Entries in Terrorism (2830)
NATO Secret Armies Linked to Terrorism?
Monday, August 25, 2008 at 09:59 By Dr. Daniele Ganser At a time when experts are debating whether NATO is suited to deal with the global “war on terror”, new research suggests that the alliance’s own secret history has links to terrorism. The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of MINA. |
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century
Monday, July 21, 2008 at 15:30 From: http://www.lse.ac.uk
Speaker: Professor Philip Bobbitt
Chair: Professor Sarah Worthington
This event was recorded on 3 June 2008 in the Old Theatre, Old Building
The threat of terrorism is now part of the landscape of daily lives all over the world, yet we have hardly begun to think properly about it. In his new book Terror and Consent and in this lecture Professor Bobbitt argues that we are fighting these wars with weapons and concepts which though useful to us in previous conflicts have now been superseded. He aims to provide a fundamental rethinking of most generally accepted ideas about terror in the modern world – what it is, how it operates and above all how it can be frustrated.
This event marks the launch of Philip Bobbitt's new book Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (Penguin, May 29 2008)
- Available as: mp3 (16.2 mb; approx 71 minutes)
Terrorism, Analysis, Conference Saturday, June 21, 2008 at 22:37 
A Reporter at Large
by Lawrence Wright June 2, 2008
Dr. Fadl had laid the intellectual foundation for Al Qaeda’s murderous acts. His defection posed a terrible threat.
- Last May, a fax arrived at the London office of the Arabic newspaper Asharq Al Awsat from a shadowy figure in the radical Islamist movement who went by many names. Born Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, he was the former leader of the Egyptian terrorist group Al Jihad, and known to those in the underground mainly as Dr. Fadl. Members of Al Jihad became part of the original core of Al Qaeda; among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant. Fadl was one of the first members of Al Qaeda’s top council. Twenty years ago, he wrote two of the most important books in modern Islamist discourse; Al Qaeda used them to indoctrinate recruits and justify killing. Now Fadl was announcing a new book, rejecting Al Qaeda’s violence. “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” Fadl wrote in his fax, which was sent from Tora Prison, in Egypt.
Fadl’s fax confirmed rumors that imprisoned leaders of Al Jihad were part of a trend in which former terrorists renounced violence. His defection posed a terrible threat to the radical Islamists, because he directly challenged their authority. “There is a form of obedience that is greater than the obedience accorded to any leader, namely, obedience to God and His Messenger,” Fadl wrote, claiming that hundreds of Egyptian jihadists from various factions had endorsed his position.
Two months after Fadl’s fax appeared, Zawahiri issued a handsomely produced video on behalf of Al Qaeda. “Do they now have fax machines in Egyptian jail cells?” he asked. “I wonder if they’re connected to the same line as the electric-shock machines.” This sarcastic dismissal was perhaps intended to dampen anxiety about Fadl’s manifesto—which was to be published serially, in newspapers in Egypt and Kuwait—among Al Qaeda insiders. Fadl’s previous work, after all, had laid the intellectual foundation for Al Qaeda’s murderous acts. On a recent trip to Cairo, I met with Gamal Sultan, an Islamist writer and a publisher there. He said of Fadl, “Nobody can challenge the legitimacy of this person. His writings could have far-reaching effects not only in Egypt but on leaders outside it.” Usama Ayub, a former member of Egypt’s Islamist community, who is now the director of the Islamic Center in Münster, Germany, told me, “A lot of people base their work on Fadl’s writings, so he’s very important. When Dr. Fadl speaks, everyone should listen.”
Although the debate between Fadl and Zawahiri was esoteric and bitterly personal, its ramifications for the West were potentially enormous. Other Islamist organizations had gone through violent phases before deciding that such actions led to a dead end. Was this happening to Al Jihad? Could it happen even to Al Qaeda?
A THEORIST OF JIHAD
The roots of this ideological war within Al Qaeda go back forty years, to 1968, when two precocious teen-agers met at Cairo University’s medical school. Zawahiri, a student there, was then seventeen, but he was already involved in clandestine Islamist activity. Although he was not a natural leader, he had an eye for ambitious, frustrated youths like him who believed that destiny was whispering in their ear.
So it was not surprising that he was drawn to a tall, solitary classmate named Sayyid Imam al-Sharif. Admired for his brilliance and his tenacity, Imam was expected to become either a great surgeon or a leading cleric. (The name “al-Sharif” denotes the family’s descent from the Prophet Muhammad.) His father, a headmaster in Beni Suef, a town seventy-five miles south of Cairo, was conservative, and his son followed suit. He fasted twice a week and, each morning after dawn prayers, studied the Koran, which he had memorized by the time he finished sixth grade. When he was fifteen, the Egyptian government enrolled him in a boarding school for exceptional students, in Cairo. Three years later, he entered medical school, and began preparing for a career as a plastic surgeon, specializing in burn injuries.
Both Zawahiri and Imam were pious and high-minded, prideful, and rigid in their views. They tended to look at matters of the spirit in the same way they regarded the laws of nature—as a series of immutable rules, handed down by God. This mind-set was typical of the engineers and technocrats who disproportionately made up the extremist branch of Salafism, a school of thought intent on returning Islam to the idealized early days of the religion.
Imam learned that Zawahiri belonged to a subterranean world. “I knew from another student that Ayman was part of an Islamic group,” he later told a reporter for Al Hayat, a pan-Arabic newspaper. The group came to be called Al Jihad. Its discussions centered on the idea that real Islam no longer existed, because Egypt’s rulers had turned away from Islamic law, or Sharia, and were steering believers away from salvation and toward secular modernity. The young members of Al Jihad decided that they had to act.
In doing so, these men were placing their lives, and perhaps their families, in terrible jeopardy. Egypt’s military government, then led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, had a vast network of informers and secret police. The prisons were brimming with Islamist detainees, locked away in dungeons where torture was routine. Despite this repressive atmosphere, an increasing number of Egyptians, disillusioned with Nasser’s socialist, secular government, were turning to the mosque for political answers. In 1967, Nasser led Egypt and its Arab allies into a disastrous confrontation with Israel, which crushed the Egyptian Air Force in an afternoon. The Sinai Peninsula soon passed to Israeli control. The Arab world was traumatized, and that deepened the appeal of radical Islamists, who argued that Muslims had fallen out of God’s favor, and that only by returning to the religion as it was originally practiced could Islam regain its supremacy in the world.
In 1977, Zawahiri asked Imam to join his group, presenting himself as a mere delegate of the organization. Imam told Al Hayat that his agreement was conditional upon meeting the Islamic scholars who Zawahiri insisted were in the group; clerical authority was essential to validate the drastic deeds these men were contemplating. The meeting never happened. “Ayman was a charlatan who used secrecy as a pretext,” Imam said. “I discovered that Ayman himself was the emir of this group, and that it didn’t have any sheikhs.”
In 1981, soldiers affiliated with Al Jihad assassinated the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat—who had signed a peace treaty with Israel two years earlier—but the militants failed to seize power. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, rounded up thousands of Islamists, including Zawahiri, who was charged with smuggling weapons. Before he was arrested, Zawahiri went to Imam’s house and urged him to flee, according to Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz Azzam. Imam’s son Ismail al-Sharif, who now lives in Yemen, says that this never happened. In fact, he claims, Zawahiri later put Imam in danger, by disclosing his name to interrogators.
During the next three years, these two men, who had once been so profoundly alike, began to diverge. Zawahiri, who had given up the names of other Al Jihad members as well, was humiliated by this betrayal. Prison hardened him; torture sharpened his appetite for revenge. He abandoned the ideological purity of his youth. Imam, by contrast, had not been forced to face the limits of his belief. He had slipped out of Egypt and made his way to Peshawar, Pakistan, where the Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was based. Imam left his real identity behind and became Dr. Fadl. It was common for those who joined the jihad to take a nom de guerre. He adopted the persona of the revolutionary intellectual, in the tradition of Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara. Instead of engaging in combat, Fadl worked as a surgeon for the injured fighters and became a spiritual guide to the jihad.
Zawahiri finished serving his sentence in 1984, and also fled Egypt. He was soon reunited in Peshawar with Fadl, who had become the director of a Red Crescent hospital there. Their relationship had turned edgy and competitive, and, besides, Fadl held a low opinion of Zawahiri’s abilities as a surgeon. “He asked me to stand with him and teach him how to perform operations,” Fadl told Al Hayat. “I taught him until he could perform them on his own. Were it not for that, he would have been exposed, as he had contracted for a job for which he was unqualified.”
In the mid-eighties, Fadl became Al Jihad’s emir, or chief. (Fadl told Al Hayat that this was untrue, saying that his role was merely one of offering “Sharia guidance.”) Zawahiri, whose reputation had been stained by his prison confessions, was left to handle tactical operations. He had to defer to Fadl’s superior learning in Islamic jurisprudence. The jihadis who came to Peshawar revered Fadl for his encyclopedic knowledge of the Koran and the Hadith—the sayings of the Prophet. Usama Ayub, who was in Peshawar at the time, remembered, “He would say, Get this book, volume so-and-so, and he would quote it perfectly—without the book in his hand!”
Kamal Helbawy, a former spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamist group, was also in Peshawar, and remembers Fadl as a “haughty, dominating presence,” who frequently lambasted Muslims who didn’t believe in the same doctrines. A former member of Al Qaeda says of Fadl, “He used to lecture for four or five hours at a time. He would say that anything the government does has to come from God, and if that’s not the case then people should be allowed to topple the ruler by any means necessary.” Fadl remained so much in the background, however, that some newer members of Al Jihad thought that Zawahiri was actually their emir. Fadl is “not a social man—he’s very isolated,” according to Hani al-Sibai, an Islamist attorney who knew both men. “Ayman was the one in front, but the real leader was Dr. Fadl.”
Fadl resented the attention that Zawahiri received. (In the interview with Al Hayat, Fadl said that Zawahiri was “enamored of the media and a showoff.”) And yet he let Zawahiri take the public role and give voice to ideas and doctrines that came from his own mind, not Zawahiri’s. This dynamic eventually became the source of an acrimonious dispute between the two men.
Member of Afghan Taliban Convicted in U.S. Court on Narco-Terrorism and Drug Charges
Friday, June 6, 2008 at 15:54 Khan Mohammed, a member of an Afghan Taliban cell, was convicted on May 20 by a jury in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on charges of narcotics distribution and narco-terrorism. The conviction represents the first time a defendant has been convicted in U.S. federal court of narco-terrorism since the statute was enacted in March 2006.
A DEA investigation uncovered that Mohammed was part of a Taliban plan to obtain rockets to attack U.S. military and Afghan civilian personnel at Jalalabad Airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan. A cooperating witness working with the DEA met with Mohammed on several occasions to plan the rocket attack. During the investigation, Mohammed also sold opium and heroin that he knew was intended for importation into the United States.
“As an enemy of the United States, Khan Mohammed intended to ship heroin to the United States and use profits from that trade to assist the Taliban,” said DEA Acting Administrator Michele M. Leonhart. “A dangerous double threat, Kahn Mohammed purchased rockets to attack American and coalition soldiers who were risking their lives to stabilize Afghanistan. The conviction of Kahn Mohammed puts an end to this source of poison and violence.”
The Other Terrorism - Post-9/11, Spain’s Basque terrorists are on the run—but still a threat.
Thursday, May 22, 2008 at 00:21 From: http://www.city-journal.org
The heart, if not the soul, of Spain’s capital, Madrid, is its bustling financial district. Thousands crowd daily into the skyscrapers that overlook the district’s main square. Thousands more shop at a branch of El Corte Inglés (Spain’s Macy’s), attend soccer games at Bernabéu Stadium, or ride the subways, trains, and buses whose lines converge here.
Terrorists had hoped to strike this densely packed urban space in early 2008. But unlike the devastating coordinated suicide bombings of March 11, 2004, which killed 191 train commuters and wounded 1,600, this plot did not originate with al-Qaida or any of its loosely linked affiliates. Nor was it hatched among the 12 militant Muslim Pakistanis arrested in January for allegedly planning suicide bombings in Barcelona’s subways and other strikes in Britain, France, Germany, and Portugal. No, the terrorists who dreamed of creating mayhem in the square were as Spanish as paella, as much a part of the local landscape as flamenco or bullfighting: “Euskadi Ta Askatasuna,” or “Basque Homeland and Freedom,” commonly known as ETA (pronounced “etta”). This is Spain’s “other” terrorism—a Marxoid movement that, for some 50 years, has fought for independence for the 2.5 to 3 million Spaniards of Basque descent.
Though no specific date for the financial-district attack had been set, Spanish law enforcement officials said that two arrested ETA militants confessed to planning to detonate a bomb-filled car in the square’s vast underground parking lot or in one of its surface lots at some point before Spain’s March national election. Several officials doubted that the plot would have succeeded, but the suspects were among those who staged the December 2006 bombing of Terminal 4 at Madrid’s Barajas Airport, which killed two and leveled the gigantic structure. ETA had already hidden some explosives for the new strike in the semi-Basque region of Navarre, police disclosed, and maps of the square and its parking lots turned up in one suspect’s apartment.
Because most of the world has focused on al-Qaida and its allied groups, it’s easy for outsiders to overlook the continuing danger of ETA—a seemingly anachronistic “national liberation” force in an ever more globalized world. In 2007, ETA managed to kill only five people. But over the last three decades, its attacks have claimed over 830 lives, and its ongoing commitment to violence has provided leverage to the separatist politicians associated with the Basque “cause,” even as they denounce terrorism. Angry exchanges about ETA dominated part of the preelection debates this spring between Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (the eventual winner) and his rival, Mariano Rajoy of the conservative People’s Party; al-Qaida went virtually unmentioned. Shortly before the election, ETA reminded Spaniards of its brutal presence yet again, gunning down a former city councilman in front of his wife and child in Arrasate, a working-class town in the Basque Country.
The roots of Spain’s ETA problem are in the country’s tormented past. As British journalist Giles Tremlett observes in his 2006 book The Ghosts of Spain, many Spaniards see their country as merely a state that has imposed its will on several other nations—among them Euskadi, as the Basque Country is now officially called; Catalonia, which has its own (nonviolent) separatist movement; and Galicia. In these regions, which account for a quarter of Spain’s population, Tremlett writes, “the word España is often unmentionable.” History can be a political battlefield here. For example, while most Spaniards and the rest of the planet consider Magellan the first person to have circumnavigated the globe, every Basque student knows that the honor goes to Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Basque sailor who assumed command of Magellan’s ships after the Portuguese navigator’s death in 1521. A major street in Bilbao, the Basque Country’s largest city, bears the local hero’s name.
ETA’s dream is to unite the Basques of Spain and northern France into an independent nation. Never mind that Spain conquered and absorbed Navarre, the site of the last Basque-dominated kingdom, back in 1512; or that two-thirds of Navarre’s population are no longer purely Basque; or that polls consistently show that majorities there and in the three Basque provinces (which, unlike the region of Navarre, are overwhelmingly Basque) want to remain part of Spain. ETA argues that time hasn’t healed the historical injustice of the Basque Country’s incorporation into Spain and that the Basques must return to their own traditions. (Some historians maintain that the Basques may stretch back as far as 5,000 years, making them Europe’s oldest people with its oldest language, a unique tongue called Euskara.)
Juan Pablo Fusi, former head of the National Library of Madrid and an authority on the Basque Country, points out that Basques look no different from other Spaniards and were never a nation, though they’ve had a strong sense of national identity since at least the sixteenth century. Basque nationalists have relied on a largely invented history to justify their claims, charges José Martínez Soler, who runs 20 Minutos, a free newspaper in Madrid. “ETA plays off the widespread nostalgia among Basques for something they never had—an independent Basque country,” he says.
Both men agree that ETA, founded as a Marxist-Leninist group in 1959, gained popularity from fighting Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from the thirties until his 1975 death. But ETA’s war continued even as King Juan Carlos I oversaw Spain’s transition to democracy, which culminated in 1978 with a constitution that granted considerable autonomy to Spain’s 17 regions and 50 provinces. A year later, some nationalist parties associated with ETA declared that the degree of autonomy was insufficient and began championing an independent Basque state. Over time, the list of ETA targets expanded from the Civil Guard (one of Spain’s three main police forces and the one that did most of the Franco regime’s dirty work) and the state’s military personnel to judges, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, writers and other intellectuals, and even Basque nationalists who opposed independence.
The Spanish government responded with an equally ugly “dirty war” against ETA called GAL—Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación—a secret government-sponsored campaign from 1983 to 1987, in which death squads killed, kidnapped, and tortured not only alleged ETA members but also civilians who, it turned out, had nothing to do with the group. In 1997, a Spanish court convicted several officials, including a former interior minister in the government of Socialist prime minister Felipe González, on charges related to the illegal campaign. Disclosure of GAL in a country with Spain’s history of government oppression generated sympathy for ETA that it otherwise would have lacked because of its own violence.
Eduardo Uriarte Romero knows too well why ETA remains a threat: he once belonged to it. One of 16 ETA guerrillas put on trial for the 1968 murder of a police chief, he is alive today only because the trial sparked huge protests among Basques, which led Franco to commute his two death sentences to 169 years in jail. Freed by a general amnesty in 1977, Uriarte says that he quit ETA after Spain became a democracy and the Basque region became semiautonomous. “Some in ETA argued that we had to go on after Franco’s death, that nothing had changed. But clearly, that was not true,” he notes, reminiscing over coffee at a Bilbao hotel with other former ETA members. “Since 1978, Madrid’s legal reach over us here in the Basque Country is marginal at best.”
Indeed, the Basque Country now boasts its own flag and national anthem, as well as its own health, security, and tax systems. “The Basque government collects nine out of every ten [tax] euros in the region. We have 7,500 cops and our own parliaments,” Uriarte points out. The Basque provinces also have their own Euskara-language public schools now—some 80 percent of the state schools in the region—which are teaching children a language that many of their parents don’t know. A 2001 poll found that only half of all Basques could speak or understand the old tongue; even the Basque president, Juan José Ibarretxe, had to learn Euskara after assuming his post.
Now a leader of the Foundation for Liberty, a pro-democracy Basque organization that champions democracy and civil liberties and opposes ETA and other violent groups, Uriarte argues that ETA delegitimized itself in the early eighties when it began to target Basque nationals who opposed independence. “Suddenly, anyone and everyone became fair game,” he says. The number of victims increased dramatically as ETA’s targets broadened. “From its start through the 1960s, 77 people were killed,” observes foundation vice president Javier Elorrieta García. “After the transition [to democracy], that number shot up. Today it is nearly 900.”
ETA’s stock-in-trade is less political murder than ongoing intimidation. ETA, like the Mafia, finances its operations mostly through extortion. “You get a typed letter, almost a form letter, at your business or home, saying that the time has come to do your patriotic duty and pay your ‘revolutionary tax,’ ” Elorrieta explains. “They demand between 30,000 and 300,000 euros, depending on the size of your company. If you don’t pay up, you get a second letter, which contains a warning. Then you get a third, which gives you a date by which you must comply. You don’t get another after that.” Most victims find it safer to cooperate. Spanish law enforcement officials estimate that ETA raises some 3 million euros yearly, or $4.7 million, from such shakedowns.
Judith Miller, a contributing editor of City Journal, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who writes about national security issues.
COMPREHENSIVE NEW STUDY CHALLENGING EXPERT CONSENSUS FINDS INCIDENCE OF TERRORISM DECLINING AROUND THE WORLD
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 at 23:56 Terrorism Fatalities Decline as Muslim Support for al-Qaeda Terror Network Plummets Number of Wars and Death Tolls in Africa Down Dramatically Since 1999 |
NEW YORK, May 21, 2008—Challenging the expert consensus that the threat of global terrorism is increasing, a new report from the Canadian research team that produced the much-cited Human Security Report in 2005, reveals a sharp net decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world.
The Human Security Brief 2007 demonstrates that:
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The Brief was produced by the Human Security Report Project (HSRP) research team at Simon Fraser University’s School for International Studies in Vancouver, Canada. The HSRP’s research is supported by the governments of Canada, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland and the UK.
NOT LICENSED TO KILL - German Special Forces in Afghanistan Let Taliban Commander Escape
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 16:40 By Susanne Koelbl and Alexander Szandar
German special forces had an important Taliban commander in their sights in Afghanistan. But he escaped -- because the Germans were not authorized to use lethal force. The German government's hands-tied approach to the war is causing friction with its NATO allies.
Unlike their Delta Force colleagues, Germany's KSK special forces are not authorized to use lethal force in Afghanistan except in the event of an attack.
He is also thought to be behind one of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan's history, the Nov. 6, 2007 attack on a sugar factory in the northwest province of Baghlan. The attack killed 79 people, including dozens of children and many parliamentarians and other politicians, as they celebrated the factory's reopening.
Germany's KSK special forces have been charged with capturing the terrorist, in cooperation with the Afghan secret service organization NDS and the Afghan army. The German elite soldiers were able to uncover the Taliban commander's location. They spent weeks studying his behavior and habits: when he left his house and with whom, how many men he had around him and what weapons they carried, the color of his turban and what vehicles he drove.
Graphic: Location of German forces in Afghanistan
The dangerous terrorist escaped. It would, however, have been possible for the Germans to kill him -- but the KSK were not authorized to do so.
The threat to the international relief workers and the ISAF soldiers stationed in the north may now be even greater than it was before. Warned of ISAF's activities and intent on taking revenge, the man and his network are active once again. Over 2,500 Germans are stationed between Faryab and Badakhshan, along with Hungarian, Norwegian and Swedish troops.
YouTube: Broadcast Terrorism Yourself
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 16:32 From: MASHABLE
According to the YouTube blog today, Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter explaining his misgivings with the platform for free speech that YouTube has given the public. His primary concerns weren’t the usual suspects when you think of the things that American politicians find objectionable (rap music, graphic portrayals of violence, Grand Theft Auto and Janet Jackson’s nipple).
Instead he brought up a topic that YouTube is actually fairly guilty as charged on - allowing themselves to be a willing participant in the dessimenation of Islamic terrorist organizations’s propaganda videos:
YouTube is being used to share videos produced by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. The purpose of this letter is to request that Google implement its own policy against this offensive material, remove these videos from YouTube, and prevent them from reappearing [...] Central to this media campaign is the branding of content with an icon or logo to guarantee authenticity that the content was produced by al-Qaeda or allied organizations like al-Qaeda in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam (a.k.a Ansar al-Sunnah) or al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb. All of these groups have been designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) by the Department of State.
YouTube tries to go with the standard excuses:
First, some background: hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. Because it is not possible to pre-screen this much content, we have developed an innovative and reliable community policing system that involves our users in helping us enforce YouTube’s standards. Millions of users report potential violations of our Community Guidelines by selecting the “Flag” link while watching videos.
In Lieberman’s letter, we learn that he and his staff identified numerous videos that should, in theory, be a violation of YouTube’s Community Guidelines (promoting hate-speech and violence against others, or even depicting ‘gratuitous violence’). The videos were not in fact cited by YouTube, but YouTube claims that they were not in violation of the terms of service, and did not contain any violent or hate speech content.
The fact remains that the videos are there to promote the organization, and those organizations regularly organize the killings of innocent humans, in Iraq and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, YouTube is capricous and arbitrary about content that they’ll take down that they do deem as promoting hate speech, objectionable, or promoting of violence, and what they don’t. Let’s go down the list, shall we?
Michelle Malkin: Censored for promoting hate speech, when she created a music montage showing victims of Muslim terrorist attacks in response to the Muhammed riots.
BumFights: Uncensored. Videos of actual homeless folks paid in sandwiches for beating the crap out of one another.
Handsome Hong Kong Guy Censored for showing videos of clothed local females with derogatory towards women music in the background.
Terrorism, Security, Opinion, Technology, ICT MUSLIM LEADER SAYS RECRUITMENT IN PORTUGAL "UNSUCCESSFUL"
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 11:34 Text of report by Portuguese newspaper Diario de Noticias website on 19 May
A group of Muslims who was preparing violent acts was in Portugal to recruit young Portuguese Muslims for the jihad (commonly known as Holy War). This was revealed yesterday by Sheikh David Munir, during a debate on Radio Clube Portugues. The group was in the country a few years ago but "was not successful, having been rejected by the community", he said. The feeling of integration in the country was the main reason given for the unsuccessful recruitment.
The vice-president of the Security, Organized Crime and Terrorism Observatory (OSCOT), Jose Manuel Anes, who also participated in the radio debate, told Diario de Noticias that "there was a group who was preparing attacks and came to Portugal a few years ago. It could have included people from Indo-Pakistan and the Maghreb, who might have gone through England."
The Muslim community's leader in Lisbon, David Munir, stressed during the debate that "it is necessary to try to halt this recruitment. They did not succeed here, so for them Portugal is not ideal and has gone into the backburner." Integration has contributed to security: "No Muslim living here is interested in destroying part of their home. They feel they are a citizen like any other," Munir said.
"The recruitment and the subsequent rejection by the community made them leave Portugal," Jose Manuel Anes said, adding that the group was planning actions in Portugal.
For the two experts this reaction from the community is another guarantee that danger only comes from outside. "The Muslims who have come to Portugal, or who were born here, are peaceful. They have never, nor will they ever, commit any type of aggressive act," said the imam. The only risk "would have to come from outside, Morocco, Algeria or even Spain," Professor Anes added. Cooperation between intelligence services of several countries and the lack of warning signs lead Jose Manuel Anes to say that everything is under control.
In Portugal, the integration of the community is different from that in other countries, although much remains to be done, especially with regard to the high level of ignorance which still exists about the culture and religion of this community. "When people do not know something they fear it," said Anes.
The two experts invited the Portuguese to reflect on whether the fact that a Muslim lives in Europe or in Portugal, more precisely, makes him or her European or Portuguese. "The Muslims who live here are as Portuguese as others, but we can see that they still face obstacles relating to prejudice and marginalization," said David Munir.
The bringing together of communities occurs in social events between institutions such as the Palmela Muslin school and the Lisbon mosque. "In some countries non-Muslims are not allowed in because they are not pure or believers. As long as there is respect, everyone is welcome. There is nothing to hide," said David Munir
Source: Diario de Noticias website, Lisbon, in Portuguese 19 May 08
BBC Monitoring
Recapturing Islam From the Terrorists
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 22:20 © Abdal-Hakim Murad
As New York turns its gap-toothed face to the sky, wondering if the worst is yet to come, Muslims, largely unheeded by the wider world, are counting the cost of the suicide bombings. The backlash against mosques and hijabs has been met by statements from Muslim communities around the globe, some stilted, but others which have clearly found an articulate and passionate voice for the first time. In comparison with the pathetic near-silence that hovered around mosques and major organisations during the Rushdie and Gulf War debacles, the communities now seem alert to their cultural situation and its potential precariousness. Many of the condemnations have been more impressive than those of the American President, who seems unable to rise above clichés. The motives are twofold. Firstly, and most patently, Sunni Muslims have been brought up in a universe of faith that renders the taking of innocent lives unimaginable. By condemning the attacks, we know that we defend the indispensable essence of Islam. Secondly, Muslims as well as others have died in large numbers. The Friday Prayers in the World Trade Centre always attracted more than 1,500 worshippers from the office community, many of whom have now surely died. The tourists, who spent their last moments choking on the observation deck, waiting for the helicopters that never came, no doubt included many Muslim parents and their children. But the Western powers and their fearful Muslim minorities, both battered so grievously by recent events, now need to think beyond press-releases and ritual cursings. We need to recognise, firstly, that there has been a steady 'mission-creep' in terrorist attacks over the past twenty years. Hijackings for ransom money gave way to parcel bombs, then to suicide bombs, and now to kiloton-range urban mayhem. It is not at all clear that this escalation will be terminated by further anti-terrorist legislation, further billions for the FBI, or retina scans at Terminal Three. America’s tendency to assume that money can buy or destroy any possible obstacle to its will now stands under a dark shadow. Far from being a climax and the catalyst for a hi-tech military solution, the attacks may be of more historical significance as an announcement to the militant subculture that a Star-Wars superpower is utterly vulnerable to a handful of lightly-armed young men. There could well be more and worse to come. Sobered by this, the State Department is likely to come under pressure from business interests to ask the question it never seems to notice. Why is there so much hatred of the United States, and so much yearning to poke it in the eye? Are the architects of policy sane in their certainty that America can enrage large numbers of people, but contain that rage forever through satellite technology and intrepid double-agents? Businessmen and bankers will now start to read carefully enough to discern that it is not US national interest, but the power of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, that tends to drive Washington’s policy in the world’s greatest troublespot. Threatened with disaster, corporate America may just prove powerful enough to face AIPAC down, and suggest, firmly, that the next time Israel asks Washington to veto the UN’s desire to send observers to Hebron, it pauses to consider where its own interests might lie. Among Muslims, the longer-term aftershock will surely take the form of a crisis among ‘moderate Wahhabis’. Even if a Middle-Eastern connection is somehow disproved, they cannot deny forever that doctrinal extremism can lead to political extremism. They must realise that it is traditional Islam, the only possible alternative to their position, which owns rich resources for the respectful acknowledgement of difference within itself, and with unbelievers. The lava-stream that flows from Ibn Taymiyya, whose fierce xenophobia mirrored his sense of the imminent Mongol threat to Islam, has a habit of closing minds and hardening hearts. It is true that not every committed Wahhabi is willing to kill civilians to make a political point. However it is also true that no orthodox Sunni has ever been willing to do so. One of the unseen, unsung triumphs of true Islam in the modern world is its complete freedom from any terroristic involvement. Maliki ulama do not become suicide-bombers. No-one has ever heard of Sufi terrorism. Everyone, enemies included, knows that the very idea is absurd. Two years ago, Shaykh Hisham Kabbani of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, warned of the dangers of mass terrorism to American cities; and he was brushed aside as a dangerous alarmist. Muslim organisations are no doubt beginning to regret their treatment of him. The movement for traditional Islam will, we hope, become enormously strengthened in the aftermath of the recent events, accompanied by a mass exodus from Wahhabism, leaving behind only a merciless hardcore of well-financed zealots. Those who have tried to take over the controls of Islam, after reading books from we-know-where, will have to relinquish them, because we now know their destination.
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