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A bloodied ISIS staggers on

March 26, 2017

A bloodied ISIS staggers on, Israel Hayom, Prof. Eyal Zisser, March 26, 2017

(According to the first sentence in the article, “Europe is learning the hard way what Israel learned decades ago.” If so, Europe must be an extremely slow learner. More likely, it resembles a terminally ill lung cancer victim who continues to smoke cigarettes and to inhale the smoke in hopes that it will cure him. Please see also, Islam, Not Christianity, is Saturating Europe. — DM)

Europe is learning the hard way what Israel learned decades ago. The war on terror is an ongoing struggle with ups and downs, and always painful failures. This fight requires patience and determination. There is no magic knockout punch, not by a spectacular military operation in the Syrian hinterlands or the assassination of some terrorist cell or another in a Paris or London suburb. A fight such as this can go on for years, as the reality prevalent in Europe is not about to change.

An equally important lesson, which Europe is also about to learn, is that terror constantly changes shape. In the past, al-Qaida spearheaded the waves of terrorist attacks in Europe. Now Islamic State has taken the reigns, and we can assume that if it fades and disappears, another Islamist group will take its place. The name and the headlines will change, to be sure, but the ideology will remain the same; the targets will continue to be innocent civilians across Europe, and the attackers will continue to be the same Muslim youths so enraptured by religious madness. It will be no different than our experience in Israel.

The terrorist attack perpetrated by Islamic State in London came on the heels of stinging defeats in its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. The organization’s dream of establishing an Islamic caliphate is on the verge of falling apart with the approaching fall of its government centers in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria, which serves as its capital. The organization has already lost nearly half the territory it once held, and the signals being sent by the new administration in Washington point to U.S. President Donald Trump’s willingness and even determination to send American troops into the fray to fight the organization in a decisive manner.

Islamic State’s defeat will apparently induce a monumental battle between the winners — Iran and its allies — on one side, and Turkey and the moderate Arab states on the other. Iran, to be certain, will try filling the void left by Islamic State by establishing a land corridor from Tehran to Beirut. Its adversaries, meanwhile, will try preventing the Islamic republic from achieving its goals. All this, while Russia and the U.S. will watch from the sidelines and perhaps even fan the flames in order to advance their own interests in the region.

What is important to understand, however, is that the defeat of Islamic State and the fall of the country it created in the Middle East will not be the end of the story, not for the organization itself and certainly not for the ideology it espouses. We must keep in mind that Islamic State is first and foremost an extremist ideology, which enjoys support from local populations in the Middle East and from Muslim communities across the globe.

It is also an organization that rallies support from disenfranchised populations in the region — which feel persecuted by their centralized governments — whether these are Sunnis in Iraq or eastern Syria, or Bedouin tribes in the Sinai Peninsula. Thus, even if the state it created in eastern Syria and northern Iraq crumbles, we can assume Islamic State will withdraw deep into the desert from which it came and shift to operating as a ruthless underground organization that still enjoys support from local populations. Case in point, in Sinai the group continues to operate successfully despite being pummeled by Egypt.

Islamic State also has other areas within which it can operate, such as Libya or Yemen, where it has established footholds under the cover of the civil wars persisting there unabated. There has been a great deal of speculation recently over the possibility that the group could transfer its government centers to these places. Finally, sentiment for the organization and its ideas will continue to inspire and compel Muslim youths from across the globe to carry out terrorist attacks. Other radical Islamist organizations, which are more than willing to pick up where Islamic State ends, are also vying for the hearts and minds of these youths.

The waves of terror, therefore, will continue crashing into Europe, despite all the efforts to stop them and despite the military successes against Islamic State’s leaders and commanders in Syria and Iraq. Yet the fight must remain unrelenting, as this is the nature of the war against terror. It is the only way to ensure normal life in Europe. As the Israeli experience teaches, this should be the goal, even with the knowledge that terror has not been completely defeated.

Categories: Europe and Islamic terror, European security, European terror threat, European weakness, Iraq war, Islamic refugees, Islamic State in Europe, Islamisation of Europe, Islamist organizations, Islamist terror attacks, Syrian war
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Obama Did Wiretap Trump: It’s Like Putting Together a Russian Nesting Doll

March 26, 2017

Obama Did Wiretap Trump: It’s Like Putting Together a Russian Nesting Doll, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, March 26, 2017

(Please see also, We Need an Independent Investigation of the Trump Leaks Mystery Now. — DM)

No matter how many dolls are hidden in the nest — Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch — it is undeniable that they all fit under the big one — Obama. It was he who authorized the surveillance and multiagency distribution of intelligence — in Bob Woodward’s reading, “highly classified gossip” — about political opponent Trump and his team — invading their privacy in violation of the law. If you were inclined to want Americans to lose faith in their intelligence community and media you couldn’t have done a better job than they did themselves. The Russians didn’t have to do a thing.

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Matryoshkas are Russian nesting dolls. Inside each doll are several others, smaller but identically shaped characters, until you get to the smallest one inside. Studying what we have learned of the timeline — and we still don’t have the entire story — we see Wikileaks, the smallest, at the core, and Obama as the largest piece in what is the most historically outrageous misuse of the people and institutions of government for partisan advantage.

Wikileaks

During the campaign, Wikileaks posted a number of email messages from the DNC — largely Podesta, but Hillary as well. The communications (not well reported, but, in any event, more embarrassing tittle tattle) had been on unsecured accounts, poorly guarded and easily accessed because of carelessness on the part of the Hillary team. Assange, who published them, denied the source of this information was Russian hackers. This now has been confirmed by the heads of our intelligence community, but the Clinton camp claim that the Russians did it set the stage for the notion that her opponent was the favored candidate of the Russians.

Apart from the fact that our intelligence services have denied the claim, there are a number of reasons to believe that the Russians would have preferred Hillary to Trump. For one thing, Russia is in terrible financial shape and relies on its sales of oil and gas to Europe to stay afloat. Is it sensible to believe that the Russians would prefer Trump, who made clear he wanted to vastly increase U.S. oil and gas production, over Hillary, who gave every indication of keeping it down and the worldwide price of oil and gas higher? (I can’t imagine — for the same reason — that Iran and OPEC wouldn’t prefer her as well.) Why you do suppose the Russians have been funding “green” groups in Europe — and possibly here — who oppose fracking?

Secondly, for eight years Russian businesses and businessmen closely aligned with Putin pumped millions into the Clinton Foundation slush fund, paid her husband a half-million dollars for a single speech, and got in return a substantial portion of our uranium assets when, as Secretary of State, Hillary okayed their purchase. Finally, John Podesta, chair of Hillary’s presidential campaign wasclosely aligned with Russian interests. His brother was hired by the Russians to lobby for the uranium sale. He was on the board of a company closely aligned with Putin.

As the crack investigative reporter Richard Pollock notes:

John Podesta, national chairman of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, may have opened himself up to a Russian “influence campaign” designed to temper his views of the Kremlin, The Daily Caller News Foundation (TheDCNF) Investigative Group has learned.

Influence campaigns are conducted by many governments — including the United States — with the aim of influencing decision makers in other countries to realign their geopolitical worldviews more closely to the influencing country.

Some national security experts interviewed by The DCNF wonder if Podesta may still be a target of Russian influence. They trace the campaign back to his company board membership, in which one-third of the board were top Russian businessmen with direct ties to the Kremlin.

The last time Podesta talked negatively about Russia was Dec. 18, 2016, when he charged in an NBC “Meet the Press” interview the 2016 election was “distorted by the Russian intervention.”

The former Clinton national campaign chairman has since been silent, even as other former top Clinton aides, such as Robby Mook, Brian Fallon and Jim Margolis have repeatedly aimed high-decibel rhetoric at President Donald Trump about Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential race.

[snip]

Podesta’s silence is particularly striking, according to retired Air Force Col. James Waurishuk.

“We haven’t heard very much from Podesta lately, particularly on the subject of Russia’s interference in the elections,” Waurishuk told the DCNF. He served on the National Security Council and worked on “information operations” for military intelligence.

The suggestion is that he’s staying out of it because the Russians want this chatter about their influence silenced.

In any event, Russia has now been cleared of the claim, yet in the recesses of the dimmer voters’ minds the charge remains a cogent explanation of why their candidate lost the election.

The National Security Agency and the FISA

The NSA engages in global monitoring for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It does by passive means (signals Intelligence) and active means like physically bugging systems and through subversive software. It assists and coordinates SIGINT elements at other government organization like the DIA.

Domestic communications can be intercepted under two circumstances: in the first instance to protect us against sabotage or international terrorism or sabotage. In such a case, when authorized by the president through the attorney general, it can be done without a court order provided that it is for only one year and only to acquire foreign intelligence information and there is real likelihood that a U.S. person is a party to the communication. Even then it must be done in such a way to minimize the impact on the U.S. person. The attorney general must report such surveillance under seal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and report their compliance to both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

Surveillance can also be done on a court order from FISA when the attorney general persuades the court that there is probable cause (i.e. a reasonable suspicion) that the target is a “foreign power” or an “agent of a foreign power” and the minimization requirements for information pertaining to U.S. persons will be followed. Such orders may be approved for 90 days,120 days, or a year.

FISA court authorization is almost always granted. Reliable reports indicate that the Obama administration sought authorization in July of last year when Trump appeared a likely opponent (the application is still secret) and it was denied. These reports also state that a pared-down application was sought in October and granted by the court. We have no idea on what basis the Department of Justice sought these warrants nor who the purported target was.

From the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, we learned this week that Trump team’s conversations were caught in the surveillance, that for over nine months this was never reported to his committee. Moreover, it is public knowledge that three days before the inauguration in January, for no legitimate purpose, President Obama authorized wide distribution of the surveillance reports to 16 other agencies, the names of U.S. persons involved in the conversations were not redacted, the contents were of no intelligence value and they were widely leaked — a perfectly predictable consequence of spreading the raw data so widely in contrast to normal redaction and dissemination patterns. Suspicious minds like mine think may well be to further hamper the incoming administration by leaks designed to embarrass members of his team. Nunes also reported the post-election spying “had nothing to do with Russia.”  By January 20, for example, the New York Times reported that Trump had been wiretapped.

We learned this week from Nunes’ work that the investigation is continuing.

On his own Mike Rogers, head of NSA, met privately with Trump shortly after the inauguration. We have no details of their discussion, but my guess is he told him what had happened and how. At the moment, Rogers appears to be the sole white hat in our intelligence network. But he may not be the only one, which, I think, would mean a number of former Obama officials have to be looking for lawyers.

Tom Lipscomb, a former reporter and online friend, thinks the white hats in the intelligence community fed the truth about the wiretapping directly to Trump so he could weed out from their ranks the Obama confederates. Like him, I think the Trump tweet that he was wiretapped was smart. He’s giving “fair warning to what is coming,” and the claims that Trump was engaged in some “crazy conspiracy” are evaporating just as had the earlier nonsense that he and the Russians were conspiring via Wikileaks.

Christopher Steele and John McCain

Christopher Steele is a former British intelligence agent of dubious character and credibility. He had been hired early by the Clinton camp to dig up dirt on Trump. When Hillary ended that agreement, unnamed Republicans engaged him to continue, and when they stopped paying him, the FBI — for as yet unexplained reasons — took him up. His “dossier” is preposterous, based on accounts to his aides from unnamed and thus unverifiable sources. In the rare instance when they provide recognizable details, they have been proven false. As incredible as the “dossier” was, it was used to tar Trump with salacious nonsense and to further encourage the ridiculous notion that he and his team were Russian agents.

There are three different versions of how John McCain, a bitter #NeverTrumper always seeking media cuddles and enamored by globalization, came to get the dossier — he says, in December.  In one version, he got it from a member of the McCain Institute, in other published accounts he dispatched someone abroad to get it, and in a third he first heard of it from a former British ambassador while at a meeting in Halifax. That he’s offered various tales in itself suggests some dissembling on his part. Nevertheless, he concedes he widely distributed the scurrilous dossier to the media and members of Congress. He was either a useful dupe of those determined to bring down Trump or a willing partner of theirs. Right now, he’s flailing about abroad, attacking the president and moaning that Trump hasn’t yet met with him.

The Media

John Nolte, writing for the Daily Caller, highlights how it is apparent that the media knew of the spying operation and later covered it up:

“Of course the media knew what the Obama administration had done. First off, when they thought the news would hurt Trump, the national media publicly reported on the fact that the Obama administration had spied on Team Trump. It was only after that knowledge became a liability for Precious Barry that the media pretended otherwise. In other words, they LIED.”

Jim Geraghty at National Review cites a specific example of the media-leaker waltz:

On January 12, the Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote:

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a leak of classified information. Michael Flynn was not, as far as we know, a target of any U.S. government surveillance. He was one of the figures whose conversations was “incidentally” recorded, presumably as part of the regular monitoring of Kislyak.

People within the U.S. government are not supposed to take the information that is incidentally recorded and then run to David Ignatius because they don’t like the American citizen who was recorded. That’s not the purpose of our domestic counterintelligence operations. Even if Flynn had violated the Logan Act — which, as we all know, no one has never been prosecuted for violating — there are legitimate avenues for dealing with that, namely going to law enforcement and a prosecutor.

(Invoking the Logan Act in this circumstance is particularly nonsensical, because the interpretation Ignatius floats would criminalize just about any discussion between a presidential candidate, a president-elect or his team and any representative of a foreign government on any matter of importance. If you ask a foreign official if his country would make a concession on Issue X in exchange for a U.S. concession on Issue Y, BOOM! Call out the SWAT teams, we’ve got a Logan Act violation!)

There are a lot of reasons not to like Michael Flynn, but that doesn’t change the fact that somebody broke the law and leaked classified information in an effort to get him in trouble. That is wrong and that is illegal, and Nunes is right to point out we’re going down a dangerous road when information collected by U.S. intelligence agencies about American citizens starts getting strategically leaked for partisan purposes.

No matter how many dolls are hidden in the nest — Comey, Clapper, Brennan, Lynch — it is undeniable that they all fit under the big one — Obama. It was he who authorized the surveillance and multiagency distribution of intelligence — in Bob Woodward’s reading, “highly classified gossip” — about political opponent Trump and his team — invading their privacy in violation of the law. If you were inclined to want Americans to lose faith in their intelligence community and media you couldn’t have done a better job than they did themselves. The Russians didn’t have to do a thing.

Categories: 2016 elections and Russia, Anti-Trumpers, Deep state, Democrat National Committee, Democrats and Trump, Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Media and Trump, Obama administration, Obama and Russian hacking, Obama and Trump, Obama hold-overs, Obama post-presidency, Trump administration, Trump and Russia, Trump transition, U.S. Congress
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Lessons From the Parliament Attack

March 26, 2017

Lessons From the Parliament Attack, Power Line, John Hinderaker, March 25, 2017

There is diversity in Islam, including millions of Muslims who adhere only to its spiritual elements or see themselves as more culturally than doctrinally Islamic. But when we speak of Islam, as opposed to Muslims, we are not speaking about a mere religious belief system. We are talking about a competing civilization — that is very much how Islam self-identifies. It has its own history, principles, values, mores, and legal system. Islam, thus understood, is not non-Western. It is anti-Western.

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England has been shaken by the terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge and Parliament that was carried out last Wednesday by Khalid Masood, whose real name was Adrian Elms or Adrian Ajao. As more information has come out about the terrorist, a number of observations can be made.

1) Masood/Elms/Ajao was an unusual terrorist in some ways, and typical in others. Like nearly all Islamic terrorists, he had a middle-class upbringing and at one point lived in a million dollar house in East Sussex. Drugs apparently precipitated his descent, and he had a criminal history that landed him in prison. Masood was not religious until his incarceration–his parents are Christians–but, like many others, he converted to Islam while in prison. After his release, he persuaded one of his daughters to adopt Islam, change her name and wear a hijab. At 52, he was quite a bit older than most terrorists.

2) Masood used the current weapons of choice, an automobile and two knives. Westminster Bridge is generally crowded with pedestrians, and he simply drove his car into a crowd of them, killing five and injuring as many as 50, some critically. This type of attack is very hard to stop–for practical purposes, impossible.

Following the attack, giant yellow bollards were placed in the area around Buckingham Palace to prevent attackers from driving vehicles into the crowds that always congregate there:

I don’t blame the Brits for doing this; the area around the White House is blocked off in a similar way, if I am not mistaken. But obviously, protecting a few high-profile areas does nothing to stop an Islamic terrorist (or anyone else) from driving a vehicle into a crowd anywhere, in any city.

When mass murders occur, liberals tend to focus on the weapons used by the murderer. Terrorist attacks carried out with cars and knives illustrate the futility of this approach. The only solution–if there is one–is to identify and stop the terrorist before he acts. Also, to take any feasible steps that will reduce the number of potential terrorists in the population.

3) Like many other terrorists, Masood was known to the British authorities. But they didn’t consider him a serious threat:

At some point he was investigated by MI5 over links to violent extremism but was considered too minor to monitor, and did not feature on a 3,000-strong list of suspects feared to be capable of mounting an attack.

Not surprisingly, it is very difficult to predict which radical Muslims will actually launch attacks.

4) Masood reportedly spent several years in Saudi Arabia, where he was immersed in Wahabbism. That is a pretty good predictor of radical belief and behavior.

5) One of those murdered by Masood was a policeman named Keith Palmer, whom Masood stabbed to death after crashing through a gate to the Parliament building. Palmer likely would have been even more of a hero if he hadn’t been unarmed. Disarming one’s own police force is insane.

6) Here in the U.S., there has been much talk of “vetting.” While checking out visitors and, especially, immigrants to the U.S. is certainly appropriate, to the limited extent it is possible, vetting is wholly inadequate as a security measure. Many terrorists are second generation immigrants, and others, like Masood, are Islamic converts.

7) The problem is Islam. Not all or even most Muslims, of course, but rather Islam as a political ideology. Andy McCarthy makes the point well at National Review. You should read the whole thing, which is a good primer on the subject. Here are some excerpts:

There is diversity in Islam, including millions of Muslims who adhere only to its spiritual elements or see themselves as more culturally than doctrinally Islamic. But when we speak of Islam, as opposed to Muslims, we are not speaking about a mere religious belief system. We are talking about a competing civilization — that is very much how Islam self-identifies. It has its own history, principles, values, mores, and legal system. Islam, thus understood, is not non-Western. It is anti-Western.

Like the conversion of Masood, the conversion of Birmingham has been a function of this defining Islamic attribute. Individual Muslims may assimilate, but Islam doesn’t do assimilation. Islam does not melt into your melting pot. Islam, as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna proclaimed, is content with nothing less than political, cultural, and civilizational dominance.

As Soeren Kern relates in a comprehensive Gatestone Institute report on Islam in Britain, the metamorphosis of Birmingham, along with several other U.K. population centers, signifies this resistance. When the Islamic presence in a Western community reaches a critical mass, Islam’s hostility to Western mores and demands for sharia governance result in non-Muslim flight. Marriages between Muslims resident in the Western community and Muslims overseas tend to result in childbirth rates and household growth that dwarfs that of the indigenous population. Arranged, intra-familial, and polygamous marriages, endorsed by Islamic mores, drastically alter the fabric of communities in short order. Birmingham, in particular, has been ground zero of “Operation Trojan Horse,” a sharia-supremacist scheme to Islamize the public schools.
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[T]he remorseless fact is that before ISIS and al-Qaeda and the Khomeini revolution and Hezbollah and the Blind Sheikh and the Brotherhood and Khalid Masood, there was the single thing that unites them all. There was Islam.

Western political and opinion elites remain willfully blind to this. They cannot help but project onto Islamic beliefs and practices their own progressive pieties — which take seriously neither religion nor the notion that there is any civilization but their own.

America is committed to the assumption that Islam, in all of its varieties and manifestations, is merely a religion. This entitles Islam not only to the full protection of the First Amendment, but also to the presumption that it is a benign if obsolete force, like other religions. Which explains why journalists puzzle over what could possibly have motivated the terrorist who shouts “Allahu akbar” to kill infidels.

Categories: Attack at British Parliament, Britain, Britain and Islamists, British media, Islamist terror attacks, Islamists in Britain, Known-wolf terrorists
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Canadian Imam contradicts Trudeau: “Islam will never become a part of liberal secularism”

March 26, 2017

Canadian Imam contradicts Trudeau: “Islam will never become a part of liberal secularism,” CIJ News, March 25, 2017

Mazin Abdul-Adhim. Photo: screenshot YouTube Mazin Abdul-Adhim

Another senior Muslim Canadian leader disagrees with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over the question whether Islam is compatible with secular values.

In two separate interviews with CBC, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau maintained that Islam is compatible with Western open and secular democracy like Canada:

(November 24, 2015): “Canadians are quick to point out that ISIS is wrong, that Islam is not incompatible with the Western secular democracy, a free place like Canada.”

(January 31, 2016): “But on the other hand, we need to make sure that we’re working with communities like the Muslim community for example to demonstrate that Islam is not incompatible with free and open Western societies.”

Trudeau said that “the Reviving the Islamic Spirit [RIS] convention [in Toronto]… is also about celebrating our shared beliefs in justice, fairness, equality of opportunity and acceptance” and that the values of the month of Ramadan are the “principles upon which Canada is founded” and the “tenets of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”

Unlike Trudeau, Mazin AbdulAdhim, a prominent Imam of Iraqi descent in London, Ontario who is affiliated with the radical Islamic global movement of Hizb ut-Tahrir, explains that “Islam cannot and will not ever become a part of liberal secularism.”

According to Mazin AbdulAdhim, nowadays there is a war between two ideologies, secularism and Islam, which will end up with the victory of Islam and the establishment of the Islamic State (Caliphate) which will regain control over the Muslim lands world-wide.

The following are excerpts from Mazin AbdulAdhim’s Facebook post on March 24, 2017:

The Jews and Christians are united with the atheists upon the liberal secular way of life today, and they demand that everyone join them in this way of life of theirs. Islam cannot and will not ever become a part of liberal secularism, no matter what ups and downs Muslims go through, and this has caused the Jews and Christians and atheists to take extreme manipulative measures to force Muslims to comply with their demands. This media pressure is simply a tool being used to force all Muslims to condemn the political and military laws of Islam in general by associating any crimes committed by Muslims with Islam itself (regardless of whether Islam obviously forbids it), to pressure them to submit to the liberal secular system that dominates the globe today and abandon the call for political Islam. Anyone demanding the implementation of the political and military laws of Islam will then be associated with those Muslims who committed those violent crimes, and will be treated as criminals by association… No matter what the manipulative secular elite do, they will fail at this manipulative scheme, and Islam will rise once again in the Muslim lands, and the Ummah [Muslims nation] will unite under a single sincere Islamic leadership; and the Muslim lands – including Africa, the Middle East, the subcontinent, parts of Europe, Central Asia, and parts of Eastern Asia – will be fully restored under complete Muslim control, and there is nothing the lying, fear-mongering scum of the Capitalist elite can do about it.

The following are excerpts from Mazin AbdulAdhim’s Facebook post on March 17, 2017:

It is important to understand that the West is undoubtedly heading towards banning political Islam…We need to understand that this is a struggle between two ideologies, not between countries or leaders or religions. It is a (mostly) silent war between secularism and Islam. Muslims win the moment they establish a true Khilafah [Islamic State or Caliphate], as that will be the end of the Sykes-Picot borders and puppet government control they have had over the Muslim lands for almost 100 years. And as Muslims inch closer to breaking free from the political control of the colonial West, we should expect to see them become more vicious against political Islam, and more friendly towards Muslims who accept secularism and defend it (called “moderates”)…

ICNA Canada’s online publication: “Islam is totally incompatible with western democracy”

The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Canada is an Islamic national-wide organization striving “to build an Exemplary Canadian Muslim Community” by “total submission to Him [Allah] and through the propagation of true and universal message of Islam.”

Dr. Iqbal Massod Al-Nadvi, the Amir (President) of ICNA Canada, also serves as the Chairperson of Canadian Council of Imams (Canada’s top Imam).

On its official website ICNA Canada shares with its members, followers and supporters the book “Riyad us Saliheen” (“The Gardens of the Righteous” رياض الصالحين) compiled by Imam Zakaruya Yahya Bin Sharaf An-Nawawi, a Sunni Shafi’ite jurist and hadith scholar who lived in 13th century.

The Gardens of the Righteous (Arabic: Riyadh as-Salihin), is a compilation of verses from the Qur’an and hadith by Al-Nawawi. It contains a total of 1905 hadith divided across 372 chapters, many of which are introduced by verses of the Quran.

The book “Riyad us Saliheen” (“The Gardens of the Righteous”) which appears on ICNA Canada site cntains modern commentary to the verses from the Qur’an and hadith.

The following are excerpts from the book which deal with the question whether Islam in compatible with the values of Western democracy.

“[Hadith]: 673. Abu Bakrah (May Allah be pleased with him) reported: I heard Messenger of Allah (PBUH) saying, “He who insults the rulers Allah will insult him.”

[At-Tirmidhi].

“Commentary: To affront and degrade the ruler means to disobey him and to by-pass his orders. This impairs his power, honour and dignity. Believers have been told to obey and support rulers for the sake of national interest and welfare, understanding that they desist from committing an overt disbelief and maintain congregation Salat and other duties of religion. The political system of Islam is totally incompatible with western democracy. The concept of government party and the opposition is alien to Islam. All belong to one Ummah with only one goal and pursue the same aims and objects of Islamic guidelines!”

Categories: Canada, Canada and Islamists, Canadian government and Islam, Trudeau and Islamists, Trudeau's fantasies
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Islam, Not Christianity, is Saturating Europe

March 26, 2017

Islam, Not Christianity, is Saturating Europe, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, March 26, 2017

(There is little to no good news from Europe. Ditto Canada, with its new anti-“Islamophobia” law. When will the spreading Islamist plague result in the conquest of America and death of all for which she stands? — DM)

In Germany, Angela Merkel has no children, as British prime minister Theresa May and one of France’s leading presidential candidates, Emmanuel Macron. As Europe’s leaders have no children and no reason to worry about the future (everything ends with them), they are now opening Europe’s borders to keep the continent in a demographic equilibrium. “I believe Europeans should understand that we need migration for our economies and for our welfare systems, with the current demographic trend we have to be sustainable”, said Federica Mogherini, the European Union representative for foreign affairs.

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Jihadists seem to be leading an assault against freedom and against secular democracies.

Sunni Islam’s most prominent preacher, Yusuf al Qaradawi, declared that the day will come when, like Constantinople, Rome will be Islamized.

It is Islam, not Christianity, that now saturates Europe’s landscape and imagination.

According to US President Trump’s strategic advisor Steve Bannon, the “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing, it is imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous”.

The impotence and the fragility of our civilization is haunting many Europeans as well.

Europe, according to the historian David Engels will face the fate of the ancient Roman Republic: a civil war. Everywhere, Europeans see signs of fracture. Jihadists seem to be leading an assault against freedom and against secular democracies. Fears occupy the collective imagination of Europeans. A survey of more than 10,000 people from ten different European countries has revealed increasing public opposition to Muslim immigration. The Chatham House Royal Institute of International Affairs carried out a survey, asking online respondents their views on the statement that “all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped”. In the 10 European countries surveyed, an average of 55% agreed with the statement.

Mainstream media are now questioning if “Europe fears Muslims more than the United States”. The photograph used in the article was a recent Muslim mass prayer in front of Italy’s monument, the Coliseum. In echoes of the capture of the great Christian civilization of Byzantium in Constantinople, Sunni Islam’s most prominent preacher, Yusuf al Qaradawi, declared that the day will come when Rome will be Islamized.

Hundreds of Muslims engage in a mass prayer service next to the Coliseum in Rome, on October 21, 2016. (Image source: Ruptly video screenshot)

Do civilizations die from outside or inside? Is their disappearance the result of external aggression (war, natural disasters, epidemics) or of an internal erosion (decay, incompetence, disastrous choices)? Arnold Toynbee, in the last century, was adamant: “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”.

“The contemporary historian of ancient Greece and ancient Rome saw their civilisations begin their decline and fall, both the Greeks and the Romans attributed it to falling birth rates because nobody wanted the responsibilities of bringing up children,” said Britain’s former chief rabbi, Lord Sacks.

Everywhere in Europe there are signs of a takeover. Muslim students now outnumber Christian students in more than 30 British church schools. One Anglican primary school has a “100 percent Muslim population”. The Church of England estimated that about 20 of its schools have more Muslim students than Christian ones, and 15 Roman Catholic schools have majority Muslim students. In Germany as well, there are fears of a massive Muslim influx into the school system, and German teachers are openly denouncing the threat of a “ghettoization”.

France saw 34,000 fewer babies born last year than in 2014, a new report just found. The number of French women having children has reached its lowest level in 40 years. A low fertility rate has become a plague all over Europe: “In 1995 only one country, Italy, had more people over 65 than under 15; today there are 30 and by 2020 that number will hit 35.” Welcome to the “Greying of Europe“.

Additionally, if it were not for Muslim women, France would have an even lower birth rate: “With a fertility rate of 3.5 children per woman, the Algerians contribute significantly to the growth of the population in France”, wrote the well-known demographer Gérard-François Dumont.[1]

Thanks to Muslim migrants, Sweden’s maternity wards are busy these days.[2]

In Milan, Italy’s financial center, Mohammed is the top name among newborn babies. The same is true in London, in the four biggest Dutch cities and elsewhere in Europe, from Brussels to Marseille. It is Islam, not Christianity, that now saturates Europe’s landscape and imagination.

Meanwhile, Europe’s leaders are almost all childless. In Germany, Angela Merkel has no children, as British prime minister Theresa May and one of France’s leading presidential candidates, Emmanuel Macron. As Europe’s leaders have no children and no reason to worry about the future (everything ends with them), they are now opening Europe’s borders to keep the continent in a demographic equilibrium. “I believe Europeans should understand that we need migration for our economies and for our welfare systems, with the current demographic trend we have to be sustainable”, said Federica Mogherini, the European Union representative for foreign affairs.

The Battle of Poitiers in 1356 was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in Western Europe. If Christians had not won, “perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet”. Does that sound familiar these days?

Islamists take culture and history more seriously than the Westerners do. Recently, in Paris, an Egyptian terrorist tried to strike the great museum, the Louvre. He planned to deface the museum’s artwork, he said, because “it is a powerful symbol of French culture”. Think about an Islamic extremist shouting “Allahu Akbar” while slashing the Mona Lisa. This is the trend we need to start reversing.

Categories: Europe and Islam, Islamic conquests in Europe, Islamic invasion, Islamisation of Europe, Islamist objectives
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We Need an Independent Investigation of the Trump Leaks Mystery Now

March 26, 2017

We Need an Independent Investigation of the Trump Leaks Mystery Now, PJ Media, Roger L. Simon, March 25, 2017

If you are able to see the raw data available to the NSA, which means you are inches away from the most private information of almost every human being on Earth, you have a privilege akin to the gods.  The temptations to abuse this are huge.

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The detective story of our times is unspooling before us and the MacGuffin could affect all of our lives for years to come and the very nature of our republic.

That mystery is “whodunit” in the great Trump Transition leak(s) scandal that actually pre- and post-dates the transition itself.

Who unmasked Michael Flynn and — so it seems now — others and why did he, she or they do it? Who later leaked (selectively) President Trump’s conversations with the leaders of Australia and Mexico? Is this the same person or are there several?

More importantly, who is watching the watchers and why was their work — this raw data that supposedly is never seen except on the most extreme “need to know” basis — apparently so widely distributed? Who inspired this? And who ordered what is known as a “tasking” to enable this to happen in the first place?

These questions are as or more important than healthcare, immigration, taxes or even how long ISIS will survive because they speak to the very nature of our society and the values for which we stand.  Are we still a democratic republic or have we drifted so far into a high-tech Orwellian nightmare that we will never emerge from it again?

Yes, I am aware some of Mr. Flynn’s activities may be dodgy. But that doesn’t excuse the unmasking, particularly of others, one of whom may even have been the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Devin Nunes, who was himself a member of the Trump transition team.

We need a truly independent investigation as divorced from partisan politics as humanly possible to unravel this mystery and expose the roots of this surveillance — if, as now seems likely, something of this nature occurred — to public light.

Yes, for the sake of bipartisanship, putative electoral collusion between Trump people and the Russians must be part of this investigation,  But I think at this point we can stipulate that the Russians have been trying to monkey with our elections from time immemorial and are now able to do that more effectively due to cyber technology.  We should work to counter that and undoubtedly are.  And we can also stipulate that people like Paul Manafort and John Podesta — just to name two on opposite sides of our politics – in their zeal to enrich themselves probably made deals with Russian business-types many of us would regard as unsavory.  But I would be surprised, again at this point, if the activities of those men rose to anything close to treason.

No, this is not about the Russians, nefarious as they may be.  As Pogo said many years ago about an entirely different matter, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Illegal  surveillance of Americans by Americans — whether “coincidental,” deliberate or something in between — is our problem, and we have to correct it.

Finding truly independent, impartial leadership for such an investigation will not be easy.  Jesus and Moses, by all reports, are dead. But it must be done and they must be found. Perhaps it should take the form of the 9/11 Commission, because this is just as important for our times as that event was then. The investigation, to the extent possible, should err on the side of transparency, even to the extent of revealing state secrets. It should be conducted in full view of the public, because such a large number of us have lost confidence in the leaders of our intelligence agencies, including the FBI, and also in their rank-and-file. Our suspicions may be overblown, but that must be proven to us.

Indeed, the Democrats, who have been in control for the last eight years, have much more to fear from such an investigation.  But, if they think it through, it is actually in their interests as much as anybody’s, perhaps more.  They aren’t in control now and it is a certainty that the Trump administration is going to be restaffing a good percentage of our intelligence agencies.  Mike Pompeo is already at the head of the CIA,  and Dan Coats is the director of national intelligence.  The Democrats should not want done to them what they — purposefully or not — have done to the Republicans.

But even without an investigation we have learned something extremely disturbing.  The five-year incarceration for conviction for a single leak is evidently not enough of a deterrent in our current political culture to prevent such a felony.  We should double or triple that, probably more.  If you are able to see the raw data available to the NSA, which means you are inches away from the most private information of almost every human being on Earth, you have a privilege akin to the gods.  The temptations to abuse this are huge.  Employees of the agency have been caught spying on lovers or ex-lovers, which is already despicable. To try to use this legally confidential information to change the course of events in a democratic country is a far more horrendous crime and should be prosecuted accordingly.  It is indeed treason.

Categories: Intelligence community, Intelligence leaks, Obama administration and Trump, Obama and intelligence, Obama and Trump, Trump Hater's Club, Trump transition
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Iran sanctions 15 US firms, citing Israel ties and ‘human rights’

March 26, 2017

Source: Iran sanctions 15 US firms, citing Israel ties and ‘human rights’ – Middle East – Jerusalem Post

yREUTERS
March 26, 2017 14:11

Tehran’s move came two days after the US imposed sanctions on 30 foreign companies or individuals for transferring sensitive technology to Iran for its missile program.
iran israel america

 Iranian demonstrators burn the flags of Israel, the United States and Britain as they take part in the Jerusalem Day demonstration in Tehran [File]. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Iran has imposed sanctions on 15 US companies for alleged human rights violations and cooperating with Israel, the state news agency IRNA reported on Sunday.

The agency quoted Iran’s foreign ministry as saying the companies had “flagrantly violated human rights” and cooperated with Israel against the Palestinians.

It was not immediately clear if any of the companies, which included defense technology firm Raytheon, had any dealings with Iran or whether they would be affected in any way by Tehran’s action, which IRNA said would include seizure of their assets and a ban on contacts with them.

The Iranian move came two days after the United States imposed sanctions on 30 foreign companies or individuals for transferring sensitive technology to Iran for its missile program, or for violating export controls on Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Separately, on Thursday, bipartisan leadership in the US Senate introduced a bill that would severely sanction Tehran over its ballistic missile work and its proxy activities across the Middle East, targeting several Iranian entities that were previously relieved of sanctions under the nuclear accord implemented last year.

Passage of the bill “would risk killing the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action],” an Iranian American lobbying group based in Washington said in a statement, referring to the formal title of the nuclear agreement.

The bill, which has 14 Democratic and Republican sponsors, would set mandatory sanctions for anyone involved with Iran’s ballistic missile program and those who trade with them.

It also would apply sanctions to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and put into law sanctions imposed via presidential executive order on individuals currently sanctioned due to what the bill’s sponsors describe as Iranian support for terrorism.

The bill would also require the president to block the property of any person or entity involved in specific activities that violate the UN arms embargo on Iran.

Iran has suggested that past proposed sanctions bills would violate the international nuclear agreement reached during the administration of former President Barack Obama.

Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, a co-author of the measure, told Reuters the new bill had been written not to interfere with that accord.

“We assiduously worked to make sure that no provisions actually affect the agreement as it is,” he said in an interview.

Michael Wilner contributed to this report.

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Iran says it’s ‘completely ready’ to restart nuclear program

March 26, 2017

Source: Iran says it’s ‘completely ready’ to restart nuclear program | The Times of Israel

Accusing US of violating 2015 nuclear deal, FM Zarif says relaunched program would be more advanced than previous one

By Times of Israel staff March 21, 2017, 2:08 pm
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif speaking at the 53rd Munich Security Conference at the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich, February 19, 2017. (AFP Photo/Christof Stache)

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif speaking at the 53rd Munich Security Conference at the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich, February 19, 2017. (AFP Photo/Christof Stache)

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned Monday that Tehran is “completely ready” to restart its nuclear program if the US fails to live up to its commitments under the July 2015 nuclear deal.

“If [the] US creates a situation that continuation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would damage Tehran’s national interest, then Iran is completely ready to come back to the situation it had prior to the JCPOA even more powerfully than before,” Zarif was quoted by Iranian state media as saying.

The foreign minister spoke to reporters in Isfahan in central Iran.

On the campaign trail during last year’s election, US President Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers vowed to gut the deal once in office. But since the election, the Trump administration has signaled a gentler approach, though it has not provided details of its new policy.

Earlier this month, IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said “the new administration of the United States just started and they are looking at this issue,” but “it is very early for them to give their assessment.”

The agreement saw Iran scale down substantially its nuclear activities and submit to close inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency in exchange for relief from painful sanctions.

The accord extends the “breakout time” needed for Iran to accumulate enough fissile material for a bomb to at least a year, giving the international community time to react, according to proponents and the administration of former US president Barack Obama, which helped negotiate the agreement.

In his Monday comments in Isfahan, Zarif said Iran was “committed to the promises it has made” and that the regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei had stipulated that Iran “is not to break them,” according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

But, he warned, it could do so very quickly if the agreement falls through, and the restored nuclear program would be more advanced that the one mostly frozen by the 2015 deal.

“During the past couple of months, with the efforts made by skilled Iranian scientists and experts, we have succeeded [in making] operational the most advanced centrifuges, that were just an idea at the time of approving the JCPOA,” Zarif is quoted as saying.

The Mehr News Agency quoted him saying the new centrifuges “would enrich uranium 20 times faster and more efficiently,” and that “the technical know-how has now been indigenized.”

He accused the US of repeatedly failing to fulfill its commitments under the deal, but said “pursuing the JCPOA is still justifiable for Iran” for economic reasons.

Iran has always denied wanting nuclear weapons, saying its activities are purely peaceful. The international community vehemently disagreed, and placed a strict sanctions regime on Iran for much of the past decade, until Tehran agreed to halting its program in the 2015 deal.

Besides the US and Iran, the other signatories to the JCPOA — Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany — oppose ending the agreement.

AFP contributed to this report.

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Syria said threatening to fire Scud missiles at Israel

March 26, 2017

Source: Syria said threatening to fire Scud missiles at Israel | The Times of Israel

Assad regime says attacks by IDF on Syrian targets will be met with counter strikes on military bases, Haifa port

By Times of Israel staff March 25, 2017, 4:16 pm
Illustrative: An IAF F-16 from the Red Dragon squadron during a drill, November 2013. (IDF Spokesperson's Unit/Flash90)

Illustrative: An IAF F-16 from the Red Dragon squadron during a drill, November 2013. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit/Flash90)

The Syrian leadership has sent messages to Israel warning that any further strikes by the IDF on targets within Syria’s borders would be met with Scud rockets fired deep into the Jewish state, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Diyar reported Saturday.

The Assad regime conveyed the message to Israel via Russian mediators, the report said.

According to the report, Syria warned that Israeli strikes on Syrian military targets would be met with the firing of Scud missiles capable of carrying half a ton of explosives at IDF bases, while an attack on civilian targets would see Syria launching a counter strike on the Haifa port and the petrochemical plants in the area.

The report warned that Syria has over 800 Scud missiles and that Syria would not issue any warnings before the missile strikes because Israel does not warn before it hits.

On Wednesday, Israeli jets were reported to have carried out airstrikes near the Syrian capital of Damascus, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue hitting weapons convoys and rebuffed claims Russia had ordered the strikes halted.

Syrian opposition news outlets reported that the airstrikes took place in the Mount Qasioun region near Damascus. The Israeli raids targeted Syrian army posts in the area, the reports said, in the fourth round of airstrikes attributed to Israel in Syria in less than a week.

Smoke billows following a reported air strike in the rebel-held parts of the Jobar district, on the eastern outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, on March 19, 2017 .(AFP PHOTO / AMER ALMOHIBANY)

Smoke billows following a reported air strike in the rebel-held parts of the Jobar district, on the eastern outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, on March 19, 2017. (AFP/Amer Almohibany)

There was no immediate confirmation from Jerusalem, nor any information on casualties or damage.

Tensions escalated between Israel and Syria recently, with Israel reportedly hitting various targets including strikes near the Lebanon-Syria border including a Hezbollah weapons convoy and Syrian military sites.

Also earlier in the week an Israeli drone strike reportedly killed a member of a Syrian pro-regime militia, an attack that came two days after Israeli jets, in an early morning operation, hit an arms transfer meant for Hezbollah near Palmyra, with Syrian air defenses firing missiles at the planes.

One missile was intercepted by Israel’s Arrow missile defense battery, military officials said, in the first reported use of the advanced system. It was the most serious incident between the two countries since the Syrian civil war began six years ago.

On Sunday evening, Syria’s ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari said Syria’s response to Friday’s strike was a “game-changer.” Speaking on Syrian state TV, Jaafari said the military’s response was “appropriate and in line with Israel’s terrorist operation,” and that Israel “will now think a million times [before striking again],” according to a translation cited by the Ynet news site.

“Syria’s forceful response to the Israeli attacks changed the rules of the game,” he said.

His comments came hours after Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman threatened to destroy Syrian air defense systems for targeting the Israeli aircraft during the bombing run Friday. “The next time the Syrians use their air defense systems against our planes we will destroy them without the slightest hesitation,” Liberman said on Israel Radio.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu denied reports that Moscow had told Israel to end airstrikes in the war-torn country and vowed to continue attacking weapons convoys.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting in Moscow on March 9, 2017. (AFP/Pool/Pavel Golovkin)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting in Moscow on March 9, 2017. (AFP/Pool/Pavel Golovkin)

Netanyahu said that he told Russian President Vladimir Putin during a March 9 meeting that Israel will continue to thwart attempts by Iran and its terrorist proxies, such as Hezbollah, to smuggle advanced weapons to Lebanon via Syria.

Israel has been largely unaffected by the Syrian civil war raging next door, suffering mostly sporadic incidents of spillover fire that Israel has generally dismissed as tactical errors by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces. Israel has responded to the errant fire with limited reprisals on Syrian positions.

The skies over Syria are now crowded, with Russian and Syrian aircraft backing Assad’s forces and a US-led coalition striking Islamic State and al-Qaeda targets.

Raphael Ahren and agencies contributed to this report.

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