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Obama: Islam Inherently Violent? Absurd!

March 31, 2016

Obama: Islam Inherently Violent? Absurd! Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer, March 31, 2016

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Barack Obama is amused.

“I’m amused,” he said in remarks published Tuesday, “when I watch Republicans claim that Trump’s language is unacceptable, and ask, ‘How did we get here?’ We got here in part because the Republican base had been fed this notion that Islam is inherently violent, that this is who these folks are. And if you’ve been hearing that a lot, and then somebody shows up on the scene and says, well, the logical conclusion to civilizational conflict is we try to make sure that we’re not destroyed internally by this foreign civilization, that’s what you get.”

Where would anyone get the crazy idea that Islam was inherently violent? Well, the day’s headlines might give us that very strong impression, but Obama would tell us (and has told us) that those Muslims who are screaming “Allahu akbar” as they murder non-Muslims are, despite appearances, not really Muslims at all, but just people who have twisted, hijacked, misunderstood the Religion of Peace.

It is, true, however, that there are plenty of Muslims who tell us that Islam is inherently violent. Here are a few of them:

“Jihad was a way of life for the Pious Predecessors (Salaf-us-Salih), and the Prophet (SAWS) was a master of the Mujahideen and a model for fortunate inexperienced people. The total number of military excursions which he (SAWS) accompanied was 27. He himself fought in nine of these; namely Badr; Uhud, Al-Muraysi, The Trench, Qurayzah, Khaybar, The Conquest of Makkah, Hunayn and Taif . . . This means that the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) used to go out on military expeditions or send out an army at least every two months.” — Abdullah Azzam, co-founder of al-Qaeda, Join the Caravan, p. 30

“If we follow the rules of interpretation developed from the classical science of Koranic interpretation, it is not possible to condemn terrorism in religious terms. It remains completely true to the classical rules in its evolution of sanctity for its own justification. This is where the secret of its theological strength lies.” — Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

“Many thanks to God, for his kind gesture, and choosing us to perform the act of Jihad for his cause and to defend Islam and Muslims. Therefore, killing you and fighting you, destroying you and terrorizing you, responding back to your attacks, are all considered to be great legitimate duty in our religion.” — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow 9/11 defendants

“Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world.” — Taliban terrorist Baitullah Mehsud

“Jihad, holy fighting in Allah’s course, with full force of numbers and weaponry, is given the utmost importance in Islam….By jihad, Islam is established….By abandoning jihad, may Allah protect us from that, Islam is destroyed, and Muslims go into inferior position, their honor is lost, their lands are stolen, their rule and authority vanish. Jihad is an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim.” — Times Square car bomb terrorist Faisal Shahzad

“So step by step I became a religiously devout Muslim, Mujahid — meaning one who participates in jihad.” — Little Rock, Arkansas terrorist murderer Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad

“And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives, and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.” — Texas terrorist bomber Khalid Aldawsari.

Obama would dismiss all these as “extremists” who are not really Muslim at all and have nothing to do with Islam. Yet one also might get the impression that Islam is inherently violent from the authoritative sources in Sunni Islam, the schools of Sunni jurisprudence (madhahib):

Shafi’i school: A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that was certified in 1991 by the clerics at Al-Azhar University, one of the leading authorities in the Islamic world, as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy, stipulates about jihad that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by Sheikh Nuh Ali Salman, a Jordanian expert on Islamic jurisprudence: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya)…while remaining in their ancestral religions.” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8).

Of course, there is no caliph today, unless one believes the claims of the Islamic State, and hence the oft-repeated claim that Osama et al are waging jihad illegitimately, as no state authority has authorized their jihad. But they explain their actions in terms of defensive jihad, which needs no state authority to call it, and becomes “obligatory for everyone” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.3) if a Muslim land is attacked. The end of the defensive jihad, however, is not peaceful coexistence with non-Muslims as equals: ‘Umdat al-Salik specifies that the warfare against non-Muslims must continue until “the final descent of Jesus.” After that, “nothing but Islam will be accepted from them, for taking the poll tax is only effective until Jesus’ descent” (o9.8).

Hanafi school: A Hanafi manual of Islamic law repeats the same injunctions. It insists that people must be called to embrace Islam before being fought, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It emphasizes that jihad must not be waged for economic gain, but solely for religious reasons: from the call to Islam “the people will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”

However, “if the infidels, upon receiving the call, neither consent to it nor agree to pay capitation tax [jizya], it is then incumbent on the Muslims to call upon God for assistance, and to make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.” (Al-Hidayah, II.140)

Maliki school: Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a Maliki legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

Hanbali school: The great medieval theorist of what is commonly known today as radical or fundamentalist Islam, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328), was a Hanbali jurist. He directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”

This is also taught by modern-day scholars of Islam. Majid Khadduri was an Iraqi scholar of Islamic law of international renown. In his book War and Peace in the Law of Islam, which was published in 1955 and remains one of the most lucid and illuminating works on the subject, Khadduri says this about jihad:

The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world….The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state. (P. 51)

Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Assistant Professor on the Faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad. In his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, he quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah.” Nyazee concludes: “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.

All this makes it clear that there is abundant reason to believe that Islam is indeed inherently violent. It would be illuminating if Obama or someone around him produced some quotations from Muslim authorities he considers “authentic,” and explained why the authorities I’ve quoted above and others like them are inauthentic. While in reality there is no single Muslim authority who can proclaim what is “authentic” Islam, and thus it would be prudent not to make sweeping statements about what “authentic Islam” actually is, clearly there are many Muslim who believe that authentic Islam is inherently violent.

One might also get the impression that Islam is inherently violent from these Qur’an verses:

2:191-193: “And slay them wherever you come upon them, and expel them from where they expelled you; persecution is more grievous than slaying. But fight them not by the Holy Mosque until they should fight you there; then, if they fight you, slay them — such is the recompense of unbelievers, but if they give over, surely Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s; then if they give over, there shall be no enmity save for evildoers.”

4:34: “Men are the managers of the affairs of women, for Allah has made one superior to the another, and because they have expended of their property. Righteous women are therefore obedient, guarding the secret for Allah’s guarding. And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them. If they then obey you, look not for any way against them; Allah is All-high, All-great.”

4:89: “They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of Allah; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper.”

5:33: “This is the recompense of those who fight against Allah and His Messenger, and hasten about the earth, to do corruption there: they shall be slaughtered, or crucified, or their hands and feet shall alternately be struck off; or they shall be banished from the land. That is a degradation for them in this world; and in the world to come awaits them a mighty chastisement.”

5:38: “And the thief, male and female: cut off the hands of both, as a recompense for what they have earned, and a punishment exemplary from Allah; Allah is All-mighty, All-wise.”

8:12: “When thy Lord was revealing to the angels, ‘I am with you; so confirm the believers. I shall cast into the unbelievers’ hearts terror; so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them!”

8:39: “Fight them, till there is no persecution and the religion is Allah’s entirely; then if they give over, surely Allah sees the things they do.”

8:60: “Make ready for them whatever force and strings of horses you can, to strike terror thereby into the enemy of Allah and your enemy, and others besides them that you know not; Allah knows them. And whatsoever you expend in the way of Allah shall be repaid you in full; you will not be wronged.”

9:5: “Then, when the sacred months are over, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way; Allah is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.”

9:29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah and the Last Day and do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and do not practice the religion of truth, even if they are of the People of the Book — until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”

9:111: “Allah has bought from the believers their selves and their possessions against the gift of Paradise; they fight in the way of Allah; they kill, and are killed; that is a promise binding upon Allah in the Torah, and the Gospel, and the Koran; and who fulfils his covenant truer than Allah? So rejoice in the bargain you have made with Him; that is the mighty triumph.”

9:123: “O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you; and let them find in you a harshness; and know that Allah is with the godfearing.”

47:4: “When you meet the unbelievers, smite their necks, then, when you have made wide slaughter among them, tie fast the bonds; then set them free, either by grace or ransom, till the war lays down its loads. So it shall be; and if Allah had willed, He would have avenged Himself upon them; but that He may try some of you by means of others. And those who are slain in the way of Allah, He will not send their works astray.”

There are some tolerant verses in the Qur’an as well — see, for example, sura 109. But then in Islamic tradition there are authorities who say that violent passages take precedence over these verses. Muhammad’s earliest biographer, an eighth-century Muslim named Ibn Ishaq, explains the progression of Qur’anic revelation about warfare. First, he explains, Allah allowed Muslims to wage defensive warfare. But that was not Allah’s last word on the circumstances in which Muslims should fight. Ibn Ishaq explains offensive jihad by invoking a Qur’anic verse: “Then God sent down to him: ‘Fight them so that there be no more seduction,’ i.e. until no believer is seduced from his religion. ‘And the religion is God’s’, i.e. Until God alone is worshipped.”

The Qur’an verse Ibn Ishaq quotes here (2:193) commands much more than defensive warfare: Muslims must fight until “the religion is God’s” — that is, until Allah alone is worshipped. Ibn Ishaq gives no hint that that command died with the seventh century.

The great medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350) also outlines the stages of the Muhammad’s prophetic career: “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.”

In other words, he initially could fight only defensively — only “those who fought him” — but later he could fight the polytheists until Islam was “fully established.” He could fight them even if they didn’t fight him first, and solely because they were not Muslim.

Nor do all contemporary Islamic thinkers believe that that command is a relic of history.

According to a 20th century Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid, “at first ‘the fighting’ was forbidden, then it was permitted and after that it was made obligatory.” He also distinguishes two groups Muslims must fight: “(1) against them who start ‘the fighting’ against you (Muslims) . . . (2) and against all those who worship others along with Allah . . . as mentioned in Surat Al-Baqarah (II), Al-Imran (III) and At-Taubah (IX) . . . and other Surahs (Chapters of the Qur’an).” (The Roman numerals after the names of the chapters of the Qur’an are the numbers of the suras: Sheikh Abdullah is referring to Qur’anic verses such as 2:216, 3:157-158, 9:5, and 9:29.)

Here again, obviously there is a widespread understanding of the Qur’an within Islamic tradition that sees it, and Islam, as inherently violent. And we see Muslims who clearly understand their religion as being inherently violent acting upon that understanding around the world today, in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Nigeria and elsewhere. We can hope that those who embody the true, peaceful Islam that Obama assumes to exist come forward and work against the Muslims who believe in violence, instead of just issuing pro-forma condemnations. So far we have not seen that. On the contrary, we see reformers threatened and cowed into silence. The Moroccan activist Ahmed Assid condemned violence in Islam’s name and was immediately declared an apostate and threatened with death by Muslim clerics. If the Ahmed Assids of the world represent the true Islam that is not inherently violent, the message has not gotten through to all too many of their coreligionists.

We may hope it does someday. In the meantime, it is imperative to continue to speak about how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism, so as to alert all people of good will to the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, and its motives and goals. This is not indulging in hateful generalizations; it is simply to speak honestly and realistically about a threat all free people face. If we cannot speak about it, it will nonetheless keep coming, and catch us unawares.

Categories: Islamic history, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Islamic terrorism, Obama and Islam
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Europe Still Sleeps, and Europeans Still Die

March 30, 2016

Europe Still Sleeps, and Europeans Still Die, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, March 30, 2016

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While England Slept is the title of Winston Churchill’s 1938 book documenting the failure of England to counter Germany’s rearmament. Despite the gruesome price paid for ignoring Churchill’s warnings, postwar Europe has slumbered for decades while its cultural dysfunctions have nurtured the jihadist violence erupting across Europe. Last week’s attacks in Brussels, coming four months after the Paris attacks that killed 130, suggests there are more attacks to come. According to AP, 400-600 ISIS-trained terrorists are making their way to Europe.

Europe can’t say it wasn’t warned. In 2002 Oriana Fallaci published The Rage and the Pride, a passionate defense of Western civilization and an indictment of those who appease Islamic illiberalism.  Ten years ago Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept gave first-hand reports of Europe’s feckless immigration policies that fostered and appeased Muslim radicalism and violence. A year later Claire Berlinski’s Menace in Europe and Melanie Phillips’ Londonistan sounded the same alarms. And there are the dystopian novels of Michel Houellebecq like Platform and last year’s Submission, which link Europe’s cultural and spiritual exhaustion to the rise of homegrown jihadism and Islamization.

An even more important prophet is Bat Ye’or, whose Eurabia (2005) documented “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.” The result is the dhimmi mentality of Europe’s elites, which manifests in word and deed Western inferiority to Islam, and guilt over alleged crimes against the Muslim world.

But a secularized Europe committed to multicultural fantasies and la dolce vita as the highest goods has dismissed these prophets as bigots and “Islamophobes” who distort the “religion of peace.” Yet after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate in 1923––the “catastrophe” Osama bin Laden mentioned after 9/11–– the theorists of modern jihadism were forthright and plain in expressing the intolerant and triumphalist Islamic beliefs and jihadist imperative consistent with Ye’or’s analysis. Islam’s nature, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna wrote, is “to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and extend its power to the entire planet.” Fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb concurred: “Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path.” The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, agreed: “The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and in the other a sword; the sword is for crushing the traitor and the Koran for guidance . . . Islam is a religion of blood for infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.”

Nor are these sentiments alien to traditional Islamic beliefs as codified in the Koran, Hadith, Muslim histories, and the biographies of Mohammed. As such, the jihadist imperative, despite anticolonial and nationalist rhetoric, was the foundational motivation for the military attacks on Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973, and today it still drives the terror campaigns against Israel waged by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLO. Jihad in the name of Allah sparked the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the subsequent launching of the Iranian terrorist mother ship from which numerous jihadist organizations have continued to receive training and financial support. The Taliban who gave sanctuary to al Qaeda in Afghanistan are close students of jihad and shari’a law, executing transgressors in a soccer stadium paid for by the EU.

Nor has the West been spared. Jihad lay at the heart of al Qaeda’s serial attacks on the U.S. and its military in 1993 (first World Trade Center bombing), 1996 (Khobar Towers), 1998 (East African embassies), 2000 (U.S.S. Cole), and the spectacular carnage of September 11, 2001, as well as inspiring the terrorist murders in Madrid (2004), London (2005), Fort Hood (2013), Boston (2013), San Bernardino (2015), Paris (January and November, 2015), and now Brussels. And don’t forget the torture, rape, and murders perpetrated by ISIS, the latest and most successful example of modern jihadism inspired by traditional Islamic doctrine.

We know the terrorists’ Islamic bona fides because they continually tell us why they want to kill us, in speeches, internet videos, and writings filled with Koranic verses and precedents from the life of Mohammed. Yet despite this evidence, elites in Europe and the U.S. refuse to confront the religious origins of jihadism, settling for the stale environmental and psychological causes dear to the materialist mentality. Thus they continue to chant the “nothing to do with Islam” mantra, as our president did in response to the Brussels attack. “ISIL is not ‘Islamic,’” the president asserted. “No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.” The first two clauses are patently false to Koranic commands and Islamic history, and the third is a non sequitur.

But the most powerful refutation of this common delusion is the scarcity of public protests by observant Muslims against the “extremists” who allegedly have “hijacked” their faith. After each jihadist atrocity there is typically more celebratory ululation and cries of “Allahu Akbar” in the Muslim world than marches against terrorism by heretical “extremists.” There are no “million Muslim marches,” no “not in our name movements,” no large scale Muslim attendance at memorial services for the victims. Yet perceived insults to Islam or Mohammed will produce violent mobs and lethal rampages.

Nor should this surprise us, when poll after poll registers significant pluralities and majorities of Muslims who approve of violence against infidels, and support the implementation of illiberal shari’a law. The latest evidence for such support from “moderate Muslims” comes from Brussels, where the planner of the Paris and Brussels attacks, Salah Abdeslam, was hiding in plain sight in the Muslim-dominant district of Molenbeek. Yet it still took four months for Belgian police to find him, and when they moved in for the arrest, they were met with rocks and bottles from residents who knew he was there and never tipped off the authorities.

Yet this is just one of many such enclaves in Europe. Ca n’Anglada in Barcelona, Marxloh and Neukölln in Germany, Seine-Saint-Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois in France, Malmo in Sweden, and many other towns and neighborhoods across Europe house disaffected and unassimilated Muslim immigrants whose faith predisposes them to contempt for the infidel and his secular laws, and justifies violence against the enemies of Islam. And despite the segregation, unemployment, crime, costly welfare transfers, and jihad-preaching mosques in these neighborhoods, Europe has accepted hundreds of thousands more Muslim immigrants in 2015 alone. Undoubtedly among them are untold numbers of ISIS-trained terrorists, many of them from the 5000 European Muslims who have gone to fight for ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

That is the reality everyone knows who wants to know. But too many in the West do not want to know, just as those enamored of Soviet communism did not want to know about the gulags and show-trials and engineered famines that killed at least 20 million. Like yesterday’s communist sympathizers, today the sleepwalkers of Europe are trapped in their ideological fever-dreams––fashionable self-loathing, guilt for colonialism and imperialism, sentimental one-worldism, and noble-savage multicultural fantasies. Worst of all, they are crippled by a refusal to appreciate and defend their political and cultural inheritance––prosperity, human rights, freedom, consensual government, and tolerance––created by their ancestors.

The character of Michel in Houellebecq’s Platform (2001) articulates the failure of civilizational nerve that has paved the way for metastasizing jihadist violence. Europe’s forbears, the jaded hedonist Michel muses, “believed in the superiority of their civilization,” and “invented dreams, progress, utopia, the future.” But their “civilizing mission,” their “innocent sense of their natural right to dominate the world and direct the path of history had disappeared.” All that is left is the dwindling cultural capital being squandered by their descendants, who have lost “those qualities of intelligence and determination,” and who exist only for the present and its material pleasures. Like like Michel, they are “decadent” and “given over entirely to selfishness.”

But at least Michel, unlike the sleepwalking European elite, recognizes that this is cultural suicide: “I was aware, however, that such a situation was barely tenable, that people like me were incapable of ensuring the survival of a society. Perhaps, more simply, we were unworthy of life.”

The terrorists of Paris and Brussels agree.

Categories: Europe, Foreign leaders, Free world, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and human rights, Islamic invasion, Islamic State, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Muslim assimilation, national security
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Europe Losing Freedom of Speech, America Next

March 30, 2016

Europe Losing Freedom of Speech, America Next, Fox News, Brigitte Gabriel via You Tube, March 29, 2016

Categories: Britain, Freedom of speech, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Obama's America
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Ethics of Muslim Immigration, Pt. 2 – US Under Siege?

March 30, 2016

Ethics of Muslim Immigration, Pt. 2 – US Under Siege? PJTV via You Tube, March 30, 2016

(A point that I did not see made is that Europe has many more Muslims than America, thus far. — DM)

Categories: Islam in America, Islamic immigration, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Multiculturalism, Muslim assimilation
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US Residents Linked to Terrorism Increased 200% in 2015

March 30, 2016

US Residents Linked to Terrorism Increased 200% in 2015, Truth Revolt, Tiffany Gabbay, March 29, 2016

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In the wake of terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino and Brussels, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a new report that exposes the rise of terrorist activity among US-based Muslims.

ADL reports that in 2015, 80 US residents were inspired by ISIS and linked to terrorism themselves, marking a nearly 200 percent increase from 2014. PRNewswire reports:

“The tragic attacks in Brussels remind us of the need to continuously evaluate the threat posed by foreign terrorist organizations and the influence they have on communities around the world,” said Oren Segal, Director of ADL’s Center on Extremism. “While there are significant differences in the threats to the U.S. and Europe, this report identifies some meaningful similarities, which can help us understand the threats and develop solutions to counteract them.”

As in Europe, the vast majority of U.S. residents linked to terror plots and other activity motivated by Islamic extremist ideology in 2015 acted in support of ISIS. ISIS and other terrorist groups continue to take advantage of technology to mobilize followers, spread their messages and expand their influence worldwide. While in-person networks are stronger and more prevalent in Europe, and particularly in Belgium, than in the U.S., the internet and social media sites remain a pivotal element of the modern radicalization process worldwide.

The ADL report uncovered terror plots across 22 states, with the largest portion occurring in New York, Minnesota and California. The report found that these US resident-terrorists engaged in plotting attacks and furnishing material support for attacks. Key aspects of the report found that 20 of the terror-linked US residents converted to Islam and came from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds:

“Understanding the backgrounds, demographics, and aspirations of U.S. residents engaged in activity motivated by Islamic extremist ideology can provide valuable insights into the trends and nature of terrorism we currently face and how we can best be equipped to combat it,” said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “As we saw the events tragically unfold in Brussels, ISIS terror has far reaching influence across the globe.  And the risk is not only from ISIS members themselves, but from those who might be radicalized by their hateful message.”

The way we can combat it is by abandoning our obsession with multiculturalism and political correctness. Crucial to that is purging the invented term “Islamophobia” from the popular lexicon. Further, our intelligence and law enforcement communities must not be impeded in their responsibility to monitor all mosques and Islamic centers for hate speech and questionable practices among congregates and faith leaders. Nor should they be barred from monitoring self-segregated communities that have refrained from assimilation or engaging in profiling whenever and wherever applicable.

Most important, we must exhibit strength — not capitulation — in our foreign and domestic policy concerning terrorism or the infiltration of any values anathema to our own. We must not turn on our allies. We must not tamp down any regime, however repugnant, that aids us in crushing Islamic extremism. The Islamic world bows only to the iron fist. Diplomacy works on those with whom there is leverage, not on those who aren’t even afraid of losing their own lives or the lives of their children.

Categories: Islamic State, Islamic terrorism, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Obama's America
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Self-Criticism In The Arab World Following Brussels Attacks: Muslim Justification Of The Attacks Is Unacceptable; We Must Recognize That Most Terrorism Is Carried Out By Muslims

March 30, 2016

Self-Criticism In The Arab World Following Brussels Attacks: Muslim Justification Of The Attacks Is Unacceptable; We Must Recognize That Most Terrorism Is Carried Out By Muslims. MEMRI, March 29, 2016

Following the March 22, 2016 Brussels terrorist attacks that killed 35 and wounded over 300 others the Arab press featured numerous articles accusing the West and various opponents in the region of supporting terrorism.[1] However, several notable articles expressed self-criticism, laying the responsibility for the creation of suicide bombers and for horrific terror attacks on the prevailing cultures and perceptions in the Muslim and Arab countries of origin. They harshly criticized the Muslims for not standing up against terrorism or doing enough to eliminate it and for justifying or even praising the attacks while disregarding any Muslim responsibility for terrorism.

27421(Al-Nahar, Lebanon, March 23, 2016)

Following are excerpts from these articles:

Al-Hayat Editor: We Have Failed, We Flee Our Countries And The World Attempts To Flee The Wave Of Suicide Bombers Produced By Our Culture

In an article titled “We Have Failed Indeed,” the editor of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat, Ghassan Charbel, attacked the Arabs and Muslims for sowing destruction and fear in the very same European countries that had agreed to take them in after they had fled their failed countries. Charbel argued that the Arabs and Muslims had not managed to build states and citizens that could integrate into the modern world, and that they must recognize their failure and start from scratch. He wrote: “Are we [the Arabs and Muslims] simply part of this world, or are we perhaps an explosive charge implanted in [this world’s] entrails? Are we a normal neighborhood in the global village, or are we maybe a neighborhood of suicide bombers in [that village]? Are these massacres that move [from place to place] aimed at annexing the Arab and Muslim communities in the West to the lexicon of slaughter and suicide? Are we part of the world’s present and future, or are we a dark tempest that seeks to send [the world] back to the caves that it abandoned when it chose the path of progress and human dignity?

“Do we seek to defend our character, right, or identity? Or do we [actually] seek to impose this character on others? Is our option for the other essentially that he will either be like us or we will blow him up, so that his body parts mingle with ours? Is it accurate [to say] that we are calmed only by seeing the streets of the other’s world full of barricades of corpses and broken glass? Who was it that allowed Muslim fanatics to kill a Turk on the streets of Istanbul, a Frenchman on the streets of Paris, and a tourist on the streets of Brussels?

“Has a man who came as a refugee or immigrant to a foreign country that took him in and provided him with a roof over his head, an address, social assistance, and medical care the right to blow himself up on its streets because it did not embrace his character, his interpretation, and his mode of thinking and way of life? Does the discourse regarding unemployment and non-integration in Western society detract from [the horror of] the crime? Has a spiteful person the right to kill the other merely because he does not drink with him at the same fount? Have we have the right to continue delving into historical sources in order to rely on past wrongs done to us and use this to justify the slaughter of innocents in a country whence we fled because of a tyrant or a civil war [in our own countries]? Who gave us the right to dictate to others the nature of their regimes, their values, and their lifestyle?

“We have failed indeed.

“This is the truth that can no longer be concealed or condoned. We have failed at building a normal state – a state that lives within its borders. a state of institutions that strives its utmost to obtain progress and development and provide its citizens with work opportunities and involvement, a state that cooperates with its neighbors and the world without being panic-stricken or fettered by spite. We have also failed to build a normal citizen, [one] who belongs to the current stage of development in a rapidly developing world.

“We have failed indeed.

“For decades and centuries, we have been gripped by negligence. We feared, and we closed ourselves off. We punished the oppositionist. We obliterated those who cast doubt, and accused anybody who raised questions of treason. We imprisoned the throats, the fingers, and the dreams. And thus our institutions rotted away – if they ever existed at all. The schools, the universities, and our educational curricula rotted away. Children graduate from our schools with sick imaginations and inflexible emotions… The student has become a number… and a bomb. We stood still on the world’s platform, as it [the world] moved ahead, further and further, and we became sadder and angrier. We continued to feel that the world was being built without us, and in our absence – that it was being built against us. And this was how we readied our bodies and the explosive charges and blew ourselves up.

“We have failed indeed.

“These feelings overpowered me when I listened to Syrians in Berlin recounting how they had crammed into the death boats in the hope of casting themselves and their children [ashore] into the bosom of a European country; when I listened to the Iraqis who had used the Syrians’ passports; and when I saw the tragedy in the eyes of the Yazidis, who were fleeing the hell of the [Islamic] State of [Abu-Bakr] Al-Baghdadi. This is frightening. How much we have read about our homelands and their deeply planted historical roots, while now we can only dream of escaping them, letting them die and writhe in agony around the sectarian anthems and victories by the militias. How we deluded ourselves that we were one people – and then our compatriots in this one people murdered us. We are left only with the death boats to flee our drowning countries…

“We have failed indeed.

“The world is seeking the best way to evade the throngs of refugees that we are sending, and the waves of suicide [terrorists] that are arriving from our territory and culture. The world treats us today as the source of peril to its security, progress, democracy and stability. The only solution remaining to us is to acknowledge this comprehensive and resounding failure, this terrible collapse. We must start from scratch, like a city devastated by a deadly earthquake. Continuing to hide behind lies and fallacies will [only] prolong our stay in the caves. We cannot progress to the future with our antiquated concepts and tattered garments. We cannot board the train without paying the fare [exacted] for our stagnation, our delusions, and our inflexible perceptions.”[2]

Jordanian Writer: Justifying Terrorism Is Worse Than The Attacks Themselves; We Are Responsible For The Terrorism In Our Own Countries

Tareq Masarwa, a writer for the official Jordanian daily Al-Rai, criticized how some Arabs are attempting to justify terrorist attacks by claiming that European countries are racist and marginalize Muslims. He wrote: “… [According to] some analyses [of the Brussels attacks,] the terrorists grew up in the outskirts of European cities and were angry at being marginalized! We hear these same excuses here. However, other analyses responded [to these claims] with a wise comparison: They [the Muslim terrorists in Europe] chose terrorism. Otherwise, why aren’t there millions of [South] American terrorists in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, since they too are poor and grew up in the outskirts of big cities?! According to another analysis, Europe does not give immigrants from North Africa, and specifically from Africa itself, the same opportunities that it gives European immigrants. This constitutes a justification of terrorism, since Europe gives the immigrant the opportunity for a free education, and thousands of Jordanians have attended French and German universities for free… and had an easy time becoming citizens of those countries… How are France, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium expected to promote immigrants who are illiterate? And under what social conditions can a 10-person Arab or African family [hope to] exist?!

“It is shameful that we demand that the world treat us justly as we drive away our sons by killing them, imprisoning them, or failing to provide them with proper education, healthcare, and employment, and with a dignified life. The sight of people flocking to Europe’s borders, including Syrians, Iraqis, Kurds, Afghans, and Iranians, is heartbreaking, especially when they are carrying their children or pushing them in front of them – but all we do is curse the Europeans as racists who hate Muslims and foreigners, and consider it our right to murder them in their airports, trains, and theaters.

“Did the Europeans take over our countries? Yes. But they left over 50 years ago, and we now call on them to bring down our tyrants, and accuse them of dragging their feet [on this issue].

“Terrorism is a crime, and justifying it is an even worse crime. What is happening in the cities of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, and Tunisia is terrorism, and we are responsible for its formation, its arming, and its funding. It is pointless to justify the murder of Europeans and Americans out of a desire to justify our own crimes.”[3]

Kuwaiti Writer: The Muslims Are Not Doing Enough Against Terrorism – And Some Are Even Praising It

Kuwaiti writer and author Khalil ‘Ali Haidar wrote in the Bahraini daily Al-Ayyam that the Muslims are not doing enough against terrorism and are shirking their responsibility for it. He wrote: “What are we doing here in our countries, or in Western countries in Europe and America, while these terrible blows of terrorism land on us and them, one after the other? … In fact, we do not know how to act against these terrorists. Is it sufficient that following each of these terrorist actions, which take place in merciless rapid succession and are all perpetrated by young Muslims… that we say ‘they aren’t Muslims’ and ‘they do not represent true Islam’ and are misguided khawarij[4] and apostates? And will the world be satisfied with [such statements]?

“Is it normal that while terrorism succeeds in recruiting hundreds and even thousands of Muslims, we are satisfied to persuade ourselves that their numbers ‘are still negligible’ compared to the global Muslim population? Must the number of terrorists swell to tens or hundreds of thousands before we realize that a thunderous pounding torrent [is headed] towards us, and that this means that we must stop, convene, and give intellectuals the freedom to examine the reasons [for this] and the freedom to publish the results of their studies?

“What if we had been citizens of France, Britain, Spain, and the U.S., and had given Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens, and others all these benefits [that have been given to the Muslims in Europe], including job opportunities, the option of  citizenship, salaries, and subsidies – and then they became terrorists who murdered us?! …

“The religious culture of the Islamic world during this era is afflicted with innumerable ills. We turn the world upside down over various matters, such as an article that offends us, or issues regarding the niqab, Halal meat, Christians using the word Allah – which Muslims in Malaysia, for instance, claim as their exclusive right. [Furthermore,] many leaders of Pakistani and other immigrant [groups] expend all their efforts in the sectarian campaign against the Ahmadi movement, to the point where they have no time to examine this terrorist urge among their young people, including among the educated, engineers and [other] experts.

“Unfortunately, the Muslims do not yet unanimously condemn ISIS. Some Muslims praise them [ISIS members], think the media wrongs them, and join them at the first opportunity, and even carry out the first suicide mission they are offered anywhere in the world!

“One reason for the immaturity of Muslim young people in Britain, France, and the U.S. is that the leadership of the religious institutions, and all religious activity, still remain in the hands of Arab, Pakistani and other activists and leaders who have fled to the West [and continue to] support political Islam parties. These leaders may not [themselves] carry out terrorist attacks, but they also do not truly take a stand against the terrorist religious culture. Moreover, most of their writings, ideas, and strategic positions regarding an Islamic system and the caliphate state share [this religious culture].

“We say that ‘terrorism has no religion and no homeland.’ But we must confront the fact that most terrorist attacks in the Arab and Muslim world itself are not carried out by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Ahmadis, or Baha’is – but by Muslims and the sons and daughters of Muslims. Some are not satisfied with carrying out their crimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, but carry them out in Western countries. And even if they believe that terrorism in Europe and the U.S. is justified because of [these countries’] ‘colonialist past’ and ‘hostile positions’ against the Arabs and Muslims – of what crimes are the Egyptians, Iraqis, Afghans, and Nigerians guilty? Do those countries also have shameful colonialist pasts?”[5]

 

Endnotes:

[1] See MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 6360, Arab Press Reactions To The Brussels Attacks: Blaming The West, Enemies In The Region For The Spread Of Global Terrorism, March 23, 2016.

[2] Al-Hayat (London), March 28, 2016.

[3] Al-Rai (Jordan), March 24, 2016.

[4] The Khawarij was a group that broke away from the forces of Caliph ‘Ali bin Abu Taleb and formed Islam’s first religious opposition group.

[5] Al-Ayyam (Bahrain), March 23, 2016.

Categories: Islamic terrorism, Muslim media
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After Brussels, it’s Time to Revisit Enhanced Interrogation

March 29, 2016

After Brussels, it’s Time to Revisit Enhanced Interrogation, Power Line, Paul Mirengoff, March 29, 2016

(Why hasn’t Trump suggested something like that? Oh. Wait. He did and was widely criticised for it. — DM)

According to reports, the terrorists who carried out last week’s attacks in Brussels acted sooner than originally planned because they feared that captured terrorist Salah Abdeslam would inform authorities of the attacks. Apparently, they need not have worried.

Belgian officials questioned Abdeslam only lightly, and not at all about possible new attacks. Instead, using the discredited law enforcement model, they focused on the Paris attacks of last November, presumably hoping to obtain a confession.

Back in the days of the controversy over waterboarding, there was talk about a “ticking time bomb” scenario. The question was: When we know there’s time bomb ready to go off, but don’t know the location, is it okay to waterboard a captured terrorist who likely has knowledge of the impending attack?

Opponents of waterboarding, having no satisfactory answer, tended to pooh-pooh the question. It was based on an unrealistic scenario, they insisted.

Tell that to the victims of the Brussels attacks.

In reality, most captured terrorists present a variation of the ticking time bomb scenario. These days, organizations like ISIS are constantly planning new attacks. A captured terrorist who has been active recently might very well know something about upcoming attacks in his locale.

It’s unlikely that even in the Age of Obama, the U.S. would have handled Abdeslam as ineffectively as the Belgians did. One can imagine our people declining to question the terrorist for 24 hours because he was hospitalized and then questioning him only for a fairly short time because “he seemed very tired” after surgery. But I doubt that we would have failed to ask about future attacks.

But how far we would have gone to obtain answers? Marc Thiessen suggests we might not have had to go far. He says that “in the CIA’s experience, two-thirds of detainees cooperated without any enhanced interrogation techniques at all.” That’s because “just the experience of disappearing into secret detention — with no idea where they were and no lawyer present — was enough to get them talking.”

But would the Obama administration have “disappeared” Abdeslam following his highly visible capture? And if it had, would he have started talking in time to enable authorities to act on his information?

Finally, and this is key, what if Abdeslam proved to be among the one-third of detainees who don’t cooperate without enhanced interrogation?

In that scenario, no one with a decent regard for innocent human life could object to the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on a terrorist like this. Abdeslam was the mastermind behind the Paris attacks. According to Thiessen investigators had found detonators and weapons in a safe house with his fingerprints. This was a ticking time bomb scenario.

It’s time to revisit the question of enhanced interrogation, a question that the U.S. answered incorrectly during a lull in the terrorist threat.

Categories: Brussels terror attack, Enhanced interrogation, Islamic terrorism
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The Sinai Insurgency is Spiking

March 29, 2016

The Sinai Insurgency is Spiking, Israel Defense, Dr. Shaul Shay, March 29, 2016

(Please see also, Sisi asks Obama for military intervention to save Egypt from ISIS. — DM)

SianiPhoto: AP

On March 19, 2016, a terrorist attack on a checkpoint in the Safa neighborhood in southern Arish city resulted in the death of 15 police personnel. The victims were two police captains, a first lieutenant, and 12 conscripts. A police officer and two conscripts are still missing after the attack and the whereabouts of the three “missing” police officers are still unknown. Egyptian security forces killed five of the terrorists after violent clashes that lasted for two hours.

This attack is the last among a series of terrorist attacks that have targeted army and police centers in the Sinai Peninsula. The attack was the biggest in Sinai this year and the deadliest since July 2015. It could mark the return of Wilayat Sinai (Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis) to large-scale coordinated attacks after a period of limited operations against checkpoints and security personnel.

Wilayat Sinai has claimed numerous deadly attacks in the region recently, targeting mainly security forces. Earlier this week, an Egyptian soldier and police officer were killed during two separate attacks in the northern Sinai Peninsula. Gunmen affiliated with Wilayat Sinai shot and killed the officer outside his home in el-Arish. A soldier was also killed by a sniper in Sheikh Zuweid, which is not far from el-Arish.

The attack

The terror attack was carefully organized, suggesting it had long been planned. Wilayat Sinai surveillance personnel had probably observed the checkpoint for some time and that automatic weapons and an RPG were stashed nearby.

The checkpoint was close to a valley and olive farm, providing ground cover that the terrorists probably used to crawl undetected on the ground as they hid their weapons. When the suicide bomber struck, his cohorts were then able to fire on any survivors using their cache of weapons.

According to the prosecutor-general, the incident took place at 6.30pm on Saturday (March 19). Prosecutors say checkpoint personnel were subjected to mortar and RPG fire. Ambulances attempting to reach the scene of the attack also came under heavy gunfire.

Wilayat Sinai claimed responsibility

The Wilayat Sinai, which is affiliated with the Islamic State group, claimed responsibility for the attack. In a statement on Twitter, the group said the attack was “part of a series of operations in response to the humiliation and searching of Muslim women at checkpoints.”

The statement said a suicide bomber – Abul-Qaaqaa Al-Masri – drove an explosive-laden car into the security force and detonated it. The statement threatened more attacks in the future.

The response of the Egyptian security forces

President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi held a security meeting attended by the ministers of interior and defense, the army chief of staff and senior army and police commanders. Presidential spokesperson Alaa Youssef said Al-Sisi ordered the army and police to coordinate fully in the field.

Security forces were placed on high alert, and the decision was taken to continue targeting terrorist and criminal dens while simultaneously prioritizing the safety and security of civilians.

Egypt’s North Sinai prosecution began investigations into the attack. The prosecution has inspected the site of the attack and will later listen to the testimonies of eyewitnesses and officials in the checkpoint, judicial sources said.

A few days later, Egypt’s army executed an operation to get revenge for the army and police martyrs. The forces destroyed a number of militant hideouts in Rafah and Sheikh Zuweid cities in raids. An Egyptian Army spokesperson has said that 60 Islamic State group militants were killed after fighter jets targeted the group’s positions in North Sinai.

In a Facebook post detailing the outcome of the operation, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Samir said, “counterterrorism units backed by the air force” had “killed 60 terrorists, wounded another 40 and destroyed 27 four-wheel (drive) pick-up trucks south of Rafah and Sheikh Zayed.”

Egypt’s war against terror

A new report of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) think tank, shows Egypt suffered more than 100 attacks on average per month from January to August 2015, compared to around 30 attacks per month in 2014.

The attacks are also spreading around the country. Until June 2013 violence was mostly contained to North Sinai, but after the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi by Egypt’s military, reports of militant strikes are coming in from all over the country. In particular, Greater Cairo (the provinces of Giza and Cairo), Fayoum and Sharqia have seen a spike in incidents.

The insurgency in North Sinai has transformed into near-daily attacks, often with use of advanced weaponry. Civilians account for the majority of casualties in these strikes.

Another report of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies – the Cairo index of stability, confirmed that terrorist organizations in Egypt in 2015 have become more aggressive than ever before. The number of terrorist attacks reached 617 in 2015, compared with 349 in 2014. According to the same index, Sinai’s statistics are among the worst in Egypt, as the number of terrorist attacks there reached 90 in 2015.

Yet details of the index confirmed there was a crackdown on terrorist organizations following the attacks on Sheikh Zuweid (July 2015): The total number of terrorist attacks in Egypt from August to December 2015 dropped significantly to 64, compared with 170 in the same 2014 period. The escalation in the attacks in recent weeks indicates that Egypt’s efforts to eliminate terrorism in Sinai has not been successful.

According to Maha Abdel Azim (Egyptian streets, March 13, 2016), an estimated 2100 people were killed in North Sinai in 2015, including roughly 1800 described by the military as terrorists, 150 civilians, 40 police officers and conscripts, and 140 military personnel. Many civilians are direct victims of militant attacks or are killed by often unidentified shelling. Others were killed in the crossfires during clashes between the military and militant groups. The estimate is a roundup based on statements by the military spokesperson as well as reporting from Aswat Masriya and Ahram Online.

In January 2016, Islamic State wrote in its weekly magazine Naba’, which runs news from the group’s various branches, that the Sinai branch had killed 1,400 people – members of the military and police as well as collaborators and tribal fighters – in the previous 15 months. The Egyptian military has disputed this figure and said only 69 military personnel were killed in that period.

Summary

Egyptian forces are grappling with an Islamist insurgency based in North Sinai governorate, which spiked following the 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. The insurgency has killed hundreds of Egyptian security forces, while the armed forces have said their operations have killed Thousands of militants in the area.

One of Wilayat Sinai’s largest attacks came on July 1 ,2015, when car bombs targeted security checkpoints in Sheikh Zuweid. According to a statement from Egyptian army officials issued shortly after the attacks, 17 soldiers and more than 100 militants died.

The challenge of the ongoing terror attacks in Sinai demand a comprehensive response of military and civilian counter measures. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced last year to spend 10 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.28 million) on developing the Sinai Peninsula. Additionally, the current government has said that it recognizes the need to work with the local population and provide a development program for the region.

Egypt urgently needs to come up with proper long-term social, political, and economic strategies. Only a well-coordinated plan of dialogue with the local population, social and economic development and military and security crackdown on terrorism will return security and stability to the Sinai region.

Categories: Egypt, Foreign policy, Islamic terrorism, Siani, Sisi
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Op-Ed: EXPOSE: Belgium accepted Islamization for electoral reasons

March 29, 2016

Op-Ed: EXPOSE: Belgium accepted Islamization for electoral reasons, Israel National News, Giulio Meotti, March 29, 2016

The conversation opens with a proverb: “In the land of the blind the one-eyed is a king, but not in Belgium, where those who have tried to raise the alarm have been left alone.” These are the words of Alain Destexhe, a prominent figure among the liberals in Brussels, former secretary of Médecins Sans Frontières and president of the International Crisis Group.

He is also author of “Lettre aux progressistes qui flirtent avec l’islam réac” (a letter to the progressives who flirt with reactionary Islam – Editions du Cerisier),  a letter-pamphlet that Destexhe dedicated to Philippe Moureaux, the man considered responsible for the transformation of a large suburb of Brussels into the European hub of Islamic holy war.

Two days ago, the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Michel, said that Moureaux bears a “huge responsibility.”

“For twenty years, he reigned in a sort of conspiracy of silence” continues Destexhe as he talks to us. “At the heart of this system was the powerful Philippe Moureaux, mayor of Molenbeek, media darling, who has had a real moral and political domination over Brussels’ policy. He has created a climate of intellectual terror against the few who dared to stand up. Philippe Moureaux had realized that the future of socialism would depend on the immigrants who would become, symbolically, the new proletariat”.

But who is Moureaux? Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liege, Senator, Director of the Institut Emile Vandervelde (the think tank of the Socialist Party), deputy prime minister in the Martens government, but since 1983 city councilor and then, more importantly, mayor of Molenbeek for twenty years (1992- 2012). Son of minister Charles Moureaux, Philippe has long been the darling of the anti-racist left. The “loi Moureaux”, the Moureaux law, is in fact the rule that in 1981 criminalized acts inspired by xenophobia.

Nicknamed “Moustache” for his mustache, married to a Muslim Tunisian woman, Philippe Moureaux, even before becoming mayor of Molenbeek, had always boasted of defending the rights of immigrants. He included, for the first time in the history of Belgium, Muslim representatives in municipal and regional lists. This scion of the Belgian policy has been the mayor of Molenbeek for so long that the strategic suburb has come to be embodied in Isis’ plans.

His pro-Arab sympathies date back to the war in Algeria, when Moureaux defended the representatives of the Algerian National Liberation Front, also secretly hiding them in the heights of Lustin, in the Namur region.

Merry Hermanus, activist of the Socialist Party in Brussels for decades, also has accused Moureaux: “Without the immigrant populations, the Socialist Party would have been reduced to eight percent of the electorate in Brussels. We have become prisoners.” A few days ago, Moureux published his book, “The Truth About Molenbeek”. He wrote it after the massacres of November 13, in Paris, when the political class began to question his leadership of the Brussels ghetto. In the volume, Moureaux refers to “my Muslim brothers,” writes that one of the engines of jihadism is our “Islamophobia” and punishes “a society that treats immigrants like the Jews before the war”.

“Multiculturalism has failed because we have allowed them to exclude themselves without integrating communities, causing a fragmentation of society,” tells me Alain Destexhe, former Secretary General of Doctors Without Borders. “We’re talking about Belgian citizens who reject the values of our country. Salah Abdeslam is a typical example of a guy who could lead a comfortable life. He had a decent salary and a guaranteed job for life “.

Why did you write the Lettre aux progressistes qui flirtent avec l’islam réac? To denounce the left that you could not criticize, while we were becoming the first country in Europe in number of jihadists and Brussels the weakest link in the fight against this reactionary Islam.

It was an electoral strategy: Moureaux used immigrants to stay in power. Today half of the officers in local councils and in Parliament of the Socialist Party are of foreign origin.

Why did they never demand conditions to give citizenship to immigrants? “It was a political electoral pact. Legal immigration (and illegal) was encouraged. Family reunification was facilitated. There was the granting of voting rights to foreigners, the fight against racism became the new paradigm of political discourse. And more: frequent visits to mosques, subsidies to Muslim associations, the provision of services to the Koranic schools, participation in the festival Eid El Kebir, anti-Israeli marches”.

When he was mayor, Moureaux also urged people to avoid driving during Ramadan, so as not to offend Muslims.

“Most politicians chose not to listen to sermons that became increasingly radical and in this climate radical organizations such as the Belgian Islamic Centre and others have prospered freely. Molenbeek has thus become the fastest growing area of the Brussels region of Belgium. The population of the district increased by 12 percent in 5 years and 30 percent in 15 years. The Islamization is taking place before our eyes. Already 30 percent of Brussels is Islamic”.

And there’s not only Molenbeek: “There are Anderlecht, Brussels City, Schaerbeek, Saint-Josse and Forest. When I was Secretary of Doctors Without Borders, in the ’90s, I often worked in Molenbeek. The population was already largely of immigrant origin, but nobody was trying to assert its own Islamic identity, like today. Women were not wearing the veil, no one asked halal food in schools, few went to the mosque. For this reason, if I look at Belgium today, I am very pessimistic. Perhaps it is too late”.

Categories: Belgium, Fascism, Freedom of speech, Islam and human rights, Islamic invasion, Islamic terrorism, Islamisation, Islamophobia, Molenbeek
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Secrets and Lies: Turkey’s Covert Relationship With ISIS

March 29, 2016

Secrets and Lies: Turkey’s Covert Relationship With ISIS, Clarion Project, Meira Svirsky, March 29, 2016

Islamic-State-5-IPWith the aid of Turkish officials, Islamic State fighters’ have been able to travel through Turkey to reach Syria (Photo: Video screenshot)

A hot warning received by intelligence officials revealed that the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) is planning an “imminent attack” on Jewish children in Turkey. Officials believe the most likely target is in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, where a Jewish school is attached to a synagogue and community center.

The information was obtained after Turkey arrested six ISIS operatives in the southern city of Gaziantep last week.

“This is a more than credible threat. This is an active plot,” a Turkey source said.

Less than 10 days ago, a suicide bomber stalked Israeli tourists in Istanbul before blowing himself up near them, killing five people (four of them Israelis) and wounding many more.

“The so-called Islamic State is believed to be behind both sets of attacks and the organization continues in determined efforts to perpetrate further attacks in Turkey and elsewhere,” reported Sky News, quoting from an intelligence report seen by the news outlet.

In addition to the six arrested, another three ISIS operatives were arrested last week. Turkey, it seems is scrambling to protect itself from attacks the terror group has threatened to execute all across Europe.

After the Brussels attacks, Turkish President RecepTayyip Erdogan shocked the world by saying that Turkey had captured one of the perpetrators of the massacre last June and send him back to his country.  Erdogan specifically said that Ibrahim El Bakraoui, one of the suicide bombers in the Brussels airport, was detained in Turkey and sent back to Belgium with a warning (that was ignored) that he was a militant.

Yet, new documents obtained by Kurdish YPG fighters (People’s Protection Units) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who are fighting together, refute the claim made by Erdogan that Turkey is preventing ISIS and Al-Nusra (Al Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria) from travelling through Turkey to reach Syria.

The documents seized from Islamic State headquarters in seven locations, including Kobane, show that ISIS fighters from all over the world – and particularly from Kazakhstan, Indonesia, and Tajikistan  — were given passage through Turkey to Syria.

The Firat News Agency (ANF), a Kurdish outlet whose websites have been repeatedly blocked in Turkey by Turkish courts, reports that the hundreds of documents show that since 2013, ISIS fighters have used the Istanbul and Adana airports and have received permits from the Turkish government to reside in Turkey until they cross over to Syria.

The documents also include bus tickets, electronic Turkish visas, residency permits, and documents with stamps from Turkish immigration officials.

Chillingly, the documents show that chemical and explosive materials was transferred from Turkey to Syria. One such document was signed by the manager of Istanbul’s Police Foreigners’ Department Erkan Aydoga. Manuals in Turkish as to how to use these materials were also given to the jihadis.

A sample of the documents can be viewed here.

Turkey, as has been previously reported, is playing a dangerous and duplicitous game with the West. As Clarion Project has wrote, Turkey’s arms transfers to al-Qaeda-linked Islamist jihadis in Syria have been long-documented, yet largely ignored by the Western media. A major raid by the U.S. on an Islamic State safe house in Syria in the summer of 2015 gleaned large amounts of intelligence undeniably linking Turkey to the Islamic State.

Similarly, the fact the Turkey has been the top financial sponsor of Hamas since 2012, with Erdogan arranging for the transfer of $250-300 million to this U.S.-designated terrorist group annually, is another oft-ignored inconvenience. Similarly, the West has brilliantly avoided confronting Turkey on its abysmal human rights record.

Using air-tight documentation, Nafeez Ahmed, editor of InsurgeIntelligence, writes about the many reasons the West has chosen to look the other way while Turkey facilitates oil sales for the Islamic State, which guarantees its strength and viability.

“There are many explanations,” writes Ahmed, “but one perhaps stands out: the West’s abject dependence on terror-toting Muslim regimes, largely to maintain access to Middle East, Mediterranean and Central Asian oil and gas resources.”

Since 2013, the Turkish government has been building a $100 million mega-mosque in Lanham, Maryland, taking Turkey’s“outreach” in America out of the realm of the subtle. This week in America, U.S. President Barack Obama will join Erdogan at the opening of the mosque, the largest in the U.S.

The show, it seems, must go on.

Categories: Erdogan, Islam and Jews, Islamic invasion, Islamic State, Islamic terrorism, Jews, Mosques, Obama and Islam, Obama and Turkey, Turkey
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