Free Republic

With the number of women in Hollywood coming forward and exposing Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and rape, another case has been gripping the Middle East after prominent Islamist thinker Tariq Ramadan was accussed of raping Salafist-turned secular liberal activist Henda Ayari.Ayari has accused Swiss-Muslim thinker Ramadan, the grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder, of raping and sexually assaulting her in a Paris hotel room in 2012. Ramadan’s lawyer said that his client denies the allegations and intends to file a complaint for slander.But who exactly is Henda Ayari? The Tunisian-Algerian author currently leads Libératrices, a charity that supports...

Court in Germany authorizes group of self-appointed Sharia police to continue enforcing Islamic law in city of Wuppertal. A court in Germany has authorized a group of self-appointed Sharia police to continue enforcing Islamic law in the city of Wuppertal. The law they were cleared of vioilating outlaws uniforms that are threatening, such as those of Hitler's brownshirts. The issue has been brewing ever since 2014, when German politicians reacted strongly to reports of young Salafists conducting nightly "Sharia police" patrols in the city, ordering people to stop various activities, according to the International Business Times. The men were photographed...

In the wake of the massacre in Manchester, people rightly warn against blaming the entire Muslim community in Britain and the world. Certainly one of the aims of those who carry out such atrocities is to provoke the communal punishment of all Muslims, thereby alienating a portion of them who will then become open to recruitment by Isis and al-Qaeda clones. This approach of not blaming Muslims in general but targeting “radicalisation” or simply “evil” may appear sensible and moderate, but in practice it makes the motivation of the killers in Manchester or the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015...

Saddam's Ambassador to al-QaedaBy Jonathan SchanzerWeekly Standard | February 23, 2004 A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in...

The domestic intelligence service has announced an uptick of hundreds in a matter of months. At least one cause of the worrying trend is the ease with which young people can become radicalized online, authorities said. Germany's domestic security and intelligance agency (the BfV) said on Wednesday that the radical Islamist scene in the country had grown considerably, from only about 100 people in 2013 to some 1,600 today. Indeed, according to BfV chief Hans-Georg Maassen, the number had jumped by several hundred in a matter of months."We receive between two and four credible tips on planned terrorist activity in Germany...

An undercover reporter who visited 35 asylum centers throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland says security is so bad that they risk fomenting terrorism as radicals can easily infiltrate them and convert vulnerable people to their cause. Investigative reporter and terrorism expert Shams Ul-Haq, 41, was only 15 years old and unable to speak a word of German when he came to Germany from Pakistan, much like many refugees nowadays. He warns that the registration of asylum seekers and conditions found at shelters are so bad, that they could easily lead to dangerous situations across Europe. […] Ul-Haq explained that some...

Germany’s domestic security chief warned on Sunday that the country’s radical Islamist scene is not only growing, but becoming more decentralized, posing greater challenges to surveillance operations. In an interview with national news agency DPA, Hans-Georg Maaßen also defended security officials under fire after it emerged that Berlin truck attack suspect Anis Amri had slipped through their net, saying they had done everything they could. Overall, the number of Salafists — or fundamentalist Sunni Muslims — in Germany has risen to more than 9,700, sharply up from 3,800 people in 2011, said Maaßen. “It’s of great concern to us that...

Police have confiscated tens of thousands of copies of a banned version of the Koran that came under fire for promoting religious hatred. Now the authorities must decide what to do with them. Throughout 2016, German authorities carried out raids on hundreds of locations across 10 federal states in a crackdown on the “True Religion” Salafist group, confiscating tens of thousands of copies of a fundamentalist translation of the Koran. According to media reports on Friday, the government was grappling with how to dispose of the texts — and the only option may be to bury the whole lot in...

The head of Germany’s second largest police union has harshly attacked the country’s justice system, after a court in Wuppertal ruled that so-called “sharia police” are legal. Rainer Wendt, head of the German Police Union (DpolG), told the Passauer Neue Presse (PNP) on Wednesday that the German judiciary are far too weak in dealing with known criminals. “These days the full force of the law often means we collect personal details from offenders and the judges let them go free,” said Wendt. …

A German court on Monday ruled that a group of Islamists did not break the law in forming “sharia police” street patrols and telling people to stop drinking, gambling and listening to music. The ultra-conservative Muslim group around German Salafist convert Sven Lau sparked public outrage with their vigilante patrols in the western city of Wuppertal in 2014, but prosecutors have struggled to build a case against them. The city’s district court ruled that the seven accused members of the group did not breach a ban on political uniforms when they approached people while wearing orange vests bearing the words...

Here is the fulcrum around which so much of the problem turns: the belief that Islamic law has every right to be put into practice in non-Muslim countries, and the insistence that a parallel, if unequal, legal system can function alongside civil and criminal law codes adhered to by a majority of a country's citizens. Salafism is a form of Islam that insists on the application of whatever was said or done by Muhammad or his companions ... The greatest expression of this failure to integrate, indeed a determined refusal to do so, may be found in the roughly 750...

Charges of unlawful assembly and use of uniform in public were brought against 11 members of a group trying to enforce aspects of strict Islamic Sharia law in the North Rhine-Westphalia city, a spokeswoman for the Wuppertal police told The Local. Officers stopped the 11-man group on the street on Wednesday. Some were wearing orange vests bearing the words 'Shariah Police', in violation of federal German law, the spokeswoman said. The group has been stopping young people at local drinking and gambling establishments and urging them to abstain from activities deemed to be ungodly according to Islam. The Wednesday incident...

The interior ministry has confirmed media reports that Islamic fundamentalist groups are propagandizing young male refugees arriving alone and without support or contacts in Germany. “Salafists are trying to talk with unaccompanied youths who have come to Germany without their families and who are in particular need of support and connections,” said a spokesperson from the Bavarian division of the internal security service (VS). This has been happening at refugee housing centers, but also in some instances at Munich Hauptbahnhof (central station), where tens of thousands of refugees have arrived over the past week alone. …

ISIS set four captured Iraqi men on fire by hog-tying them upside down, hanging them from a pole, then burning them alive. Once again, the savage execution was captured on video and shared on social media accounts friendly with the terror group as part of its propaganda and fear campaign. The four men in orange jumpsuits introduce themselves on camera and are made to watch videos of other ISIS executions before they’re marched out to the desert, with chains around their wrists and ankles, to their fate. After a man wearing camouflage and a mask explains how the men must...

A mob of some 20 Islamists stormed a debate in Amsterdam that was featuring two Muslim liberals, the Canadian writer and Muslim feminist Irshad Manji and the Dutch-Moroccan Green Left MP Tofik Dibi. Muslim extremists belonging to the group Sharia4Belgium, which seeks to establish Islamic Sharia law across Europe, yelled "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is Greater") and threatened to break Manji's neck. Waving an Islamist jihadist flag, they then demanded that Manji and Dibi be executed for apostasy. The December 8 debate on how liberal Muslims can prevent Islam from being hijacked by Muslim extremists was held at the De Baile...

Former DIA director: Obama White House made “willful decision” to support Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. Mehdi Hasan is a highly suspect analyst and Foreign Policy Journal appears to be a pro-jihad paleocon publication, and Al Jazeera is certainly a pro-jihad propaganda outlet. All that is noted, but if this transcript is accurate, former DIA director Michael Flynn is confirming that the Obama Administration knowingly decided to support al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and directly enabled the rise of the Islamic State. And given the Obama Administration’s general stance toward the global jihad and Islamic supremacism, what...

In a February 22, 2015 article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, Sheikh 'Adel Al-Kalbani, the former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, attacked the extremism of the Islamic State (ISIS) and groups like it. He said that it takes more than mere words, condemnation, and even fatwas to halt the spread of ISIS's ideas and prevent young people from joining its ranks – it requires reform in Islam that will restore its original tolerant character. Stating that Islam is fundamentally tolerant and that the Prophet and his Companions were lenient with those who disagreed with them, Al-Kalbani added that...

Global Warming? The Pope is Wrong April 27, 2015 Alan Caruba My thoughts regarding the Pope are rooted in my knowledge of the long record of lies, false predictions, and claims by various environmentalists over the years. When the Vatican announced it would hold a conference on April 28 called “Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development”, I wondered why the Vatican is not holding a conference to organize the protection of Christians—particularly in the Middle East—against the wholesale genocide that is occurring. The Pope is not alone in this. There appears to...

Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière ordered the dissolving of salafist organization Tauhid Germany on Thursday, saying that the group radicalized youth and encouraged them to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS. The Interior Ministry claimed in a statement on its website that Tauhid Germany is a successor organization to Millatu Ibrahim, a group which was banned in 2012. The ministry reports that Tauhid Germany spreads propaganda on the internet which “calls for the removal of Germany’s peaceful democratic structure.” …

The German PEGIDA movement held its largest meeting yet last night to protest what they call the ‘Islamisation of the Western World’, despite stiff opposition from all sections of Germany’s elite including politicians, media, and the arts. PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week,...