How to insult a “progressive,” Pat Condell via You Tube, July 6, 2015
Posted tagged ‘Multiculturalism’
How to insult a “progressive”
July 6, 2015Leftist and Islamic Policymakers Outlaw the Truth
July 4, 2015Leftist and Islamic Policymakers Outlaw the Truth, American Thinker, Sonia Bailley, July 4, 2015
No need to worry, the recent Ramadan triple slaughter fest in Tunisia, France and Kuwait has nothing to do with Islam. There is no linkage between Islam and terrorism, and the word Islamic need not be used to describe the terrorists because their murderous and barbaric ideology has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is, after all, a religion of peace that is being hijacked, perverted and distorted by only a small percentage of savage extremists.
Welcome to the false narrative that Western leaders, mainstream media outlets, and academic elites are enforcing on civil society to help shape the public’s perception of Islam so that it is always presented in a positive light. Any form of expression that reflects badly on Islam is in violation of Islamic law, which forbids any criticism of Islam, even what that criticism expresses the truth. Stories that are reported according to this narrative need not have anything to do with factual accuracy or truth. Both the 2009 Fort Hood massacre in Texas and the beheading in Vaughan Foods in Oklahoma last September were reported as workplace violence and not Islamic terrorism.
With the aid of leftist and Islamic policymakers shaping the course of international relations and security policies, that false narrative is finding its way into international policy to destroy the West’s hard-won, cherished core values. Realities and facts that might tarnish Islam’s name are deemed hate speech and becoming lost through censorship. The 57-state Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which is the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization that happens to be rooted in communism, and the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is the most influential and largest Muslim organization in the world pushing to criminalize any criticism of Islam, are two such policymakers who are influencing world leaders and the news media.
Most Western world leaders are bleating the same empty platitudes about the recent Ramadan terrorist attacks in Tunisia, France and Kuwait, carefully avoiding the word “Islam.” UK Prime Minister David Cameron explained to the media that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the terrorists who “do these things…do it in the name of a twisted and perverted ideology.” When asked if it’s right to say that the recent Ramadan attacks have nothing to do with Islam, UK Home Secretary Theresa May responded to BBC’s Andrew Marr in the positive, “that it has nothing to do with Islam. Islam is a peaceful religion,” and that the terror attacks are “about a perversion of Islam.”
Instead of issuing travel warnings not to vacation in Islamic countries especially during Ramadan, the Islamic “sacred” month of feasting — a month rife with bloodshed and battle since Islam’s inception, when armed raids on Meccan trade caravans and bloody battles were waged by Mohammed and his followers (including the 1973 Yom Kippur War on the 10th of Ramadan), not to mention the ISIS Ramadan message that jihad is 10 times more obligatory during Ramadan, and that those who die will be rewarded by Allah ten times more than during the rest of the year — Western leaders like Cameron continue to nourish the official politically correct narrative of Islam being a religion of peace not linked to terrorism.
The twisted and perverted ideology to which both Cameron and May refer, pervades pages and pages of the Koran and other Islamic doctrine, inspiring jihadists and religious Muslims to “do these things,” including operating child sex slave grooming gangs throughout Europe, especially in the UK, to rape, pimp, torture and sometimes kill non-Muslim underage schoolgirls. The Koran itself contains over 100 verses promoting violence against non-Muslims who, to this very day, remain victims of the verse.
What lies at the heart of Islam is an antipathy towards non-Muslims, as well as a deeply-entrenched duty and commandment from Allah to wage Jihad and eventually subjugate non-Muslims worldwide to Islamic rule in the name of Allah. Massive street prayer is one form of subjugation conducted only to intimidate and Islamize Western society, to remind non-Muslims who’s really in control. Similarly, forcing non-Muslims in their own countries, in the UK for example, to eat halal slaughtered meat — an utterly inhumane and barbaric Islamic practice, not to mention a multi-billion dollar industry controlled by Muslim Brotherhood organizations that fund jihad worldwide — when only a mere 5% of the UK population is Muslim, and when the Koran specifically exempts its followers from eating halal if it’s not available, is another way to subjugate non-Muslims.
People are becoming sitting duck targets for Islamic terrorists in Western countries and abroad because of the little-known but powerful world policymakers like the OSCE and OIC who influence world leaders to kowtow to Islamic interests. Western leaders fail to convey an accurate picture and understanding of what is really going on in the world because it might reflect badly on Islam, and they don’t want to appear “Islamophobic” for fear of more terrorist attacks. By failing to report the truth, they are denying citizens the opportunity to take appropriate action that could save their lives when faced with something that could be considered a threat, such as a beach vacation in an Islamic country over Ramadan.
The dead European tourists in Tunisia might still be here today had there been an undistorted flow of information to warn them that warfare and killing in the name of Islam are encouraged during the month of Ramadan. Furthermore, people might choose to avoid Islamic countries at all times if they were aware that these countries rely upon the most non-liberal draconian and barbaric Islamic or sharia-based corporal punishments imaginable.
The anti-blasphemy narrative pushed by the highly influential but little-known OIC, ehich speaks on behalf of over 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide, not only silences any expression considered to be offensive and insulting to Islam, but punishes the offenders, as Mohammed did to his dissenters and insulters. They were either condemned to hell or killed. Because Muslims consider Mohammed as the ideal model for mankind to follow, many Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, have also made blasphemy subject to the death penalty with their anti-blasphemy laws.
It is this anti-blasphemy law that the OIC is striving to legally enforce on the world in order to curtail speech and expression when it comes to Islam — not so much for religious compliance as for the global subjugation of non-Muslims to Islam. Since 2005, the OIC has been pushing relentlessly for a UN blasphemy resolution (Resolution 16/18 passed in 2011) to silence so-called Islamophobia — a term deliberately coined and marketed in the 1990s by the International Institute of Islamic Thought, one of the thousands of Muslim Brotherhood front groups worldwide, to drive public discourse and policy. However, the OIC’s top priority is to globally criminalize any criticism of Islam, and is working with the Muslim Brotherhood to accomplish this. Ten years later, in 2015, telling the truth about Islam has become a crime in some European countries.
The highly influential yet little-known OSCE that is rooted in communism, is supposed to protect and promote civil liberties. Instead, it is negotiating them away by capitulating to the OIC narrative of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose stated goal from the 1990s is to destroy Western civilization from within. Its goal of global domination is to be accomplished not through violence, at least not yet, but rather through the slow infiltration of Western government, military, judicial and academic institutions.
So far, there has been practically no opposition from any Western administration in power, only cooperation from world leaders, government officials, and leftist policymakers. In fact, the cooperation from Western leaders with OSCE and OIC policymakers has been so great, that the U.S. co-sponsored Resolution 16/18 with Pakistan, and helped usher it through in 2011, despite this resolution being a direct assault on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
At an OSCE May session in Vienna (on how the media can help prevent violent radicalization that leads to terrorism), OSCE panelist Leila Ghandi, producer and TV show host on the most popular Moroccan TV channel (2MTV) that is over 60% government-owned, maintained that the truth or facts about “a community” can sometimes constitute hate speech when those facts are offensive and therefore should not be said. The panelist’s words echo those of the new OIC Secretary General, Iyad Amin Madani, who tweeted earlier this year following the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris, that “freedom of speech must not become a hate speech and must not offend others.” In other words, truth about Islam is designated as hate speech.
Furthermore, OSCE panelist Victor Khroul, correspondent for Rossiya Segodnya, a Russian state-owned international news agency, questions why the mainstream media throughout the world still refer to the “self-proclaimed self-established state in the Middle East” as the Islamic State. His words echo those of Madani, who proclaimed last year that the Islamic State has no connection with Islam. Khroul claims it’s a mistake for these people to be called Muslim and their state Islamic, which only “confuses the audience with this correlation with Islam.” He maintains that it’s still possible “to find other words to describe this so-called state and its activity,” discounting the facts that Islamic State is what ISIS named itself and its state, and that ISIS clearly credits its motivation to Islam and its acts to Allah. The name Islamic State does not have to be rectified because it accurately reflects reality, defines the organization in question, and is therefore a correct term that would sit well in the world of Confucius and his doctrine on rectifying names.
Major Stephen Coughlin, an attorney, former U.S. Army intelligence officer, and the Pentagon’s leading expert on Islamic law and jihad (until he was dismissed in 2008 for linking Islam with terrorism with his Red Pill Briefings), stresses the urgency of defining the enemy as he defines himself: “you cannot target what you will not define…if I can’t use the concepts of Jihad that Al-Qaeda say they rely on, then I can’t understand what they are going to do.”
Author of Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, Coughlin attended the OSCE May session and responded to the OSCE jargon as follows:
“Once you decide that facts on the ground as they present themselves, can be considered hate speech, this is no longer about truth…you are subordinating facts that the public has a right to know when they formulate their decisions, and replacing them with narratives to keep them from coming to the understanding of events that can be articulated and verified. That can never be considered hate speech. We’re not talking about speech at all. We’re talking about brazen disinformation.”
Rather than disseminate vital information to the public that can save lives, Western world leaders are betraying their citizens by submitting to the OSCE and OIC narrative of outlawing any criticism of Islam and rendering truth illegal. Reassuring citizens that Islam is a religion of peace merely renders them incapacitated from exercising sound judgment, crippling their ability to make the right decision in the face of potential harm.
While global institutions and national security policies are being shaped, and compromised, by highly influential but ill-known world organizations such as the OSCE and OIC, it’s critical that citizens get to know who those policymakers really are, and become more engaged in public affairs and the political process in order to arrest the Islamization process of the West…before it’s too late to reverse.
Designating Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Immigration Enforcement
July 2, 2015Designating Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Immigration Enforcement, Center for Immigration Studies, Dan Cadman, July 2, 2015
During . . . (2009-2014 . . . half of a decade), ICE agents have removed exactly three aliens. Three. And yet the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and others tell us that the nation is peppered with Islamic State supporters, not to mention the plethora of other terrorist groups one can choose to affiliate with.
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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just issued a public report on the process used to designate foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which assigns lead responsibility to the Secretary of State. It is called “Combating Terrorism: Foreign Terrorist Organization Designation Process and U.S. Agency Enforcement Actions”.
GAO initially prepared and distributed the report to the Department of State (DOS) and other government parties in April, but withheld it publicly until material that DOS identified as “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU) was redacted from the public version just released.
Even with the SBU redactions, one finds some interesting and suggestive factoids buried in the report in typically dry bureaucratic language.
Among them is that, under the designation process developed by DOS, various agencies participating in the targeting and review can put “holds” on designation. Section 219 of the INA, which outlines the legal basis for designation of FTOs contains no such proviso.
The reasons described for placing “holds” are just a wee bit fuzzy and this arouses my suspicious nature because, in addition to the other government agencies one would expect to participate (such as the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Justice and Homeland Security Departments, etc.), one finds mentioned the DOS regional bureaus (see note 16 in the report). These are the folks that look out for the political angles of inter-governmental relationships between the United States and other countries. Could it be that bilateral politics are involved in FTO designation? One fears so, because it is suggestive that, although various other statistics are scattered throughout the GAO report, the number of holds and who placed them is nowhere to be found. Could this be the “sensitive” data that DOS didn’t want revealed to the public? If so, under which secretaries of State did such regional bureaus exercise this extra-statutory ability? And how many such holds have been placed, and for how long?
Another interesting factoid is that between 2009 and 2014 Customs and Border Protection inspectors denied entry to over 1,000 alien applicants for admission based on terrorism grounds, including membership in or affiliation with designated FTOs. We can reasonably assume that some portion of these aliens were applying for admission under the visa waiver program (VWP) and that a significant number were granted multiple entry visas by DOS consular officers before the terrorist connection was known, but that their visas were not revoked by DOS after the connection was made.
Then there is the abysmally low number of aliens taken into custody within the United States on terrorism-related removal grounds, presumably by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During the same date range used to calculate CBP figures, (2009-2014 — half of a decade), ICE agents have removed exactly three aliens. Three. And yet the FBI director, the director of national intelligence, and others tell us that the nation is peppered with Islamic State supporters, not to mention the plethora of other terrorist groups one can choose to affiliate with.
The shockingly low number comports with remarks I made in a prior posting when I commented that since the formation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose mission is obviously to protect the homeland, we Americans — and most particularly the leaders in this administration — seem to have forgotten the important lesson about the nexus between safe communities and using the deportation laws to remove foreign threats.
Two other noteworthy items that merit their own examinations in full, but not here: that waivers have been granted to individuals with terrorist connections, apparently both to enter the United States, and to gain various immigration benefits administered by one of DHS’s subordinate agencies; and that of the 69 FTOs designated since 1997 when the law authorizing designation took effect, 10 (nearly 15 percent of total designations) have been removed from the list by the Secretary of State.
How not to write about Iran
July 2, 2015How not to write about Iran, The New York Times, Ishaan Tharoor, July 2, 2015
(The NY Times article is a good example of how not to write about Iran. History is important, but Iran’s more recent activities are even more important. That ancient Persia and its Islamic successors engaged in and supported terrorism is important, but that the Islamic Republic of Iran still does is more important. Please see also, Rouhani Threatens Nuclear Breakout. — DM)
In the Western imagination, Iran has long been a kind of bogeyman. It’s the land of hostage crises and headscarves. It was part of the Axis of Evil (whatever that was). Its leaders grouse about defeating Israel, an American ally. Its mullahs, say Iran’s critics, plot terror and continental hegemony.
Supporters of the ongoing talks in Vienna, where Iranian diplomats and their international counterparts are wrangling over a final agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program, are in part hoping to change this overwhelming narrative.
Rapprochement between Iran and the U.S., they argue, would signal a new era for U.S. relations in the Middle East — and, at the very least, put to rest fears of yet another American military escalation in the region.
But whether that changes the actual Western discourse around Iran is another matter. Every society or culture gets stereotyped in some way by others — but Iran, even before the rise of the Islamic Republic in 1979, has been a very conspicuous victim.
That’s in part a consequence of its history. As the inheritor of Persia’s ancient empires, Iran has been the Other — the enemy of the nominal “West” — since classical times and the famous wars with Greek city-states. In the 18th century, some European writers and thinkers popularized the image of a “decadent” and “despotic” Persia as an allegorical device to critique their own societies. A century later, as Europe’s empires gained in power, the Orientalist cliches hardened and served to bolster the West’s own sense of racial and moral superiority.
Even in the present day, many of the old tropes have been trotted out during the nuclear talks. While giving testimony to Congress in 2013, Wendy Sherman, a senior State Department official and lead negotiator with Iran, counseled caution when dealing with the Iranian regime because “deception is in their DNA.” The remarks, which infuriated Tehran, gestured at much older Western perceptions of Iranians as “wily” swindlers who cannot be trusted.
Sherman was hardly alone in conjuring up this stereotype: Those opposed to her efforts have also done the same. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal last year warned against “haggling in a Mideast bazaar” and embarking on a “Persian nuclear carpet ride.” This April, Michael Oren, Israel’s former U.S. ambassador, went on a cringe-worthy ramble about the crafty tricks of Persian rug salesmen.
“The Iranians are not just expert carpet merchants,” Oren wrote, stretching the ungainly metaphor to its frayed, tasseled edges. “They also deal in terror and endangering American allies.”
Other more nuanced assessments fall into similar traps, too. Earlier this week, James Stavridis, a retired U.S. admiral, top NATO official and the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, painted a picture of the Iranian regime with the broadest brush he could possibly find.
“Tehran’s geopolitical strategy,” he wrote, “is taken directly from the playbooks of the first three Persian empires, which stretched over a thousand years.”
To no great surprise, this view of Iran as a mysterious realm, beholden to its past (and its vast store of carpets), irks some observers.
“Iran is an ancient civilization with a rich culture that definitely has roots in its old history,” Iranian-American journalist Negar Mortazavi tells WorldViews. “But to stereotype modern Iran and Iranians based on what happened thousands of years ago is wrong.”
Mortazavi argues that you would never see such simplistic, overreaching appraisals of American allies: “Do we view today’s Europe through the affairs of the Vikings? No. Do we look at Saudi Arabia through the lens of its old Islamic Empire when it was taking over the world? No.”
Arash Karami, the Iran editor of the Middle East news site Al-Monitor, dismisses the idea “that Iran has imperial ambitions in the Middle East simply because of its history.” He adds that “most Iranians only have a vague understanding” of the long-gone Achaemenid dynasty or the medieval Safavids.
The stereotypes in play seem to support the contention of some hawks that Iran is not a normal, rational state actor. Critics of the Islamic Republic may see nothing wrong with that, but these sorts of characterizations were being made well before the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the collapse of U.S.-Iran ties.
In a write-up published in January 1952, Time magazine named Iran’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh as “Man of the Year.” The recognition was not particularly flattering. It sneeringly described Iran as “a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar.” And it went on to attack both Mossadegh’s plan to nationalize Iran’s oil — at the expense of British and American energy interests — and the leader’s character.
Time actually called the Iranian politician “a strange old wizard.”
A year later, the Ivy League buddies of Time’s editors in the C.I.A. helped engineer a coup that ousted Mossadegh, scrapped Iran’s fledgling democracy, and re-installed the country’s monarchy as an American client. Memory of that event still informs the political conversation within Iran, but is rarely recognized in the West.
“In American media, it seems that either those wily Persians are calculating ‘chess masters’ outwitting the well-meaning Westerner,” says Karami, “or they’re bumbling idiots” who resent how “the West rules the Middle East.”
To be sure, there are many negative things that should be said about Iran’s political status quo — where a repressive theocratic government curbs dissent, jails journalists and actively supports armed proxies elsewhere in the Middle East. But you don’t need to start quoting Xenophon or Morier to get there.
“If you’re writing about a country of more than 77 million people,” says Kia Marakechi, news editor at Vanity Fair, “and the metaphors or signifiers you draw on come more from ‘Aladdin’ than a serious understanding of that nation’s politics and culture, you should probably hand the assignment to someone else.”
Pulling down the slaver flags of Islam and Africa
July 2, 2015Pulling down the slaver flags of Islam and Africa, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 2, 2015
In our incredibly tolerant culture, it has become politically incorrect to watch the General Lee jump a fence or a barn, but paying tribute to the culture that sent the slaves here and that still practices slavery is the culturally sensitive thing to do.
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The return of the Confederacy was averted in the summer of 2015 when major retailers frantically scoured through their vast offerings to purge any images of a car from the Dukes of Hazzard. If not for their quick thinking, armies of men in gray might have come marching down the streets of New York and San Francisco to stop off for an Iced Mocha Frappucino ™ at a local Starbucks before restoring slavery.
History will little note nor long remember the tired wage slaves making $7.25 an hour while checking Amazon and eBay databases for tin models of an orange car with a Confederate flag on top. During this courageous defense of the homeland from the scourge of a mildly politically incorrect 80s show, Hillary Clinton committed her own unpardonable racist hate crime by saying, “All lives matter”.
The politically correct term is, “Black lives matter.”
Even while our own Boss Hoggs in DC and SF are locking up the Duke boys as a symbol of racism, they are loudly arguing that black lives matter, all lives don’t. The proportion that the weight of a life should be measured by race is the sort of idea that we might have associated with slavery. Today it’s an idea that we associate with racial tolerance as we heal our nation’s racial wounds one race riot at a time.
Romanticizing the South means a whipping from our cultural elite. Instead of romanticizing the culture that bought slaves, they romanticize the Middle Eastern and African cultures that sold them the slaves.
When Obama condemned Christianity for the Crusades, only a thousand years too late, in attendance was the Foreign Minister of Sudan; a country that practices slavery and genocide. Obama could have taken time out from his rigorous denunciation of the Middle Ages to speak truth to the emissary of a Muslim Brotherhood regime whose leader is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. But our moral liberals spend too much time romanticizing actual slaver cultures.
It’s a lot easier for Obama to get in his million dollar Cadillac with its 5-inch thick bulletproof windows, a ride Boss Hogg could only envy, and chase down a couple of good ole boys than it is to condemn a culture that committed genocide in our own time, not in 1099, and that keeps slaves today, not in 1815.
Even while the Duke boys were being chased through Georgia, Obama appeared at an Iftar dinner; an event at which Muslims emulate Mohammed, who had more slaves than Robert E. Lee. There are no slaves in Arlington House today, but in the heartlands of Islam, from Saudi mansions to ISIS dungeons, there are still slaves, laboring, beaten, bought, sold, raped and disposed of in Mohammed’s name.
Slavery does not exist under the Confederate flag eagerly being pulled down. It does exist under the black and green flags of Islam rising over mosques in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and America today.
In our incredibly tolerant culture, it has become politically incorrect to watch the General Lee jump a fence or a barn, but paying tribute to the culture that sent the slaves here and that still practices slavery is the culturally sensitive thing to do. In 2015, slavery is no longer freedom, but it certainly is tolerance.
And it’s not just about Islam.
If romanticizing Dixie is wrong, so is romanticizing those ancient African cultures so beloved by amateur anthropologists and professional sociologists with more plastic tribal jewelry than sense. Slavery was an indigenous African and Middle Eastern practice. Not to mention an indigenous practice in America among indigenous cultures.
If justice demands that we pull down the Confederate flag everywhere, even from the top of the orange car sailing through the air in the freeze frame of an old television show, then what possible justification is there for all the faux Aztec knickknacks? Even the worst Southern plantation owners didn’t tear out the hearts of their slaves on top of pyramids. The romanticization of Aztec brutality plays a crucial role in the mythology of Mexican nationalist groups like La Raza promoting the Reconquista of America today.
Black nationalists romanticize the slave-holding civilization of Egypt despite the fact that the narrative of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from bondage played a crucial role in the end of slavery in America. The endless stories about the “Amazons” of the African kingdom of Dahomey neatly fit into the leftist myth of a peaceful matriarchal Africa disrupted by European colonialism, but Dahomey ran on slavery.
The “Amazons” helped capture slaves for the Atlantic slave trade. White and black liberals are romanticizing the very culture that captured and sold their forefathers into slavery. “In Dahomey,” the first major mainstream black musical was about African-Americans moving to Dahomey. By then the French had taken over old Dahomey and together with the British had put an end to the slave trade.
The French dismantled the “Amazons” and freed many of Dahomey’s slaves only for the idiot descendants of both groups to romanticize the noble last stand of Dahomey fighting for the right to export black slaves to Cuba and condemn the European liberators who put a stop to that atrocity.
If we crack down on romanticizing Dixie, how can we possibly justify romanticizing Dahomey or the Aztecs or Mohammed? If slavery and racism are wrong, then they are wrong across the board.
Even by the miserably racist standard under which all lives don’t matter, only black lives matter, Dahomey and Mohammed had bought, sold and killed enough black lives to be frowned upon.
If we go back far enough in time, most cultures kept slaves. The Romans and Greeks certainly did. That’s why the meaningful standard is not whether a culture ever had slaves, but whether it has slaves today. If we are going to eradicate the symbols of every culture that ever traded in slaves, there will be few cultural symbols that will escape unscathed. But the academics who insist on cultural relativism in 19th century Africa, reject it in 19th century South Carolina thereby revealing their own racism.
And so instead of fighting actual modern day slavery in Africa and the Middle East, social justice warriors are swarming to invade Hazzard County.
As Ben Carson pointed out, we will not get rid of racism by banning the Confederate flag. Even when it is used at its worst, by the likes of Dylann Storm Roof, it is a symptom, not the problem. Roof was not radicalized by the dead Confederacy, but by the racial tensions kicked off by the Trayvon Martin case.
The same racial tensions that led to the murder of two police officers by a #BlackLivesMatter protester in New York City led to the massacre of nine black congregants in a church in Charleston. This surge of violence has its roots in racist activism by Obama and his supporters seeking power and political gain, but feeding racial tensions for political purposes eventually risks leading to actual violence.
The Confederate flag is a matter of history. The racial tensions stirred up by Obama have actually gotten people killed. Slavery is not making a comeback and Robert E. Lee will not come riding into San Francisco any time soon. The Civil War ended long ago. The country would be a better place if modern racists who believe that some lives, whether black or white, matter more than others would stop trying to start one.
UK: Belfast Pastor Faces Prison for “Grossly Offending” Islam
June 28, 2015UK: Belfast Pastor Faces Prison for “Grossly Offending” Islam, The Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, June 28, 2015
- James McConnell’s prosecution is one of a growing number of examples in which British authorities — who routinely ignore incendiary speech by Muslim extremists — are using hate speech laws to silence Christians.
- “My church funds medical care for 1,200 Muslim children in Kenya and Ethiopia. I’ve no hatred in my heart for Muslims… I believe in freedom of speech. I’m going to keep on preaching the gospel. I have nothing against Muslims, I have never hated Muslims, I have never hated anyone. But I am against what Muslims believe. They have the right to say what they believe in and I have a right to say what I believe.” — James McConnell, Pastor.
- “Since the Islamic State took over, it [Mosul] has become the most peaceful city in the world.” — Raied Al-Wazzan, Executive Director, Belfast Islamic Center. Al-Wazzan is now trying to leverage the controversy over McConnell’s remarks to shame local politicians into providing him with free public land to build a mega-mosque.
An evangelical Christian pastor in Northern Ireland is being prosecuted for making “grossly offensive” remarks about Islam.
James McConnell, 78, is facing up to six months in prison for delivering a sermon in which he described Islam as “heathen” and “satanic.” The message was streamed live on the Internet, and a Muslim group called the police to complain.
According to Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS), McConnell violated the 2003 Communications Act by “sending, or causing to be sent, by means of a public electronic communications network, a message or other matter that was grossly offensive.”
Observers say that McConnell’s prosecution is one of a growing number of examples in which British authorities — who routinely ignore incendiary speech by Muslim extremists — are using hate speech laws to silence Christians.
McConnell, who turned down an offer to avoid a trial, says the issue of Christians being singled out for persecution in Britain must be confronted, and that he intends to turn his case into a milestone trial “in defense of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
Pastor James McConnell of Belfast: “I have no regrets about what I said. I do not hate Muslims, but I denounce Islam as a doctrine and I make no apologies for that. I will be pleading ‘not guilty’ when I stand in the dock in August.”
The controversy began on the evening of Sunday, May 18, 2014, when McConnell, the founding pastor of the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle, an evangelical mega-church in northern Belfast, preached a sermon on a foundational verse of the Christian Bible, 1 Timothy 2:5, which states: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
Preaching with an oratorical flourish common to traditional Protestantism, McConnell said (sermon begins at 22m, 40s):
“For there is one God. Think about that. For there is one God. But what God is [the Apostle] Paul referring to? What God is he talking about? The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
“The God who we worship and serve this evening is not Allah. The Muslim God, Allah, is a heathen deity. Allah is a cruel deity. Allah is a demon deity. A deity that this foolish government of ours … pays homage to, and subscribes financial inducements to curry their favor to keep them happy….
“While in Muslim lands Christians are persecuted for their faith; their homes burned, their churches destroyed, and hundreds of them literally have given their lives for Christ in martyrdom. A lovely young [Sudanese] woman by the name of Miriam, 27 years-of-age, because she has accepted Christ as her Savior, will be flogged publicly and hanged publicly. These fanatical worshippers are worshippers of the god called Allah. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a fact and it cannot be denied and it cannot be refuted.
“I know the time will come in this land … and in this nation to say such things will be an offense to the law. It would be reckoned erroneous, unpatriotic. But I am in good company, the company of [Protestant Reformers] Luther and Knox and Calvin and Tyndale and Latimer and Cranmer and Wesley and Spurgeon and such like him.
“The Muslim religion was created many hundreds of years after Christ. Mohammed, was born in 570. But Muslims believe that Islam is the true religion, dating back to Adam, and that the biblical Patriarchs were all Muslims, including Noah and Abraham and Moses, and even our Lord Jesus Christ.
“To judge by some of what I have heard in the past few months, you would think that Islam was little more than a variation of Christianity and Judaism. Not so. Islam’s ideas about God, about humanity, about salvation are vastly different from the teachings of the Holy Scriptures. Islam is heathen. Islam is satanic. Islam is a doctrine spawned in Hell.”
McConnell’s comments about Islam comprised less than ten minutes of a 35-minute sermon that focused on Christian theology.
The blowback was as swift as it was predictable. The Belfast Islamic Center, which claims to represent all of the 4,000 Muslims thought to be living in Northern Ireland, complained to police, who dutifully launched an investigation into whether there was a “hate crime motive” behind McConnell’s remarks.
McConnell later issued a public apology, but he refused to recant. He also rejected a so-called informed warning. Such warnings are not convictions, but they are recorded on a person’s criminal record for 12 months. Anyone who refuses to accept the warning can be prosecuted, and McConnell now faces six months in prison. The first hearing of his case is set for August 6.
In an interview with the Belfast Telegraph, McConnell said he would rather go to prison than disavow his comments about Islam.
“I am 78 years of age and in ill health but jail knows no fear for me. They can lock me up with sex offenders, hoodlums and paramilitaries and I will do my time.
“I have no regrets about what I said. I do not hate Muslims, but I denounce Islam as a doctrine and I make no apologies for that. I will be pleading ‘not guilty’ when I stand in the dock in August.
McConnell said that the charges against him were symbolic of the persecution Christians are facing in Britain today:
“It is a case of back to the future. In the first century, the apostles were jailed for preaching the gospel. Early Christians were boiled in oil, burnt at the stake and devoured by wild beasts. If they faced that and kept their faith, I can easily do six months in jail.”
McConnell’s attorney, Joe Rice, vowed to fight the case “tooth and nail.” He said:
“I don’t agree with everything Pastor McConnell says but his prosecution represents a threat to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. If we’re moving into a genuinely pluralist society, these freedoms must be extended to Christians as much as they are to others.”
After public prosecutors announced that they plan to call eight witnesses in McConnell’s prosecution, Rice said:
“Rest assured we will call many, many more. This will be a landmark case with leading political, religious and academic figures giving evidence.
“The logic of the decision to prosecute Pastor McConnell means that many clerics — including Catholic priests and other evangelical pastors — could now find themselves under investigation for preaching with passion.
“My client’s remarks weren’t addressed at individual Muslims but at Islam in generic terms.”
McConnell stressed that he does not hate Muslims. “My church funds medical care for 1,200 Muslim children in Kenya and Ethiopia,” he said. “I’ve no hatred in my heart for Muslims, but I won’t be stopped from preaching against Islam.” He added:
“I apologized last year if I had unintentionally hurt anyone’s feelings. I would defend the right of any Muslim cleric to preach against me or Christianity. I most certainly don’t want any Muslim clerics prosecuted but I find it very unfair that I’m the only preacher facing prosecution.”
In an interview with the Guardian, McConnell reiterated that he is “not going to be gagged.” He said:
“The police tried to shut me up and tell me what to preach. It’s ridiculous. I believe in freedom of speech. I’m going to keep on preaching the gospel. I have nothing against Muslims, I have never hated Muslims, I have never hated anyone. But I am against what Muslims believe. They have the right to say what they believe in and I have a right to say what I believe.”
The executive director of the Belfast Islamic Center, Raied al-Wazzan, is leading the push to prosecute McConnell. “This is inflammatory language and it definitely is not acceptable,” he saidin an interview with the BBC.
Al-Wazzan is now trying to leverage the controversy over McConnell’s remarks to shame local politicians into providing him with public land, for free, to build a mega-mosque in Belfast. “We need the land from the government,” he told the BBC. “And there is a huge demand for it. The Muslim population is growing in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, but especially in south Belfast.”
In January 2015, al-Wazzan drew attention to himself when he praised the Islamic State’s rule of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, where jihadists have decimated out the city’s 2,000-year-old, 60,000-strong Christian community. Speaking to the BBC, al-Wazzan said: “Since the Islamic State took over, it [Mosul] has become the most peaceful city in the world.”
After local politicians called for the government to cut public funding for the Belfast Islamic Center, al-Wazzan recanted. But the Belfast Islamic Center’s website continues to prominentlydisplay the writings of a Muslim extremist named Bilal Philips, who has been banned from entering the UK because of his preaching of violence against Jews, Christians and homosexuals, and his glorification of Islamic suicide bombers.
McConnell summed it up this way: “Islam is allowed to come to this country, Islam is allowed to worship in this country, Islam is allowed to preach in this country and they preach hate. And for years we are not allowed to give a tract out, we are not allowed in Islam, we are not allowed to preach the gospel. We are persecuted in Islam if we stand for Jesus Christ.”
The Myth of Muslim Radicalization
June 18, 2015The Myth of Muslim Radicalization, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 18, 2015
Usaama Rahim
Mainstreaming extremism is . . . Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.
****************
After some of its quarter of a million Muslims headed to join ISIS, Quebec decided the answer was a $2 million anti-radicalization center headed by a specialist in cultural sensitivity. But if you’re about to be beheaded by a masked ISIS Jihadist, a specialist in cultural sensitivity isn’t going to help you much.
Western governments nevertheless keep rolling out their culturally sensitive approaches to fighting ISIS.
The key element in Obama’s strategy for fighting ISIS isn’t the F-15E Strike Eagle, it’s a Twitter account run by a Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer which claims to “Counter Violent Extremism” by presenting moderate Islamists like Al Qaeda as positive role models for the Islamic State’s social media supporters.
So far 75% of planes flown on combat missions against ISIS return without engaging the enemy, but the culturally sensitive State Department Twitter account has racked up over 5,000 tweets and zero kills.
Cultural sensitivity hasn’t exactly set Iraq on fire in fighting ISIS and deradicalization programs here start from the false premise that there is a wide gap between a moderate and extremist Islam. Smiling news anchors daily recite new stories about a teenager from Kentucky, Boston or Manchester getting “radicalized” and joining ISIS to the bafflement of his parents, mosque and community.
And who is to blame for all this mysterious radicalization? It’s not the parents. It certainly can’t be the moderate local mosque with its stock of Jihadist CDs and DVDs being dispensed from under the table.
The attorney for the family of Usaama Rahim, the Muslim terrorist who plotted to behead Pamela Geller, claims that his radicalization came as a “complete shock” to them.
It must have come as a truly great shock to his brother Imam Ibrahim Rahim who claimed that his brother was shot in the back and that the Garland cartoon attack had been staged by the government.
It must have come as an even bigger shock to Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, the Imam linked to Usaama Rahim and his fellow terrorist conspirators, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers, who had urged Muslims to “grab onto the gun and the sword.”
The culturally insensitive truth about Islamic ‘radicalization’ is that it is incremental.
There is no peaceful Islam. Instead of two sharply divided groups, peaceful Islam and extremist Islam, there is a spectrum of acceptable terrorism.
Muslim institutions have different places on that spectrum depending on their allegiances and tactics, but the process of radicalization is rarely a sharp break from the past for any except converts to Islam.
The latest tragic victim of radicalization is Munther Omar Saleh; a Muslim man living in New York City who allegedly plotted to use a Tsarnaev-style pressure cooker bomb in a major landmark such as the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. Saleh claimed to be following orders from ISIS.
Media coverage of the Saleh arrest drags out the old clichés about how unexpected this sudden radicalization was, but what appears to be his father’s social media account shows support for Hamas.
Likewise one of Usaama Rahim’s fellow mosque attendees said that Rahim and another conspirator had initially followed the “teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood” but that he had been forced to cut ties with them when they moved past the Brotherhood and became “extreme”.
Despite the media’s insistence on describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a moderate organization, it has multiple terrorist arms, including Hamas, and its views on non-Muslims run the gamut from the violent to the genocidal.
A year after Obama’s Cairo speech and his outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood, its Supreme Guide announced that the United States will soon be destroyed, urged violent terrorist attacks against the United States and “raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”
Despite this, Obama continued backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power across the region.
There are distinctions between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, but the latter is a splinter group of the former. Al Qaeda’s current leader came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. A move from one to the other is a minor transition between two groups that have far more in common than their differences.
And since the Brotherhood controls much of the Islamic infrastructure in the United States, the idea that Munther Omar Saleh or Usaama Rahim became radicalized because they went from a Jihadist group that takes the long view in the struggle against the infidel, putting political structures into place to make a violent struggle tactically feasible, to a Jihadist group that focuses more on short term violence, is silly.
Radicalization isn’t transformational; it’s incremental.
It’s the Pakistani kid down the block deciding that instead of joining the Muslim Students Association and then CAIR to build Islamist political structures in America, he should just cut to the chase and kill a few cops to begin taking over America now.
Radicalization is the moderate Imam who stops putting on an act for PBS and the local politicians and moves to Yemen where he openly recruits terrorists to attack America instead of doing it covertly at his mosque in Virginia.
Radicalization is the teenage Muslim girl who forgets about marrying her Egyptian third cousin and bringing him and his fifty relatives to America and goes to join ISIS as a Caliphate brood mare instead.
It’s not pacifism giving way to violence. Instead it’s an impatient shift from tactical actions meant to eventually make Islam supreme in America over many generations to immediate bloody gratification. ISIS is promising the apocalypse now. No more waiting. No more lying. You can have it tomorrow.
Radicalization does not go from zero to sixty. It speeds up from sixty to seventy-five.
It builds on elements that are already there in the mosque and the household. The term “extremism” implicitly admits that what we are talking about is not a complete transformation, but the logical extension of existing Islamic beliefs.
Omar Saleh seemed cheerful enough about Hamas dropping Kassam rockets on Israeli towns and cities. Would he have supported his son setting off a bomb in the Statue of Liberty? Who knows, but his son was already starting from a family position that Muslim terrorism against non-Muslims was acceptable.
Everything else is the fine print.
When Usaama Rahim followed the way of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was with a moderate group whose spiritual guide, the genocidal Qaradawi was the godfather of cartoon outrage and had endorsed the murderous Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
The slope that leads from Qaradawi’s cartoon rage to trying to behead Pamela Geller isn’t a slippery one; it’s a vertical waterfall. And this is what radicalization really looks like. It doesn’t mean moderates turning extreme. It means extremists becoming more extreme. And there’s always room for extremists to become more extreme which turns old extremists into moderates while mainstreaming their beliefs.
In the UK, Baroness Warsi, Cameron’s biggest mistake, blamed Muslim radicalization on the government’s refusal to engage with… radicals. Or as she put it, “It is incredibly odd and incredibly worrying that over time more and more individuals, more and more organisations are considered by the government to be beyond the pale and therefore not to be engaged with.”
The reason why the government is refusing to “engage” with these organizations is that they support terrorism in one form or another. Warsi is proposing that the UK fight radicalization by mainstreaming it.
Mainstreaming extremism is also Obama’s policy. It’s the logic behind nearly every Western diplomatic move in the Middle East from the Israel-PLO peace process to the Brotherhood’s Arab Spring. And these disasters only created more Islamic terrorism.
The Muslim teenagers headed to join ISIS did not come out of a vacuum. They came from mosques and families that normalized some degree of Islamic Supremacism and viewed some Muslim terrorists as heroes and role models. It’s time for Western governments to admit that the ISIS Jihadist is more the product of his parents and his teachers than of social media Jihadis on YouTube and Twitter.
Radicalization doesn’t begin with a sheikh on social media. It begins at home. It begins in the mosque. It just ends with ISIS.
Islam’s ‘Baby Jihad’
June 12, 2015Islam’s ‘Baby Jihad,’ Front Page Magazine,
Islamic aspirations to dominate the world are set to happen—if not through might of arms, then apparently through sheer numbers.
In 1900, the Muslim population of the world was less than 200 million. Conversely, the Christian population of the world was almost 560 million—almost three times the number of Muslims.
Times have changed. According to the findings of a Pew Research Center in America:
The number of Muslims will increase at more than double the rate of the world’s population, which is expected to rise by 35 per cent in the next four decades.
There will be more Muslims than Christians in the world in less than sixty years, new research revealed.
The [Islamic] religion’s share of the world’s population will equal the Christian share – at roughly 32 per cent each – in 2070, analysis by the Pew Research Center showed.
[…]
By 2050 Muslims will make up around ten per cent of Europe’s population.
For a better idea of what is in store for Europe, simply look to the UK’s “Londonistan”—the apt name for London and other regions with a notable Muslim presence: Already with a 10 percent Muslim population, Londonistan is a reflection of Europe 35 years from now when it too is projected to be ten percent Muslim (and by which time the UK will likely have an even much larger Muslim population).
The same sorts of anti-infidel violence and sexual abuse that is a daily fixture in Muslim majority nations is already a normal feature of Londonistan with its mere 10 percent Muslim minority.
Put differently, if “ISIS” and other Islamic groups regularly behead “infidel” men and sexually enslave “infidel” women in the Middle East—so are “average” Muslims doing so in the UK:
Recall how in 2013, two Muslim men shouting “Allahu Akbar” beheaded a British soldier with a cleaver—in a busy intersection and in broad daylight no less. They even boasted in front of passersby and asked to be videotaped.
Or recall how Muslims were recently busted for running a sex ring in Rotherham, England: 1,400 British children as young as 11 were plied with drugs before being passed around and sexually abused in cabs and kabob shops.
It was at least the fifth sex abuse ring led by Muslims to be uncovered in England—Muslims who only make 10 percent.
During the trial of an earlier Muslim-run sex ring “Several of the men on trial in Liverpool apparently told their victims that it was all right for them to be passed around for sex with dozens of men ‘because it’s what we do in our country.’”
In fact, that is exactly what some Muslim men do to infidel girls in their country. Seemingly not a day goes by without Christian girls in Egypt, Pakistan, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, and any number of other Muslim majority nations being abducted, enslaved, raped, and/forced to convert (See Crucified Again, pgs. 186-199 for a sampling, plus the doctrinal justification.)
When a Muslim man savagely raped a nine-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan, he told her “not to worry because he had done the same service to other young Christian girls.” Commenting on this case, local human rights activists said, “It is shameful. Such incidents occur frequently. Christian girls are considered goods to be damaged at leisure. Abusing them is a right. According to the community’s mentality it is not even a crime. Muslims regard them as spoils of war.”
Indeed, there is no end of patterns of abuse against Christian minorities in the Muslim world that are now occurring in the West. While many are now aware that “ISIS” destroys churches and Christian cemeteries, few realize that Muslims—not “ISIS”—just average Muslims—are doing the same thing in the West.
Days ago in Canada, which has a miniscule Muslim population, a Muslim man vandalized and desecrated a church on several different occasions. Among other things, he covered the Christ statue in front of the church with black paint and broke its fingers and tore up Christian books inside the church.
Weeks earlier in France, 215 Christian gravestones and crosses in the cemetery of Saint-Roch de Castres (Tarn) were damaged and desecrated by a Muslim man later described as follows: “The man repeats Muslim prayers over and over, he drools and cannot be communicated with: his condition has been declared incompatible with preliminary detention.”
And last March in Germany, a potential jihadi attack on the cathedral and synagogue in Bremen was averted following action by police.
In short, along with all the other forms of jihad to be wary of—the sword jihad, the tongue jihad (deceit/propaganda), the money jihad (financial support to jihadis)—the West should also be aware of the baby jihad.
If the same sorts of crimes being committed against Christian minorities in Muslim majority nations are already being committed in Europe and North America—despite the fact that Muslims are currently minorities—how then when, as projected, Islam becomes the most adhered to religion in the world?
US Diplomats Reveal EU Sanctions Assault After Iran Deal
June 9, 2015US Diplomats Reveal EU Sanctions Assault After Iran Deal, Israel National News, Ari Yashar, June 9, 2015
EU flag (illustration)Flash 90
Israel has been fighting the Iran nuclear deal due to the great danger it poses, but senior Western officials have revealed it is also doing so because once a deal is reached, the European Union (EU) and UN are planning a diplomatic offensive targeting the Jewish state.
The political assault is meant to force Israel into returning to yet more peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and making dangerous concessions in the process – and reportedly the EU already has a list of sanctions ready to force Israel to bend.
A senior Western diplomat told Ma’ariv in a report published Tuesday that “a diplomatic attack against Israel is expected soon that will surprise even the pessimists in Jerusalem.”
“In the (UN) Security Council, in western capitals and at EU headquarters, they are just waiting for the Iran deal to be signed and for it to be approved by the American Congress,” warned the diplomatic source.
It appears that the waiting period will likely expire in September, at which time a UN General Assembly will open in tandem with the first shots of the diplomatic barrage against Israel.
Diplomatic sources familiar with Western European positions vis-a-vis Israel said the EU already has a list ready, itemizing sanctions against Israel in the fields of trade, agriculture, science and culture.
That list is to be translated into an economic assault – unless Israel presents a new set of concessions it is willing to make for a new round of peace talks, after the last set of talks was torpedoed by the PA signing a unity deal with the Hamas terrorist organization.
“Senior officials in Jerusalem are aware of the existence of sanctions documents at EU headquarters, some of which have even fallen into their hands,” one diplomatic source revealed to Ma’ariv.
The source added that US President Barack Obama’s threat made in an Israeli interview this month, according to which he may cut US support for Israel at the UN, specifically was referring to “the sanctions file” against Israel which is currently biding its time at the EU headquarters.
The US is reportedly weighing its responses, as the current Israeli government does not appear to be likely to launch a new series of peace talks after the massive failure of the last round, and the PA’s unilateral moves in the international arena in breach of the 1993 Oslo Accords that founded it.
“The make-up of the government is such that no faction or minister will stand up to the lack of an initiative from Prime Minister (Binyamin) Netanyahu,” a diplomat from New York told Ma’ariv. “The coming months will be difficult for Israel. This time Israel will pay a heavy price for continued stagnation. This time, it is also uncertain if Uncle Sam will succeed in saving Israel, and maybe he won’t want to do so.”
Spain in the Eye of the Storm of Jihad
June 6, 2015Spain in the Eye of the Storm of Jihad, The Gatestone Institute, Soeren Kern, June 6, 2015
(Right of return? — DM)
- The Islamists are especially interested in converts who have not yet taken on Muslim names and whose official IDs still have their Christian names, so they can purchase weapons without drawing the attention of police.
- At least 50,000 Muslim converts are currently living in Spain. Police say that converts are especially susceptible to radicalization because they are facing increasing pressure from Islamists who are calling on them to carry out attacks to “demonstrate their commitment” to their new faith.
- Spain has also become a key entry point for human trafficking mafias being used by jihadist veterans seeking to return to Europe after fighting in the Middle East.
- “Turkey is the Seven-Eleven of false passports.” — Spanish agent working on a human trafficking case.
Spanish security forces have arrested a total of 568 jihadists over the past ten years in 124 separate operations against Islamic terrorism, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz revealed at an African security conference in Niger on May 14.
Fernández Díaz said that “constant police and judicial actions” have helped Spanish authorities prevent another large-scale terrorist attack similar to the March 2004 Madrid train bombings, in which nearly 200 people were killed and more than 2,000 were injured.
At the same time, Fernández Díaz has warned that it is “very probable” that Islamic terrorists will strike Spain at some point in the future; he has estimated the probability of an attack to be 70%.
At a two-day terrorism conference held in Madrid on April 23 and 24, Fernández Díaz said that at least 115 Spanish jihadists — including at least 15 women — are now known to have joined the Islamic State. He added that 14 jihadists had returned to Spain; nine of those are in prison and five remain free.
In January, Fernández Díaz said the number of Spanish jihadists abroad was 70, which implies a jump of more than 40 new jihadists in the first four months of 2015 alone. In August 2014, the first time that Fernández Díaz provided an official estimate, he said there were 51 Spanish jihadists fighting abroad.
Meanwhile, “dozens” of jihadists and other Islamic radicals are entering Spain from neighboring France, where they are said to be “asphyxiating” due to a government crackdown following theCharlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January. (On April 29, French President François Hollande announced that a force of 7,000 troops would be deployed to patrol French streets on a permanent basis.)
According to an anonymous Spanish intelligence operative interviewed by El Confidencial, a media outlet based in Madrid, French jihadists are moving to Spain because they feel they have “greater room for movement” on the Iberian Peninsula. They include individuals “suspected” of being Islamic radicals, but for whom there is insufficient proof for either government to arrest them.
The report says that most of the jihadists from France are moving to Catalonia and Spain’s Mediterranean coast, where they are attempting to “blend in” with Muslim communities there. Also known as the Spanish Levant, the region roughly corresponds with what was once known as Xarq al-Ándalus, territories that were occupied by Muslim invaders for nearly five centuries.
Al-Andalus is the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France occupied by Muslim conquerors (also known as the Moors) from 711 to 1492. Many Muslims believe that territories Muslims lost during the Christian Reconquista of Spain still belong to the realm of Islam. They claim that Islamic law gives them the right to return there and re-establish Muslim rule.
In July 2014, jihadists with the Islamic State produced a video in which they vowed to liberate al-Andalus from non-Muslims and make it part of their new Islamic Caliphate. The video showed a jihadist speaking in Spanish with a heavy North African accent, warning:
“I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic flag, the Islamic caliphate. We will die for it until we liberate those occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia. And I declare: Spain is the land of our forefathers and we are going to take it back with the power of Allah.”
A tweeted photo of an Islamic State supporter holding the Islamic State’s black flag of jihad in front of Aljafería Palace in Zaragoza, Spain
Counter-terrorism authorities are now warning that the Islamic State is actively looking for Spanish converts to Islam who possess gun licenses and who can legally purchase rifles and shotguns. The Islamists are especially interested in converts who have not yet taken on Muslim names and whose official IDs still have their Christian names, so that they can purchase weapons without drawing the attention of police.
At least 50,000 Muslim converts are currently living in Spain. Police say that converts are especially susceptible to radicalization because they are facing increasing pressure from Islamists who are calling on them to carry out attacks to “demonstrate their commitment” to their new faith. “Converts are the perfect breeding ground for Islamism,” according to a Spanish intelligence operative.
These concerns have been confirmed in a new report published by the Spanish Institute of Strategic Studies, an organ of the Ministry of Defense, which warned that so-called lone wolves pose the biggest threat to Spain and other European countries.
“They are activists who secretly swear allegiance to [Islamic State leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and act independently without making contact with anyone, so locating them becomes a living hell,” the report said. It added:
“Terrorists no longer need to communicate directly with the leadership of the organization to which they belong, or use the telephone or emails to know exactly what to do, when and under what circumstances. There is no longer any need for prior contact to establish the type of signals to be used, the conditions and dimensions of an attack or any restrictions.
“These tactics end the dream of the intelligence services to control everything through the systematic interception of communications and the use of satellite imagery. If there is no communication, it is not possible to intercept anything.”
Spain has also become a key entry point for human trafficking mafias being used by jihadist veterans seeking to return to Europe after fighting in the Middle East. A report prepared by Spanish border police identifies three main routes of entry — Africa, South America and Europe — and warns that human trafficking is “more lucrative than cocaine trafficking.”
According to the report:
“The proliferation of organizations trafficking in human beings and taking advantage of counterfeit documentation is resulting in the introduction of thousands of people into European countries. The problem is compounded when one considers that European jihadist veterans who have fought in Syria and Iraq on behalf of the Islamic State are using the same networks to facilitate their return. Many have arrest warrants in different countries (Spain, France, UK, etc.) and Islamic State members may cross our borders to carry out terror attacks in Europe.”
In November 2014, police in Madrid arrested 18 individuals — eight Lebanese, four Spaniards, three Syrians, one Ecuadorian, one Moroccan and one Ukrainian — accused of running smuggling operation to bring people from Syria into Spain. Police estimate that the cell, which had branches in Lebanon and Turkey, generated earnings of between €50,000 ($55,000) and €100,000 ($110,000) each month. According to one of the agents working on the case, “Turkey is the Seven-Eleven of false passports.”
Meanwhile, at least 60 jihadists in Catalonia are said to be waiting for a signal from the Islamic State to attack, according to the Madrid-based El País newspaper. The warning was given during a closed-door meeting of anti-terrorism police held in late April in Viladecans, a town near Barcelona.
The unofficial meeting was convened after a counter-terrorism operation in Catalonia was compromised, when some jihadists were allegedly tipped-off that they were about to be arrested. Although the exact circumstances of the imbroglio remain unclear, it appears to have been the result of poor inter-agency coordination between counter-terrorism police in Madrid and Catalan police known as the Mossos d’Esquadra. The two groups were apparently investigating the same Islamist cell without consulting each other.
The meeting in Viladecans, attended by 130 agents from different police forces — Mossos, Civil Guards, national and local police — from across the country, got together to discuss their mutual concerns about “the lack of training of law enforcement to combat jihadist terrorism.”
Much of the daylong meeting was used to share information about how to detect “radicalization processes” and how to distinguish ordinary Muslims from Salafists and jihadists. A counter-terrorism specialist said that one of the key problems faced by police is that “jihadists have infiltrated society, they drink alcohol, eat pork and dress like a Westerner and are undetectable.”
One of the organizers of the event, Alex Pérez of a local branch of the International Police Association, said:
“We go out on the street every day but we do not have the tools needed to combat threats against the public. Some of us are digging into our own pockets to train ourselves, protect ourselves and provide an adequate service to society.”
Another police officer summed it up this way: “We are screwed and will be much worse off in the future because there are radicals increasingly inclined to attack.”
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