machines so far to the agency, he said.
The Transportation Security Administration has been adding low-level X-rays and millimeter-wave technology machines to find explosives. There are millimeter-wave machines at 19 airports, the agency said on its Web site.
TSA recently announced the purchase of 150 Rapiscan units with some of its $1 billion in airport-security funds from the $787 billion economic stimulus package, said Greg Soule, a security administration spokesman.
The agency intends to purchase an additional 300 advanced imaging-technology units in 2010, Soule said.
Using the technology is voluntary for passengers, the security administration said. Those who do not wish to receive millimeter wave screening will undergo metal detector screening and a pat-down, according to the agency.
Privacy Issues
Full-body imaging has been criticized by some advocacy groups as an invasion of privacy. Kant said his company has mitigated that concern by blurring body images and having technicians viewing the images in a different location from the screening equipment.
“There have been privacy concerns expressed about the use of these whole body-imaging devices, but I think those privacy concerns, which are, frankly, mild, have to fall in the face of the ability of these machines to detect material like this,” Lieberman said on “Fox News Sunday” on Dec. 27.
Using technology for every threat may cost more and reduce risk less than measures such as increasing visa reviews in “high-risk” countries, said David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University and the University of North Carolina.
“Every time we have an episode, we should not rush to judgment and spend billions of dollars deploying the newfangled technology that will meet a very narrow sliver of the threat,” said Schanzer. “That’s not a satisfying response that politicians can make. Politicians feel an urgent need to respond to the threats today.”
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To contact the reporter on this story: Angela Greiling Keane in Washington at agreilingkea@bloomberg.net
Obama Violates Osama Oath
By Rep. Steve King
11/27/2009
On December 18, 2007, then presidential candidate Barack Obama leveled the first of dozens of heavy criticisms against President George W. Bush. In a speech in Des Moines, Obama blasted President Bush for taking his “eye off the ball in Afghanistan." He continued: "It’s time to…increase our military, political, and economic commitment to Afghanistan. That’s what…I’ll do as president."
This was Barack Obama’s first “eye off the ball” speech. It was the beginning of a barrage of campaign speeches accusing the Bush administration of “taking our eye off of Osama bin Laden” (Denver, 1/30/08).
On July 15, 2008 in Washington, D.C., then Senator Obama vowed to deploy “the full force of American power to hunt down and destroy Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all of the terrorists responsible for 9/11." In fact, Barack Obama specifically used the name of Osama bin Laden at least 40 times in speeches during his Presidential campaign while definitively pledging to focus all necessary resources against bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban in the countries where they live and operate.
On November 3, 2008, the day before his election, Obama delivered for the last time as a candidate his oft repeated promise, “I will finally finish the fight against bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. I will never hesitate to defend this nation.”
More than a year has passed since Obama was elected. Since that date, we have seen a distinct contrast between candidate Obama and Commander-in-Chief Obama. Candidate Obama seldom failed to rail against the war in Iraq - the “war of choice” - and seldom failed to burnish his national security credentials by railing against bin Laden. As he said repeatedly before his election, “I have no greater priority than taking out these terrorists who threaten America, and finishing the job against the Taliban. I will never hesitate to defend this nation!”
President Obama has now hesitated for a full three months since General McChrystal requested more troops in Afghanistan and said failing to do so risked an outcome that “will likely result in failure.” A Commander-in-Chief must be decisive in time of war. The lives of our troops, the destiny of our nation and that of the free world is at stake.
Well before January 20, 2009 when he took the presidential oath of office, Obama swore an oath to defend America at home and abroad. When he became a US Senator, Obama took the Congressional oath which says, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.”
In every case, campaign rhetoric and national security policy merge the moment we elect a president. In this case, quite specifically, President Obama’s Congressional oath and campaign promises were merged by his taking the oath of office of President.
A President’s oath of office is set by the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” To fulfill that oath, a president must defend our nation against all the enemies of the Constitution. Osama bin Laden is one, beyond any quibble or doubt. And when a president is elected, he becomes accountable for the promises he made.
When he became president, the presidential oath required Obama to recommit to those principles. Thousands of Americans gave him their vote in full faith that Obama would keep faith with them and make good on his solemn vow to defeat bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Today, it has become completely obvious that President Obama has taken his eye off the very ball that he defined as candidate Obama. As President, he has virtually stopped talking about defeating Osama bin Laden.
In the year since elected, during the dozens of speeches and press conferences he has given as president and in dramatic contrast with his own persistent and repetitive warnings about “taking our eye off of Osama bin Laden,” Obama has uttered the name bin Laden only four times. It is even more significant that not once since his election has Obama repeated his oath to “finish the fight against bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists.”
American fighting forces are by far the best fighting forces the world has ever seen. They alone among the troops of the world defend and advance the cause of liberty for the sake of all who yearn to be free. Defeat, retreat or failure is not a political decision for them.
They have written a blank check to the Commander-in-Chief for a value up to and including their very lives. Our troops know they will one day come home, boots on or boots off. They are not deployed to dither.
Their very nobility requires a decision from the President who said, “This is a war that we have to win.”
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Rep. King was elected to Iowa's 5th District in 2002. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee and its Constitution and Immigration subcommittees.
PHOTO: American Nick Berg after being tortured and beheaded by his Islamic captors.
What is Torture? By Jamie Glazov
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dave Gaubatz, the first civilian U.S. Federal Agent in Iraq (2003). He currently conducts first-hand counter-terrorism research in Islamic Centers/mosques throughout the U.S. Visit his site at www.daveg.us
FP: Dave Gaubatz, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
President Obama recently released intelligence about our country’s interrogation methods such as water boarding, sleep deprivation, liquid diets, and a terrorist being put in a box with a bug. What do you think of these developments?
Gaubatz: Jamie, in the last couple of weeks, several current active duty and military veterans have contacted me and asked why Obama would do this with the support of the Democratic Party. I could give a politically correct answer and say our President had the best intentions and just made an innocent mistake by doing all of this. I can’t do this because it is not true.
President Obama has made too many alleged mistakes for his actions to be anything but intentional. Americans at some point need to understand that, even by his own admissions, he went to a church for 20 years led by a leftwing extremist, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he was friends with terrorist Bill Ayers, and bowed to a Saudi Arabian leader who condones under Sharia law the marriage of 8 year old children to adult men, and still in 2009 distributes literature advocating Muslims to kill Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who do not adhere to the strict adherence of Sharia law.
Most Americans understand the “interrogation methods” released by Obama are not really torture. More importantly Al Qaeda terrorists do not. Inconvenient, uncomfortable, tiring, and irritating, but not torture. I do not believe President Obama has the best interest of our country, our citizens, or the thousands of military and intelligence officers as his primary goal. If I were taking all of Obama’s actions and putting them into an “intelligence report” the following conclusion could be made:
[1] President Obama does not have the best interest of our country, our citizens, or the thousands of military and intelligence officers as his primary goal.
[2] The release of the ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ could be seen as an intentional signal to Al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters, that if you are ever captured, you should not release any information about your fellow ‘brothers and sisters’ who are involved in ‘Jihad’ because the worst that can happen is you may have to undergo inconveniences, but nothing life threatening.
[3] President Obama and his supporters are indeed sending a message to potential enemy combatants that could be interpreted as such: stay the course, it may be long and difficult, but patience and perseverance will ultimately lead to your victory.
Note: This is a frightening and very similar message Islamic organizations inform their members with. A brochure is now being distributed throughout the U.S. which says: If you ever get confronted by the FBI, do not to speak with the them and do not provide information on your fellow Muslims.
FP: The mainstream media continues to call ‘waterboarding’ torture. What is it in your view?
Gaubatz: We are falling into the trap Islamic terrorist groups and liberals want us to fall into. We have got to get over being afraid of names and definitions defined by liberals. CAIR and ISNA use this tactic. Politicians, law enforcement, and concerned citizens are so fearful of being called an ‘Islamophobe’ they fail to do their jobs, which is to protect our country.
Let’s call ‘waterboarding’ a form of torture. It is insignificant. ‘Waterboarding’ or sleep deprivation does not equate to what our ‘troops’ face if they are captured in Iraq or Afghanistan by Islamic terrorists. If readers go to my blog atwww.daveg.us, they will see just a sampling of notes I took in 2003, Iraq. They should observe the one intelligence report I had written on 5 May 2003. The title is “1000 bodies”. Directly behind the Saddam Hospital Private Jessica Lynch was being held as a POW, our team was provided intelligence by one of the Iraqi doctors describing a ‘graveyard’ innocent Iraqis who defied Saddam Hussein were buried after undergoing significant torture and then killed. Our intelligence officers ‘through’ interviews and interrogations located many such sites throughout Iraq.
I had the opportunity to interview several Fedeyeen (civilian thugs of Saddam) we encountered and asked them if our country would again be attacked similar to Sept. 11th, 2001. Many said our troops would suffer from suicide attacks and the Islamic terrorist groups would target the “hearts of Americans”. I asked them to define what the hearts of Americans means. In no uncertain terms it was defined as attacking our children. The people we interviewed further explained they know the ‘hearts’ of Americans are their children and the most effective way to make them suffer and cower to their demands, would be to attack them. If for a minute any American believes the Islamic terrorist groups would never attack a school bus full of children, or send a suicide bomber into a school, or into a high school football stadium, or kidnap children and torture them, they need only ask the citizens of Israel. The Islamic terrorists who advocate such actions do not have hearts nor do they have a conscious. They have for years been taught to hate Christians and Jews and would sacrifice their own children to destroy their enemies (per the words of one Iraqi I interviewed).
FP: President Obama reversed his position about releasing photographs of prisoners allegedly tortured by American personnel. In addition Nancy Pelosi/D-CA (Speaker of the House) is now in hot water about lying about what she knew of interrogation methods prior to 2003. Based on your knowledge of how counter-intelligence operations are conducted, why do you think Obama changed his mind on the photographs and why did Pelosi lie?
Gaubatz: I believe President Obama has been tactfully informed by U.S. military leaders that our brave troops on the ground are risking their lives everyday for America and are beginning to ask who their ‘Commander in Chief’ is and what ideology he truly supports. These troops have young sons and daughters at home, and although they are willing to give their lives for America, they are second guessing themselves about dying for a Commander in Chief who is aiding and providing comfort to our enemies.
These troops who see death everyday and understand death means leaving their young children without a mother/father for a lifetime, will sacrifice themselves, but do not want their children to suffer if the Commander in Chief does not love America as they do. Our troops are very intelligent and know Obama admitted to cocaine use and having terrorists as friends. These are automatic disqualifiers for a Top Secret security clearance and to have any access to our nuclear weapons systems. These troops understand no active duty member with a background as shady as Obama would ever be granted a security clearance giving one access to our nuclear weapons.
Our troops are thinking about their children and saying they will give their life for America, but not for a leader who appears to be following the ideology of socialist countries and who also appears to have sympathy for Islamic leaders more than he does for his troops in the field. I firmly believe our military leaders provided Obama the reality of his actions of jeopardizing more innocent American lives for his personal political goals. Our troops and Americans who support them will give their allegiance to their country first. They will not give it up to a socialist nation or leader who puts their lives at risk.
In regards to Nancy Pelosi: Ms. Pelosi along with President Obama has jeopardized our country’s national security by releasing the interrogation methods and has put our intelligence officer’s lives in jeopardy. Additionally Pelosi told our enemies (Islamic terrorists and their supporters) that our intelligence officers can’t be trusted. Islamic terrorists will use the words of Pelosi to justify their continued actions of terrorist acts. Americans will tolerate only so much in the name of politics; they will not give up America or allow innocent men, women, and our children to suffer for any politician.
FP: Final words?
Gaubatz: Thank you Jamie. I praise the effort former VP Dick Cheney is conducting. He is speaking on behalf of millions of American. Cheney is essentially saying Americans will not allow our country to be destroyed and there are millions of people to include our troops, LE, and our intelligence officers that will not allow it to happen. I could be wrong, but I do not believe so.
I have watched the ‘homemade’ videos made from Islamic terrorists when they beat our soldiers, had their snipers shoot them, and slowly cut their throats to enhance their suffering and subsequently beheaded them. My fellow Americans, this is torture. Don’t believe me; ask innocent Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan who have witnessed this and worse.
Recently I put together a one hour long video of what ‘torture’ actually is. The video is from various Islamic Jihadist sites I have monitored for several years and will never be seen in the MSM. The DVD is titled, “Torture in the Name of Islam”. If readers truly want to see what torture is and what Islamic scholars operating in America advocate, then they should watch. If readers want to believe ‘waterboarding’ is torture, then do not watch this video. Thank you. _________________
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
Selling Insecurity By Jacob Laksin
President Obama could not have picked a worse week to take a stand in defense of his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay prison.
On Wednesday, Senate Democrats led the way in overwhelmingly rejecting, by a vote of 90 to 6, the administration’s request for $80 million to relocate the Guantanamo detainees, a decision that replicates an earlier rebuff by the House last week and makes it increasingly unlikely that Guantanamo will be closed by Obama’s much-hyped January 2010 deadline.
Later that afternoon, FBI director Robert Mueller threw another spammer in the works when he warned that transporting Gitmo’s denizens to U.S. prisons could enable them to radicalize America’s prison population, as well as plot and carry out terrorist attacks.
Then, on Thursday, news broke of a still-unreleased Pentagon report finding that of the 534 detainees originally held at Gitmo, one in seven returned to terrorism upon their release.
In short, it was an unpropitious time to make the case that Guantanamo Bay was endangering American security; that it was undermining the U.S.-led war against Islamic terrorism; and that its closure was of the utmost importance.
Yet that is precisely what Obama did yesterday morning, as he delivered what was billed as a national security address but what was in reality a not-so-thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism policies and a labored attempt to justify a move that few – including few Democrats in Congress – actually support.
In keeping with the administration’s weakness for well-scripted symbolism, Obama spoke at the National Archives in the nation’s capitol. Presumably, this home of the U.S. Constitution was intended to send the message that closing Gitmo was not only strategically wise but also consistent with the country’s founding documents.
If so, the point was lost in a speech that failed to compensate in soaring rhetoric for what it lacked in basic coherence. And it didn’t help the president’s case that he was competing for coverage with former vice president Cheney, whose own speech at the American Enterprise Institute – a rousing, impressively unapologetic defense of the Bush administration’s record in keeping the country safe – threatened to overshadow his president’s.
Substantively, the president’s speech was a confused jumble. In no small part, this was because the Obama administration has quietly adopted many of the Bush-era policies that the president feels called upon to condemn.
For instance, the president criticized the Bush administration’s detention regime and stressed that federal courts were adequate to the task of prosecuting terrorist suspects. In a curious transition, Obama then endorsed the previous administration’s position repudiating U.S. courts in favor of Military Commissions, which he explained are an “appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war.”
It bears noting that during the presidential campaign Obama railed against what he called “a flawed military commission system.” Since taking office, however, his administration has followed this system with only the most cosmetic of changes. Lest anyone wonder, the president assured that this did not constitute a “reversal” on his part. That settles that.
On the controversial matter of transporting Gitmo detainees to U.S. prisons, Obama was only slightly more consistent. While he pointed to high-security “supermax” federal prisons as a suitable alternative, Obama largely dodged the pressing question of which prisons, and which states, would receive the detainees.
The omission was not exactly surprising. Bringing Gitmo’s terrorists to the U.S. remains widely unpopular among both Republicans and Democrats, few of whom are prepared to incur the political risk of actually accepting the inmates. As Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid succinctly put it, “We don’t want them around.” Against this political backdrop, the president’s refusal to offer any specifics about the transfer policy he proposes must be seen as an abdication of responsibility.
He stumbled yet again in his discussion of detention policies. On the one hand, Obama denounced the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects under the Bush administration, stating that “detention policies cannot be unbounded.” At the same time, he made sure to add that that he was “not going to release individuals who endanger the American people.” So, which was it?
The latter was closer to the Bush administration’s approach and, though one wouldn’t know it from yesterday’s remarks, it is Obama’s as well. For all its recrimination and finger pointing, the Obama administration has claimed the right to detain indefinitely al-Qaeda and Taliban captives, including those who have not been charged with a war crime (a position upheld by a federal court this week.) That leaves open the interpretation that yesterday’s speech was a cynical ploy to follow the Bush administration’s course on detainee policy while taking credit for a supposed break with the past.
Obama was more forthright – if not more convincing – in his assessment of Guantanamo’s impact on the larger war on terror. “The record is clear,” the president said, “rather than keep us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security.”
Even from Obama’s own remarks, though, this was anything but clear. The president noted, for instance, that Guantanamo is home to terrorists who remain a threat to the United States, including “people who have received extensive explosives training at al-Qaeda training camps, commanded Taliban troops in battle, expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.”
That echoes earlier findings by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees are a “demonstrated threat” to Americans, while 95 percent were at the least a “potential threat.” Since Guantanamo is the reason that these detainees have not been able to carry out additional terrorist attacks, it defies common sense to claim that the prison has “weakened” national security.
Beyond shoddy logic, Obama’s speech also had serious practical flaws. Obama pointed out that his “review team” has approved 50 detainees to be transferred from Guantanamo. What he could not say is where these detainees would be transferred, alluding vaguely to “discussions with a number of other countries.”
That was no coincidence. European countries have been unwilling to take in detainees, even if it means an expedited end to the detention center they have denounced as an affront to human rights. Britain and France, for example, have agreed to accept just one prisoner each. As Cheney observed in his AEI speech, Obama may have won “applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo,” but “the United States has had little luck getting other countries to take hardened terrorists. So what happens then?”
What indeed. Sending the detainees back to their countries of origin is no solution. Of the 240 prisoners who remain at Guantanamo, nearly 100 are from Yemen, whose policy of dealing with detainees through “rehabilitation” programs, paired with its popularity as a destination for ex-Guantánamo inmates eager to rejoin terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, makes it a singularly poor choice to accept the detainees. It’s no wonder that the most effective point made by Cheney yesterday concerned the difficulty of the choices facing the government as it works to prevent another terrorist attack on American soil.
While the president’s rhetoric often suggests otherwise, that reality may be dawning on the Obama administration. In this connection, perhaps the best that can be said of the president’s address is that his actions don’t match his words. As Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith observed in the New Republic this week, on a host of national security issues – from military detention, military commissions, and targeted killings, to habeas corpus rights, rendition and surveillance programs – the Obama administration’s policies are largely indistinguishable from the policies in the later years of the Bush administration. “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging,” Goldsmith wrote.
The Guantanamo debate is a case in point. Yesterday’s dueling speeches were a clash of styles more than substance. True, Obama continues to attack the Bush administration’s record on national security, often unfairly. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, President Obama has paid his predecessors the ultimate compliment. _______________
Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin [@] gmail.com.
Forgetting the Two-State Solution
By Joseph Klein
Ever since 1977, the United Nations has sponsored the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” to mark November 29th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its partition resolution. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called November 29th a “day of mourning and a day of grief.” It takes place every year at UN headquarters in New York and at the UN Offices at Geneva and Vienna and elsewhere. This year it was observed on November 30th since the 29th was a Sunday.
In honor of this year’s “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a special “Message” stating that sixty-two years ago, “the General Assembly, resolution 181, put forth a vision of two States.” He said that the “State of Israel exists” but the “State of Palestine does not.”
I asked the Secretary General’s spokesperson at the press briefing at UN headquarters on that day if Ban Ki-moon has a position on whether the two-state solution should include specific protection of Israel as a Jewish state. After all, the whole purpose of establishing the state of Israel in the first place was to create a Jewish homeland where Jews would no longer be a persecuted minority who were told that they do not belong in the country in which they happened to reside. The international community at the time passed the partition resolution knowing full well that its vision of two states included a Jewish state living side by side with a Palestinian state. But the Arab states rejected the UN partition resolution – the original two-state solution. The Jewish state accepted it.
Fast forward sixty-two years. President Obama, when he addressed the General Assembly in September, talked about a Jewish state of Israel living side-by-side in peace with a Palestinian sovereign state. But in a press briefing at UN headquarters on September 22nd, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayad rejected the idea of a Jewish state. He said it “was not part of the Palestinian Authority’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist in peace and security.”
My question to the Secretary General’s spokesperson was meant to elicit whether Ban Ki-moon had the courage to reaffirm the UN General Assembly’s original vision – a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace and security. The answer was, No.
“We don’t have a position on that,” said Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson. “We have said it over and over again. What we do recognize is the need for the existence of two States, living side-by-side. We don’t actually want to venture into determining what each State will be like. I think it’s for the people of those States to determine what those States will be. What I would say is that, for us, it is important that the two-State solution be carried through.”
Every November the United Nations makes a public spectacle of mourning what it had recommended as a peaceful solution to the Arab-Jewish dispute over the Palestine Mandate territory sixty-two years ago. The UN is effectively repudiating its own original two-state solution, spurned by all of the Arab countries back in 1947 but accepted by Israel and backed back then by the international community.
The Palestinians continue to insist on their own state, to be governed as they wish – very likely under Islamic law. The UN is rallying to their cause and blaming Israel for defending itself against unremitting terrorist attacks. And gone is the clear international recognition of the reason that Israel was established in the first place.
The Palestinians will not even come to the negotiating table until they get their way completely on certain pre-conditions, such as a total freeze of all settlement activity. But negotiations, if they ever start in earnest, are doomed to fail if the Palestinians and their enablers refuse to recognize Israel’s right of self-determination to live in peace and security as a Jewish state.
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan called himself a "soldier of Allah" on business cards found in his apartment after the shooting rampage at Fort Hood in which he is accused of murdering 13 people.
Hasan Called Himself 'Soldier of Allah' on Business Cards
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, reportedly obtained the business cards over the Internet. In addition to listing his profession and contact information, the cards contain a discrete reference to his religion:
"SoA(SWT)."
Watchdogs say the first letters are shorthand among militant Muslims to "soldier of Allah." The last letters refer to "Subhanahu Wa Ta'all," which means "glory to God."
The business cards were among numerous discoveries in Hasan's apartment of interest to investigators, who also are looking into whether Hasan wired money to Pakistan before last week's massacre.
Reporters including Fox News camera crews were shown inside Hasan's sparse one-bedroom apartment. Hasan, 39, who was wounded in the Nov. 5 massacre and has been talking to investigators since he regained consciousness in the hospital, was charged Thursday with 13 counts of premeditated murder.
Among the items reportedly found in his upstairs apartment: bottles of vitamins and medications stuffed in a shoebox for which Hasan had obtained prescriptions or, in some cases, that he had prescribed for himself.
Combivir, a drug used to treat HIV, was in the stash with about a dozen pills left in the bottle, the Dallas Morning News reported. It had been given to Hasan in 2001 at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, the newspaper said.
It wasn't known why Hasan had the HIV medication or whether he was taking it. Combivir also has been prescribed to medical workers to prevent exposure to HIV in needles.
Prescription cough suppressants were among the other bottles reporters said they saw.
A closed closet with a "Do Not Open" sign taped to it was photographed in Hasan's unit at the Casa Del Norte apartments. A manager there taped the closet door shut after inspecting it and letting the media in, according to the Morning News.
Meanwhile, authorities say they're looking at whether Hasan was sending money to Pakistan --and if so, why. The Virginia-born soldier is the son of Palestinian immigrants, was raised in the United States and has some relatives still living in the West Bank.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., told the Morning News that sources "outside of the [intelligence] community" have information about Hasan's possible ties to Pakistan, which is battling a large Islamist insurgency movement.
Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee's ranking Republican, declined to identify the sources.
"They are trying to follow up on it because they recognize that if there are communications — phone or money transfers with somebody in Pakistan — it just raises a whole other level of questions," he told the paper.
Hasan's family has said he doesn't have ties to Islamic extremists.
In another development, the military psychiatrists who supervised Hasan at Walter Reed Army Medical Center reportedly tried to re-channel his growing focus on American-fought wars in Muslim countries.
A Walter Reed staff member familiar with his medical training told The Washington Post that Hasan was ordered to attend university lectures on terrorism, Islam and the Middle East in the hopes of redirecting his increasing preoccupation with the conflicts felt by Muslim American soldiers on the front lines.
U.S. military doctors overseeing Hasan's medical training reportedly had been worried he was "psychotic" and possibly capable of killing other American soldiers.
Medical officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center held a series of meetings beginning in the Spring of 2008 to discuss serious concerns about Hasan's work and behavior, National Public Radio reported.
"Put it this way," one official told NPR. "Everybody felt that if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, you would not want Nidal Hasan in your foxhole."
An official who participated in the discussions reportedly told others he was worried that if Hasan was deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he might leak covert military information to Islamic extremists, NPR reported.
Another official "wondered aloud" to colleagues whether Hasan might be capable of killing fellow soldiers in the same way a Muslim sergeant in 2003 had set off grenades at a base in Kuwait, killing two and wounding 14, the radio network reported.
The officials who discussed Hasan's status were unaware — as some top Walter Reed hospital officials were — that intelligence agencies had been tracking Hasan's e-mails to a radical imam since December 2008, NPR said.
Officials considered kicking Hasan out of the program but chose not to partly because firing a doctor is a "cumbersome and lengthy" process that involves hearings and potential legal conflict, sources told NPR.
Officials also believed they lacked solid evidence that Hasan was unstable and were concerned they could be accused of discriminating against him because of his Islamic identity or views.
Hasan is accused of spraying a Fort Hood soldier processing center with more than 100 bullets last Thursday before civilian police shot him. He is recovering, under guard, at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
IT'S A HOLY WAR, STUPID! CLICK HERE
ENEMY WATCH: If Islam is the Religion of Peace, Why Do They Have to Keep Reminding Us? By: Don Feder
“Last week, four Southern Baptists were arrested for plotting to blow up St Patrick’s Cathedral. The men, who became born-again Christians in prison, wanted to kill and terrorize Catholics.”
If that was the opening paragraph in a newspaper story you were reading, your gut reaction would be – huh? Baptists don’t do things like that in the name of their faith. Neither do Catholics, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons.
But when we read the headline in a May 21st New York Times’ story – “4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues” – it was ho-hum stuff.
It wasn’t exactly a revelation when The Times informed us, in the 9th paragraph, “They are all Muslims, a law enforcement official said” – just in case you thought the conspiracy involved Episcopalians, Rotarians or the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
If you hear about a hijacking, suicide bombing, sniper attack or the beheading of a hostage anywhere in the world, your first reaction is: a Muslim did it. Why? Because 9 times out of 10 a Muslim did do it.
In the case of The Newburgh Four, here’s what we know:
1.Their names are David “Daoud” Williams, James “Abdul Rahman” Cromitie, Onta “Hamza” Williams and Laguerre “Amin” Payen. At least two were prison-converts to the Big Peaceful.
2.They planned to blow up two synagogues with what they thought was C-4 explosives, supplied by the FBI.
3.They wanted to obtain Stinger missiles to shoot down military aircraft.
4.As Assistant US Attorney Eric Snyder stated when the defendants were arraigned in federal court, “These are people who were eager to bring death to Jews and the Jewish community.”
5.According to an informant, Cromitie said of the Jewish people: “I hate those motherf-----s, those f---ing Jewish bastards. I would like to get a synagogue.” Also, while scoping out a Jewish community center as a potential target, Cromitie is alleged to have said of nearby pedestrians that if he had a gun at the time, he would “shoot each one in the head.”
If Islam is such a “religion of peace,” why do they have to keep reminding us? Nobody’s running around saying “Christianity is a religion of peace” or “Judaism is a religion of peace” – because neither proposition is in doubt.
Yet, George W. Bush felt compelled to regularly reassure us (especially after 9/11) that Islam was about as peaceful as a religion can get.
Speaking at a 2005 dinner marking the end of Ramadan, Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said Mohammedanism was the "religion of love and peace.” For Condi, being peaceful wasn’t enough. Islam had to be warm and cuddly too. “We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam,” Rice absurdly remarked. “We’ve seen it in many ways” – including in glorious Technicolor, in the video of the decapitation of Daniel Pearl.
President Obama boasts of his Muslim relations and his upbringing in Jakarta. In a speech to the Turkish parliament during his first trip abroad as president, Barack Hussein Obama assured the Muslin world that America “will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better, including my own country.”
When was the last time a U.S. president conveyed deep appreciation for the Christian faith?
So, Islam is a religion of peace and love, as well as a benefactor of humanity. If this is intuitively obvious, why do they have to keep saying it? Perhaps because the vision of a compassionate Islam is so often obscured by explosions, flying body parts, collapsing skyscrapers, rolling heads, and rabid imams preaching hate the Jews, hate the Christians, hate America, hate the West, etc.
If Islam is so gentle and kindly, why does it have such appeal for the most violent element in our society – those filled with resentment and rage, who like to hurt people (a lot)?
Question: Under what circumstances is an infidel most likely to convert to Islam: 1. While volunteering at a hospice or homeless shelter? 2. While working at a day-care center? 3.While planting flowers and singing Kumbaya at a peace rally? or 4. While incarcerated at a state or federal prison? What’s that? Someone told you, didn’t they?
Conversions behind bars are so common that Mitch Silber, chief NYPD intelligence analyst, says cops have a name for it “Prislam.” Chuck Colson of The Prison Fellowship Ministries was warning us of the coming jailhouse jihad almost a decade ago.
More than 2 million are imprisoned in the United States, of which an estimated 6% are members of the religion of rest-in-peace. Sometimes their real-world experience at hurting people (a lot) is put to good use as newly-minted Muslims.
Have you ever noticed how converts to a faith, or those with a newfound commitment to the religion of their birth, tend to be, well – nicer. Born-again Christians – including those who come from dysfunctional backgrounds – often exemplify the New Testament admonition to be “salt and light,” likewise committed Catholics and those who’ve moved from a secular Jewish identity to orthodoxy.
Islam is the exception.
By all accounts, John Walker Lindh, born into an upper-middle class family, was as normal as a child of broken home in Marin County, California can get. Then, at age 16, he converted to Islam and began calling himself Suleyman al-Faris.
In 1998, at age 17, John/Suleyman traveled to Yemen, to study Arabic so he could read the Koran in its original language. From there, the religion-of-peacenik went to Pakistan to study at a madrassa.
The spring of 2001 found him at an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
When captured by U.S. forces in November 2001, Lindh was fighting for the blissful rule of the Taliban. Now, he’s serving a 20-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, and probably proselytizing the other inmates, when he isn’t studying his peace-manual.
Other converts to Islam, unlikely to be mistaken for Mister Rogers, include:
•John Muhammad – Born John Allen Williams, he converted to Islam in 1987. Mr. Prophet was a member of the Nation of Islam for a time and reportedly provided security for Farrakhan’s 1995 “Million Man March.” Along with his boy companion, Lee Boyd Malvo, Muhammad shot and killed 16 people in 7 states in the fall of 2002. In custody, Muhammad told authorities that he was following in the footsteps of his idol, Osama bin Laden. He’s currently on death row in Virginia.
•Jose Padilla (AKA: Abdullah Al Muhajir) – Joining a Puerto Rican street gang as a teen, Padilla compiled an impressive juvenile and adult rap sheet, including attempted theft, aggravated assault and unlawful weapons possession. In 1998, Padilla became a jihadi tourist, traveling to Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan in search of the peace only Islam can bring. Padilla was trained at the camp of an al Qaeda affiliate in Afghanistan in 2000. Bin Laden deputy Abu Zubaydah sent Padilla back to the United States with $20,000 and an elaborate scheme to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb.” Apprehended, he’s now serving the remainder of a 17-year sentence.
•Richard Reid (Aka: Abdul Raheem, AKA: the Thom McAnn of terrorists) – Born in London the son of a Jamaican immigrant, he spent time in a number of British prisons, where he converted to the ROP. As a member of al Qaeda, Reid was assigned to blow up American Airlines Flight 63, en route from Paris to Miami, by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes. In this religious duty, Reid/Raheem failed, and is now serving a life sentence in the U.S.
•Sgt. Hasan Akbar – While stationed at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait (preparing to deploy to Iraq), on March 23, 2003, Akbar attacked other soldiers with grenades and a rifle, killing two officers and wounding 14 servicemen. His diary revealed a man of all-consuming hatred. (“Destroying America is my greatest goal.”) Prior to the murders, Akbar confessed in his journal “I will have to decide to kill my Muslim brothers fighting for Saddam Hussein or my battle buddies.” It didn’t take much thought. A military court convicted Akbar of the murders and sentenced him to death. He temporarily resides at Ft. Leavenworth, on his way to a rendezvous with 72 virgins.
The apologists for Islam (Crescent-kissers) respond that these ex-cons and psychos are no more representative of Islam than Bernie Madoff is of Jewish financiers or Ted Haggard (former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who had a relationship with a gay hooker) is of Christian leaders.
This is a plausible argument, at first blush. But if the Johnny jihadists, snipers, and homicidal anti-Semites got Islam wrong, who gets it right?
How about the Muslim-American groups which, in a rare show of empathy, rushed to condemn the Newburgh Four, including the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American –Islamic Relations?
Putting aside the fact that each of these groups has questionable connections, what are they actually doing to fight terrorism other than paying lip-service to the cause?
Robert Spencer, the editor of Jihad Watch, muses: “One might wonder why Muslim groups don’t become more proactive, and institute programs in mosques and Islamic schools in the West (as well as in the Islamic world) to teach Muslims why the views of Osama bin Laden et al are wrong, and how true Islam eschews violence against and hatred of unbelievers. Yet CAIR, ISNA, MPAC and the rest have never instituted or even called for such a program. They are ready with the condemnations after arrests or explosions, but why wait passively? Why not head off jihadist activity by Muslims”? This is a rhetorical question.
Who gets Islam right? How about a Palestinian religious figure who took the bold move of attending the Second Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace in 2008? Attendees vowed to “condemn any negative representation” of each others religions.
For Zaid Abu Alhaj that pledge lasted about a year. On April 3, 2009, he gave a sermon on Al-Aqsa TV which included the following prediction: “The time will come, by Allah’s will, when their property will be destroyed and their children will be exterminated, and no Jew or Zionist will be left on the face of the earth.”
Oh, fine, this crazy Palestinian cleric probably also doesn’t understand the religion he’s practiced his entire life either. How about Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al Sudais, who – as imam of Mecca’s Grand Mosque – holds the most prestigious Moslem pulpit in the world?
In a 2003 sermon, Al Sudais prayed that Allah would “terminate” the Jews, who he called “the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers … pigs and monkeys,” also “evil,” “tyrannical,” ‘treacherous,” and part of a “continuum of deceit.”
Cairo’s Al-Azhar University is the Vatican of the Muslim world. Is it reasonable to suppose that Sheik Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, grand imam of Al-Azhar since 1996, knows a thing or two about Islam?
The Shriek tells us the Koran condemns Jews for “their own particular degenerate characteristics” including “corrupting” the words of Allah, “consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics, caused by their deep-rooted lasciviousness.” But, there is hope. “All Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims, the bad ones do not.”
You’d think the Muslim chaplain at Harvard could put a happy face on his faith.
According to the April 14 Harvard Crimson, in an e-mail response to a query from a Muslim student, Taha Abdul-Basser wrote that there was “great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment [for apostates]) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.” Thankfully, the Islamic world isn’t troubled by that darned hegemonic modern human rights discourse.
Harvard’s official chaplain later explained that he was merely expressing a position that “I do not hold … personally” – but which contains “great wisdom” and which “one should not dismiss out of hand.”
What is the West’s response to the Rampaging Religion of Peace?
As Obama-appointed Director of the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano doesn’t have time to watch the jailhouse jihadists. She’s too busy staking out pro-life demonstrations, NRA conventions and American Legion meetings. This is where the real danger to our national security lies, Napolitano informed us in the DHS report “Rightwing Extremism: Radicalization and Recruitment,” issued on April 7.
Napolitano's counterpart in the United Kingdom, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, focuses on fighting evil Islamaphobes – witness her decision to ban the likes of Dutch parliamentarian and “Fitna”-producer Geert Wilders and talk-show host Michael Savage from the shores of Albion.
So PC is she that Smith wants British officials to begin referring to Islamic terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” Not only are terrorists' acts no reflection on Islam, they’re giving the religion of peace a bad name!
Smith knows Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. How? Muslims told her so. “As so many Muslims in the U.K. and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting terror, pain and grief.” If I was a used-car salesman, I’d pray Smith would wander onto my lot.
In the U.K. each bombing and kill-the-infidels sermon becomes an indoctrination moment to assure the credulous that to call attention to slaughter committed in the name of Islam and condoned by the words of Islam (contained in the Koran), slanders Islam. Oh for the days when Labor governments only wanted to destroy Britain’s economy, not the nation itself.
Napolitano prefers the designation “man-made disasters” to terrorism.
Obama is too busy fighting a war on capitalism and trying to close down Guantanamo (and mainstream the jihadists into the U.S. prison population) to pay much attention to an ideology backed by guns and bombs and bent on world domination.
The day is approaching when TV and radio broadcasts will be interrupted every 15 minutes with the message “Islam is – you betcha – a religion of peace.” Otherwise, we’re bound to forget.
This column originally appeared on GrassTopsUSA.com and appears here with its author's permission. ________________
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
The Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy
We’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives terrorism.
By Mark Steyn
Thirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “War on Terror.” Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy — a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.
And he’s a U.S. Army major.
And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity — as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.
When it emerged early on Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: “Please judge Major Malik Nadal [sic] by his actions and not by his name.”
Concerned Tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that — and not just in the sense that the New York Times’s first report on Major Hasan never mentioned the words “Muslim” or “Islam,” or that ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s only observation on his name was that “as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’”
What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.
Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions — flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own — taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.
But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half a million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.
But he didn’t really need to “lock it up” at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any “red flags” were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are “anti-war.” Some of them are objectively on the other side — that’s to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope. Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation” is an adviser to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the U.S. attorneys). In Toronto this week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned en passant that, on flying from the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: “We are not to question sharia.”
That’s the guy manning the airport-security desk.
In the New York Times, Maria Newman touched on Hasan’s faith only obliquely: “He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference.” Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had “Allah” and “another word” pinned up in Arabic on his door. “Akbar” maybe? On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Koran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired. But don’t worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there’s no terrorism angle.
That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his “too Westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two U.S. residents — one American, one Canadian — arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. “One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says.
Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else — even in the Army.
What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.
Why is it that when a so-called liberal opens his mouth about the Ft. Hood massacre by a Muslim jihadist I know that I’m going to feel less safe? The corrupt mayor of Chicago (and presidential patron) blames the shooting of 41 soldiers — at the deployment center for the wars against Muslim jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq — on the alleged fact that “America loves guns.”
As if the traitor Hasan had not clearly and unequivocally renounced his American citizenship and declared war on his own country because it was not a Muslim state. As if there were not in fact NO GUNS ALLOWED on the Fort Hood base, which is why his soldier (!) victims were unarmed and therefore someone didn’t shoot him dead after his first blast. What is wrong with American so-called liberals that they proudly expose themselves in public as idiots when it comes to the holy Muslim war that has been declared against us? That they just don’t get it? And they don’t.
The New York Times website devoted a whole column to summarizing the debate on the “motives” of the traitor, including a sampling from this blog, which provides a good picture of the mush that has replaced the brains of such otherwise respected leftwing pundits as the Atlantic’s James Fallows who wrote a column on the attack titled “The Meaninglessness of the Shootings.” Veteran leftist Michael Tomasky writes in the leftwing Guardian,
“So if indeed Hasan was an America-hating extremist, what are we to make of it?”
And concludes nothing. “America-hating extremist” would be an accurate description of some of Tomasky’s friends — perhaps former friends — at the Village Voice where he once worked. But it is hardly an adequate description of Hasan from what we already know. He thought of himself as a soldier in a global army that has declared war on Americans and Jews in the first place, but also on all infidels in the name of Islam. That puts a somewhat different color on it, Michael. This extremist said to an audience of doctors in university lecture (a military university no less) that those who do not believe in Islam should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.
And liberals are too polite (too “politically correct”?) to notice. Actually it’s not polite that they are (they are actually quite rude) but in denial. And why is that? It is the same denial that progressives maintained through the 70 years of the Communist nightmare, denial that mass slaughters were being conducted by their Soviet comrades, that Russia and China were vast prison camps, and that the same fate awaited us in the West if we didn’t wage a cold war against their expansionist designs. It does sound familiar doesn’t it?
The only mystery is why progressives (so-called) like Tomasky and Fallows (and President Obama) should bend over backwards to protect medieval psychos — and I am speaking here of the tens of millions — of Muslims who idolize Osama Bin Laden, Hamas, and Hezbollah and embrace their genocidal agendas. There is only one possible answer to this question and that is that, to one degree or another, leftists regard America as the Great Satan and Israel as the Little Satan or believe at the very least that the policies of these two countries are the real cause of the violence against them.
____________________
Norman Thomas (November 20, 1884 – December 19, 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911. As a candidate for President of the U. S., Norman Thomas said, in a 1944 epoch speech:
“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism', they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.”
He went on to say:
“I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”
Sometimes an Extremist Really Is an Extremist
Just as we should not jump to conclusions, we shouldn’t jump away from them.
By Jonah Goldberg
Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan demonstrated many things when he allegedly committed treason in the war on terror. For starters, he showed — gratuitously, alas — that evil is still thriving.
He demonstrated that being a trained psychiatrist provides no immunity to ancient hatreds and religious fanaticism, nor does psychiatric training provide much acuity in spotting such things in others. For example, the London Telegraph reports that, in what was supposed to be a medical lecture, Hasan instead gave an hour-long briefing on the Koran, explaining to colleagues at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that nonbelievers should be beheaded, have boiling oil poured down their throats, and be set on fire.
His fellow psychiatrists completely missed this “red flag” — a suddenly popular euphemism for incandescently obvious evidence this man had no place in the U.S. Army.
He proved how lacking our domestic security system is. According to ABC News, intelligence agencies were aware for months that Hasan had tried to contact al-Qaeda. His colleagues reportedly knew he sympathized with suicide bombings and attacks on U.S. troops abroad, and one colleague said Hasan was pleased by an attack on an Army recruiting office and suggested more of the same might be desirable. That’s treason, even if you’re a Muslim.
Which raises the most troubling revelation: For many people, the idea that he is a Muslim fanatic, motivated by other Muslim fanatics, was — at least initially — too terrible to contemplate. How else to explain the reflexive insistence after the attack that the real culprit was post-traumatic stress disorder? The fact that PTSD is usually diagnosed in people who’ve been through trauma (hence the “post”), and that Hasan had never seen combat, didn’t seem to matter much.
Apparently the “P” in PTSD can now stand for “pre.”
A few months ago, an anti-Semitic old nut named James von Brunn allegedly took a gun to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to get payback against “the Jews” and killed a black security guard in the process.
In response to this horrific crime, the leading lights of American liberalism knew who was to blame: Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the GOP. One writer for the Huffington Post put it succinctly: “Thank you very much Karl Rove and your minions.”
The fact that Von Brunn was a 9/11 “truther” who railed against capitalism, neocons, and the Bush administration didn’t matter. Nor did the glaring lack of evidence that Rove et al. ever showed antipathy for the museum. It was simply obvious [to liberals] that Von Brunn was the offspring of the “right-wing extremism (that) is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment,” wrote columnist Paul Krugman.
If only Hasan were a fan of Glenn Beck!
Hasan's Personal Jihad
By Clare M. Lopez
A week after a Muslim jihadi gunned down more than 40 fellow citizens at Ft. Hood, Texas, America’s national security leadership still won’t admit that the attack had anything to do with Islam. By failing to acknowledge that connection, those with a constitutional duty to defend this nation “against all enemies foreign and domestic” consistently substitute a policy of political correctness at the expense of military readiness. The fact is that the 5 November 2009 attack that took the lives of thirteen American patriots was not just an act of terrorism: it was an act of war. When a gunman from the ranks of Islamic Jihad mounts an armed assault against a military target in complete consistency with the enemy doctrine of war, it is time to recognize that the U.S. actually is at war -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but with all those who follow the call of Jihad. These are the Jihad Wars and the stakes are clear: shall Americans live in security under the Constitution or shall the enemy within and without compel us to submit to Shari’a (Islamic law)?
The few courageous commentators, like Colonel Ralph Peters, Bill O’Reilly, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), who dare to notice that U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was born and raised a Muslim, yelled “Allahu Akbar (“God is the greatest”) while shooting people in the back, and sought Islamic fatwas from American-born Yemeni al-Qa’eda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (who’d been his imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia), have been ignored. Hasan told colleagues, "I'm a Muslim first and an American second." He proselytized his psychiatric patients, many with PTSD, trying to convert them to Islam -- and they complained about it. He gave a Power Point presentation while at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences entitled ‘Why the War on Terror is a War on Islam" in which a classmate says he “justified suicide bombing" and spewed "anti-American propaganda.”
The Army knew about all of this. Further, the 9/11 Commission, Congress, and the FBI had all focused on al-Awlaki’s links to al-Qa’eda eight year ago. DIA issued an internal report in 2003 warning that Muslim soldiers in the U.S. military pose a possible security threat after Sgt. Hasan Akbar, a Muslim convert, killed two and wounded 15 others at a military camp outside Baghdad.
But in the days since the Ft. Hood massacre, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George Casey has appeared more worried about the possibility that diversity in the military could become “a casualty” than he has about his constitutional duty to ensure force protection within the ranks of this country’s military, unit cohesion, and readiness to defeat this nation’s enemies. The reality that Maj. Hasan and Sgt. Akbar should alert us to is that some of those enemies are already inside the gates. They do not wear an enemy uniform or fight within the bounds of the Geneva Convention code. They pose as loyal Americans but render their true allegiance to Islam and Shari’a.
We know from the Muslim Brotherhood’s own internal documents that the strategy of Islamic Jihad includes “destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands….” In other words, the strategy of our sworn enemies is designed to get us to wreck our own country with our own hands, from within our own society. Gen. Casey and all the rest of our national security leadership are responsible for knowing this, for knowing that our military has been penetrated by enemy soldiers such as Hasan, and for establishing a successful defense plan that identifies and excises them out of the Army before they do what Akbar and Hasan have done.
This is not to say that either Akbar or Hasan is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood; but, from their words and deeds, we do know that they hold the same ideological beliefs as the Brotherhood, al-Qa’eda, and all who seek the dual objectives of a new Caliphate and worldwide enforcement of Shari’a. Hasan may or may not be found to have direct links to recognized Islamic terror organizations. This needs to be investigated, but should not distract us from the increasing prevalence of the individual jihadi. Under Islamic law, in the absence of a Caliph, it is the duty of every Muslim to wage individual jihad (or fard ayn) against the enemy if any part of Muslim lands is occupied by non-Muslim soldiers. That jihad may be by the sword, the pen, or the purse -- and in fact, is all of those. The ultimate objective is still the same: subjugation of the entire world to a supremacist Islamic ideology.
When President Obama expressed the sentiment at the Ft. Hood commemorative ceremony that “no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor," he showed that he either does not consider Islam a genuine faith (hardly likely) -- or, he has no idea what is contained in the Qur’an, ahadith, and Sunna. But Hasan certainly does know that the Qur’an commands him and all Muslims: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which has been forbidden by Allah and his apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, even if they be of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Q 9:29) Shouldn’t the commander in chief of the U.S. military know it too?
Given what the Army chain of command and other federal investigators surely do know and have known about Hasan, his expressed beliefs, and declared loyalties, there is no reason the murderous assault at Ft. Hood should have occurred. When the official blinders and earplugs are removed, jihadis like Hasan self-identify to any with the will to understand. His motives were expressed loudly and clearly many years ago, but just as declarations of war by al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood, have been willfully ignored.
Unless an investigation such as called for by Lieberman, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, can jolt our national security leadership out of its suicidal reluctance to name the enemy and pursue him wherever he may be found, the brave members of the U.S. military will remain in mortal peril, not only on foreign battlefields, but right here at home on American soil. And if the U.S. Army cannot even defend its own -- against its own -- then how can it defend the rest of us?
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Ms. Lopez is the Vice President of the Intelligence Summit and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.
Ft. Hood Suspect Had 'Unexplained Connections' Wednesday, November 11, 2009 The Army psychiatrist suspected of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood had "more unexplained connections to people being tracked by the FBI" than just a radical Muslim imam, investigators have found, according to a report.
The names of the individuals Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was in contact with was not revealed by the official, but sources in Congress told ABC News their names and locations will likely emerge soon.
The mystery over whether the military knew Hasan was communicating with radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki lapsed into finger-pointing ahead of congressional investigations looking into the Army psychiatrist's contacts with extremists.
Even as President Barack Obama remembered those killed at the Texas Army post and condemned what he described as "the twisted logic that led to this tragedy," federal agencies reacted to conflicting claims about whether a Defense Department terrorism investigator looked into Hasan's contacts months ago with Awlaki. Awlaki, an imam who was released from a Yemeni jail last year, has used his personal Web site to encourage Muslims across the world to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. A military official Tuesday denied knowing Hasan had such contacts.
Two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case on the record, said the Washington-based joint terrorism task force overseen by the FBI was notified of communications between Hasan and the imam overseas, and the information was turned over to a Defense Criminal Investigative Service employee assigned to the task force. The communications were gathered by investigators beginning in December 2008 and continuing into early this year.
That defense investigator wrote up an assessment of Hasan after reviewing the communications and the Army major's personnel file, according to these officials. The assessment concluded Hasan did not merit further investigation — in large part because his communications with the imam were centered on a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the investigator determined that Hasan was in fact working on such a paper, the officials said.
The disclosure came as questions swirled about whether opportunities were missed to head off the massacre in which 13 died and 29 were wounded last Thursday — a familiar, early stage in the investigation of headline-grabbing crimes when public officials involved in a case often speak anonymously as they try to shift any blame to rivals in other agencies.
The Senate already has launched its own inquiry into the Hasan case. Sens. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, plan to hold a hearing on the shootings next week.
The disclosure Tuesday of the defense investigator's role indicated the U.S. military was aware of worrisome behavior by the massacre suspect long before the attack. Following the disclosure, a senior defense official, also demanding anonymity, directly contradicted that notion.
The senior defense official said neither the Army nor any other part of the Defense Department knew of Hasan's contacts with any Muslim extremists. But the defense official carefully conceded this view was based upon what the Pentagon knows now.
Hours later, the same senior defense official reiterated that the Defense Department was not notified before the Fort Hood massacre of investigations into Hasan, despite the participation of two Defense Department investigators on two joint task forces run by the FBI that looked at Hasan. This defense official asserted that the task force ground rules barred any members from telling their home agency about task force findings without approval of the other investigators and wasn't aware of whether there was ever any discussion of doing that.
FBI officials were not immediately available to comment late Tuesday on what ground rules prevailed in the joint task forces or whether they were applied in this situation or not. One government official, however, pointed out that to complete the assessment the Defense Criminal Investigative Service representative had to access Hasan's Defense Department personnel file and determine what research he was conducting at the time.
The FBI has opened its own internal review of how it handled the early information about Hasan. Military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies also are defending themselves against tough questions about what each of them knew about Hasan before he allegedly opened fire in a crowded room at the huge Army post.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Deadly denial
By Ralph Peters
As President Obama belatedly appears at Fort Hood today, will he dare to speak the word "terror?"
He won't use the word "Islamist." If he mentions Islam at all, it'll be to sing its praises yet again.
We've already learned that Islamist terrorist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan attended the Northern Virginia mosque of Imam Anwar al-Aulaqi, a fiery al Qaeda supporter who later fled the United States. We know that Hasan's peers, subordinates and patients repeatedly raised red flags that his superiors suppressed. We know he was a player on Islamist-extremist Web sites. The FBI's uncovering one extremist link after another.
But to call this an act of terrorism, the White House would need an autographed photo of Osama bin Laden helping Hasan buy weapons in downtown Killeen, Texas. Even that might not suffice.
Islamist terrorists don't all have al Qaeda union cards in their wallets. Terrorism's increasingly the domain of entrepreneurs and independent contractors. Under Muslim jurisprudence, jihad's an individual responsibility. Hasan was a self-appointed jihadi.
Yet we're told he was just having a bad day.
Our politically correct Army plays along. Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey won't utter the word "terrorism." The Forces Command Public Affairs Office guidance for officers never mentions "Islam" or "terror," leaving you unsure whether there was a traffic accident down at Fort Hood, or maybe an outbreak of swine flu.
Meanwhile, the media try to turn Hasan into a victim. A sickening (and amateurish) Washington Post article portrayed him as a poor, impoverished minority living in a $320-a-month rathole apartment and driving a down-market car -- as if the squalor made him a terrorist.
Squalor he chose to live in, by the way: As a major drawing added professional pay for his medical credentials, plus his benefits, Hasan made a six-figure income. And he was single, without college loans or medical bills. Has anybody asked where the money went? I'll bet a chunk of it disappeared in cash donations to hard-core Islamist causes. Will a single journalist track the missing bucks?
It gets worse: On Sunday evening, a ranking officer in Hasan's medical chain of command raced to cover her butt. Asked why the killer was promoted to major after receiving career-killer performance reviews at Walter Reed, the officer claimed that Hasan faced the same promotion board requirements as everyone else.
Liar, liar, uniform on fire: A dirty big secret in our Army has been that officers' promotion boards have quotas for minorities. We don't call them quotas, of course. But if a board doesn't hit the floor numbers, its results are held up until the list has been corrected. It's almost impossible for the Army's politically correct promotion system to pass over a Muslim physician.
Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the few lawmakers willing to whisper the word "terrorism," needs to call the officers who sat on Hasan's promotion board before the Senate, put them under oath, then ask if Hasan made major because of minority-quota requirements.
This corrupt (and now deadly) affirmative-action system does a severe disservice to the bulk of minority officers, who make the grade on quality and professionalism. It leaves other officers wondering if the new guy who just showed up in the unit is a "real" officer or an affirmative-action baby.
Ditto for our government's unwillingness to take on Muslim extremists on US soil. Blathering about freedom of religion, we foster hate speech. By protecting the fanatics, we betray the peaceful majority of our Muslim citizens, leaving them afraid to speak out, since the feds shield the fanatics in charge of their mosques and communities.
Let's be clear: Maj. Hasan's terrorism should not result in a witch hunt against Muslim service members. But soldiers who happen to be Muslims must be subject to the same level of scrutiny and discipline as those of other faiths.
Just as we'd expect the Army to get rid of a disruptive white supremacist, we need to cashier anyone who espouses violent Islamist extremism -- as Maj. Hasan did, again and again.
We won't. Because Islamist terrorism doesn't exist. Just ignore the dead and ask our president.
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Copyright 2009 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
Reuters – Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army doctor identified by authorities as the suspect in the shooting.
Understanding Fort Hood: Nothing ‘Sudden’ About ‘Sudden Jihad Syndrome’
By Rusty Shackleford
“Shock” and “horror” are the words being used to describe the massacre at Fort Hood by Major Nidal Malik Hasan. But while the events were “horrible,” they should have come as a “shock” to no one — at least if by “shock” they mean “surprised that Hasan would turn so violent.”
Hasan was a devout Muslim who, prior to his transfer to the Texas base, attended a conservative mosque on a daily basis and was known by associates to occasionally rant about U.S. involvement in the War on Terror. Press accounts also claim that Hasan had at one time been the subject of an FBI investigation because of an internet posting bearing his name which justified suicide bombings.
No one should be shocked that Hasan would turn to murder and terror. The only thing shocking about Hasan’s actions is the amount of carnage. Who would have guessed that a man armed only with handguns could kill and injure so many?
Radical Islamists — or those who believe that Islam offers a total legal and political system rather than just a moral guide for individual lives — have been engaged in a holy war against the United States for decades. Luckily, most plots involving groups of would-be terrorists have been detected early and disrupted. Like all criminal conspiracies, the more people involved, the more likely detection becomes.
Since 9/11, only individuals have successfully carried out acts of violence in the name of political Islam against domestic targets. Daniel Pipes has used the term “sudden jihad syndrome” to describe, somewhat facetiously, individual Muslims who suddenly turn violent and, in the name of Islam, go on a killing spree.
I say “somewhat facetiously” because it is the mainstream press that usually creates a narrative in which no one could have seen this coming, and therefore these individual acts of jihad seem”sudden.” But scratch the surface of these reports and one finds a pattern in which these acts of jihad are not so sudden. Sure, there may have been an event which set off the violence — in Hasan’s case, he was set for deployment to Afghanistan — but underlying this trigger is a deeper commitment to an ideology, to a total political program and a worldview which sees America as an aggressor and Muslims around the world as victims.
For instance, reports in the press claim that Hasan had been under investigation for posting about suicide bombings on the internet. A person with a name matching Hasan’s wrote the following in refutation to moderate Muslims who condemned suicide bombing:
"Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam."
And if this is what Hasan is writing under his own given name, one is left to wonder just how extreme any other thoughts belonging to him but written under a nickname — the norm on the internet — would be.
Ironically, one person being quoted repeatedly in media reports as “shocked” at Hasan’s behavior is Faisal Khan, the former imam at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Springs, Maryland, where, the imam says, Hasan attended mosque on a daily basis. I say ironic because while there is no indication that Khan condones violence as a means to an end, there is evidence that Khan is an Islamist who shares the same political goals as the most notorious of terror organizations.
Khan is on the board of directors for the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The ISNA is an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood — the movement which spawned al-Qaeda — and was at one time supportive of Palestinian terrorist organizations. The ISNA claims that they no longer have any ties to these groups, but at best, the kind of Islam promoted by many of its members is that of Saudi-style Wahhabism or so-called “moderate” Salafism. In other words, the promotion of political Islam and of the implementation of Islamic law remains a goal for many in the ISNA.
On the ISNA’s action alert website posted right below two condemnations of Hasan, the group asks for provisions of the Patriot Act to be amended to make it more difficult to prosecute those sending “humanitarian aid” to terrorist groups. This is no surprise given that the ISNA was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case — a case in which ISNA leaders were key in raising “humanitarian aid” from Muslims and then diverting that aid to the terrorists of Hamas.
Given the incompatibility of the goals of a religious state and that of American liberalism, one has to wonder just what the Hasan’s former imam means when he states that Hasan never gave any indication that he was an extremist.
Of course, many so-called “moderate” Salafis and Wahhabis now toe the official line of their Saudi Arabian financiers and decry terrorism in their pursuit of political Islam. (But of course they define acts of intentional violence against civilians in Israel as “not terror.”) Hasan’s noted Muslim piety and association with what most Americans would consider a radical philosophy might not be sufficient to raise alarms — all other things being equal.
However, several former colleagues now report that Hasan would occasionally voice odd and, in hindsight, alarming opinions. For instance, on Friday morning, NPR reported that at an academic conference Hasan deviated from his topic and:
"instead of giving an academic paper he gave a lecture on the Koran… [I]t seemed to be his own beliefs. … He talked about if you are a non-believer the Koran says you should have your head cut off."
Another colleague recalled that Hasan regularly called the War on Terror a “war against Islam.”
And retired Col. Terry Lee told Fox News that Hasan had once said that “maybe Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor.” Other statements made by Hasan made it clear to Lee that by “aggressors” Hasan meant the U.S. military and not the radical Islamists we were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While Major Malik Hasan may have displayed no overt disposition towards violence, he certainly did display a disposition towards a radical political philosophy at odds with core American values, a worldview shared by paranoid Muslims around the world, and support for terrorist tactics deemed outside the rules of civilized warfare. Add to all of this the reports that Hasan yelled “Allahu Akbar” during the rampage and it seems fairly clear that at least one underlying motivation was that of jihad.
Those desperately looking for some other explanation for Hasan’s behavior should be reminded that crazy and motivated-by-jihad ideology are not mutually exclusive categories.
Any number of adjectives can be used to accurately describe Thursday’s events (i.e., “horrifying,” “despicable,” “disgusting”), but “shocked” is not one of them. Given the number of terrorist plots uncovered just in the last few months and the number of attacks on soft targets by those with “sudden jihad syndrome” since 9/11, it was only a matter of time before someone was successful in wreaking the kind of casualties that all these jihadists sought. And, even more importantly, until we begin to recognize the underlying ideology of political Islam as one motivating factor for terrorism, then another attack like that which occurred on Fort Hood is virtually guaranteed.
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Dr. Shackleford is an educator and runs the Jawa Report.
IT'S A HOLY WAR, STUPID! CLICK HERE
If the Terrorists Misinterpret Islam
You'd be hard-pressed to find a left-leaning group of voters who know much about the contents of the Koran.
Liberalism withholds judgment until finding an answer bulletproofed by logic and reason, and this practice is nothing less than the bedrock of the first world.
I am of course referring to classical liberalism, now tragically mistitled conservatism. The half-philosophy known as the Left co-opted that most precious word, liberty, then stopped reading at “withholds judgment.” And this anti-intellectual betrayal of humanity’s best idea has once again resulted in an unfathomably dangerous historical anomaly: an existential threat is flourishing, liberty and life are at stake, yet the ones we now call liberals refuse to pass judgment on the illiberal. They have access to enough logic and reason for a bombproof conclusion, yet they refuse to pass judgment.
Forbes’ 2009 survey of the world’s most dangerous countries is out, and the list is comprised almost entirely of Islamic-dominated lands. A second list, of the world’s active conflicts, is essentially a checklist of current Islamic aggression (and describes an entirely related point — the few non-Islamic conflicts have communist/socialist or other totalitarian participants). Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Pakistan, West Bank/Gaza Strip, Sri Lanka, Yemen, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Algeria, Nigeria, Georgia — that’s Forbes‘ top 15.
The world’s current conflicts: an Islamic revolt in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq; an Islamic butchery in Sudan; an Islamic civil war in Somalia; an Islamist civil war in Sri Lanka; an Islamic invasion into Chad (perpetrated by the Sudanese butchers); an Islamic insurgency in Thailand; an Islamist insurgency across all of Northeast Africa (the Maghreb); an Islamic separatist movement in Kashmir; an Islamist insurgency in the Philippines; and a sustained Islamic belligerency against Israel involving Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
Besides those, the Earth is pained with a few conflicts involving Islamic, Communist, and other totalitarian movements, most of which are among the long-simmering variety and primarily feature constant human rights abuses rather than open war.
And that’s it. That’s all of the fighting.
Human rights? Women’s rights? Islamic states — including the supposed moderates such as Jordan — take up virtually the entire list of worst offenders, along with a few other Communist/totalitarian regimes.
Rationalism, fairness, the death of tribalist fears, the emergence from tyranny and the plumb line from there to intellectual accomplishment — it all seeds from the invention and military defense of the liberal. Presented with this evidence, the classical liberal is required to withhold judgment until finding an answer bulletproofed by logic and reason. This behavior is undeniably what the classical liberals among us have done — admirably — since 9/11.
First, we withheld judgment on the religion of the attackers. President Bush stood on rubble and promised “the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” But he also stated, again and again, that we are not at war with Islam, simply with a perverted form of the great religion. It was a subjective, anti-intellectual conclusion. It was not based on reason, and the correct response regarding liberalism’s stance toward Islam should have been: “We have not reached an answer yet.”
The left took a similar stance, if only initially — they withheld judgment on the religion of the attackers but then chose to blame Western policy towards Islamic lands for motivating the terrorists. Subjective is not a descriptive enough word for this. Essentially, that was the end of the Left’s investigation — which, stunningly, is exactly what Leftism required.
Technically, the Left preaches that the most enlightened human behavior is to withhold judgment in favor of first concluding a thorough self-examination. But that self-examination process — the perfecting of America and the West prior to judging another culture — can never conclude. There will always be a poor decision, a misguided decision, or a failed policy enacted by democratically elected officials. A Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Our country is run by a marketplace of ideas. Some will win support and be proven right and some will win support and be proven wrong. Representatives will be voted in and out, the future will always remain unknown, and our leaders will continually take risks with our direction. So withholding judgment in favor of a thorough self-examination becomes a fraud, a half-measure. It becomes a permanently withheld judgment, which is no approach at all. Just a worthless, subjective, illogical philosophy of government, a perennial invocation of “this sentence is false,” to the point that a definable Leftist international policy does not, in fact, exist.
The non-Left liberals? Those with any connection to the beliefs of the classical liberal have spent the past decade asking the questions they are required to ask:
Do societies ever turn to terroristic, totalitarian behavior solely because of outside oppression, or do the movements arise from within?
Is Islam as it is practiced by terrorists and aggressive Islamic countries a new phenomenon? Or does it predate contact with the West?
Is it possible for one religion/culture to be more worthwhile to humanity as a whole than another?
Is it racist to think Islam is inherently violent?
These questions researched, the next step was to thoroughly examine the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sira, and the accepted interpretations of such by Islamic scholars and leaders.
Quite simply, what was Mohammad’s life like? How does it compare, objectively, to other prominent religious figures? How did subsequent Islamic leaders interpret Mohammad’s teachings, and — most importantly — how did they act in response? If Islam as interpreted by the terrorists is not true Islam, what is the strain of moderate Islam called? Who are its leaders and its followers? What is their literature? Where is it practiced?
Almost eight years following 9/11, eight years to address these questions, and I am hard-pressed to find any sort of sizable leftist group of voters who know a bloody thing about the contents of the Koran.
The classical liberals? We’ve done what was required of us in the name of defending liberty. Feel free to challenge our bulletproofed conclusion, but we promise your failure:
If the terrorists misinterpret Islam, then so does Mohammad.
The evidence concerning Islam is as much logic and reason as any government can ever hope to get regarding an international crisis. As an Islamic leader chases the bomb, we do not intend to wait for the illiberal, unreasoned, irrational half-thinkers of the left to simply ask a proper question.
Because they never will. ______________
David Steinberg is a New York-based freelance writer and photographer. During election season, he blogged as the Posthumous Luger. He also owns and runs the City CrossFit, a fitness training company specializing in older populations and beginners.
