Free Republic

LOS ANGELES - An Egyptian immigrant's deadly attack on an Israeli airline ticket counter last year has been ruled a terrorist attack related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an FBI spokesman said Friday. "Given his political views and the fact that El Al is an Israeli government-owned airline, that met the criteria for a terrorist attack," said Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesman for the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, 41, opened fire at Los Angeles International Airport's El Al ticket counter on July 4 last year, killing two people before being shot dead by an airline security...

Egypt’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya – or Islamic Group – is warning it could use violence as a means to ensure Sharia law is adopted in the latest draft of the country’s constitution and is calling on Egyptians to wage “jihad and fight in support of Sharia.” This call was made by Mohamed Salah, the leader of the group which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization. Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya’s spiritual leader was the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman who is imprisoned in the U.S. for his role in blowing up the World Trade Center in New York in February 1993 and for plotting...

Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya leader Mostafa Hamza, detained for terrorist activity and attempt on Hosni Mubarak's life, released Tuesday by President Morsi's pardon Egypt's security authorities released, Tuesday, Mostafa Hamza, a prominent radical Sheikh charged with attempting to assassinate former president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia in1995. Hamza, a leading member of Islamic organisation Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya, was extradited to Egypt from Iran in 2004. He was detained following terrorism-related charges that included being a member of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. SNIP(The wire services are ignoring this news. We learned about it via FrontPageMag which highlighted that Hamza was behind the Luxor massacre. FPM excerpted...

FBI affidavit details Abdel-Rahman's jailhouse pipeline JUNE 3--Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman laughed at the ease with which his legal team improperly smuggled messages that allowed the Muslim extremist to continue directing terrorist operations while serving a life sentence in a Minnesota prison cell, according to a sealed FBI affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun. Abdel-Rahman joked that "trained doves" were transporting messages to his disciples. "I really would like that they arrest those doves. I wish that one day I read, 'The FBI was able to arrest the doves that are contacting the Sheikh.'" The convicted terrorist then added, "as...

CAIRO – Hundreds...have staged a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to demand the release of an Egyptian cleric imprisoned in the United States for plots to blow up New York City landmarks. Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the blind sheik, is serving life in prison after a 1995 conviction for his advisory role in conspiracies to blow up the United Nations and several New York bridges and tunnels. ....Thursday, protesters near the heavily fortified embassy held banners reading "freedom for our sheik" and chanted slogans and held prayers. The protest leader was Abboud el-Zomor, who...

The Perfect Storm author spent a month with anti-Taliban warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud in 2000. Now he offers his reaction to the recent murder of the Northern Alliance leader—and the subsequent attacks on the U.S. In November 2000 [National Geographic] Adventure sent contributing editor Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Reza (see photo gallery) to profile Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. The resulting article (read an excerpt) appeared in our March/April 2001 issue and has just been reprinted in Fire, a collection of Junger’s journalistic work. ________________________________________________________ On September 9, 2001, suicide bombers killed Massoud. Two days later the U.S. was...

The son of Omar Abdel Rahman, a Jama’a al-Islamiya leader known as the “Blind Sheikh” who was convicted of terrorism charges in the US in 1995, threatened to organize a protest at the US Embassy in Cairo and detain the employees inside. Abdallah Abdel Rahman’s threat came during a press conference organized by the sheikh’s family near the highly fortified American embassy compound on Thursday evening. Abdel Rahman demanded that President Mohamed Morsy intervene for the release of his father as he did in the case of Egyptian journalist Shaimaa Adel who was detained for nearly two weeks for covering...

CAIRO - In his first public speech addressing tens of thousands of mostly Islamist supporters, Egypt's president-elect Mohammed Morsi has vowed to free the blind sheik jailed in the U.S. for a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Morsi, Egypt's first Islamist and civilian president-elect, promised Friday to work to free Omar Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual leader of men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also promised to free detained Egyptian protesters facing military tribunals.

"The Egyptian faction of al-Qaeda led by Zawahiri was defacto running the militant group, after bin Laden was taken ill in 2004 and they were trying to take full control," the paper said.

Jama'a al-Islamiya leader Omar Abdel Rahman, who is being held in a prison in North Carolina, US, in a 15-minute telephone conversation with his wife Aisha said “the Egyptian revolution achieved the impossible.” His son Mohamed said an officer from the prison called Abdel Rahman’s home on the landline first to make sure that his wife was there, and that her voice matched the registered "voiceprint." He added that a recorded message from the prison’s phone said the line would be cut immediately if any person other than Aisha talked on the phone. He also said that his father was...

A federal appeals court has ordered a civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case that originated in Minnesota to begin serving her prison sentence. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan today also upheld Lynne Stewart's conviction, which was based in part on illegally aiding her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, during a visit with him at the federal prison in Rochester, Minn., in May 2000. She was convicted of smuggling messages between Abdel-Rahman and a terrorist group. Stewart was sentenced to a little more than two years in prison.

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

Terrorist LawyerBy George PackerThe New York Times | September 23, 2002 One Saturday morning in November 1994, Ramsey Clark, attorney general under President Johnson and more recently a spokesman for radical Arab causes, met in his Manhattan office with a criminal defense lawyer named Lynne Stewart. Clark wanted Stewart to take on a new client -- Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric and the spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad movement, whose most recent address before the Metropolitan Correctional Center was a fourth-floor apartment in Jersey City. The sheik was about to go on trial for directing a...

<p>LONDON (AP) -- An Egyptian man accused of conspiring to assassinate an Afghan northern alliance leader was freed Thursday after a terrorist charge against him was dismissed -- but was immediately re-arrested on an extradition warrant from the United States.</p>

October 21, 2006 Lawyer Convicted in Terror Case Lied on the Stand, a Juror Says By JULIA PRESTON He was known as Juror 8, for the jury box chair where he listened silently for more than six months as the convoluted evidence unfolded in the trial of Lynne F. Stewart, the radical defense lawyer accused of aiding Islamic terrorism. The jurors argued behind closed doors in Federal District Court in Manhattan for another month before they finally agreed to convict Ms. Stewart on all five charges she faced for smuggling messages out of prison from her terrorist client, Sheik Omar...

RIVERSIDE'S TERROR RALLY By CHARLES E.F. MILLARD October 18, 2006 -- In the uproar over Monday's outrageously soft sentence for terror-aiding lawyer Lynne Stewart, Riverside Church seems to be distancing itself from the despicable rally it hosted in her support Sunday. Stewart was convicted by a jury of her peers. The uncontested facts were that she had smuggled messages from convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman ("the blind sheik") to his followers in the Islamic world. Those messages directed his followers in the terror group Gama'a Islamiyya to end their cease-fire with the Egyptian government and begin killing Rahman's enemies. Rahman,...

Staten Island Democratic Association's meeting this week featured "guest of honor" criminal defense lawyer Lynne Stewart, a former Islander who is facing charges of terrorism. Ms. Stewart keynote address updated the group on the government's case against her. Ms. Stewart, a former Stapleton resident who graduated from Wagner College, was arrested in 2002 for allegedly providing material support for terrorism, among other charges. New charges have just been filed against Ms. Stewart charging her with conspiracy to commit terrorism by using convicted World Trade Center bomber Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman as "personnel" to carry out her acts. Additionally, she is...

A Staten Island mailman who was a follower of the blind terror sheik tracked down confidential addresses of FBI agents and prosecutors pursuing Al Qaeda, according to court records and federal sources. Ahmed Sattar, described by federal prosecutors as a point man for a major terror group in America, was spotted by one federal agent near his home. The agent moved his family from the area.Sattar also was put on the federal payroll, receiving thousands of dollars to be a paralegal for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman during his 1995 terror trial, government officials said.Even though federal investigators became suspicious of...

NEW YORK -- Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison in federal court in Manhattan Monday. She was convicted of providing support to terrorists by helping a jailed Egyptian sheik communicate with his followers on the outside. Before sentencing, her lawyer told the judge that any prison sentence for Stewart would be a death sentence because of her serious health problems. Stewart pleaded with the judge to allow her to live out the rest of her life "productively, lovingly, righteously.'' Assistant US Attorney Andrew Dember rejected defense suggestions that Stewart's conduct was judged differently after9-11. "This case...

<p>A task force of federal agents has ratcheted up a two-year-old antiterrorism investigation aimed at several Virginia-based Islamic charities suspected of diverting millions of dollars to terror network al Qaeda and other militant radicals.</p> <p>Led by agents of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Internal Revenue Service and the FBI, the task-force probe has targeted a number of people tied to several private companies and interrelated Islamic charities operating out of business fronts in Herndon and Falls Church.</p>