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Iran's hardline Interior Ministry has decided to control and crackdown the NGOs by preparing a list of groups that it claims are planning to overthrow the Islamic regime. Conservative Qods daily has exposed a plan by the ministry to deal with Iranian NGOs. Based on Qod’s report, the Interior Ministry has accused some NGOs of misusing money, supporting members of the former government of Khatami and secretly communicating with foreign agents. During the last days of President Mohammad Khatami's reform government, Ashraf Boroujerdi, social affairs deputy at the Interior Ministry had stressed the existence of plans to fight NGOs and...

Philly Cleric Sentenced for Corruption By JOANN LOVIGLIO, Associated Press Writer Mon Sep 19, 2:12 PM ET A prominent Muslim cleric on Monday was sentenced to more than seven years in prison on racketeering and other charges, the latest in a string of convictions stemming from the FBI's sweeping probe of municipal corruption. Prosecutors said that Shamsud-din Ali, 67, used his political connections to obtain dubious loans, donations and city contracts. In addition to his 87-month sentence, Ali was ordered to pay restitution. He was released pending an appeal. The investigation of the so-called "pay to play" culture in Philadelphia's...

DETROIT - A Cleveland imam convicted of hiding terrorist ties has agreed to leave the United States, ending his deportation case, his attorney and government officials said Thursday. The agreement allows Fawaz Damra to resettle in Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Egypt or the Palestinian territories, said Greg Gagne, a spokesman for the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review. A judge has approved the agreement with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which will decide his destination. Damra is still in federal custody, said Robert Birach, a Detroit lawyer who negotiated for him. He declined to discuss more...

BRITAIN has failed to expel a single Muslim hate cleric since the 7/7 bombings, figures reveal. The news is a huge embarrassment to PM Tony Blair, who promised a crackdown. Britain is bottom of a European league for the number of extremist preachers expelled. Germany is top with more than 20 imams forcibly removed. Spain, Italy and France have each deported four and Holland three. Yet only Omar Bakri Mohammed has gone from Britain — and he went abroad of his own accord. He has merely been banned from returning. Mr Blair claimed “the rules of the game were changing”...

SO it wasn't a political stunt. It isn't about Iraq. And the threat of Islamist terror right here is more real than many pretend. How real? If the police are right, they have saved scores of you from being blown up -- as people in Madrid and London were blown up. As NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney put it, the arrest yesterday of 17 Muslim men disrupted "the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack". He said explosive material had already been collected. Yet only last week, Prime Minister John Howard was pilloried by many for having warned of an...

Racial Violence explode again Groups of Middle-Eastern men descended on Cronulla seeking revenge for Sunday's attacks, smashing cars with baseball bats.

Venerable white-bearded dervishes and high-heeled girls with garish lipstick found rare common ground before dawn on Tuesday, celebrating an Iranian holiday with the mystical chants of the Sufis. Sufi Muslim spirituality is largely tolerated under Iran’s strict Islamic laws, although senior religious figures occasionally call for a clampdown on its rites. Under an almost full moon, several hundred Iranians came to celebrate the birthday of the ‘Mahdi’ at the Zahir-od-dowleh cemetery in northern Tehran, a dervish hub where many writers and artists are buried. The Mahdi is a key figure of Shi’ite Islam, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad whose...

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain on Wednesday unveiled the criteria it will use to bar foreigners it believes inspire terrorism as part of a broad crackdown on Islamist preachers after last month's bombings in London. Interior Minister Charles Clarke published a list of "unacceptable behaviors" which would prompt deportation or a ban on entry.

Britain's promised crackdown on the "preachers of hate" began this morning as ten foreign nationals were detained. Among them, Times Online has learned, is Abu Qatada, described as al-Qaeda’s spiritual ambassador in Europe. Abu Qatada, whose is also known as Sheikh Omar Abu Omar, and the other nine foreign nationals are being held by four police forces, working with the Immigration Service. They are in a prison service facility while the Home Office prepares to deport them. The Home Office has not confirmed that Abu Qatada is among the people detained this morning but Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said...

Group Authoring Fatwa Has Links to Bin Laden Ally By Sherrie Gossett July 29, 2005 (CNSNews.com) - Thursday's religious edict condemning terrorism was authored and issued by the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law. The edict was signed by 18 council scholars. The Fiqh Council of North America traces its origins to the early 1960s and the Religious Affairs Committee of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the United States and Canada, according to the council's website. This Religious Affairs Committee evolved into the Fiqh Committee of the Islamic Society of North...

Can Islamic-fascist terrorism bring an end to American liberty? Can it conquer Christianity, the largest practiced religion in the world? And what of the other major religions of the world? The sane humanity breathing on this planet would respond, “No way!“ But then there are the radical Islamic morons who have a nihilistic ideology that supports their barbaric tactics of terrorism, and so they continue their idiotic Jihad. Apparently, the morons think they can dominate the world! And so the senseless killing continues. While the sane humanity of the world respects freedom to worship without oppression and discrimination, factional followers...

In south Tehran there is a huge walled cemetery dedicated to the martyrs, the young men who died fighting in the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. This vast city of the dead, complete with its own subway station and shops, does not share Arlington National Cemetery's sublimely stoic aesthetic of identical tombstones, row upon row. In Tehran's war cemetery, each of the fallen is remembered individually with his own martyr's shrine, a sealed glass cabinet on a stand. The cabinets are filled with faded photos of men forever young, some in helmets or red bandannas, some carrying...

Crackdown on Muslim clerics who preach hate By George Jones, John Steele and Catriona Davies (Filed: 12/07/2005) New laws to catch people planning acts of terrorism will be fast-tracked through Parliament if the police and security services investigating the London bombings want extra powers, Tony Blair promised yesterday. As the first of more than 50 victims of the blasts was officially named, Mr Blair said the Government was considering clamping down on radical Muslim clerics who were "inciting hatred". Vanessa Sykes comforts Caroline hall after laying flowers near King's Cross station yesterday He promised one of the most "vigorous and...

We all know who was to blame for Thursday's murders... and it wasn't Bush and Blair The instinctive response of a significant portion of the rich world's intelligentsia to the murder of innocents on 11 September was anything but robust. A few, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, were delighted. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was 'the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,' declared the composer whose tin ear failed to catch the screams. Others saw it as a blow for justice rather than art. They persuaded themselves that al-Qaeda was made up of anti-imperialist insurgents who...

CLEVELAND -- A federal judge made a decision today involving convicted Islamic leader Imam Fawaz Damra's U.S. citizenship.Judge James Gwin ordered that Damra's citizenship be revoked, with the understanding from the government that he will not be detained while pending appeal.Damra was sentenced Monday to two months in federal prison and four months of house arrest for lying about his connections to terrorist groups when he applied for U.S. citizenship.Damra is expected to begin serving his sentence after the Muslim holiday of Ramadan ends in November.Damra is the leader of Ohio's largest mosque, the Islamic Center of Cleveland in Parma.

An Ohio mosque leader may be leaving the country earlier than expected.NewsChannel5 learned that Imam Fawaz Damra's appeal was dropped in the Court of Appeals.That means his citizenship remains revoked and the deportation process could begin soon. A judge revoked his citizenship in September 2004.A jury convicted Damra last year for lying about connections to terrorist organizations on his application for U.S. Citizenship.The 42-year-old spent two months in prison and four months under house arrest.Damra is the leader of Ohio's largest mosque, the Islamic Center of Cleveland, in Parma.

Thursday 07 July 2005, 10:19 Makka Time, 7:19 GMT Muslim scholars met in Amman, Jordan, for religious dialogue The Muslim world's top scholars have agreed that fatwas, or religious edicts, should only be issued by clerics with religious authority. The move is meant to weaken statements by figures involved in fighting in Iraq who ordain violence. The three-day meeting in Amman, which ended on Wednesday, has for the first time gathered representatives of eight Sunni and Shia Muslim schools of thought. They all also agreed that followers cannot label other Muslims as "apostates", something groups in Iraq have done to...

ROME (AP) - An Italian prosecutor is investigating whether U.S. agents played a role in the alleged abduction from Milan of a suspected Islamic militant, according to news reports. The 41-year-old imam, identified as Abu Omar, disappeared in the northern Italian city in February 2003. Milan Prosecutor Armando Spataro is looking at whether he was seized in a CIA operation and flown to Egypt for interrogation, the Corriere della Sera and other newspapers have reported. Last week, the prosecutor visited a joint U.S.-Italian air base in Aviano to find documents on air and vehicle traffic that might shed light on...

In recent months, the cause of freedom has made enormous gains in the broader Middle East. Millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq defied terrorists to cast their ballots in free elections. Palestinians voted for a new president who rejects violence and is working for democratic reform, and the people of Lebanon reclaimed their sovereignty and are now voting for new leadership. Across the Middle East, hopeful change is taking place. People are claiming their liberty. And as a tide of freedom sweeps this region, it will also come eventually to Iran. The Iranian people are heirs to a great...

Photos From The 'Islamic Republic' of Iran: Bombings in Oil-Rich Province of Iran Kills Nine, Wounds 36; Tehran Bomb Kills One An Iranian clergyman and people pass as muncipality workers try to clean up the explosion site in Ahvaz, Iran, Sunday June 12TH, 2005.(AP) Rescue workers are seen at the explosion site in Ahvaz, Iran, Sunday June 12th, 2005. (AP) A TV grab from the state run Iranian network shows cars damaged by the explosion in Ahvaz, Iran, Sunday June 12TH, 2005. (AP) People watch Ayatollah Khomeini's footage, the founder of Islamic Republic of Iran, on a huge screen talking...

An outbreak of polio in Yemen has risen to 63 cases, making it one of the worst epidemics in the world, the UN health agency said. The number of cases in Yemen will probably soon exceed 100, as many more suspected cases are being investigated, said Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation's polio eradication campaign. "They are having a pretty big epidemic there," Rosenbauer said. "But we should be able to stop the virus relatively quickly." Meanwhile, in Indonesia, which like Yemen was thought to be polio-free, two more cases have been confirmed, the WHO said. Indonesia,...

Clerics strip fugitive Taliban leader of power By Tom Coghlan in Kandahar (Filed: 20/05/2005) A crowd of 600 Afghan clerics gathered in front of an historic mosque yesterday to strip the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar of his claim to religious authority, in a ceremony that provided a significant boost to the presidency of Hamid Karzai. The declaration, signed by 1,000 clerics from across the country, is an endorsement of the US-backed programme of reconciliation with more moderate elements of the Taliban movement that Karzai has been pursuing ahead of the country's first parliamentary elections, due in September. Symbolically,...

The conviction last week of Ali al-Timimi, an American-born Islamic scholar, on terrorism charges thrust the so-called "Virginia Paintball Jihad" case to the forefront as the federal government's greatest court victory against terrorism. All told, federal prosecutors counted 10 convictions in the case. Al-Timimi's conviction marked the first post-Sept. 11 case in which the government won a terrorism conviction for actions tied to philosophy and words designed to help the enemy, rather than deeds, such as providing money, equipment or actual combat help to that enemy. "Until now these people have escaped. It is a very powerful position to be...

Bellevue firm tied to pro-Hamas Web siteBy Peter LewisSeattle Times staff reporter, April 23, 2005 A Bellevue company has helped support a Web site dedicated to advancing Hamas, an Islamic organization the U.S. government considers a terrorist group. The site features videos of Humvees blowing up and U.S. soldiers being killed. The site was down temporarily yesterday but was working again last evening. Content included a training video of the "Mujahideen Army" and a message to the American people that said in part they had "elected criminals and are responsible for their actions." The Bellevue company, eNom, apparently is...

<p>October 15, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Pentagon investigators will question a Muslim chaplain who arranged a trip to Mecca for Islamic U.S. servicemen that was paid for by a Saudi charity linked to al Qaeda, a top Defense Department official said yesterday. In March 2001, Capt. Rasheed Muhammad led a "Haj tour" for about 60 Muslim service people that was paid for by the Muslim World League, which is dedicated to the spread of an extreme form of Islam embraced by Osama bin Laden.</p>

Two held over US fears of radical cell in forces By David Rennie in Washington (Filed: 24/09/2003) The United States military is urgently investigating a potential radical Muslim cell among its own servicemen at the Guantanamo Bay prison as it emerged yesterday that two more members of the garrison are in custody. Senior Airman Ahmad I al-Halabi, an Arabic language translator, was secretly arrested a month ago, Pentagon officials said last night. He is being held at an air base in California and is charged with more than 30 counts of espionage, aiding the enemy, disobeying a lawful order and...

Militant Imams Under Scrutiny Across Europe By DON VAN NATTA Jr. and LOWELL BERGMAN ONDON, Jan. 24 - In nightly sermons broadcast on the Internet, Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a 46-year-old Syrian-born cleric, has urged young Muslim men all over the world to support the Iraq insurgency on the front line of "the global jihad," investigators say. He struck a similarly defiant tone this month at a rally attended by 500 people at a central London meeting hall, where a giant screen behind him showed images of the World Trade Center falling. "Allah akbar!" - "God is great" - some...

On October 24, 2004, Arabic websites Middle East Transparent[1] and Elaph[2] posted a petition from Arab liberals to United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan and the Security Council. Written primarily by the Tunisian intellectual Lafif Lakhdar, the petition calls for an international treaty banning the use of religion to incite violence. The Saudi newspaper Arab News reported that, within a week of the petition's posting, over 2,500 Muslim intellectuals from twenty-three countries had signed the petition.[3]Shakir al-Nabulsi, a Jordanian academic and one of the signatories, noted that "There are individuals in the Muslim world who pose as clerics and issue death...

The Islamic organization poised to build the largest mosque in the Northeast on a site in Roxbury has long-standing ties to an Egyptian cleric who praises suicide bombings and a Muslim activist indicted last week in a terrorism financing probe. The Islamic Society of Boston, which has city approval to build a sprawling $22 million Islamic cultural center and mosque on Malcolm X Boulevard, has had a long association with Dr. Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi, whose vocal support of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas prompted the State Department to bar him from entering the U.S. four years ago. The local religious...

NEW YORK (AP) - A Yemeni sheik and his assistant were convicted Thursday of plotting to funnel money to al-Qaida and Hamas, handing a victory to prosecutors shaken last year when the man who was supposed to be their star witness set himself on fire outside the White House. Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed were found guilty on all but two of the 10 charges in an indictment that accused them of vital roles in a terror-funding network that stretched from Brooklyn to Yemen. In a meeting with FBI informants in a German hotel room,...

Ahmed Omar Abul Ali, the Virginia Muslim charged with conspiring to assassinate President Bush, met several times with Zubayr al-Rimi—Al Qaeda’s number two man in Saudi Arabia, killed in a shootout with Saudi forces in September 2003: Abu Ali linked to Saudi Arabia al Qaeda leader. (Hat tip: The Jawa Report.) A Falls Church man accused of conspiring to assassinate President Bush met several times with an al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia who once was the target of a global manhunt and a key suspect in an attack that killed nine Americans in Riyadh, law-enforcement authorities said. Ahmed Omar...

Extremist cleric staged al-Qaeda recruiting rally By Sean O’Neill and Richard Ford THE radical Islamist cleric whose internet sermons are being investigated by police has held a secret conference at which British Muslims were urged to join al-Qaeda. About 600 people, including women and children, punched the air and chanted Allahu akbar (God is greatest) as they were shown videos of hijacked airliners crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001. Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical Syrian-born cleric, said that if the British Government did not relax its tough anti- terrorism laws, the response from...

<p>November 17, 2003 -- A Yemeni cleric who allegedly boasted of giving Osama bin Laden millions of dollars collected at a Brooklyn mosque could be hauled into federal court as soon as today, after more than 10 months spent fighting extradition from Germany, a law enforcement source said. Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad and his alleged assistant, Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, are expected to be arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court immediately upon their arrival in the U.S. on charges they gave material support to al Qaeda and Hamas.</p>

Mar. 5, 2003 Yemeni cleric charged with raising funds for Al Qaida and Hamas By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK A Yemeni cleric detained in Germany bragged to an FBI informant that he supplied $20 million, recruits and weapons to Osama bin Laden in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, US officials said Tuesday. Much of the money came from contributors in the United States, including worshippers at the Al Farouq mosque in New York, Attorney General John Ashcroft said in announcing charges against Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad. Amid an undercover operation, Al-Moayad "boasted that jihad...

THE trial of a Yemeni imam accused of supplying millions of dollars to Osama bin Laden and Hamas began in New York today. Jury selection was expected to take about two weeks, with the prosecution to begin presenting its case on January 25. Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad, 56, was detained with another Yemeni in Germany in January 2003 and extradited to the United States later that year. US Attorney-General John Ashcroft said in announcing charges against Mr Al-Moayad in March 2003: "The FBI undercover operation developed information that Al-Moayad personally handed Osama bin Laden $US20 million ($26.3m) from his terrorist...

'Muslim women don't have a problem with the fact that their husbands have a few other wives," declared the Iranian ayatollah with great conviction. Sitting across the conference table from him, in the magnificent 17th-century Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como in Italy, I disagreed. My conversations over the years with Muslim women colleagues had given me a quite different picture. "I would suggest that you don't really know how women feel since you're a man. I'm a woman, and I can tell you that women do not want to be one of several wives." While ordinarily this kind of challenge...

Moderate Muslims? By Daniel Pipes There is good news to report: the idea that "militant Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution" is finding greater acceptance over time. But there is also bad news, namely growing confusion over who really is a moderate Muslim. This means that the ideological side of the war on terror is making some, but only limited, progress.The good news: Anti-Islamist Muslims are finding their voice since 9/11. Their numbers include distinguished academics such as Azar Nafisi (Johns Hopkins), Ahmed al-Rahim (formerly of Harvard), Kemal Silay (Indiana), and Bassam Tibi (Göttingen). Important Islamic figures...

China's intelligence service spent years training a spy who posed as a Catholic priest in New York and was part of an escape plan for a Chinese agent in the CIA, according to a veteran FBI counterspy.     Retired Special Agent I.C. Smith said China's use of the masquerading priest was "one of the most fascinating things" about the spy case of Larry Wu-tai Chin, who supplied secrets to China for decades as a CIA translator until his arrest in 1985.     "The People's Republic of China Ministry of State Security took a married Chinese national from the People's Republic and...

This past week, I have received many responses from Muslims concerning my two most recent columns: ''Followers of Islam: Can You See the Blood on Your Hands'' and ''Here Comes the Arab/Muslim Outrage.'' In one breath, some of the writers would call themselves ''intellectuals'' and then accuse me of being a Jew when I put tough questions to them that they could not answer. They maintained that as an American, I just was not intelligent enough to understand Islam. The mistake these ''intellectuals'' made is believing that I have any intention of ''understanding'' Islam. It has taken me since 9/11...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- President Pervez Musharraf had the ears of the world for his groundbreaking speech. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, he needed to show that the only nuclear-armed Islamic nation was not a threat. Wearing a dark jacket instead of his army uniform, he denounced religious extremism and vowed to fix the Islamic schools in his back yard accused of fomenting hatred, the ones that crank out militants the way Harvard churns out MBAs. But almost three years later, Pakistan remains a country where promises come easier than progress. Indeed, travels through the dense cities and...

A U.S. lawyer accused of aiding militant Muslims said in testimony on Monday there are times when violence is needed to change oppressive governments and institutions, including those that "perpetuate capitalism." The lawyer, Lynne Stewart, 65, is on trial on charges she helped an imprisoned client, the radical cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, communicate with Egypt's Islamic Group. The group is on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations. Stewart has denied any wrongdoing and maintains she was doing her duty as a lawyer representing a client being held incommunicado. She could face 15 years in prison if convicted of the...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - U.S. military officials said Monday that at least 200 Iraqi troops had deserted their posts in the American-led offensive on Fallujah, illustrating the predicament faced by men who are torn between orders from commanders and outrage from their countrymen. Prominent Iraqi clerics, including influential Sunni Muslims and top aides to rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, condemned the Iraqi troops who were serving alongside Americans in Fallujah, the Sunni stronghold 40 miles west of Baghdad. The insurgent council that's controlled Fallujah for the past six months threatened to behead Iraqi troops who entered the city...

WHEN Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills and junk mail was a letter addressing him as “ugly dog”. It told him he would soon be beheaded. It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker.

Checking the www.iraqthemodel.blog site in the October 22, 2004 blog section under the title, "Clerics Endorse Democracy", had Ahmed Al Safi, a senior aide of Ayatollah Sistani who made his announcement that "Those who don’t participate in the elections will end up in hell” and he added in his speech that “we must bear the responsibility and we must all participate in...

WASHINGTON - Documents found by American troops at a terrorist camp in Iraq last year contained the name of a New York mosque imam now facing federal charges of plotting to obtain a shoulder-fired grenade launcher, law enforcement officials said Friday. An entry in an address book found by the soldiers at an Ansar al-Islam camp last summer in northern Iraq referred to Yassin Aref as "the commander" and included his address and telephone number in Albany, N.Y., the officials said. Although Aref had come to the FBI's attention before the address book's discovery, two law enforcement officials speaking on...

Clerics order end to Iraq hostage-taking By Adrian Blomfield in Baghdad (Filed: 06/09/2004) Iraq's most senior Sunni religious body said yesterday it would issue a fatwa outlawing the abduction and execution of any foreigner in the country. Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot are still being held While there have been demands from across the Muslim world for the release of two French reporters who have been held captive since August 20, the edict, due to be signed today, is the most significant so far in the six-month hostage crisis. At least 102 foreigners have been abducted since April. Twenty-eight have...

Clerics resist Musharraf's war on madrassas By Massoud Ansari in Karachi (Filed: 05/09/2004) Islamic clerics in Pakistan have launched a campaign of resistance against a government crackdown on religious schools. They are furious that President Pervez Musharraf is attempting to staunch the flow of "terrorist recruits" by regulating the schools, known as madrassas. There are up to 20,000 such schools in Pakistan and until now the state has had no control over them. The government is now insisting that they should be registered and teach secular subjects. The Farooqia mosque in Karachi, which runs an extremist Sunni seminary, has hosted...

ALBANY, N.Y. — Federal agents and Albany police raided a Muslim mosque overnight Wednesday and arrested two men for helping someone they thought was a terrorist, a law enforcement official confirmed to FOX News on Thursday. A block of downtown Albany (search) was sealed off with armed officers for several hours after the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agents executed search warrants at the Masjid As-Salam mosque (search) and two Albany-area residences, officials said. Yassin Muhhiddin Aref, 34, the Imam of the mosque, and Mohammed Mosharref Hoosain, the 49-year-old founder of the mosque, were arrested early Thursday morning....

Video and audio: http://standwithus.com/shahada.asp This taped footage and the following commentary are from Palestinian Media Watch: http//pmw.org.il (Itamar Marcus, Director). "Ask for death" is the message that the Palestinian Authority [PA] has been conveying to its children since the start of violence in October 2000. In June 2002, two articulate 11-year-old girls were interviewed in the studio of official Palestinian Authority TV. Among other topics, they spoke of their personal yearning to achieve death through Shahada – Death for Allah – and of a similar desire they said exists in "every Palestinian child." It is striking that their desire for...

BREAKING NEWS Close associate of Osama bin Laden, Khaled al-Harbi, surrenders to Saudi security officials in Tehran, Saudi official says. Details soon.