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Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is the head of the Muslim Scholars Association and who serves as spiritual mentor for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, attacked the Islamic Caliphate State established by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in large parts of Syria and Iraq. In an interview with a Turkish news agency, Qaradawi said that the caliphate is meaningless as it does not meet the requirements as dictated by Islam. It should be noted that Sheikh Qaradawi supports Hamas, operates a jihad against Israel, and in the past has made rulings permitting suicide bombings ...

<p>President Obama said Thursday he doesn’t have a strategy yet for defeating Islamist militants in Syria.</p> <p>“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse,” Mr. Obama said in a news conference at the White House. “We don’t have a strategy yet. As our strategy develops, we will consult with Congress.”</p>

Man with ISIS flag on vehicle threatens cops with bomb Updated: Aug 28, 2014 3:17 PM CST CHICAGO (Sun-Times Media Wire) - A man who had an ISIS flag waving from his vehicle is facing several charges after he threatened police with a bomb Wednesday morning when he was pulled over on the Southwest Side. Emad Karakrah, 49, was charged with felony counts of disorderly conduct and aggravated fleeing; and a misdemeanor count of driving on a never-issued license, according to Chicago Police. He was also issued three traffic citations. Someone called police after seeing a “suspicious person” driving a...

The ceasefire agreement didn’t give Hamas everything it wanted, but it gave Israel nothing at all.Israel’s insistence on demilitarizing Gaza fell by the wayside.Why? Here’s one answer. Nabil Shaath, a senior PLO official and confidante of PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas, said that Israel dropped the demand that Hamas be demilitarized, due to American pressure, in an interview with the Arabic Ma’an News Agency. As usual the war was won on the battlefield and lost at the negotiating table. Which means it will have to be repeated in a year or two with a stronger Hamas.Without demilitarizing Gaza, the entire...

<p>Yesterday, in New York, the sister of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested for allegedly threatening to blow someone up in what appears to be some kind of weird love triangle situation. You will, of course, remember the Tsarnaevs as the infamous terrorist duo behind the Boston Marathon bombing, which took place back in April of 2013.</p>

Benjamin Netanayu's days as Israeli prime minister may be numbered following his agreement with Hamas for an extended ceasefire, says Danny Danon, a Likud party member of the Knesset and Netanyahu's former deputy minister of defense. Netanyahu inexplicably accepted the ceasefire even though a majority of the cabinet members would have wholeheartedly voted no, Danon explained Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV. "We are disappointed … You fight with the Hamas you don't negotiate with the Hamas. You don't negotiate with a terrorist organization," Danon said. "We should fight against the Hamas. We have the ability and...

Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) fighters have executed dozens of members of the Syrian army they captured after seizing an air base in the northeast of the country, a group monitoring the violence said on Thursday. ISIL, a radical offshoot of al-Qaeda, stormed Tabqa air base on Sunday after days of clashes with the army and said it had captured and killed soldiers and officers in one of the fiercest confrontations yet between the two sides. The capture of Tabqa, the Syrian army's last foothold in that area, and apparent killing of large numbers of its soldiers...

N4T Investigators: Church and State Tucson - It's 12:40 in the afternoon, and in the Islamic Center of Tucson, a time to pray. Muslims have a strict daily prayer schedule, five times a day at specific times. One of those times is in the middle of the school day. In a room off the library at Desert View High School, four to six Muslim students pray during every school day for about 10 minutes. Sunnyside Unified School District officials tell the News 4 Tucson Investigators that all but one of the students pray during their lunch period, the other misses...

United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The United Nations said that an armed group captured 43 UN peacekeepers on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights on Thursday and that it was doing everything to secure their release. An additional 81 peacekeepers were "currently being restricted to their positions in the vicinity of Ar Ruwayhinah and Burayqah," it added. Israel closed off the area around Quneitra on Wednesday after an officer was wounded by stray fire as Syrian rebels, including fighters from the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra front, stormed the crossing. No details were released on the nationalities of the detained...

MAKHMUR, Iraq — Bullet-riddled walls, burned-out buildings and a hastily dug grave in this town where U.S. troops were once stationed mark the northernmost advance of Islamic State militants along one of the main highways leading into Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurdish forces recaptured Makhmur, an oil and farming center just 40 miles south of the Kurdish capital, Irbil, in the wake of U.S. airstrikes launched this month on Islamic State positions, pushing the militants back to the town of Qarach, a 15-minute drive down the road. Few of the 18,000 people who lived in Makhmur have returned, fearing that Islamic State...

Baghdad (Alliance News) - Kurdish Peshmerga forces Thursday took control of seven villages from the Islamic State in northern Iraq in a major offensive against the radical group, the Iraqi government-run TV al-Iraqiya reported. The villages are located near the strategic Mosul Dam, which the Peshmerga had recaptured from the extremists in mid-August.The dam, Iraq's largest, is located on the Tigris River, which flows through the capital Baghdad.After having suffered setbacks by the Islamic State early this month, the Peshmerga, backed by US airstrikes, have been able to retake several areas from the al-Qaeda splinter group in the past two...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A U.S. Coast Guard vessel fired in self-defense on an Iranian boat in the Persian Gulf, the Navy said Wednesday, an encounter that could exacerbate tensions between the two countries as they work to hammer out a lasting deal over Iran's nuclear program. Cmdr. Kevin Stephens, a spokesman for the U.S. Navy's Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, said personnel on a small boat dispatched from the U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat Monomoy fired a single shot when it saw crew on a nearby Iranian dhow training one of its two .50-caliber machine guns on them and preparing...

Some news about the Tsarnaev family: A sister of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects was arrested in New York Wednesday after allegedly threatening a woman in a domestic harassment case, saying, “I have people that can go over there and put a bomb on you.”Ailana Tsarnaev, of North Berger, New Jersey, was arrested at a police station in New York City Wednesday afternoon, charged with one count of aggravated harassment. She was released with a summons to return to a criminal court in Manhattan on Sept. 3, according to police Lt. John Grimpel.Grimpel said the victim of Ailana Tsarnaev’s...

Israelis are not happy with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And they shouldn’t be.The headline at Israel National News reads: “Majority of Israelis Think Israel Didn't Win Gaza Operation” Journalist Ari Yashar writes: Poll: 59% say op. not a success, as Netanyahu's approval rating nose-dives further to a paltry 32%; majority oppose ceasefire.  snip Clearly the disappointment is not directed at the IDF, which 83% of the public said it was satisfied with - instead Israelis apparently are severely dissatisfied with the political echelon, and Netanyahu at its head.  (snip) Criticism has been pouring in from all corners over Netanyahu's apparent...

Investigators now believe a fire which damaged a mosque in Berlin earlier in August was started deliberately. Police had believed that the fire at the Mevlana mosque in Kreuzberg might have been caused by a technical fault or started accidentally, but both of those possibilities have now been ruled out. […] The fire began in building materials stored in an unfinished extension to the structure and caused smoke damage to the façade and the interior of the mosque. Renovation and extension work has been going on at the site since 2013. …

For the first time in the capital city's history, Mohammed is the common name for boys and men

A Sinai-based militant group said on Thursday it had beheaded four Egyptians, accusing them of providing Israel with intelligence for an airstrike that killed three of its fighters. Four headless corpses were found in the Sinai Peninsula earlier this month, security sources said -- the first time that any decapitations had been made public in Egypt. The men had been abducted by gunmen two days earlier while driving in the town of Sheikh Zuwaid, which is just a few kilometers from the Gaza Strip. In a video released on Twitter, Egypt's most dangerous militant group, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, said the...

Despite how unsavory and barbaric Islamic groups and persons around the world have been acting—whether Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Mesopotamia’s Islamic State, Somalia’s Shabaab—perhaps few things are as disgusting and cowardly as the Muslim rape of nuns: defenseless Christian women who sacrifice much of their lives to help sick and needy Muslims.The latest such attack comes from Bangladesh, which is over 90% Muslim in population. In early July, dozens of men armed with machetes, knives and iron rods attacked the convent of PIME (Pontifical Institute of Foreign Missions nuns in Boldipuku), a village mission in north Bangladesh. In the words of...

89% of Gazans support indiscriminate rocket fire against Israel civilians, according to a poll released on Wednesday. The survey, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), also showed widespread support for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which has been fiercely criticized of turning a blind eye to Hamas incitement in its schools in the Gaza Strip, as well as the use of its school buildings to store rockets. Asked about their opinion on the issue of “firing rockets at Israel”, 60.3% “strongly supported” such actions, while a further 28.6% supported it somewhat—for a total of...

In a concise and clear manner, the former United States president, George W. Bush, said on the 11th of May, 2011, that United States foreign policy should continue to promote the ideas of freedom and democracy as a way to combat global terrorism. "The long-term solution," Bush said, "is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal." In the light of the current confrontation with the Islamic State terror organization, as well as with Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups, it is pertinent to assess to what extent Bush is right. In order to defeat a totalitarian...