Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

World Terrorism: News, History and Research Of A Changing World #9 Security Watch
BERNAMA ^ | June 19, 2007 | BERNAMA

Posted on 06/19/2007 4:43:36 PM PDT by DAVEY CROCKETT

Saudi King Says Middle East Crisis Will Affect The World

DUBAI, June 19 (Bernama) -- The Saudi king has warned of an impending "explosion" in the Middle East, saying that it will not only affect the region but will spread all over the world, the English daily Gulf News reports.

"The Middle East region suffers from the longest conflict in our contemporary history which is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Israel's occupation of Arab lands," King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, said in an interview with the Spanish El Pas newspaper which was published simultaneously in Al Riyadh newspaper yesterday.

"At this point in time we are exerting efforts to solve this conflict, but we are witnessing an expansion of the crisis to include other countries like Iraq and Lebanon," he said.

"This makes the region replete with troubles that pose grave concerns for us. My fears are the fears of all reasonable men that the explosive situation will not be confined to the region but will extend to the whole world," he added.

The Saudi monarch yesterday began a five-nation trip that will take him to Spain, France, Poland, Egypt and Jordan.

King Abdullah also underlined the importance of solving the problem of Iran's nuclear programme peacefully in a way that guarantees all countries in the region to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in accordance with the standards of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v3/news_lite.php?id=268361

(Excerpt) Read more at bernama.com ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: history; islam; terror; terrorist; theworld; wt; yasinalqadi
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 3,821-3,8403,841-3,8603,861-3,880 ... 4,101-4,118 next last
To: All; FARS; milford421; Velveeta

Qantas safety questioned

AN unqualified Qantas mechanical engineer signed off on the safety of
more
than 1000 international flights in the past year without having a
licence to
do so.

The “imposter”, based at Sydney international airport, is being
investigated
by the Australian Federal Police after allegedly forging his licensed
aircraft maintenance engineer’s licence without having passed the Civil

Aviation Safety Authority exams required.

The alleged fraudster has “given the thumbs-up” to more than four
international flights a day over the past year.

Irregularities with his licence were exposed during a routine checking
process last month, Qantas executive general manager of engineering
David
Cox said yesterday.

The man had been responsible for signing off on maintenance, which
allowed
aircraft to then be classified safe to fly.

When confronted by Qantas management the engineer tendered his
resignation
and is now alleged to have fled.

He contacted his union, the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers
Association, last week seeking help, but has not been heard from since.

ALAEA federal secretary Steve Purvinas said it was the responsibility
of
Qantas to check its employees were qualified to sign off on aircraft.

Qantas said yesterday the man was not only responsible for “certifying
for
the release of aircraft” but also authorised more junior, unlicensed
engineers to send aicraft on their way. Since discovering the man was
unlicensed, CASA and Qantas retraced the work he carried out and found
no
anomalies.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22279396-662,00.html


3,841 posted on 08/21/2007 3:23:12 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

Death Toll from Suicide Bombings in NW Iraq Rises to 500 (back)

August 19, 2007

The death toll from four apparently coordinated suicide car bombings near Iraq ‘s northwestern town of Sinjar late Tuesday rose dramatically to 500, while 375 others injured, hospital official told Xinhua on Wednesday.

‘We have received 500 corpses and 375 others injured people,’ said Dr. Kifah Muhammad, the manager of the hospital in Sinjar, a town in western Nineveh province.

He added that the death toll could rise further as rescue workers continue to ferry the victims to the hospital.

The newly obtained figure from the hospital doubled the death toll Xinhua earlier got from a local police source, which said that 250 people were killed and 300 others injured.

Late Tuesday, four suicide car bombs, apparently targeting residents from Iraq ‘s Yazidi religious minority, ripped through Yazidi residential compounds in Kahtaniya and al-Jazeera near Sinjar.

The Yazidis are primarily ethnic Kurd and mostly live near Mosul ,capital of Nineveh province.

The coordinated attack on Tuesday recorded the deadliest incidents of its kind since the Iraq war broke out in 2003.

The last bloodiest attack took place on Nov. 23 of 2006, when a series of bombings and mortar rounds killed more than 200 people and injured more than 250 others in Baghdad ‘s Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City .

However, the U.S. military gave a lower death toll in a statement on Wednesday despite the lurid death toll from hospital.

The military said in the statement that some 60 Iraqi civilians were killed and an unknown number injured in the five car bombs in western Nineveh province, one more bomb than what the media reported.

Four car bombs struck Kahtaniya near the Sinjar region while another car bomb detonated in a residential area of al-Jazeera, southwest of Khahtaniya, it said.

So far, no any group has claimed responsibility for the attack. However, many people blamed it on al-Qaida terrorists in Iraq , who were forced to leave Anbar and Diyala provinces amid a joint massive U.S.-Iraqi offensive against them and commenced staging attacks in other vulnerable areas, such as Sinjar.

Source: http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/6240572.html


3,842 posted on 08/21/2007 6:59:13 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

RPG Discovery - Los Angeles Area (back)

August 18, 2007

by Cindy Santos and Kimerly Edds

NOTE: Article below of interest given known terrorist intentions to use RPGs to bring down civil aircraft (El Al in Geneva for one). Would be interesting to see how the stolen van was modified.

A military-style rocket-propelled grenade found in a customized van was disarmed and hauled off to the Orange County Sheriff’s headquarters in Santa Ana .

The sheriff’s bomb squad called the Marines’ Explosive Ordnance Detail from Camp Pendleton to disarm the weapon.

Marines detonated the device found in the recently stolen and recovered 2005 Ford E350 van with three explosives before taking the van from the scene was declared safe.

Sheriff’s deputies were called to the 24000 block of Via Portola at about 12:45 p.m. when Ernie Adkins, the van’s owner, found the grenade tashed in the overhead rack.

Adkins’ reported his van stolen a few weeks ago. Upland police returned to him.

Source: http://www.ocregister.com/news/sheriff-military-amormino-813380-called-niguel


3,843 posted on 08/21/2007 7:03:37 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

HOMELAND SECURITY

First Crack in US-UK Special Relationship? (back)

August 18, 2007

by Adrian Morgan

The unelected prime minister of Britain , Gordon Brown, assumed his office on June 27. Within three days, two car bombs were discovered in the West End of London, and a flaming Jeep Cherokee filled with gasoline and butane gas was driven into the entrance of Glasgow Airport . Brown and his newly-appointed Home Secretary made speeches after these terror plots, but were careful not to mention ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Muslim terrorism’, despite the ideology of the perpetrators.

The new terminology removing any associations of Islam from discussion of Islamic terrorism came directly from Gordon Brown’s command, denoting a shift from the policies of his predecessor and fellow Labour party member Tony Blair. The term ‘war on terror’ was also dropped by Gordon Brown. Kowtowing to the minority Muslim population, Brown’s official spokesman said: ‘There is clearly a need to strike a consensual tone in relation to all communities across the U.K. It is important that the country remains united.’ Perhaps for the sake of accuracy he should have employed the expression ‘It is important that the country maintains a pretense of being united.’

Brown’s revised strategy on terrorism - focusing on ‘consultation’ with so-called community ‘leaders’ and donating money to ‘citizenship schemes’ - was naturally welcomed by the extremist Muslim Council of Britain. This group, co-founded by Kemal el-Helbawy of the Muslim Brotherhood, has senior members who support the ideology of Islamist ideologue Syed Ala Maududi. Though its leaders have refused to support events such as Holocaust Memorial Day and have never condemned Hamas attacks against Israel , the MCB acted as advisers for the Labour party government under Tony Blair. Their favored position was weakened after the MCB signed a letter in August 12, 2006 blaming UK foreign policy for home-grown terrorism.

In October last year, the government warned Muslim groups that if they were not active in fighting extremism, they would lose their state funding. There are rumors, so far not proven, that the MCB may once again become an advisory body of the UK government. Brown has promoted two individuals into his cabinet - Mark Malloch Brown (Foreign Office minister) and Douglas Alexander (International Development Secretary) - who appear to promote negotiations with international extremist groups and a weakening of the ‘special relationship’ with the US.

The new Foreign Secretary, 42-year old David Miliband, promoted the integrity of the ‘special relationship’ prior to Gordon Brown’s visit to Camp David on July 30. Yet on Tuesday August 8 Miliband signaled a major departure from the policies of Tony Blair. In a letter to Condoleezza Rice, Miliband requested that the US sends five suspected terrorists, currently held in Guantanamo Bay , to Britain . None of these individuals has UK citizenship, and there are few in Britain who wish them to be living here.

On August 1, it was announced that one UK non-citizen, an Iraqi named Bisher al-Rawi, was back in Britain . He had been arrested in Gambia in November 2002 with Jamil al-Banna, a Jordanian with known links to suspected Al Qaeda member Abu Qatada. Shortly before their arrests, al-Banna had been approached by MI5, who had sought information on Qatada. The freeing of Bisher al-Rawi, who has been a resident of the UK (but not a citizen) for two decades, appears to be part of the US plan to reduce numbers at Guantanamo , with a view to eventual closure.

In the past, Britain has called for release of UK nationals, but the request by Miliband is the first time that Britain has asked for the release of individuals who are not citizens but refugees or ‘residents’ in Britain. The five subjects of Miliband’s request are Jamil al-Banna, Omar Deghayes, Shaker Abdur-Raheem Aamer, Binyam Mohammed al Habashi and Abdulnour Sameur. The Sunday Times quoted Sandra Hodgkinson, deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affair at the Pentagon. She warned that the suspects could try to rejoin terror operations. Unless Britain takes precautions, they could pose a threat to UK security, Hodgkinson warned.

Sandra Hodgkinson claims that one of the individuals had been an interpreter for Osama bin Laden, and had been funded by him while living in Afghanistan . Another had a ‘long-tern association’ with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former head of Al Qaeda in Iraq . Another individual is said to be a ‘jihadi veteran’ of the Bosnian conflict who has links to the terrorist Salaheddine Benyaich, who helped organize the suicide bombings of May 16, 2003, in which 33 innocent people died. So who are these individuals?

The Detainees That Britain Wants Back

Jamil el-Banna, who had been arrested at Banjul airport in Gambia on November 8, claims he had visited Africa to set up a peanut oil company. He has refugee status. He knew Abu Qatada when they were neighbours in Pakistan . His case has been supported by Amnesty International and by Brent East MP, Sarah Teather, who is chair of Britain ‘s All Party Parliamentary Group on Guantanamo Bay . She has said: ‘This decision should have been taken years ago. Abandoning British residents to indefinite imprisonment in obscene conditions was a gross dereliction of duty by the Government. Guantanamo Bay is an insult to democracy and a violation of the principles the war on terror purports to defend. Many questions remain over the Government’s complicity in the abduction and imprisonment of Jamil.’ Al-Banna is the only one among the five to have been cleared for release by US authorities.

Shaker Abdur-Raheem Aamer (aka Shakir Abdurahim Mohamed Ami) is originally from Saudi Arabia but has lived in Battersea, south London , since 1996. Given indefinite leave to remain in Britain , he married and had three children. He had been captured in Afghanistan on January 15, 2002. He claims that he had gone to Afghanistan in August 2001 to carry out charity work. A fourth child was born after his arrest which he has not seen. Despite the attempts by his supporters to portray Aamer as a traumatized victim, according to files quoted by Sandra Hodgkinson, he received a stipend from bin Laden when he lived in Afghanistan . He also acted as an ‘interpreter’ for bin Laden, it is alleged, and had ‘ties’ to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Aamer is said to have links to Islamists who plotted an attack upon the UK parliament in 2005.

Binyam Mohammed al Habashi is an Ethiopian who arrived in Britain in 1991, aged 15. His father had become an asylum seeker. He converted to Islam seven years after his arrival. He is suspected of undergoing explosives training in Afghanistan alongside shoe-bomber Richard Reid. He had been arrested in Karachi , Pakistan , in 2002. He is accused of trying to fly to the US where he was said to have intended to be part of a plot to blow up apartment blocks. He claims that he was sent from Pakistan to Morocco , where he was subjected to torture during an 18 month detention.

The Times wrote recently: ‘A United States military indictment alleges that Binyam Mohammed received firearms and explosives training alongside the shoebomber Richard Reid, was lectured by Osama bin Laden and was given a terrorist mission by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 atrocities.’

Abdelnour Sameur is a deserter from the Algerian army who arrived in 1999. Since April 2000 when his refugee status was accepted, he has ‘leave to remain’ in Britain . He lived in South Harrow, in northwest London with his brother. Sameur has said that in the summer of 2001, a man he had encountered in the notorious Finsbury Park mosque had given him money to go to Afghanistan . Sameur said that he thought that in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime, he would find it easier to live as a Muslim. Sameur is said to have fought with the Muslim fighters in Bosnia . He was arrested in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan after he had been shot in the leg while trying to resist capture.

While in Afghanistan Sameur admitted having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, but later claimed he had made the confession under duress. Sameur said to US investigators at Guantanamo : ‘I just told them anything, whatever they wanted to hear, because I wanted them to treat my leg. I saw other people there whose legs had to be cut off. I did not want my leg to be cut off.’

36-year old Omar Deghayes is a controversial figure, with a controversial brother who runs an extremist mosque - the Alquds mosque - in Brighton , Sussex . Libyan-born Omar Deghayes was arrested in Pakistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban. According to the US authorities, Omar Deghayes had gone to Afghanistan with the help of a senior Al Qaeda figure, had attended a terror training camp, and ‘had a good relationship with Osama bin Laden’. He had arrived in Britain in 1986 with his mother, his sister Amani and brother Abubaker, after his trade unionist father had been shot by Gadaafi in Libya . It is alleged that Omar Deghayes is shown on a Chechen training video in the possession of the Spanish government, but his lawyers claim this is a case of mistaken identity. His sister denies that he has ever been to Chechnya . Omar Deghayes had settled with his family in Brighton, and had studied law at Wolverhampton and Huddersfield . He had dropped out of studies and gone to Afghanistan .

Some of the US evidence against Omar Deghayes appears to be corroborated by court reports. In May 2004 David Courtailler was sentenced by a French court to jail for ‘conspiring with criminals engaged in a terrorist enterprise’. Courtailler had gone to Afghanistan and had links to Jamal Zougam, a key suspect in the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, which killed 190 people. At Courtailler’s trial, it was stated that Omar Deghayes had given him 1,000 pounds to travel to Afghanistan . In Courtailler’s indictment, he had also been given a telephone number in Pakistan by his benefactor.

Courtailler had arrived in Brighton in 1997 while a recovering drug addict. He had converted to Islam at the Alquds mosque run by Omar Deghayes’ brother Abubaker. The original imam at the mosque, Dr Abduljalil Sajid, had been ousted by Abubaker Deghayes and his followers. These had used threats and actual violence to take control of the mosque, backed up by court records. On four occasions between December 1996 and January 1997, Abubaker Deghayes had physically attacked Dr Sajid.

The statements from Sandra Hodgkinson of the Pentagon claim that one of the 5 individuals that Britain wants returned had links with Salaheddine Benyaich, who was a plotter of the May 2003 Casablanca bombings. Currently, Benyaich is serving an 18 year jail term in Morocco for his part in the bombings. Long before these attacks took place, Benyaich had used the stolen identity of a Brighton man to gain a UK passport. The individual whose identity was stolen was a 32-year old electrician named David Charles Burgess. In fact, the British government had issued the Moroccan terrorist with TWO passports. Benyaich had used these to travel around Europe . Courtailler had gone on a three month trip to Spain and North Africa in November 1998. In Tangiers, he had stayed at the family home of the Benyaich family. Was David Burgess’ identity, so useful for Saleheddine Benyaich, stolen with assistance from the Deghayes-controlled Alquds mosque in Brighton ?

Omar Deghayes claims that in March 2004 while in Camp Delta , he was so badly sprayed with pepper spray that he is now blind in one eye. In a diary, Omar Deghayes has shown Islamist contempt for his US captors, writing: ‘I am very frustrated with these cunning officers and worthless men of no word. In Arabia we look down on such people.’

The warnings of Sandra Hodgkinson should be heeded. Some of these five individuals that Gordon Brown’s government wishes to return to Britain may easily revert to their terror associations. Once in Britain , the Human Rights Act of 1986 will mean that - should they reactivate their terror links - they will be impossible to deport.

The ethos behind the move to have these individuals returned is almost certainly designed more to appease the Islamists in Britain than it is to please the general public. The shadow immigration minister, Damian Green of the Conservative party, has written to Jacqui Smith, Brown’s new Home Secretary. He wrote: ‘Can you confirm, on the information you have, either that the individuals present no risk to British security or that the necessary measures have been taken to ensure that they will pose no threat on return to this country?’

So far, no answer has been forthcoming....

Source: http://www.speroforum.com/site/article.asp?id=10733


3,844 posted on 08/21/2007 7:09:01 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

Egos Trump Action as Terror Cells Remain Uninvestigated (back)

August 17, 2007

by Frank Salvato

Just when you thought the disingenuous blathering of the elected class, which typically serves up a huge helping of inaction and poor governance, was as bad as it could get, something comes along that makes their political opportunism seem almost acceptable.

This time the dysfunctional behavior is between law enforcement agencies, and because of it, our national security hangs in the balance.

A new report by the Inspectors General of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice spotlights a dysfunctional relationship between agents from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It seems that ICE doesn’t like working with the FBI on cases involving terrorist financing.

The report alluded to the fact that there were a few reasons why ICE had its nose out of joint with the FBI, but the one reason that made my jaw drop was that ICE agents felt slighted where acknowledgment regarding successful cases was concerned. Unbelievable.

How pathetic is it that agents from two of our chief law enforcement agencies — during a time of war — would be more concerned with who gets credit for successfully executing their jobs than actually doing the jobs to the best of their abilities?

All federal law enforcement agents — as well as most law enforcement officers in the United States (most firefighters as well) — swear an oath:

‘I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.’

These agents, by swearing this oath, put duty above vanity. They accept the mission of serving and protecting the citizens of the United States while safeguarding its citizenry from enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Today, these agents are on the front lines of a conflict that sees our very existence hanging in the balance. They are responsible for defending our country from the clandestine and criminal operations of an enemy hell-bent on eradicating the American way of life — literally.

Yet in the face of this very real danger, a danger whose threat may very well eclipse that of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the security of our nation and the safety of the American people have been compromised by egos.

I, for one, have had it with the self-centered, the lazy and the purposefully ignorant. I am angry with the appeasers, the deniers and the America-haters. I am tired of being placed into harms way by the ideologically lazy and the conceptually dysfunctional.

I am tired of having to explain what should be considered common sense and pointing out what should be common knowledge and having to do so in the Internet age, when information is just a mouse click away.

Our nation, our culture, is facing perhaps the quintessential struggle of our time, a legitimate battle for our survival. We are facing an enemy that wants to bring our nation and the whole of Western Civilization to an end.

This enemy is not a misunderstood religious sect or a faction of oppressed people lashing out because of something we, as a culture, have done to them. They are an aggressive, fascist sect who hates us and everything we stand for, going all the way back to the Founders and the Framers.

We are at war and, quite frankly, we did an incredible disservice to the free world when we failed to secure an accurately defined and binding Declaration of War after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

It is outrageous that we have tolerated, to date, the spittle-infused ranting of the useful idiots of the American Fifth Column. It is criminal that our government has not prosecuted, for acts of treason, those individuals and organizations — both of the media and the civil rights variety — who seek to give unfathomable advantages (i.e. leaking classified information to the press, hampering intelligence gathering and facilitating the defeat of our troops on the battlefield) to those who want to kill us.

These short-sighted, maladjusted, narcissists contribute nothing to the advancement of true freedom and liberty, here or around the world, and but for providing the perfect example of how to destroy a republican form of democracy, their contempt for these principles stands as testimony to their uselessness.

It is equally, if not more outrageous that law enforcement agents are engaged in a battle of egos, a battle for territorial recognition, while ignoring directives (orders), violating their oaths and abandoning their countrymen because they weren’t given a gold star for doing the job they signed-on to do.

It is well past time that we, the average American, demand more from our government and our fellow Americans. We must take back our country from the influence of the American Fifth Column, the fringe elements of our society.

We, the silent majority, must shake off the apathy that has rendered ineffective our constitutionally mandated duty to civic responsibility and we must do it now, before it is too late.

It is our duty to educate ourselves on the facts, to discard the propaganda of the deceitful and to condemn those who disseminate false information — or ‘spun’ rhetoric. We must attack those political opportunists who will say anything to attain power. We must expose the American Fifth Column for the minority anti-freedom, anti-sovereignty, special interest faction that they are.

We must eradicate from our government opportunistic ‘professional’ politicians and, at the same time, demand that those who enlist to serve and protect our nation do so selflessly and diligently.

To do this, we, the majority in our great nation, have to lead by example and that means giving of ourselves, sacrificing time and treasure and supporting those who are fighting the good fight, whether it be on the front lines of the Iraqi battlefields or the informational battlefields of cyberspace and the media. Bottom line, if you aren’t doing anything to help, you aren’t doing anything.

As for the ICE and FBI agents who are having problems getting along and doing their jobs, if you can’t get over your bloated egos long enough to be faithful to our nation then quit.

There are men and women — better men and women — who love our country enough to do the job without getting a ‘gold star.’ Just ask any Gold Star Mother.

Source: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCommentary.asp?Page=/Commentary/archive/200708/COM20070817a.html


3,845 posted on 08/21/2007 7:10:16 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

TERRORISM RESPONSE

Killer of US Troops Released (back)

August 18, 2007

by Michael Sontheimer

Eva Haule, released from prison on Friday, was a leading member of the ‘third generation’ of leftist terrorist group RAF. The operative, however, has yet to shed light on the numerous assassinations carried out by her group, many of which remain unsolved.

Eva Haule spent her last hours as a free woman in the ice cream café ‘Dolomiti’ in Rüsselsheim — a town near Frankfurt . She was meeting with two supporters of the Red Army Faktion, the home-grown terror group to which she belonged. The trio attracted the attention of a person seated at a nearby table, who recognized them in police posters. Every time the waitress came to the table, the three would hurriedly gather together their papers.

The man called the police. Moments later, when two officers approached Haule’s table with guns drawn, she chose not to pull her own pistol. On August 2, 1986 Eva Haule disappeared behind bars and was sentenced to life in prison eight years later.

Now, a Frankfurt court has announced that the ex-terrorist — convicted of killing two Americans in a 1985 air base bombing — will be released on parole. The court ruled that the former RAF member no longer presented a threat to society. With her release, only two former members of the RAF — which disbanded in 1998 — will remain behind bars: Haule’s former comrade-in-arms Birgit Hogefeld and Christian Klar, arrested in 1982.

Rebuilding Terror

Born in 1954, Haule grew up in southern Germany . In 1979 — while nominally studying social work though already a full-time political activist — Haule moved to West Berlin , where she visited imprisoned members of Movement 2nd June and became part of the militant squatter movement. But sporadic street fights with anarchists did not completely satisfy her. She wanted to use tougher methods against the government. Her steely determination stood out even then.

But in the early 1980s, there weren’t many groups Haule could turn to. In the period following the arrests of Christian Klar, Brigitte Mohnhaupt and the remaining members of the RAF’s ‘second generation’ in November 1982, the terrorist group was significantly weakened. The RAF of the early ‘80s lacked not only members but also the logistical capabilities to carry out attacks.

But in early 1984, Haule went underground with veteran RAF supporters Birgit Hogefeld and Wolfgang Grams and joined up with a group trying to rebuild the terror organization. A major setback, though, quickly followed. After a number of RAF members had assembled in a safe house, a pistol accidentally fired a bullet through the floor and into the apartment of an electrician living below. The man only realized what happen when a stranger rang his bell and explained that she had a water leak in the flat above his and was wondering if it had seeped down into his apartment. The electrician then looked up at his ceiling, saw a hole it, saw the bullet in his floor and called the police.

In one fell swoop, the police arrested six RAF members: Helmut Pohl, Christa Eckes, Stefan Frey, Ingrid Jakobsmeier, Barbara Ernst and Ernst-Volker Staub.

Like a Hydra

At the hideout, the police were also able to confiscate 8,400 pages of documents, most importantly strategy papers and reconnaissance plans. Among the latter were details about planned RAF victims, such as defense industry magnate Ernst Zimmermann and Karl Heinz Beckurts, a member of Siemens’ board of directors.

Once again it looked as though the RAF was at an end. But soon, like a hydra, the terror group grew yet another new head. Haule, Hogefeld, Grams and maybe other, still-unidentified RAF members continued.

Four months after the Frankfurt arrests, RAF members robbed a gun store in Maxdorf — just south of Frankfurt — and made off with 22 pistols and 2,800 rounds of ammunition. The arsenal was full once again. One month later, on Dec. 18, 1984, it was time to go on the offensive. The group parked a car loaded with a 25-kilogram bomb in front of the main gate of a NATO training center in Oberammergau . But the detonator failed.

At the end of January 1985, a commando from the French terrorist group Action Directe shot a director of the French Defense Ministry in Paris . The group’s tight bonds with the RAF quickly became clear. The statement released by the French group following the murder was signed by the ‘Elisabeth von Dyck Commando’ — named after an RAF member who was shot to death by police in Nuremberg in 1979.

Unsolved Murder

Exactly one week after the Paris attack, a woman rang Ernst Zimmerman’s doorbell in Gauting, near Munich . She claimed to be the mail carrier and that she needed a signature. When Zimmerman — a manager at a company which built turbines for fighter planes and engines for tanks — opened the door, he was confronted by a man wielding an automatic weapon. The duo tied up Zimmerman and his wife before taking him into the bedroom. Once there, he was executed with a shot through his head. The murder has gone unsolved.

The third generation of the RAF had found its modus operendi — a style of killing it stayed true to until the 1991 murder of Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, responsible for selling off former East German state property following 1990 reunification. It was also clear to the investigators that the new RAF was extremely professional. Although Zimmerman’s murderer wore no gloves, there were no fingerprints left behind.

It was then that the RAF carried out an attack that cut the already slender ties to Germany ‘s leftist-radical scene once and for all. A woman in the Wiesbaden club ‘Western Saloon’ began flirting with 20-year-old US soldier Edward Pimental. The GI left the disco with her — and was found dead the next morning in a nearby forest.

Just why Pimental had to die quickly became apparent. On Aug. 8, 1985, a car bomb ripped through a parking lot at the Rhein-Main Air Base, killing Airman First Class Frank Scarton and Becky Bristol, a civilian employee. Another 23 people were injured in the blast. The perpetrators had used Pimental’s ID to get on the base.

Numerous leftists, including jailed RAF members, publicly criticized the murder of the young US soldier and the air base attack. In response, the RAF said: ‘We are not misty-eyed social workers.’

Vow of Silence

Indeed. Just four weeks before the August 1986 arrest of Eva Haule, a commando blew up the BMW of Siemens board member Karl Heinz Beckurts. He and his driver, Eckherd Groppler, both died in the attack.

When Haule was arrested, German public prosecutors knew that she was an active member of RAF commandos. But they didn’t know much more. Like almost all RAF members who had fallen into the hands of the authorities, she refused to talk.

But that didn’t protect her from being sent to the slammer. In 1988, she was sentenced to 15 years in prison after being convicted on 23 counts of attempted murder — based partially on weak evidence — for the attack on the NATO training center in Oberammergau . But that wasn’t the only time she was prosecuted. After a secret message from Haule was found in a fellow-inmate’s cell in which she wrote of ‘we’ in reference to the air base attack, she immediately became a prime suspect in the bombing. Despite serious doubts voiced by Germany ‘s Federal Criminal Police Office, in 1994 a Frankfurt court sentenced her to life in prison.

Since she has been in prison, Haule has — like Brigitte Mohnhaupt, who was released from jail in March — opted to show no remorse for her actions as an RAF member. She cut off relations with Birgit Hogefeld, an RAF member who distanced herself from the group’s activities. Like her friend Helmut Pohl, she never gave interviews about the RAF. Instead, she has become involved in helping political prisoners.

And the man in the ice cream café in Rüsselsheim who tipped off the police 21 years ago? For him, it was a worthwhile phone call. He was awarded 100,000 German marks for his trouble — tax free.

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,500561,00.html


3,846 posted on 08/21/2007 7:12:13 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

Hamza May Go Free as Witness Backs Down (back)

August 19, 2007

by Abul Taher

One of Britain ’s most notorious Islamic extremists may be freed from prison as early as next year after an Al-Qaeda ‘supergrass’ said he was no longer prepared to testify against him.

Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed firebrand who used to preach at Finsbury Park mosque in north London , was expected to be extradited to America for trial on charges including trying to establish a terrorist camp in Oregon .

But in a New York courtroom last week James Ujaama, 41, the key witness against Hamza, appeared to have reneged on a deal to testify against him. The change of heart could lead to the collapse of the American request for Hamza’s extradition now going through British courts.

Eight of the 11 counts on which the case rests depend on Ujaama’s evidence. Hamza faces a possible total of 100 years in prison in America .

The Egyptian-born cleric, 49, is serving a seven-year sentence in Belmarsh prison, southeast London , for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred. But because he has already spent more than three years in prison and on remand, he will qualify for parole early next year and will go free if the extradition case collapses.

Hamza’s next extradition hearing is in October. A lawyer close to his case said: ‘This is a very significant development and it will be brought up in the next court hearing.’

Finsbury Park mosque, under Hamza’s control, was blamed for radicalising some of Britain’s worst extremists, including Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and Zacarias Moussaoui, sentenced to life for his involvement in the 9/11 plot. At least two of the failed bombers in London on July 21, 2005, also worshipped there.

Hamza was jailed in 2006 after a court heard tapes of his sermons including: ‘Killing the kafir [infidel] for any reason you can say is okay even if there is no reason for it.’

He is accused by the US of trying to set up a training camp in Bly , Oregon , and providing material support to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He is also accused of using Finsbury Park mosque as a base for sending recruits to Afghanistan to train for jihad.

Ujaama, a Muslim convert from Seattle , was charged with trying to set up the Oregon camp with Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat, another Briton.

Aswat, who is in jail in Britain pending extradition, was arrested at the request of British police in Zambia and questioned for his alleged role in the 2005 London bombings. He has never been charged and denies any involvement in terrorism.

After his arrest in 2003 Ujaama struck a deal with the FBI: he promised to testify against Hamza and Aswat and was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of aiding the Taliban, which left him with a reduced prison sentence.

But last year, while on supervised release, Ujaama fled on a false passport to Belize , where he was arrested last December. On Monday he appeared in court in New York , where the more serious terror-related charges against him were reinstated. He now faces up to 30 years in jail.

According to court transcripts, Ujaama said: ‘Part of the reason I left the US was to avoid having to . . . give testimony in the criminal matters against Abu Hamza and others.’

The Home Office declined to comment on individual cases, but said: ‘Any prisoner sentenced for more than four years automatically qualifies for parole after half that term.’.

Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article2284368.ece


3,847 posted on 08/21/2007 7:13:51 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

POLICE AND CRIME ISSUES

2 al-Qaeda Arrested; Freed by Mob (back)

August 17, 2007

Police arrested two al Qaeda suspects in Musakhel Bazaar Thursday who were forcibly got released by angry mob who attacked police station. According to details, Musakhel police raided a mosque in Musakhel Bazaar today and arrested two persons for their links with al Qaeda. They were brought to Police station Musakhel.

On report of their arrest police gathered at mosque and expressed serious anger. Later they moved towards Police station and entered the station. The angry mob got two suspected al Qaeda suspects and shifted them to unknown destination.

Firing also took place on the occasion in which two police men Tor Jan and Naseebullah were injured. District Nazim Musakhel Sardar Asmatullah Musakhel immediately called Frontier Corps. he said that suspected al Qaeda men would be arrested again with the help of Frontier Corps.

Source: No url available


3,848 posted on 08/21/2007 7:15:02 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421

[update on fake bomb]

Fake Bomb Used in Turkish Cypriot Plane Hijacking (back)

August 18, 2007

Unidentified men stand by the hijacked Turkish airplane Atlas Jet during the surrender of its two hijackers at Antalya’s airport, 18 Aug 2007

Turkish media say two men who tried to hijack a Turkish Cypriot flight to the Middle East Saturday did not have a bomb as they claimed.

Reports quoting Turkish authorities say the so-called bomb the hijackers used to threaten the plane’s 136 passengers and six crewmembers turned out to be modeling clay. However, police say at least one of the hijackers had a knife.

Both men later peacefully surrendered to police after most of the people aboard the aircraft either escaped or were released during a refueling stop at Antalya Airport in southwestern Turkey.

Authorities also detained one passenger as a suspected accomplice.

The two hijackers seized control of an Atlasjet flight traveling from northern Cyprus to Istanbul early Saturday, demanding to be flown to Iran or Syria. Passengers interviewed after the incident on Turkish television said the hijackers claimed to have ties with al-Qaida.

The motive for the hijacking is not clear.

Authorities say one suspect is Turkish. The other has a Syrian passport, but is believed to be Palestinian.

Officials say some of the passengers and crew who fled the plane suffered minor injuries when they jumped from the aircraft’s open door to the Antalya Airport tarmac. The pilots escaped through the cockpit windows, and they shut off the plane’s power to prevent the hijackers from taking off.

Cyprus has been divided into a Greek Cypriot south and a Turkish Cypriot north since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded the island in response to a Greek-backed military coup in Nicosia. Only Turkey recognizes a Turkish Cypriot state.

Source: http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-08-18-voa24.cfm


3,849 posted on 08/21/2007 7:30:32 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421

Iranian Guards Amass Secret Fortunes (back)

August 19, 2007

by Philip Sherwell

As the zealous enforcers of Iran’s Islamic revolution, they are at pains to be seen living humbly, maintaining homes in the crumbling Soviet-style slums of downtown Teheran and driving modest, imported Korean cars.

But for many commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, the force allegedly responsible for ordering attacks on British and US forces in Iraq, life is rather more luxurious than they want it to appear.

Huge wealth: Sadeq Mahsouli

Behind the façade of a simple, pious existence, they live in mansions in the exclusive hills of northern Teheran with the latest model of BMW or Mercedes Benz in the garage, luxury hand-woven rugs on the floor, wardrobes full of designer clothes and a safe packed with diamond and gold jewellery.

Such men have grown rich as the Guards have extended their role from imposing religious rectitude at home and exporting Iran’s revolution, to playing a huge role in the country’s economy. From the oil and gas industries to chicken farms and apiaries, the Guards have used their power and muscle to take control of major areas of business in Iran.

Now, though, their burgeoning economic empire is the focus of White House moves to classify the regime’s 125,000-strong praetorian Guard as a ‘terrorist organisation’.

Under plans disclosed last week, the Bush administration is expected to announce the classification in coming months in response to the Guards’ alleged role in terror attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Iran’s disputed nuclear programme.

The listing would allow the US to freeze or block bank accounts and business involved with the Guards, although the immediate impact would be limited as the US already has an almost complete trade embargo on Iran. But the designation could be more than symbolic if US diplomats can encourage European states and companies to follow suit by persuading them that trade with Iran is effectively trade with the Guards.

General Yahya Rahim Safavi, the leader of the Guards, responded defiantly yesterday. ‘America will receive a heavier punch from the Guards in the future,’ he said. ‘We will never remain silent in the face of US pressure and we will use our leverage against them.’

Under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself a former Guards commander, the organisation has aggressively expanded its business empire as part of his strategy of placing hardliners in key positions of power.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, the exile opposition movement which revealed the existence of Iran’s secret nuclear programme in 2002, has tracked the explosion of the Guards’ economic operations. ‘The country’s economy and politics is now under the command of veteran Guards commanders and senior officials of the security and intelligence apparatus,’ it concludes in a dossier on the Guards’ activities.

Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the council, which Iran itself regards as a terrorist organisation, said: ‘The designation of the Guards will have been long overdue. The UK and EU should adopt similar measures without delay.’

Teheran would doubtless counter that the council’s armed wing is itself listed as a terror organisation by the US - the council’s supporters claim that designation was made as a bargaining chip when the Clinton administration attempted rapprochement with Iran.

One former Guards commander to have benefited is Sadeq Mahsouli, 47, an Ahmadinejad confidant. He spent much of his career in the military and security apparatus before using his guards contacts and credentials to build a business in construction and oil trading.

Indeed, when he was nominated to be oil minister in 2005, his wealth even raised opposition in the parliament, where one legislator called him a ‘billionaire general’. Mr Mahsouli acknowledged he was a rich man but was quoted by the state-run newspaper Hammiyan as saying: ‘What Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] has prohibited is the attitude and demeanour of living in palaces, not living in palaces itself.’

They may not technically be palaces, but his six mansions and estates are estimated to be worth £10 million while his total worth could be as much as £86 million, according to Iranian media reports.

Several Iranian businessmen, speaking anonymously, have detailed how the Guards have used force and intimidation to grab business. ‘If you enter the economy using a gun and handcuffs, it is much easier to deal with competitors and to win the most lucrative contracts,’ said Mohsen Sazegara, who co-founded the organisation in 1979 but then turned against the regime and was jailed before going into exile in America in 2003.

He claimed the Guards had turned into a ‘corrupting’ and ‘mafia-like’ organisation, which was heavily involved in smuggling goods for the thriving black market. These include alcohol, which is supposedly forbidden but is widely consumed at private parties frequented by the Iranian elite. Much of the smuggling is done through Guards-controlled airports.

Even as Teheran suffers an economic slump, which is undermining Mr Ahmadinejad’s popularity, jewellery boutiques and luxury furniture are doing a booming trade thanks partly to patronage from the Guards, who have also been investing heavily in property.

The real ‘fat cats’, however, are funnelling their money abroad into the Gulf states, most notably Dubai. Such investment could also provide a foreign bolthole if the regime falters in the future.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/19/wiran119.xml


3,850 posted on 08/21/2007 7:32:15 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421

IRGC: The Sopranos of Iran (back)

August 17, 2007

by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Some have described them as the Corps of Engineers of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

If so, the Rev. Guards’ Khatam-ol-Anbia conglomerate is more akin to the Corps of Engineers run by the Sopranos.

An estimated 1/3 of the Rev. Guards 120,000 troops work for Khatam-ol-Anbia, digging underground bunkers, hiding away nuclear materials, building roads and schools (and more underground bunkers) in South Lebanon.

Increasingly, they also getting into the banking business in northern Iraq, and are horning into major construction and development projects such as the Tehran metro and the South Pars natural gas field development project.

It is because of these last activities that the Bush administration decision to designate the IRGC as a ‘global terrorist’ entity, as leaked to the Washington Post this week, could have a tremendous impact on Iran’s ability to lure Western companies into its embrace.

While the immediate financial impact of designating the IRGC under Executive Order 13224 will be little or nothing because the IRGC has no holdings in the US, the political impact could be immense, says former Treasury Department analyst Jonathan Schanzer.

‘By designating the IRGC we are sending a message to the world that we are looking at an arm of the Iranian government and saying it is a terrorist entity. That is significant,’ Schanzer tells me.

‘The goal of this type of step is to scare off the foreign oil companies, send them a clear signal that they have to get out now, jump immediately, pull their funds out,’ he believes.

Schanzer knows the subject inside and out. As a former deputy to Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levy, he was involved in drafting earlier sets of financial sanctions against Iranian banks and other entities, that have hugely impacted Iran’s ability to access international capital markets and conduct business in U.S. dollars.

He believes that this type of sanction has a ‘resididual effect’ that will impact ‘any entity providing funds to the IRGC or doing business with them,’ making them potentially liable to be designated by the United States as a terrorist sponsoring organization as well.

That is one powerful tool, and it will hit some of the world’s biggest oil companies head on.

U.S. officials are not yet commenting officially on the proposed designation, but unofficially have been telling reporters that the move came as a result of a growing frustration within the administration with the lack of effectiveness of the United Nations sanctions on Iran.

‘Time is short,’ one administration official told me.

The administration is clearly counting on the fear factor. By designating the Revolutionary Guards in its entirety, the U.S. is hoping to make foreign companies doing business with Revolutionary Guards companies think twice about the wisdom of continuing that relationship.

‘How much risk are they willing to accept? Are they willing to wake up one morning and find that their U.S. bank accounts have been frozen? Or their U.S. subsidiaries shut down? We want them to be forced to make a choice between doing business with the IRGC, and doing business with the rest of the world,’ an administration source said.

Over the past three years, the IRGC has moved from being a purely military organization, parallel to the regular armed forces, to being a military-economic cartel, similar to the People’s Liberation Army in Communist China.

In 2004, when the Iranian government awarded the management of Tehran’s new airport to a Turkish company, the IRGC showed its clout by occupying the airport and preventing it from opening, until the contract was cancelled and given to one of its own companies.

Since former Revolutionary Guards officer Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took power in August 2005, the business activities of the IRGC have expanded dramatically.

The biggest and best known IRGC commercial enterprise is Khatam-ol-Anbia (Ghorb). The ‘Ghorb’ part means ‘base,’ just as ‘al-Qaeda’ means ‘base.’ Khatam-ol-Anbia itself means ‘The Last Prophet,’ a term used to designate the Prophet Mohammad.

‘Khatam ol-Anbia (KOA) handles billions of dollars of industrial, construction and oil projects in Iran and elsewhere,’ a former Iranian military officer told me. ‘They are involved in huge oil exploration projects in southern Iran, the Tehran metro, and have close ties to Chinese oil companies.’

This source, who was able to quiz Rev. Guards officers in Tehran about KOA’s activities, also confirmed their involvement in construction and banking activities in northern Iraq, and extensive involvement on the ground in Lebanon, where they were responsible for building the underground bunkers used by Hezbollah to store the Iranian and Syrian-supplied rocket launchers they used against Israel during last summer’s war.

KOA hit the big time last year, when they won a series of no-compete bids with the Iranian government, including a $2 billion deal to develop parts of the South Pars gas field, a separate $1.3 billion contract to build a pipeline, and a $1.2 billion deal to build the 7th line of the Tehran metro.

Once Khatam-ol-Anbia (KOA) gets the business, it turns around and subcontracts to mostly foreign companies, said Dr. William Samii of the Center for Naval Analysis. ‘It doesn’t do much of it itself.’

In Feburary, for example, KOA officials publicly signed a $500 million contract with Daelim of South Korean to produce liquefied natural gas from the South Pars gas fields.

The list of companies working on the South Pars project is long, and includes oil industry giants such as Total and Technip of France, Russia’s Gazprom, Italy’s ENI, Petronas of Malaysia, LG of South Korea, and Toyo Engineering of Japan.

Once the U.S. designation becomes official, this means all them potentially could face being designated as terrorist entities themselves unless they severed business ties with KOA and other IRGC entities.

‘Our objective is that nobody should be doing business with them,’ an administration official said.

‘We will take a very serious look at any business anywhere in the world that is doing business with the IRGC and force them to make a choice. We’re going to make it as hard as possible for them to continue doing business with the IRGC.’

Ahmadinejad and IRGC leaders wanted KOA to get involved in oil and gas field development to break the back of the Iranian ‘oil mafia,’ Dr. Samii told the American Enterprise Institute at a recent conference.

‘Who is the oil mafia? Hashemi Rafsanjani and his associates, by implication,’ he added.

Samii told the charming story of how KOA managed to wrest the ownership of a Romanian oil rig in the Persian Gulf away from a company called Oriental Oil, which was owned by people close to Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

But neither KOA nor Oriental Oil had ever paid the Romanians for the oil rig. Last October, when the Romanians tried to get it back, ‘suddenly the IRGC Navy showed up, boarded the oil rig and took it over,’ Samii said.

‘So it shows that Khatam-ol-Anbia, despite its protestations of being a purely commercial enterprise, is willing to work with the armed aspects of the revolutionary guards to pursue its economic objec tives,’ he added.

If the U.S. Treasury won’t get you, the Iranian Sopranos in the Rev. Guards will.

Caveat emptor, as they say..

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=CBE5E116-8DF4-41D2-B500-CC1862083269


3,851 posted on 08/21/2007 7:33:58 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421; DAVEY CROCKETT
TERRORIST CONNECTIONS

2 American Indian Tribes Selling Entry to Aliens (back)

August 18, 2007

For prices starting at $50, two nonfederally recognized Indian tribes are offering membership to thousands of illegal aliens, claiming they can achieve legal status by joining the groups.

But immigration authorities insist becoming a tribe member gives no protection against being deported. And immigration advocates condemn the practice, saying it defrauds immigrants of money and gives them false hope.

‘You can’t just decide to become a member of a tribe and all of a sudden legalize your status,’ said Marilu Cabrera, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

In Nebraska, some people reported paying up to $1,200 to join the Kaweah Indian Nation, which became the target of a federal investigation after complaints about the tribe arose in at least five states.

Manuel Urbina, the tribe’s high chief, acknowledged his group has sold at least 10,000 tribal memberships to illegal aliens for about $50 each.

‘We are not going against the law, we’re with the law,’ he said, claiming membership papers can help illegal aliens avoid being detained by authorities if they are asked for documents.

A Florida man has made similar sales pitches to illegal aliens on behalf of a North Dakota-based tribe.

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs denied the Kaweah group recognition in 1985 because it was not a real tribe. A Kaweah tribe did exist once, but is unrelated to the one that applied for recognition.

John Dossett, a lawyer for the Washington-based National Congress of American Indians, called the group ‘just a total sham’ and compared its membership offer to spam e-mail solicitations.

Angel Freytez of the Nebraska Mexican-American Commission said advocates have fielded complaints about the group from illegal aliens in Kansas, California, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Tim Counts confirmed that documents from the tribe offer no protection ‘from the consequences of being in a country illegally. It won’t work.’

Many illegal aliens seeking legal status are not sure what to believe, but some are willing to try joining a tribe. In Kansas, a Guatemalan man and his wife from El Salvador were indicted for purportedly trying to get U.S. passports and Social Security cards by claiming to be members of the Kaweah tribe.

The U.S. attorney in Kansas is investigating fraud accusations against the Wichita-based tribe. But the case could be difficult to prosecute because illegal aliens are hesitant to come forward out of fear they could be turned over to immigration officials.

A Florida man said he sold about 2,000 memberships to the North Dakota-based Pembina Nation Little Shell tribe through a Web site. Each cost $150.

Audie Watson, president of the Tamarac, Fla.-based religious nonprofit Universal Service Dedicated to God, said his tribe has a waiting list of prospective members. But he admitted about 500 people have asked for refunds because of ‘adverse publicity.’

The Little Shell tribe asked for federal recognition in North Dakota in the 1970s, but tribal representatives never completed the application process, according to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

In 2006, the Florida Attorney General’s Office heard complaints about the tribe. But a spokeswoman for the attorney general said authorities were unable to find victims or substantiate the charges.

Mr. Watson said no legal authority has told him that selling memberships is illegal. As for those who say it’s a scam, he said: ‘If they want to pass judgment, I can’t help that.’

Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070818/NATION/108180051/1001&template=printart


http://www.google.com/search?q=nonfederally+recognized+Indian+tribes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=Kaweah+Indian+Nation&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=Manuel+Urbina%2C+the+tribe%E2%80%99s+high+chief&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=membership+papers+can+help+illegal+aliens&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=Bureau+of+Indian+Affairs+denied+the+Kaweah+group+recognition&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=investigating+fraud+accusations+against+the+Wichita-based+tribe&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=North+Dakota-based+Pembina+Nation+Little+Shell+tribe&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://www.google.com/search?q=Tamarac%2C+Fla.-based+religious+nonprofit+Universal+Service+Dedicated+to+God&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

3,852 posted on 08/21/2007 7:46:04 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

Jihad is a Harsh Mistress (back)

August 17, 2007

by Baron Bodissey

Back in June, I wrote about President Bush’s visit to the Washington Islamic Center, the largest and most prestigious mosque in our nation’s capital. It was a quintessential act of dhimmitude, to journey to the heart of radical Islam in D.C. and speak deferentially to the Muslim Brotherhood representatives of the Religion of Peace.

The groups represented at the President’s speech included CAIR, MPAC, ISNA, etc., which are known fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood and related Islamic terror groups, and help channel money to all the different ‘charities’ which fund terrorist activities.

Always on Watch, in a post at Northern Virginiastan links to an interesting news story this morning about the Washington Islamic Center. According to The Washington Post, there’s somewhat of a kerfuffle over the alleged misappropriations of funds by the mosque’s bookkeeper.

Bear with me, because this story is somewhat convoluted, and there seems to be more to it than meets the eye:

> Mosque Bookkeeper Alleges Payments to Director’s Mistresses

>

> A man charged with embezzling $430,000 from a prominent Washington mosque said in court documents filed yesterday that the mosque’s director was actually paying him for rent and other expenses for the director’s mistresses.

>

> The motions were part of the defense’s argument in the federal government’s case against Farzad Darui, a former manager at the Islamic Center of Washington, the city’s oldest mosque and a landmark on Embassy Row. Darui has been indicted for allegedly taking checks that he was supposed to use to pay the mosque’s regular bills and directing them instead toward his own private businesses.

But Mr. Darui also insists that he was also trying to prevent the mosque from being hijacked by Saudi extremists who were controlling the flow of funding:

- - - - - - - - -

The 140 pages filed by Darui’s attorneys describe him as a patriot who was trying to keep extremists from seizing control of the mosque, whose board is made up largely of ambassadors from various Islamic countries. Darui says in motions that he was being pressured by Saudi funders of the center and its director, Abdullah M. Khouj, to allow in ‘individuals who adhered to a radical form’ of Islam.

‘For over 25 years Farzad Darui . . . has been dedicated to preventing radical fundamentalists from taking over Washington D.C.’s Islamic Center,’ one of the briefs begins.

Assuming this is true, then what’s the deal with the checks made out to Mr. Darui’s company?

According to Darui’s filings, the Saudi government was funneling money secretly to Khouj. The filings don’t explicitly give a reason but assert a Saudi desire to control the influential mosque. The briefs say that Khouj used some of the money to pay for housing for two mistresses in apartments Darui owned and other expenses for the women, which is Darui’s explanation of why checks to Darui’s companies have Khouj’s signature.

So here’s a hypothetical — but plausible — scenario for the series of events:

1. The Saudis routed money to Mr. Khouj for the purposes of funding radical activities through the Washington Islamic Center.

2. Mr. Khouj took a cut off the top, presumably the customary procedure, so that he could support himself and his mistresses in their lavish lifestyle.

3. Mr. Khouj quartered his mistresses in premises owned by Mr. Darui, in order to encourage the latter’s cooperation, and also to make him vulnerable in case the screws needed to be twisted later on.

4. Mr. Darui resisted Mr. Khouj’s efforts to radicalize the mosque.

5. The screws were duly twisted on Mr. Darui, so that now he must face his day in court trying to explain a mess that looks very, very bad for him.

As I said, this is only hypothetical. The whole affair could be just what it seems, a simple case of venality on the part of the mosque’s bookkeeper. Or it could have yet another explanation; given the labyrinthine nature of Middle Eastern political intrigue, it’s hard for an uninformed outsider to tell.

As Always on Watch says:

One could hope that the funds indeed went to support a mistress and not a Wahhabist push to control the oldest mosque in Washington, D.C. But, somehow, I doubt that outcome. After all, it is well known in counter-jihad circles that Wahhabists have funneled money into mosques throughout Western nations and, thereby, have spread Wahhabism to attendees of the mosques. Also, many imams in mosques have direct ties to Saudi and to Wahhabism. Funds supporting a mistress would be more palatable than the Wahhabist funding of mosques and would not undermine the very existence of the United States.

For a Wahhabist, Jihad is a demanding mistress.

Source: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2007/08/jihad-is-harsh-mistress.html


3,853 posted on 08/21/2007 7:50:35 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421

Oliver Stone Film on Ahmadinejad to Counter Negative Propaganda (back)

August 17, 2007

U.S. filmmaker Oliver Stone has again proposed making a documentary about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian producer and filmmaker Alireza Sajjadpur said August 16.

Sajjadpur, who is also secretary of Iran’s Islamic Society of Artists, said that Stone’s publicist had emailed the request to Ahmadinejad’s office, and added that in the email, the publicist ‘referred to the bad image that the U.S. media has given to Islam and Islamic countries and said that the documentary could assist in countering such negative propaganda.’

Ahmadinejad’s art advisor, Javad Shamaqdari, has stated that the president has not yet responded to this request.

Stone’s first request to make the documentary was announced by Sajjadpur on June 28, but Ahmadinejad’s media advisor Mehdi Kalhor rejected it and called Stone a part of ‘the Great Satan’ (i.e. the U.S.).

Source: http://www.thememriblog.org/blog_personal/en/2542.htm


3,854 posted on 08/21/2007 7:52:28 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; milford421

Islam and Democracy: The Urgency of Reforming State Faith (back)

November 27, 2007

by Dr. Peter March

George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘Liberty demands responsibility. That’s why so many dread it.’ Peter March doesn’t dread it. He embraces it. When political, media and academic leaders were falling over themselves pandering to radical Islamists over the Mohammed cartoon affair, Peter March stood firm, acted boldly and spoke truth to power. He made clear that freedom of expression is indivisible. That it is the shield of the free and the staff of the just. And that no attempt at compromising this most sacred of our public trusts for the sake of appeasing the violent enemies of liberty can ever be justified.

A Professor of logic at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, March posted copies of the Mohammed cartoons on his office door as both a statement of academic freedom and a protest against those seeking to stifle even any debate on campuses on the egregiously violent Islamist reactions to their original publication. Though told by administrative officials to take them down, March persisted and all complaints against him have been dropped. March said at the time ‘I feel threatened by the crowds around the world shaking fists, shaking sticks, burning things down,’ he says. ‘I wish to make my stand, that here in Canada that won’t wash.’ And just as he took a stand then, we should stand with him now.

Prof. March argues that without an immediate reformation within Islam from its current statist faith, it will forever be incompatible with liberal democratic societies and continually in conflict with them as Islamic societies will always fall prey to the manipulations and control of the leaders and forces of theocratic tyranny. He presents his case from the evidence of history; ethics; religious development; Islam’s own moral precepts and teachings; the current friction between Canada’s secular universal multiculturalism and Islamic values; and his vision of the possibilities for a reformation of Islam in Canada.

Prof. March’s Concordia talk was just one stop on a national speaking tour. He raised the resources himself and this is a completely independent initiative. ~ BPW

(Photos courtesy of Robert J. Galbraith www.robertgalbraith.com)

Prof. March with BPW

Islam: Honor and Insult

This is the fifth lecture on Islam and Democracy. I’ve called this lecture ‘Islam: Honor and Insult’. Distinguish first between Islamic culture and the religion of Islam: Not everyone who’s culture is Islamic believes in Allah and follows the Koran. Similarly, the culture within which I live is recognizably Christian but I am not a Christian. A Jew living in Canada lives in a typically Christian culture but may have also adopted more or less compatible parts of the Jewish culture. When I talk of Islamic culture I am therefore not committed to talking about someone who is committed to Allah, or any particular view of Islam the religion.

In an Islamic culture the males of the family enjoy a status higher than that of females. This status is part of the characteristic code of honor functioning inside such cultures. Very often this code of honor is appealed to in justifying the punishment of female members of the family with punishments ranging from verbal discipline to death. Every Moslem woman knows that if she violated the male code she may be punished severely. There is no strong guarantee of a woman’s safety other than obedience to the male code of honor: a woman obeys or fears for her life. This condition reduces women to the condition of slaves.

More particularly, the honor code requires that women dress modestly even to the point of covering themselves completely. This requirement works deeply against the interest of women in finding a suitable partner who respects them, respects their children and who encourages equality in the partnership. If a woman can not show herself publicly, show her sexual attractions, her intelligence, her personality then she can not compete for the best partners in an open market. Unable to compete she has no opportunity to escape from the control of a single male no matter how badly he behaves, and certainly has no opportunity to express her sexual preferences. A woman who is kept from society as she is in Islamic cultures is denied the means to her freedom and personal development and, in particular, denied the opportunity to select a mate according to her changing needs and preferences.

I will add that many traditional Islamic cultures allow men take many wives thus having the crucial right to select mates during marriage. They can, in some cultures, rent a wife for a specified period. Such men can, if they wish, be on the constant ‘look out’ for a partner they would like to have by contrast to the women who can not - given the honor code. This gender inequality is often justified by the claim that it is women who seduce men and hence must be covered up to minimize the predations of the men. There is no justice in this claim, of course, women are just as likely to be affected by men as men are by women. The truth is that women in Islam are caged. They never have an opportunity to develop the skills which will allow them to find a suitable partner on their own.

Another major consideration arguing against the continuation of the honor code is that young males are being taught that men should dominate women and this is clearly undesirable in a free and equal society. Children need to be brought up with the example of fathers and mothers who are equal in every way feasible.

It is worth saying that nothing in the Koran actually says that women are slaves. Some passages suggest clearly that the woman must allow her husband to have sex with her whenever he wishes, others that she should obey her husband and these passages could easily be used to justify the cultural norms. Some clearly suggest the use of violence against women, including scourging. Considering the matter from a modern European or American feminist perspective, woman in Islamic culture is a sexual and domestic slave.

The objections to this view of Islamic culture are not supported by evidence:

1) Please read the testimony of the many women who have written on this topic having been brought up and lived in the I.C.. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin is a good start. Irshad Manji’s The Problem with Islam Today, Souad’s Burned Alive

2) Further evidence lies in the fact that almost all the honor killings happening in various parts of the world are of women, not men. These killings and forced suicides are now appearing in Europe and will soon appear more and more in North America. My colleague Malin Enstrom makes it her duty to uncover these cases as part of her research.

See the recent (Nov 10) response of the Canadian Supreme Court. National Post:

The Supreme Court of Canada declined an invitation on Thursday to consider whether Muslim cultural and religious beliefs in ‘’family honour’’ should be taken into account as justification for receiving a lighter sentence for killing an unfaithful wife. The court refused to hear the appeal of Adi Abdul Humaid, a devout Muslim from the United Arab Emirates, who admitted to stabbing Aysar Abbas to death with a steak knife on a visit to Ottawa in 1999.

In an application filed in the Supreme Court, Humaid’s lawyer, Richard Bosada, argued Humaid was provoked by his wife’s claim she cheated on him, an insult so severe in the Muslim faith it deprived him of self-control. The concept of ‘’family honour’’ in the Muslim culture means a man is disgraced if his wife has an affair, said the application. ...Humaid contends his Muslim beliefs should be a factor because he killed his wife after she hinted she was having an affair with a business associate. Abbas was 46 years old when she died of 23 stab wounds to the throat in the fall of 1999, while she and her husband were visiting their son at the University of Ottawa.

Under these circumstances, men in Islamic culture come to view themselves as above the law of the nation in which they reside and to owe allegiance first to the word of Allah - as set out in the Koran and the Sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and to the familiar practices of Islamic culture which they were taught as children.. These texts, let us note, are considered contradictory or paradoxical by many who read them. Despite this, the texts are seen to justify disobedience of the local law. Islam, in Islamic culture, is generally taken to be the highest law available and the law which even law-makers must obey.

This role played by Islam in Islamic culture means that democracy is not viable inside such a culture. As in the case of Christianity, Islam has to Reformed if it is to become compatible with democratic values. To a considerable extent this reform has already been proven possible by the example of Turkey and while there is a long way to go, there are grounds for hoping that the process can be completed to the extent that an adequate democracy becomes possible inside an Islamic culture. Turkey is an example worth studying.

Now, leaving honor for the moment, I want to briefly consider the role of insults inside such cultures. A typical view of Moslems is that they are charged, by their religion, with the defense of the faith. They must fight those who call the faith into question either by word or deed. Posting certain cartoons is a recent example of alleged insults - or the case of a person wishing to leave the faith in Afghanistan, the case of Abhdul Rahman. Rahman was questioned, by a judge, in court this way:

‘Do you confess that you have apostatized from Islam?’

He responded, ‘No, I am not an apostate, I believe in God.’

Question: ‘Do you believe in the Koran?’

Response: ‘I believe in the Injil (New Testament) and love Jesus Christ. ‘

And there are more obvious incidents such as making disparaging remarks about Muhammad, Allah, or cases in which an actual copy of the Koran was treated disrespectfully in as in instances in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib.

This responsibility to defend the faith, particularly from insult, becomes a yet greater responsibility when it is accepted as meaning that any military attack on a geographical area having predominantly Islamic culture, whether the attack is provoked or not, is an attack on the faith and one which demands that Muslim believers must join in the defense. This second commitment to the avoidance of ‘insult’ thus enslaves the Moslem man restricting his freedom of action and speech with overwhelming implications. Despite any Canadian interest or any other humanitarian interest, a Muslim man may be called upon to defend the faith even in far off places - at least by making suitable financial contributions.

Just as women in Islamic Culture are generally sexual and domestic slaves to the men, so too the men are slaves to the perceived commands of Allah through their Imam - to defend the faith with violence, if necessary. Of course the faithful need guidance in these matters - given the difficulties involved in interpreting the Koran, so the control rests ultimately on the Imams of each community. Now, the imams are said to be chosen by the community, of course, but they must be chosen according to their faithfulness to the Koranic teachings. Such faithfulness is a matter of checking their views against those accepted historically inside the enormous corpus of Islamic theology. This means that Moslem men are, practically speaking, slaves to the Imams throughout large areas of their lives.

I take this as enough to justify thinking of Islamic culture today is usefully thought of as a slave culture. Such a culture can not have its way in a culture which considers women equal to men and it is the responsibility particularly of Canadian women to work actively to change the lives of Moslem women in Canada.

BPW, Prof. March, Edmond Silber

Reformation

The reformation of Islam as it enters Canada may well follow that of the Christian except that the process will be accelerated - seven hundred years will be compressed into a few years - a generation at most, I expect.

I say seven hundred years because the Christian reformation took that long. Christians were at their height by the 14th century. By that time they had garnered control of governments, of the courts, the education and the science of the time. From that point on, for seven hundred years we see Christianity slowly being pushed out of all these vital institution of Christendom. I should say, of course, that if you control government, the courts, the education and the science of a culture then you have virtually complete control of that culture. In Islamic culture, Islam is certainly expects to control the first three, and science, the last, has fallen into disrepute in the wider Islamic culture.

How was the Christian reformation beginning in the fifteenth century achieved. Certain events are more important than others. First, the monasteries became interested in knowledge generally and the church slowly allowed others to come and study at these monasteries. These centers became the proto-universities and knowledge, critical skills, rational thought came to be valued in the culture generally. It was an extremely slow process which only ended at my university in the last thirty years.

A second deep influence which allowed for reform was the fact that the Christian text, the Bible, particularly the New Testament, says virtually nothing of a practical nature in specifying forms of worship, patterns of living, diet etc.. The Testament’s assigned duties of Christians to fight are minimal to non-existent, and the rights of women seem to be generally respected in the New Testament. Many have thought of Christ as a pacifist. The Koran, by contrast is notoriously rigorous in everything from diets to death settlements.

Accordingly, while the Christian reformation, though it did certainly produce an enormous amount of violence in the process, this violence was not easily justified in the key text. Mohammed can not be mistaken for a pacifist.

So, in some ways the Reformation of Islam is going to be a good deal more challenging - though perfectly feasible - if one considers the present realities of Islamic cultures. And the suppression of Islam to match the complete suppression of Christianity is something which we will see in North America certainly within two generations.

To understand how this will happen we need to force a distinction between what we can call religious freedom and its mere shadow freedom of worship. Freedom of worship is what is available in the West, that is, citizens are free to go to a place of worship and perform certain ceremonies - as they wish - consistent with local law about intoxicants, etc.. The worship can include wearing religious symbols although even that is obviously under attack. The right to be religious is not thus protected except in so far as one can go to a Church, Mosque, Synagogue, and Temple. But laws now restrict any religious ceremonies in the area of education and have been restricted in places associated with government and have been removed from the legal system almost entirely. Thus in the vital social institutions including all the functions of government including the army and police, religion is banned, or all religions are treated equally, this too is the case in publicly supported schools and universities, and it has been banished from science. This freedom of worship is a mere shadow of true religious freedom. This is the result of the Christian Reformation seen not as a religious event but as a change in social mores.

True religious freedom would be quite another matter and it is not on offer in Canada. True religious freedom would consist in the right to follow one’s religious texts either as interpreted by the individual citizen, or as interpreted by suitable authorities. In the case of Islam this would involve that the citizen would fight (perhaps with violence) for the dominance of government by straight forward theocrats, it would involve that education public and private have the responsibility to produce children as good believers in Allah and His precepts. It could well involve the imposition of an Islamic morality, and much else. Suffice to say such freedom to dominate government, courts, education and possibly science itself is not going to wash in Canada.

So what we have in Canada is freedom of worship only, not, as it suggests in our constitution, freedom of religion. The slow but unstoppable history of Western society involves the suppression of all religion to the extent that religion is now excluded from all the key institutions of society.

This reality means that as Islamic culture moves into the West she too will be suppressed. How this will happen is not far to seek. Begin with the fact that we do not control access to universities and that they are generally affordable. Predictably we will see that the education of Muslim women in a a Western cultural milieu would soon involve that many will get job training, acquire job skills, an independent income, and will choose not to become slaves to any man. They will free themselves from the yoke of the honor code as imposed by Muslim men. Remember that in the Koran the dominance of men is predicated on the fact that men support the women materially. This justification will disappear when women are properly educated and trained. Once men no longer can conceptualize themselves as the guardians of the virginity and purity of Moslem women they will be severely affected by a deep loss of personal identity. Their central role in the family as guardians will be decimated. This may sound brutal but one should not mourn the passing of slavery even if it leaves the slavers with an identity crisis.

Once the Muslim man is sheared of his power in the family he too will have to find new identity and purpose either in yet more devout efforts in the mosque, or else by changing to become one of the millions of Canadians who see their career and hobbies as the main business of life with their role in the family reduced to only a part support and sharing divided authority with a partner who may have little sympathy for the more aggressive values of Islamic culture. It may be a hard sell to convince a well educated wife that some of the family money should go towards tomorrow’s jihad.

The education of Canadian Muslim women will quickly result in the Reformation of Islam in Canada. It will be up to the Canadian institutions - governments, courts, well-fare support system, women’s shelters and all the rest to get Moslem women into schools, universities and job training as one of the highest priorities. With respect to immigration policy, preference should therefore be given to women with small children when they comes from geographical areas dominated by Islamic cultures. Male immigration from such areas should be seen as a much higher risk activity. Every effort has to be made to offer these women the chance to recover from their condition as domestic and sexual slaves.

The only good methods for promoting the required reform of Islamic culture are those of the free and democratic society, yet there is every reason to believe that this effort will not present a great challenge. In Iran itself the majority of students in the universities are now women. Could there be a more significant fact? These women will soon have their own income and demand the freedom to spend that which is rightfully theirs - among the most important freedoms available in a modern economy.

Gabrielle Brenner, Georgette Bensimon, Farouk Melek, BPW

Democracy

Turning now to the deeper issues of what is involved in our democratic form of life, it should go without saying that one can’t achieve a democratic form of life simply by introducing the formal institutions of democracy like voting, the rule of the majority, representative government. One has to form citizens with certain characteristic conceptions of themselves as persons, certain ideas of the meaning of their existence, of the legitimate basis for a healthy self-concept. These can vary across the democracies no less than Islam varies across the Islamic world but certain elements are uniformly present.

1) One requires the conception that all persons are equal as to their rights. This is not just a legal requirement; it is a deep conception that both men and women should be accommodated by the social arrangements so as to be able to pursue their own personal goals where these goals are not defined in a sexist fashion. Honor codes are out of the question. And all this has to be granted absolutely independently of the person’s religious preference.

2) Deference to authority has to be severely restricted. An obvious example is that we don’t want citizens to accept being told by anyone how they should vote. Less obviously, professors and teachers can not be allowed to teach on the basis of authority and the minds of children must not be developed in such a way to leave them unable to think critically about religion - otherwise a religion like the old Christianity, or some forms of modern day Islam, will be able to swamp our democracy.

3) (Begin with a talk about how our country must look to someone coming from an Islamic Culture) Most important of all is the question of morality. When someone comes to a Western democracy, stepping out of an Islamic culture and confronted within hours by the secular society, the shock is enormous. My own father was completely shocked by Canada as he found it in the late fifties so much so that he literally seemed to despise Canada and its people for fully ten years. So, anger, a terrible sense of loss and perhaps a disgust at local culture is fairly common among Canadian immigrants from significantly different cultures - though it is not proper to say so.

The immigrant must feel that a culture like ours is apparently devoid of religion and therefore devoid of all morality. This is natural if the immigrant has come from a culture where it is assumed that morality comes from a religion, their one True religion. It is a huge leap for such a person to see that morality does not require a religious or spiritual basis. Therefore the predictable intuition, the natural intuition is that local Canadians, klacking in all signs of serious religion, are a bunch of reprobates seeking the almighty dollar, sex and drunkenness. The women will seem like whores - dressed for sex - the men as superficial, unprincipled (presumably - do they ever pray?). The children are seen to be growing up untended by proper parents, largely unguided and undisciplined.

Indeed, not only the immigrant will feel this way. Someone peering at Canada from inside a tightly knit Islamic culture even if they are a long term resident of Canada, may continue to feel this way.

Yet in a democracy, a democracy which allows freedom of worship, but not freedom of religion, it is essential that some consensus be reached as to how ethical issues are settled and how morality is discovered and evolves. In Islamic cultures the presumption, of course, is that the Koran and the Sayings of Mohammed are the proper source of morality. Many Christian fundamentalist have similar beliefs about Christ and the Bible.

one thing is clear, in a democracy it has to be accepted first that one’s morality, while it is a guide of the deepest kind in the life of an individual, still it does not trump the law. A Christian fundamentalist may not kill the abortionist even if the abortionist is a murderer. And one may not kill one’s wife or daughter for exercising their right to sexual freedom. Adultery is not a crime in Canada and is, arguably an important part of women’s rights.

This, however, does not begin to answer the question how public morality is to be discovered and modified. In the democracies this has to be settled by a discussion of the consequences of various competing courses of action. That is, since there is no general agreement as to what is right, citizens are forced to become consequentialists, that is, they a restricted to persuading the other person to go along with or resist a proposed moral standard only by appeal to the consequences of our adopting that standard - the actual or likely consequences. But, it is the individual which must judge which consequence is a pro and which a con. This judgment is made in the privacy of a person’s conscience and is best left secret. If the matter is very important, it can be offered as proposed law and settled by voting for parties or individuals who support or do not support the proposed standard. In this way, a secular society grows independently of the ambient religions. The key is that one’s conscience is left secret just as one’s vote is secret.

This simple solution to the origin of morality is very hard to accept even for mature secular thinkers. It seems like a hollow system which leaves the whole project of human life to an uncertain fate. Why, after all, should the collective intuitions of ordinary people be allowed to form the rules whereby we all are pressured to live? What is the guarantee of virtue in such an arrangement?

But the fact remains that in a democracy arguments about what is right must be converted into arguments about consequences and the individual has to be left the ultimate judge, judging in the secrecy of his or her own conscience, how the pros and cons stack up. In this way each individual helps shape public morality by expressing his or her preference - and the expressing it either by their behavior, by their words, or by their vote.

The possibility of this activity is at the heart of the democratic dialogue. It means that a strict protective boundary must be drawn around the individual so that his/her conscience can operate freely and independently. It is not appropriate in a democracy to hound the individual in an ethical discussion, hounding them to reveal the deep springs of their moral judgments. Be it religion, political principles, upbringing, or whatever may be the origins of the individuals moral intuition, still the individual’s conscience must be able to take part in the ethical discussion of the day while yet retaining its Privacy. This is an essential element in the development of personal values and it is an essential condition for the free development of one’s moral conscience. It is not too much to say that any system in which individuals are pressed to reveal the basis of their conscience can not be a deeply democratic system. Freedom, ultimately involves freedom from of conscience, freedom from being pressed too hard about one’s values, freedom to make up one’s mind in peace.

The democratic dialogue on which everything depends thus requires a form of quiet, patient, discussion - no matter what the other discussant says. The skill involved in managing and taking part in such a discussion is not bought cheaply and is not, at the moment, a notable feature of Islamic culture - though it was at one time, it is said. One might say that anger is certainly more obvious there as one would expect of an authoritarian culture: anger is simply the threat of hurt, an imposition of power and it is a learned strategy - and it can be unlearned. (Note about the marchers against me at SMU)

Of course, it is primarily the business of schools and universities to teach this complex form of speech, a form of speech which requires tactful restraint on both sides, particularly when the question is painful or controversial and it is what we must teach to Moslem women and children as a first priority - the key being that one does not intrude into the sanctum of another person’s moral conscience: you make your points and then you back off leaving the individual free to decide the issue at their leisure and then to vote and to act as they see fit.

This then is the answer to the riddle of morality in a secular society and provides the reason for not seeing Canadians as evil, unprincipled, sexually insane, etc.. There is morality in Canada but it’s not, or not necessarily a religious matter. Today it is probably not generally a religious matter.

Where is the guarantee that this process will provide a desirable outcome? Well, what happens in Canada is that parents and teachers teach and stimulate each student’s ability to care for the other person, an ability which is indistinguishable from the raw fact that homo sapiens is a social animal. Each student, each child, shares a necessity to have others around, finds that he/she has to live with others, to have some support from others. This instinct and its development in the hands of good parents and skilled teachers is then the source of human morality. We can be encouraged to search for a way to live peacefully together, and we can be affected by such efforts. We learn to live, in this way, without hurting and harming each other. Our moral discussions must then have to do with trying to minimize the pain of others and we appeal to each individual’s social nature to help us find ways of living together with a minimum of pain.

That, in practice, is the source of morality in a secular society. It does not exclude religion, far from it, but neither does it need religion.

Source: http://www.iapm.ca/newsmanager/anmviewer.asp?a=502z


3,855 posted on 08/21/2007 7:55:05 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

Inside the Madrasa (back)

August 19, 2007

by Ebrahim Moosa

As I walked one morning last spring through the town of Deoband, home to India’s famous Sunni Muslim seminary, a clean-shaven man, his face glowing with sarcasm, called out to me. ‘Looking for terrorists?’ he asked in Urdu. ‘I have every right to visit my alma mater,’ I protested. With a sheepish grin he turned and walked away.

I shouldn’t have been so annoyed. The century-old seminary in Deoband had come under intense scrutiny after the Taliban leadership claimed an ideological affiliation with it via seminaries in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Journalists, politicians, and diplomats have since September 11 descended periodically on this town near Delhi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, long considered the intellectual and spiritual heartland of Indian Islam.

Once the Taliban was linked to Bin Laden, every aspect of India’s Muslim seminaries, or madrasas, became stigmatized. Top-level U.S. officials, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a chorus of journalists, pundits, and scholars have declared all madrasas to be breeding grounds for terrorists, but they have done so without any evidence and without an understanding of the complexity of these networks of schools, which are associated with multiple Muslim sects and ideologies. They have drowned out reasonable voices—for example, Peter Bergen and William Dalrymple—who argue that not all madrasas can be indicted in the war on terror. But even their sympathetic gestures fall short of providing a realistic picture of what happens inside madrasas or humanizing their inhabitants.

Had I not been defensive, I would have told the man from Deoband that I had lived and studied in several Indian madrasas between 1975 and 1981. A quarter century later, I had returned—not in search of terrorists, but to try to create a bridge between the world inside the walls and the outside.

* * *

‘Wednesday 23 April 1975: The start of our four months in India. We slept after reading two raka’as (formal Muslim prayers). After fajr (pre-dawn prayers) and ishraq (optional after-sunrise prayers) we slept again. This was at Khar mosque in Bandra, Bombay.’ So reads the first entry I made in my diary on my six-year journey in India’s madrasas.

Mumbai, known as Bombay in 1975, was a bewildering city for an 18-year-old kid from Cape Town, South Africa. Nothing prepared me for the intimidating throng of beggars and street urchins outside the airport, the countless people sleeping on sidewalks, and the heavy-laden monsoon air and strong odors. At the time I wasn’t aware of the full impact of the ‘state of emergency’ that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had imposed to silence her critics, but I knew that fear surrounded me: people whispered about danger and secret arrests. I suddenly understood my father’s reluctance to let me go.

Deciding to study in India was its own journey that began with a crisis of faith. I was barely 16 when a classmate, a Jehovah’s Witness, brought some stinging anti-Islamic literature to our class. I still hear Gabriel reading: ‘Muhammad was an impostor who spread his message by the sword and was unworthy of being a prophet.’ And he added, ‘Actually, Muhammad cribbed his teachings from Jews and Christians whom he met during his travels.’ I had learned at the daily religious school sessions—also called madrasa in South Africa—that as a youth the Prophet Muhammad traveled to Syria with his uncle and was even anointed by a Christian monk. But never did I suspect the Prophet of treachery. This first exposure to the hostility some Christians harbor toward Muslims crushed my unchallenged sense of faith. But the encounter also started me thinking critically about Islam: it would change my life.

A trip to the library did little to reassure me. The refined prose of authors like Sir William Muir and Montgomery Watt leveled the same charges against Muhammad and claims to Islam’s authenticity. On reflection, it seems rather odd that as devout Christians and rational Scotsmen, Muir and (perhaps less so) Watt found it plausible that God could be incarnate in a man from Nazareth but incredible that a seventh-century Arab could prophesy as the Jewish prophets did.

I later found comfort with a group called the Tabligh Jamat. The Arabic word tabligh means ‘to convey or transmit.’ The Tabligh Jamat consisted of lay Muslims reminding their co-religionists of their religious duties. I attended their pious circle at my neighborhood mosque in District Six, Cape Town’s multiethnic and defiant cultural center, where I lived during the school week. Several years later, apartheid’s architects would obliterate District Six to remove any evidence that the coexistence of different races was possible and assign us to racially segregated ghettos.

But questions about my faith persisted. My doubts—and my existential anxiety as a person of color in this white-supremacist world—became unbearable. My plans to become an engineer slowly gave way to another obsession. I wanted to go to India to study the faith of my ancestors, to reconcile that faith with reason. My mother was sympathetic to my cause, but my father didn’t want to see his eldest son as a poor cleric dependent on the benevolence of the community. Born and raised in South Africa, he hardly performed the daily rituals or attended Friday prayers, giving priority to his business. He relented, though, when my aunts reminded him of the promise of paradise for learned scholars of Islam and the Qur’an as well as their benefactors.

* * *

In my heart I was following my mother’s prayers. She had come to South Africa as a 19-year-old bride from Gujarat. Far from close relatives and burdened with domestic chores in an extended family with seven children, one of whom died in infancy, she took refuge in religion. In particularly tough times she would share with me, her eldest, the religious lore she learnt in her childhood in the village of Dehgaam, of how the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, endured life’s trials.

My grandiose plan was also an escape from the drudgery of life: South Africa’s third-rate segregated schools, where discipline was violent and dictatorial, and the weekends and vacations working in the family grocery store in a seaside town 30 miles away. I was aware of the country’s segregationist politics; but I knew little of the lives of black South Africans, and I did not see the black unrest that would erupt on June 16, 1976, after I had been in India just more than a year.

When I arrived in Bombay, Tabligh volunteers received me and the rest of our group; I had agreed to spend four months in the Tabligh program before entering a madrasa. The brainchild of an Indian cleric, Muhammad Ilyas, who felt the teachings of Islam were not reaching the grass-roots faithful in British India, the Tabligh has no real bureaucratic administration, but its presence is felt in almost every corner of the globe. Resigning from his teaching position at a prestigious madrasa in the 1920s, Ilyas devoted himself, against tremendous odds, to revival work (da’wa) in the Mewat, a region straddling two states, Rajasthan and Haryana. He used a small mosque, the Banglawali Masjid, as his base in Delhi, where he cultivated his core of loyal associates. On the same site today a Spartan mosque serves as the international center (markaz) of the Tabligh.

Ilyas had a simple but highly effective evangelical message that he had boiled down to five points to mirror Islam’s five cardinal pillars of practice: grasp the true meaning and implications of the creedal statement that there is no deity except Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger; pray conscientiously five times a day; acquire learning and engage in the frequent remembrance of God; honor fellow believers; and participate in missionary work (da’wa) by spreading awareness of Islam. The Tabligh now hosts some of the largest Muslim gatherings, involving millions of participants on the subcontinent and around the world.

Working with the Tabligh was a grueling ordeal; and overcoming culture shock in India was daunting. We stayed at mosques, ate very basic meals, navigated treacherous roads, and traveled in overcrowded trains. By the lights of my naive faith, eternal damnation awaited these millions of Hindus apparently devoted to idols. In just weeks, India taught me to ask the first and enduring question about the workings of divine justice: how was it possible that a just God could promise me paradise and damn all these people who look like me? Years later, I would discover that many thinkers in the monotheistic tradition were confronted by similar questions, including the 12th-century thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, about whom I would later write a book.

I cut short my four months with the Tabligh to three and headed for the Madrasa Sabilur Rashad in Bangalore along with two other South Africans I met in the Tabligh. At the austere walled campus I found dozens of students apart from the majority South Indians and the few from my home country—young men from Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, and a lone Cuban. I occupied the fourth thin mattress in a sparse and cramped dorm room with a West Indian, an African-American, and the Cuban. The latter two would in pursuit of piety rise at 3 a.m. for optional prayers and liturgy, tormenting the rest of us for not doing the same. I saw this ‘calculator mentality’ often in the Tabligh—the preoccupation with rewards for performing certain acts of piety and an attitude that these roommates celebrated.

Daily madrasa routine would begin at least an hour before sunrise with preparation for the early-morning prayers. Afterward students remained at the mosque to read a portion of the Qur’an. Others used the early morning hours to memorize the Qur’an, known as hifz. Breakfast would follow in the dining hall, called ‘the mess,’ a reminder that the British had ruled India. Breakfast consisted of South Indian idli (lentil-rice patties), a crispy roti (baked bread), and chai (tea boiled in milk). Most foreign students made breakfast in their rooms with a spread of eggs, toast, and chai.

I had arrived at the madrasa only one month before it closed for the long Ramadan break, the end of the academic year. But in that short time I chafed at the highly regimented and pietistic environment and, worst of all, the cafeteria food. I took a class on memorizing portions of the Qur’an for liturgical purposes and perfecting my recitation of the holy book. The six-hour day of memorization was tedious, and students would take frequent bathroom breaks, sip lots of tea, and play surreptitiously to pass the time. The day’s memorized passage, as well as back lessons, were recited to an instructor at least twice daily. It took up to three full years to memorize the entire Qur’an. Not having budgeted such a length of time, I selected chapters, which would be useful in the classroom or in delivering sermons, as well as for liturgy. Since all instruction was in Urdu, I also threw myself into learning both Urdu and Arabic in private lessons.

But after almost four months in India, I had yet to enroll in an alimiyya program, required for gaining the knowledge and skills of an alim, the Arabic word for ‘a learned person.’ (The plural, ulama, is today used to refer to Muslim clerics.) I spent the Ramadan break with my maternal grandfather, visiting my parents’ ancestral villages in Gujarat, near Bharuch, a bustling city on the banks of the Narmada River. On the outskirts of Baruch I discovered a small madrasa, Darul Uloom Matliwala, supported by an affluent South African family and enrolling some 200 students at the time.

The centerpiece of the seminary was a three-level Parsee bungalow. Parsees are followers of Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion of Persia. They straddle Indian and Anglo cultures and often speak both English and Gujarati. The bungalow was large enough to accommodate several classrooms and administrative space. To the side of the sprawling compound on Eidgah Road was a beautiful mosque of pastel greens surrounded by palms and a well-maintained garden. A student dormitory abutted the tilled fields that ran down to the banks of the Narmada.

The pace was relaxed and congenial. I decided to enroll. By coincidence, three other fellow South Africans came to study as a private cohort with a brilliant teacher, Mawlana Ibrahim Patni, who allowed me to join his group. Mawlana Patni’s talents were such that he could have succeeded as a lawyer or businessman. For the first few months we four would spend most of the day at the back of a class with dozens of 12-to-14-year-olds who were taking elementary classes in the pre-alimiyya program. We were on average 18 years old, writing with white chalk on child-sized black slate boards. At first we hardly understood the day classes we were auditing, but as the weeks and months progressed, things became clearer. By year-end I had a good handle on Urdu, and my Arabic was coming along.

As I adjusted to my new life, I also learned that my naive views about madrasas were not immune to contradiction. Puritanism reigned, and sex was taboo. I recall one evening in Bangalore when the Cuban student raised the alarm in the dorms, claiming that he had caught two Indian students in a homosexual embrace in the bathroom. I was scandalized, and the revelation haunted me for weeks. At home and in the madrasa I was taught that heterosexual conduct outside marriage was forbidden (and had life-threatening consequences); homosexuality was an unthinkable abomination.

Within a few months at the Bharuch madrasa I received my second jolt: I learned that it was an open secret that one of the teachers had sexual relations with younger men or perhaps even boys. Disturbed, but less shaken this time, I was getting a reality check. The personal lives of teachers and fellow students would not be my biggest concern. I realized that Bharuch was a provincial city and the madrasa lacked the more robust intellectual environment I sought, which was available in reputable North Indian madrasas.

After a year in Gujarat, I headed for Darul Uloom Deoband—the most prominent and prestigious madrasa for those affiliated with the Deobandi interpretation of the Sunni sect. Deoband, legend has it, was named after the goddess Durga, who in ancient times lived in the dense forest (van) near a lake (kund). It then became known as the ‘forest of the goddess’ (devi van) or ‘lake of the goddess’ (devi kund), which became corrupted to Deoband.

Today, the small town of Deoband, 98 miles from the Indian capital, Delhi, is typical, with open air markets, bookstores, food stalls, grocers, barbers, Internet cafes, and telephone exchanges. On its congested roads, man, animals, and vehicles vie for space. Locals joke that Deoband is famous for five things starting with the letter m: moulvis (Muslim clerics), masjid (mosque), mandir (temple), matchchar (mosquitoes) and makkhi (flies). But the spacious courtyard of Darul Uloom Deoband, in its serenity and historical grandeur, is reminiscent of Castalia in Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game: a place without family, amusements, poverty, and hunger, but dedicated to learning and hierarchy. Inside the red-brick walls, a large green cupola rises, dominating the landscape. The madrasa is built like a medieval fort, with four main gates and a courtyard marking the administrative and teaching spaces. Enclosing a large r courtyard replete with manicured lawns and simple flower gardens are extremely modest student residences. A majestic white marbled mosque now looms outside Madani Gate of the main campus.

* * *

Deoband was founded in 1867 in the aftermath of the failed Indian rebellion against British rule. With the defeat of the Moghuls, Muslim India divided into two intellectual paths. One saw the future secured in the embrace of modernity; this school established secular universities such as Aligarh Muslim University, founded by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. The other embraced tradition through religious schools, madrasas.

Deoband’s intellectual architect, Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, a man of ascetic taste, a committed traditionalist, and a tireless anti-imperialist, belonged to the latter group. He and Khan were contemporaries and, as evident in their extensive and at times hostile correspondence, clashed over the meaning and place of Islam in the modern world. According to Khan, modern rationalism and science were compatible with a new interpretation of Islam—his. Older and more established doctrines, he believed, might have to be modified, if not jettisoned. (Khan did have his limits—he never entirely reconciled himself with the role of women in modern society.) Nanautvi was also a rationalist, but for him rationalism did not mean modern Western rationality like Descartes and Spinoza. It was, instead, a very early form of Greco-Arabic rationality consisting of Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic in the service of the old theological formulations of faith. Even today , this rationalist framework at Deoband and similar schools effectively exclude modern science.

Despite his anti-imperialism, Nanautvi did find European bureaucratic modernity attractive. He was trained at Delhi College, established by the British East India Company. He institutionalized exams, salaries for faculty, stipends for students, and an administrative system at Deoband modeled in part on Delhi College.

Nanautvi and his descendants controlled the main campus of Deoband until 1981 when rivals ousted Nanautvi’s aging grandson during an extended student strike that led to the closure of the institution. The reasons for the schism remain unclear. Students and their supporters at the time leveled charges of nepotism at the leadership and demanded better living conditions and some modernization of the syllabus. Ironically, the ousted administration had been planning to radically transform the Deoband madrasa with the support of a new hastily formed council that was later deemed to be unconstitutional. Two decades later very little had changed at the main Deoband campus. In fact, a breakaway madrasa, a cloned version of the main Deoband madrasa, has sprung up not far from the original campus. The new facility housed some 1,500 students, whereas the main campus housed over 3,000 students.

Deoband and other madrasas on the Indian subcontinent differed from their counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world: they were privately funded. In fact, their raison d’¯(tm)tre was resisting the state, in particular the influences of British rule and the spread of modernity through westernized Muslim elites. In contrast, Cairo’s al-Azhar and other schools in the Middle East had lost their independence to secular governments, who turned religion and clerics into extensions of the state and coerced modernization in certain areas.

For idealistic young men like me, who landed on the subcontinent in the mid-1970s in search of salvation and identity, the madrasas of India and Pakistan were presented as genuine bastions of tradition. We viewed institutions and scholars throughout the Middle East with disdain: they were feckless, robbed of intellectual vigor by governments that were slavish to foreign powers and uninterested in indigenous talents and history. Despite meager resources (extremely meager compared to the bourgeois comforts to which I had become accustomed), the madrasas had great legitimacy in our hearts and minds.

Being a student at Deoband was for me at first a dizzying experience. I devoured my texts, and they opened up worlds to me. Madrasa education drives home the sacred nature of knowledge. One is taught to show the utmost respect for the bearers of knowledge, teachers, and the instruments of learning, books. Novices quickly learn that some scholars cannot even tolerate the sight of paper lying in the street; carelessly discarded paper is the desecration of knowledge. Texts are not only symbols of learning, but markers of progress, too. So, for instance, if you ask a student what year of the program he is in, he will cite the text he is studying; only an insider could translate the name of that text into a specific year of the curriculum.

We studied books that were written in the tenth century and earlier, as well as those from the 15th to 20th centuries. The beauty of the textual tradition lies precisely in its discordant variety: texts serve as palimpsests of the ancient and the modern world. The best professors not only translated and clarified the text; they made an effort to link the ancient world to contemporary realities.

Law, called fiqh in Arabic, is the mainstay of the madrasa curriculum. Fiqh is actually moral discourse that proposes ethical guidelines for society. Learning the classical fiqh texts was exciting and awesome; after all, learning the practices advanced by tradition confers a certain responsibility and authority. I initially held out the hope that the proper application of fiqh would create an ideal Muslim society, only to find out that it would take more than law. I was disturbed, too, that some of what passes as the execution of Sharia practices involved gruesome amputations and floggings. I believed that if there were other ways to deter murder and theft they would be preferable to the practices of early centuries. There were few teachers to whom one could air such doubts. Most would respond with dire warnings of the spiritual and theological hazards of such thinking.

Even as students we would lampoon some of what we were taught, questioning its utility. For instance, in the fiqh class there were endless discussions about seven types of water usable to secure ritual purity: rain, sea, river, and well water, followed by water melted from snow and ice, and, finally spring water. Most of us had only seen water from the taps and wells, and few students from rural India would have had seen snow or the sea, except for in pictures—and pictures were rare, since images of animate objects were taboo. But thoughtful professors would transform arcane lessons into broader discussions, for example about the validity of recycled water for ritual purposes, a possibility unimaginable to the medieval authors of our texts.

* * *

Critics often charge the madrasa system of anachronism, a charge that is partly true. Defenders of the traditional curriculum, which was devised by the 18th-century scholar Mulla Nizamuddin, insist on the supreme pedagogical value of the old texts. They believe that, apart from connecting students to the canonical tradition, the ‘Nizami curriculum’ enhances one’s mastery of every discipline and enables scholars to solve any contemporary problem. But few have been able to rebut the charge that the texts used are redundant and at times impenetrable, save to a few scholars who have spent their lives mastering them. Indeed most texts are frustratingly terse, forcing teachers and students to scour commentaries and super-commentaries for help. The multiple levels of calligraphic marginalia on each textbook page were decorative, but they were taxing to the eyes and mind. For decades critics have petitioned for more lucid texts. But inertia has turned the texts and syllabus into inviolable monuments to the past. The result is that students are poorly prepared and lack the confidence to engage the tradition critically to meet the needs of a changing world. At its worst the system recycles intellectual mediocrity as piety.

After three years in India I started asking questions about the relevance of the texts and how to apply their insights in the modern world and, especially, in South Africa. By now I had become acutely aware of the political challenges of my home country: racism, and the intransigence of the Muslim clergy there to speak out against the evil of apartheid. Reading the uncensored Indian press and following political developments at home through the literature of Nelson Mandela’s banned African National Congress, all impressed upon me the challenges I would face in South Africa. My restlessness drove me to read widely and independently—especially literature written by more contemporary authors. One such author was Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, whom most teachers in Deoband reviled and for whom only the bravest expressed guarded admiration. Mawdudi was the gadfly among clerics who pushed for what is called ‘political Islam.’

Mawdudi rose to prominence during the dying years of British colonialism and after partition moved to the new state of Pakistan. While he had the credentials, he was not a member of the clerical elite, being for most of his life an autodidact, a gifted writer and founder of a continent-wide social movement known as the Jamat-e Islami. Mawdudi’s prolific writings guaranteed him audiences among modern educated Muslims. As the traditionalist ulama bickered with him on petty issues, Mawdudi emphasized the social dimensions of Islam as an ideology. If Muslims conceived of Islam as a social teaching then they could build new societies. Establishing an Islamic state, fully backed by Islamic laws and institutions, was one of Mawdudi’s ideals. Mawdudi was an ideologue with a vision, a political program, and international influence. Sayyid Qutb, the prominent Egyptian writer and ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood was persuaded by Mawdudi’s analysis that secular materialism was akin to the days of ignorance, jahiliyya, at the birth of Islam.

I thus discovered an interpretation of Islam outside the walls of the madrasa where I could find inspiration and guidance for building society from an Islamic platform. The ancient texts I was studying suddenly seemed musty and stale.

An overbearing government clerk who told my father that my expired passport could not be renewed unless I returned home changed everything. During mysubsequent—and, as it turned out, unecessary—three-month trip to South Africa in 1978, I realized I had been living in a cloistered world. Just seeing the people of Cape Town made me begin to question everything: my lifestyle, attire, ideas about my future. Up to that point, I had hardly spent time in Indian cities; nor did I watch television, go to movies, or listen to music because of the strict moral code I had followed for three years. I had given away all my Western clothes, vowing to wear only what I then believed was ‘Islamic dress’: the typical loose-fitting knee-length tunic, called a kurta, and loose-fitting pants.

I now knew that if I were to follow the rules of Deoband, not only would my life in South Africa be restricted—I had come to the madrasa to escape such confinement—but so too would be my emotional and intellectual development.

On my return to India I stepped into the precincts of Deoband wearing a T-shirt and jeans, a cavalier affront to my immediate friends. Even though the act was largely symbolic—I would continue to wear the conventional attire—I spurred a debate among close friends about what I thought were the deficiencies in the madrasas. Fellow students and a few teachers predictably labeled me a ‘modernist,’ an insult. Some of my younger teachers who often gently challenged my views, helped me realize how self-righteous I had been in the past about an Islamic dress code and the superiority of the interpretations of madrasa authorities on virtually every matter.

It was time to move on. I was still determined to complete the alimiyya program, but I needed to find a madrasa with less emphasis on texts. I explored opportunities to study in Libya, Iraq, and Egypt to little avail. I was less of an idealist by now, and the burden of becoming independent started to weigh on me as I approached 21. Taking over the family business was certainly not an option; I needed to find a vocation.

I decided to transfer to Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama, a madrasa in the capital of Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow. Nadwa was located on the banks of the Gomti River, which flows through this historic Mughal city, reputed for its refined culture, food, and aesthetic taste and a place where people still feel nostalgia for the days of nobility. In Mughal times this region was known as Oudh, and its rulers were mostly those who followed the Shia rite. In my student days there were occasional Sunni–Shia tensions around the beginning of the Islamic month of Muharram, signaling the Muslim New Year, when public exhibitions of Shia passion plays rekindled ancient grievances underlying the sectarian split within Islam more than a millennium ago. Yet Lucknow was a city that took pride in civility.

* * *

Moving from Deoband to Nadwa is in effect like transferring from the Vatican to a liberal divinity school. Deobandis look askance at Nadwa: in addition to being too modern and too liberal for the Deoband temper, it is more internationalist in outlook. Its former president, the late Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, was internationally reputed in the Muslim world. A one-time colleague of Mawdudi, with whom he would later had differences, he was clearly enchanted by Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood. He wrote extensively on the plight of Muslims in the 20th century and mobilized for their welfare and advancement. Nadwa received a great deal of support from foundations and individuals in the Arabian Gulf, and the campus boasts significant upgrades over the last three decades. Ali Nadwi was a descendent of the Prophet’s family and was therefore known as a sayyid. He wrote mainly in Arabic and strongly believed that a renaissance among the Arabs would have a saluta ry influence on the rest of the Muslim world. I think that toward the end of his life he was less sanguine about such an outcome.

Nadwatul Ulama was launched in 1898 by a broad spectrum of ulama, traditionalists to modernists, who all believed that the Deoband-type madrasa education did not equip students for the challenges of modern life. Placing a greater emphasis on the liberating message of the Qur’an, Nadwa favored certain departures from the traditional curriculum and emphasized the study of history. Nadwa’s motto was ‘Synthesizing the profitable past with the useful modern.’ Nadwa’s tolerance to intra-Sunni differences made it attractive. Students adhering to the Barelwi school of thought, a more Platonic interpretation of Islam that accepts elements of popular religion, and Salafis, those who follow a scripturalist interpretation, both rivals to Deoband, enroll at Nadwa to pursue different degrees. Students are allowed to attend class wearing Western dress, although the majority wear kurtas.

But while Nadwa offered me space to pursue my own interests, the curriculum was in the end not that different from Deoband. (On a recent visit to both places I was unable to tell the difference.) By now, too, the Nizami curriculum seemed largely redundant. Classes at Nadwa were not very demanding. And I was completely put off by the lifeless study of Islamic law, even though the philosophy and sociology animating law and ethics intruigues me to this day. On my own I frequented the British Library in the Hazratganj area of Lucknow and borrowed widely from Nadwa’s excellent library collection to read new subjects—political science, economics, and English literature. I found Alex Haley’s biography of Malcolm X inspirational and became totally enchanted by Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss), the author of The Road to Mecca, an account of an Austrian Jew’s discovery of Islam and his life as an explorer, a confidante of kings and rulers, a scholar and a dip lomat. Asad and Malcolm X kindled in me the desire to write. I published an essay in Arabic in Nadwa’s monthly newspaper and submitted op-ed pieces to the daily Northern India Patrika on politics and Islam.

In 1980 several international speakers attended a conference on Arabic literature held at Nadwa. A tall and imposing Egyptian lawyer and Princeton postgraduate, Mohammed Fathi Osman impressed me. We had several animated conversations about the Iranian revolution that had just occurred. Later, when I was about to graduate, I wrote Osman seeking advice. I received no reply, and decided to visit Egypt and explore a master’s degree at al-Azhar in Cairo. By now I was thoroughly disabused of my earlier, negative views of Islamic education in the Middle East. But just weeks before I was to leave, Osman sent a message inviting me to join the staff of a promising new magazine, sponsored by liberal Saudis, that he was launching in London. The choice between studies in Egypt and journalism in the United Kingdom was a no-brainer. I grabbed the offer and set off for London. Arabia: The Islamic World Review turned out to be the beginning of my career as a jour nalist. Even though I moved on from Arabia after 18 months, its closure a decade later was a great loss to the world of progressive Islamic ideas.

* * *

Spending six years inside India’s madrasas left deep imprints that over time have become only more significant as I have grown further from my youthful indignation. If given a choice once again at age 18 between a madrasa and a university, I suspect I would opt for a madrasa.

I remain a critic of madrasa education—its inability to provide the big picture of Islamic ideas, its failure to effect the transformation of Muslim societies. Yet madrasas offer something of enormous value. Properly harnessed, they are repositories of classical learning and seed intellectual sophistication that might challenge the shallow discourses of fundamentalism and revivalism that often pass as Islam today. Madrasas are environments of Islamic cultivation of the self, culture, civility, wisdom, and life.

While madrasas are growing in number on the subcontinent, the cherished world of the madrasas of my youth is rapidly disappearing. Shrill rhetoric substitutes for critical and sober reflection as the battle lines are drawn between a triumphant West and the madrasas who believe it is out to destroy them. This atmosphere breeds a debilitating defensiveness and a victim’s mindset. Madrasas of the 21st century will continue to change. I fear that the West’s insistence on casting madrasas as redoubts of terror and proposing invasive surveillance techniques and unilateral curriculum reforms will only force madrasas to retreat into more unpredictable modes of resistance. Madrasas may be forced to defend themselves by more militant means as the political rapids in countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh become more turbulent.

My experience in the madrasas is an atypical one: I crafted my own program and selected from what was on offer, whereas most conform to the prescribed syllabus and ideology. Yet as I continued in my work as a journalist, social activist, and then academic in South Africa and now in the United States, I have been able to recover the palimpsest of my madrasa education. I now appreciate these resources in ways madrasa authorities would not approve. Now, as I write about human rights, bioethics, Islamic law, and the ethical interpretation of the tradition, I can do so with confidence and argue that tradition is open to abuse and open to change. In my own thinking, writing, and activism I can push back against the many retrogressive forces and form productive associations with progressive ones. I doubt I would have had the courage to undertake some of this work otherwise. <

Ebrahim Moosa is a professor of Islamic studies at Duke University and a 2005 Carnegie Scholar. He is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, which was awarded the American Academy of Religion’s 2006 Best First Book in the History of Religions prize. He is working on a book called Inside Madrasas.

Source: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.1/moosa.html


3,856 posted on 08/21/2007 8:03:49 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS

August 21, 2007 Anti-Terrorism News

(Iraq) Five killed in Iraq violence - roadside bombs in Baghdad Jadida and Kirkuk, driveby shootings in Baquba and Kanaan
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_mideast_afp/iraqunrest_070821115508;_ylt=AvC2UREVJjyGGDPGOyPpR6VX6GMA

Iraq: Locals protest against al-Qaeda in restive Diyala province
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1221333493

Iraq: Saddam aides face trial over Shiite uprising
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1220986682

(Iraq) Trial begins of Chemical Ali for 1991 massacres
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2298658.ece

(Iraq) U.S. Military seems set on cutting Iraq combat role - Move in 2008 would include increased training of Iraqi forces
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20369702/

(Iraq) Blasting coalitions new al Qaeda goal
http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070821/NATION/108210054/1002

(Afghanistan) Wave of violence in Afghanistan kills 23 - fighting in Ghazni, Qara, and Helmand province
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_sthasia_afp/afghanistanunrest_070821113209;_ylt=AuSAo41AgFBQY.fOAJ.iIn7OVooA

Afghan police kill four suspected Taliban fighters - in western Afghanistan’s Farah province
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1187502434009&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

(Afghanistan) South Korea wants more time for hostages talks: Taliban
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070821/wl_nm/afghan_hostages_dc_1;_ylt=AsRuq20lM1PazZHNOU9QsynOVooA

Pakistan frees man held in terror case, dismaying U.S. officials — Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan’s computer files included
surveillance information on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in DC, the Citigroup Tower and New York Stock
Exchange in NYC and Prudential Building in Newark, NJ
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/21/america/pakistan.php

(Pakistan) Suspect’s release seen as blow to Pakistan - Al Qaeda computer expert Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_sthasia_afp/pakistanattacksqaedarelease_070821095421;_ylt=Ai85IiAMhlysleEn8_BXXg_zPukA

(Pakistan) Al-Qaeda expert with links to Heathrow plot is released
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2296363.ece

Pakistan: ‘Talks with the Taliban’ welcomed
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Politics/?id=1.0.1221233039

Pakistan: ‘Most likely’ to be next al-Qaeda stronghold
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1221233275
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\08\21\story_21-8-2007_pg1_5

(Pakistan) 21 Iranian hostages freed in Pakistan
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_sthasia_afp/iranpakistanunresthostage_070821064646;_ylt=ArxB_icJwVKGnkty2j4.NcvzPukA

(Pakistan) 6 soldiers killed in Hangu attack - update on Monday attack
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\08\21\story_21-8-2007_pg1_3

(Indian Kashmir) High-level team to probe fire in J&K ammunition depot
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/High-level_team_to_probe_fire_in_JK_ammunition_depot/articleshow/2298568.cms

(U.S.) Holy Land Fund Trial: Judge threatens to bar Holy Land defendant —
Ghassan Elashi: ‘This trial is an extension of a Zionist conspiracy’
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/082107dnmetholyland.5287a588.html

(U.S.) Holy Land Fund Trial: An Unexpected Guest — by The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT)
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2007/08/an_unexpected_guest.php

(U.S.) Michigan: Two Muslim Charities Shut Down — Goodwill Charitable Organization (GCO) and Mabarrat
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=435ccffd6f487a0859706c22db94a03c

(U.S.) Seattle: FBI Investigating Unusual Ferry Passengers
http://www.kirotv.com/news/13934929/detail.html#

(U.S.) FBI seeks help identifying 2 men seen aboard Washington State ferries
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/328396_ferries21.html
Seattle Post-Intelligencer declined to publish a photo circulated by the FBI

(U.S.) Oregon: Ujaama’s words may help U.S. win extradition
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003844507_ujaama20m.html

(Somalia) One killed as Mogadishu attacks rage
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/somaliaunrest;_ylt=AoqpODApJEKOfYT7UECmriWQLIUD

Somalia: District Commissioner Survives Roadside Bomb Explosion
http://allafrica.com/stories/200708201330.html

(Sudan) Attack on British embassy in Sudan foiled
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/08/21/wsudan121.xml

Jordan: Saddam’s daughter won’t be extradited
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1218433589

Egyptian Court Convicts, Sentences Terror Suspects - jailed nine Egyptians for their role in a series of
2005 terrorist attacks that killed three foreign tourists
http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-08-20-voa54.cfm

Lebanese army advances in Nahr El-Bared
http://www.kuna.net.kw/home/Story.aspx?Language=en&DSNO=1013284

(Lebanon) Militants said seeking truce in Lebanon camp war
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070821/wl_nm/lebanon_fighting_dc_2;_ylt=Ar0X_xEr_Qay6IdOt12.Tf7agGIB

(Lebanon) Islamists seek family evacuation at Lebanon camp
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_mideast_afp/lebanonunrest_070821090748;_ylt=AkfSrdmnCLmXwd6CyycdJ.TagGIB

(Lebanon) Hezbollah’s museum of hate
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=0d50016d-2eb3-4777-9c5c-8d4614b3297d

Iran hangs 30 over ‘US plots’
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__international_news/&articleid=316927&referrer=RSS

(Iran) Tehran to release US-Iranian scholar on bail — Haleh Esfandiari
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_mideast_afp/iranusjusticerights_070821121801;_ylt=AhMtx3MpMnstoYMZOBVJ_YVSw60A

Iran: New nuclear sanctions would doom cooperation
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1187502433127&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Hamas calls for EU inquiry to prove it is not siphoning off electricity revenues
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/africa/ME-GEN-Palestinians-Power-Outage.php

Hamas attacks Israel with 25 mortar shells
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-08/21/content_6577629.htm

(Israel) 2 Kassams land in w. Negev; one hits kindergarten
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1187502434140&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Israeli helicopters strike Gaza — at least 10 terror suspects of Islamic Jihad and Hamas killed
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2007/08/21/israeli_helicopters_strike_gaza/9089/

Israeli troops kill Palestinian militant in Nablus
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/africa/ME-GEN-Israel-West-Bank-Operation.php

(Israel) IDF arrests 20 terror suspects in West Bank
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1187502429202&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Israeli warplanes breach Lebanon airspace
http://www.kuna.net.kw/home/Story.aspx?Language=en&DSNO=1013272

(Philippines) 12 hurt in Zamboanga City bomb blast
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storyPage.aspx?storyId=89366

Philippine National Police on nationwide alert - because of anti-terrorist because of ongoing operations in Sulu and Basilan
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=89358

Philippines’ Arroyo says offensive against militants in south may prompt attacks elsewhere
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/asia/AS-GEN-Philippines-Fighting.php

Philippines militants turn to YouTube
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_asia_afp/philippinesattacksabusayyafinternetyoutube_070821053808;_ylt=At.rKELf94LPAFqo5afgUT4wuecA

Indonesian court dismisses Islamic group’s suit against anti-terror squad
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/asia/AS-GEN-Indonesia-Militants-Lawsuit.php

Norwegian anti-terror unit helped free German hostage - report
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/news/article_1345656.php/Norwegian_anti-terror_unit_helped_free_German_hostage_-_report

(UK) Police in court bid for Channel 4 tapes — of unbroadcast material in documentary “Dispatches: Britain Under Attack”
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2007380765,00.html

(UK) Scotland Mosque leaders blame UK foreign policy for extremism
http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/other/display.var.1631153.0.0.php

(Australia) Indian ‘terror’ doctor wins Australian visa case
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_sthasia_afp/britainattacksaustraliaindia_070821113807;_ylt=AqDg8voq8QFvo6Zsrmb_koQTv5UB

Australia: Government to appeal Haneef ruling
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.1221373169

(Bulgaria) Bomb Blast in Bulgaria’s Town Vratsa
http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/bomb-blasts-in-front-of-an-apartment-in-bulgarias-town-vratsa/id_24494/catid_66

(Germany) Protests over terror arrest of German academic
http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,,2152984,00.html

(Spain) Batasuna member arrested for ETA magazine
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=81&story_id=43085

Burundi: grenade attacks on politicians homes wound 2 bystanders
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/africa/AF-GEN-Burundi-Attacks.php

China warns of hijack threats during Beijing Olympics
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/asia/AS-SPT-OLY-Beijing-Hijacking.php

China, Russia to hold first joint anti-terror drill in Moscow
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/China_Russia_to_hold_first_joint_anti-terror_drill_in_Moscow/articleshow/2298388.cms

(New Zealand) Bomb suspects in court
http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/488120/1314350

(Sri Lanka) Five killed amid heavy shelling in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070821/wl_sthasia_afp/srilankaunrestattack_070821120622;_ylt=AlxvuPYLpNvUUXArI61BfmUtM8oA

North Korea criticizes US-SKorea military drills, warns it will take ‘strong countermeasures’
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/asia/AS-GEN-NKorea-US-Military.php

(North Korea) Reclusive North Korea reaches out for UN, international aid
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/asia/AS-GEN-NKorea-Rain.php

(North Korea) Removing North Korea from terror list may anger allies
http://www.kgan.com/template/inews_wire/wires.international/37b6724e-www.kgan.com.shtml
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070821/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_nkorea_terror_list_2;_ylt=AuSPCRmVJKK7SEk.rqksRAmCscEA

Commentary: Can we really take al Qaeda to court?
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2007/08/can-we-really-take-al-qaeda-to-court.html
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YzNiODMyMzhiYzdiODUxYjBkNzVlNTdkNzBmZTdkYmE=
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/21/opinion/edmore.php

Other News:

(Belgium) Stories of Life: Working with a Moroccan Colleague
http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2007/08/stories-of-life-working-with-moroccan.html
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2328

Europe Academics: No need to worry about Islamization
http://islamineurope.blogspot.com/2007/08/europe-no-need-to-worry-about.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/694a6eb0-4eb5-11dc-85e7-0000779fd2ac.html

(UK) British Civics Class Asks, What Would Muhammad Do?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/world/europe/21britain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=world
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/017849.php


3,857 posted on 08/21/2007 8:26:28 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421

Terrorists May Strike Oil

Realizing that oil is the lifeblood of the West oil facilities
constitute a
tempting target that is under-secured

Sam Elrom (8/20/2007)

http://www.omedia.org/Show_Article.asp?DynamicContentID=2533&MenuID=603

http://www.omedia.org/Show_Article.asp?DynamicContentID=2533&MenuID=603

Introduction

As terrorists changed their global war paradigm, infrastructure targets
are
now in their cross hair and a shift from hardened targets to targets
that
are more vulnerable is more visible. Terrorists have kept the oil and
energy
industry up high on their target acquisition list and from their
standpoint
for very good operational reasons:

* Firstly, the common belief that very sensitive sites, such as
refineries, processing facilities, offshore rigs, pipelines and tankers
are
well protected is in many cases false.

* Secondly, it is presumed that there is a correlation between the
very high turnover and profits in the business and the industry’s
ability to
protect itself. After all, it makes sense that the protection of the
“goose
that lays the golden eggs” would be protected at the maximum level
available; again, it is far from reality.

* Thirdly, terrorists were unhappy with the fact, that in spite of
hundreds of worldwide attacks during the last decade against the oil
industry, their actions did not attract the expected attention of the
international media. They tend to blame the unsatisfactory coverage on
the
fact that the attacks were conducted mainly in remote regions. Many
considered the attacks to be an integral part of the business and
industry’s
natural risks.

* Least but not last, as part of the projected West demise, terrorists
realized that a shortage of oil supply is extremely painful for the
West to
cope with because it affects the entire nerve system of the Western
economy
and shatters the very basics of our life style and culture. It also
creates
huge loses for American and foreign investors and cracks-open the very
foundations of the new, westernized global political and economic
structure.
More so, it has an immediate negative impact on young, yet unstable
democracies and their economies mainly in several ex-Soviet countries
where
oil is the only natural resource.

* In addition, it magnifies and intensifies the fears of a terror
attack and creates an atmosphere of new investments abstinence, thus
adding
additional difficulties to the anyway fragile economies. It also
galvanizes
a domestic sense of instability and uncertainty seen by Jihadists as
the
beginning of the end of the Western civilization. Not to loose time,
Al-Qeida has defined precisely in 2003 their goals in an instruction
manual
found in Afghanistan which reads: the umbilical cord (the oil supply-
SE)and
lifeline of the crusader (infidels - SE)community, (is) the object of
the
next major assault on the West, an assault that could wreak havoc with
America’s economy and way of life”.

Changes in terror strategy

Observations and analysis of more than twenty years of a vast array of
terror attacks and related events allow us to draw a comparison chart
showing a strategic change in patterns, which are actually adaptations
and
responses to the changes we’ve made in our strategic approach of”
“search
and destroy” initiative policy. Hereafter are the changed guidelines
adopted
by Al-Qeida and its surrogates:

* Aiming at soft targets is the most effective way to achieving mass
fear, chaos and distress and scoreless casualties

* Target Infrastructure because the impact is of immense magnitude and
long-lasting

* Take advantage of transportation natural vulnerabilities and
protection difficulties

* Focus on supply lines because of the abundance of targets relatively
easy to reach and hit

* Focus on high risk-high value poorly protected sites because of the
propaganda added value and the immediate impact on the industry and
commerce”

*

Exploit the psychological factor and wage a propaganda warfare; keep
the momentum going by daily terror events in various location in the
world,
using the loose connections of transnational networking and connection
with
local terror factions as initiators

The oil industry is under an imminent threat

There is an abundance of easy targets in the US yet terrorists were
unable
to generate an attack on a major facility since 9/11, but the belief
-spread
by interested parties - that the reason lies in the superior protection
of
the critical infrastructure is a purely baseless. We know retroactively
that
the real reason was a false perception that high risks-high value
targets in
the US are much better protected than in Kazakhstan, Nigeria or Yemen
where
attacks on similar industrial sites and oil facilities were successful
and
continue today. This interim five years long of zero attacks in the US
led
politicians and business leaders to the wrong conclusion that at least
for
now the infrastructure is not a priority on terrorists’ hit list,
therefore
there is no need to heavily invest in upgrading and reinforcing
existing
prevention and protection systems.

It took the terrorists, and more specifically Al-Qeida, several years
to
realize that the same terror attacks they carried out in remote
locations in
Africa or Kazakhstan are executable in the US, UK, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Bottom
line: oil & energy industries are extremely vulnerable and not prepared
yet
to meet the challenges that the transnational revived organizations
like
Al-Qeida present.

Furthermore, significant benign events such as the huge power outage
generated in Canada a few years ago, coupled by several in-depth
chemical
facilities investigations by TV networks which exposed the naked truth
to
the public (and the terrorists), have shown how easy it is to penetrate
and
retreat from a highly protected facility without being detected.”
Although
the investigative journalists intended well, public exposure showing
how
extremely unprotected those critical sites are, were an encouraging
wakeup
call to the terrorists to rethink and refocus again on those
industries.

The napping sentinel

Terror groups are aware of the increased security measures that were
taken
in western countries to protect national, historical and symbolic
sites. But
they are aware as well of the security gaps, the lack of national
coverage
of security needs for the protection of critical infrastructure and the
reluctance to invest in security unless the government pays a big chunk
of
it. A terror organization cannot afford to fail because they can choose
the
staging location, the target and the timing. Terrorists are always in
search
of targets that will focus the whole media attention, inflict as many
as
possible casualties, have an immediate impact of public safety, create
a
sense of insecurity, and generate chaos, confusion and fear.

Obviously, loosing the safe haven of Afghanistan coupled by the US
policy of
pursuing the enemy wherever, has forced the terrorists to change
strategies
looking for easier, more effective attack options. As a result, a
strategy
shift is taking place in recent years, moving from targeting national
symbols towards softer targets and under protected critical
infrastructure
sites. The oil industry, with its industrial ramifications and vast
array of
related sub-industries are on the top list of this new pragmatic
approach
because the vulnerabilities are visible and many sites still don’t have
adequate protection. Partially, this lack of protection is because it
is
very difficult to develop and manage a system that provides an overall
superior protection all the time while maintaining the same high level
of
alertness and readiness for long periods. Nonetheless, poorly
coordinated
attempts are so evident only to be year after year be criticized by the
media, the experts and the internal investigative units. As it stands
today,
attacking an infrastructure site is easier than hijacking a plane, and
that
is a very disturbing fact because we know how many gaps exist in
aviation
security.

Security is in many aspects an invisible high-value asset. Thus, there
is a
reluctance to allocate the needed budgets for such an amorphous
volatile
goal defined as physical security which does not create any tangible
profits. More so, convincing corporate, stock holders and investors
that
better security actually means higher profits in the long run is
equally
difficult. It becomes an even more daunting task when in some cases the
profit lost due to a terror attack is lower than the investments needed
to
put in place a system that may prevent such attacks.

This “short memory syndrome” from which many businesses suffer from is
more
prevalent the more we distance ourselves from 9/11 and without any
significant sign of a terror attack in mainland USA. But if such a
major
attack occurs in the heartland of any critical infrastructure
conglomerate
such as an oil port, the economic and homeland security implications
are
economically disastrous, not to mention the lose of life, the wounded
and
maimed and the impact on their families and on national morale.

With figures showing that the U.S. imports over 52% of its oil
amounting to
more then 12 million barrels per day, and with a projected dependency
expected to grow to nearly 70% in the next 20 years, the acute problem
America is facing today is obvious. A terror attack using a “dirty bomb
pales in comparison to the devastation created by a ship loaded with a
cargo
of common grade LPG, or industrial explosives and chemicals being
detonated
in one of US main highly congested oil ports. This is more than a
viable
scenario and from the terrorists’ point of view, the results will
likely be
catastrophic and more effective than other non-nuclear or bio WMD. It
is the
simplest and shortest way to reach an already available source of
material
which otherwise would have been impossible to buy or prepare in such
enormous quantities without creating suspicions. These are common
highly
commercialized materials available everywhere and a trained and
motivated
terrorist needs only to board the ship, plant a detonator and activate
it
wirelessly at the right moment.


3,858 posted on 08/21/2007 9:02:08 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All; FARS; milford421; DAVEY CROCKETT

Talking to Iran

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118739533381601535.html

COMMENTARY
Talking to Iran
By MICHAEL A. LEDEEN, WSJ, 18 August 2007

For some time now, the chattering classes have debated whether the
United
States should negotiate with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both sides
have
endowed the very act of negotiating with near-mythic power.

The advocates suggest that “good relations” may emerge, while
opponents
warn it is somehow playing into the mullahs’ hands. Both seem to
believe
that the three recent talks in Baghdad are historically significant,
since
they are said to be a departure from past practice.

That claim is false. Every administration since Ayatollah Khomeini’s
seizure of power in 1979 has negotiated with the Iranians. Nothing
positive
has ever come of it, but most every president has come to believe that
a
“grand bargain” with Tehran can somehow be reached, if only we
negotiate
well enough.

Washington diplomats have steadfastly refused to see the Iranian
regime for
what it is: a relentless enemy that seeks to dominate or destroy us.
This
blindness afflicted the first American negotiators shortly after the
1979
revolution, and has been chronic ever since, even though Iran declared
war
on us in that year and has waged it ever since.

During the first negotiations in early 1979, shortly after the
Revolution,
the Iranians denounced American meddling, and the Americans lamented
Iran’s
dreadful human-rights practices. The Iranian negotiator, Deputy Prime
Minister for Revolutionary Affairs Ibrahim Yazdi, said that Iran had
just
undergone “the cleanest revolution in world history,” even though mass
executions were underway throughout the country.

Yet American diplomats were optimistic that a grand bargain could be
struck. The Iranians wanted arms, and American military men sat down
to
work out the details of new sales. On the diplomatic front, Assistant
Secretary of State Harold Newsom reported that:

“the Iranian suspicions of us were only natural in the
post-revolutionary
situation but that after a transition period common interests could
provide
a basis for future cooperation-not on the scale of before but
sufficient to
demonstrate that Iran has not been ‘lost’ to us and to the West.”

This was written almost precisely a month before the American Embassy
in
Tehran was seized in November, 1979. For the next 444 days, diplomats
talked and talked, until, minutes before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration,
the
hostages were ransomed out.

Five years (and a new set of hostages) later, the Reagan
administration
commenced secret negotiations with the mullahs, using American,
Israeli and
Iranian back channels. Reagan’s deep personal concerns about the fate
of
the hostages drove the policy, and inverted the logical strategic
order.

continued............


3,859 posted on 08/21/2007 9:08:37 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]

To: All

Southern Thai Jihad & Manipur

Southern

http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2007/08/southern-thai-jihad-manipur.html

Thai Jihad & Manipur - International Terrorism Monitor

-—Paper No. 268

http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2007/08/southern-thai-jihad-manipur.html

By B. Raman

The Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency has reported as follows on
August
20, 2007: “Fifteen suspected Al Qaeda operatives have been arrested
from
Moreh town in Chandel district of Manipur bordering Myanmar, official
sources said on Monday. While 10 operatives were Myanmarese, five were
from
Bangladesh, the sources said. Assam Rifles personnel, acting on a
tip-off,
nabbed them from a house at Moreh Ward number 3, about 120 km from
Imphal on
August 17, the sources said. All of them had entered India without
valid
documents, they said.

They were proceeding to Bangladesh via Manipur and Silchar in Assam,
the
sources said. Foreign currency, including US dollars, were seized from
the
arrested persons, the sources said. The other currencies recovered from
them
were Bangladeshi taka, Myanmarese kyat and some coins. While one of the
activists had a work permit of Thailand, identity card, hospital card,
income tax card, a bank receipt of a Kuala Lumpur bank were also seized
from
the others, the sources said. The activists were identified as Md Nasen
(42), Faizu Rehaman (17), Sled Salam (21), Abul Hussein (42) and Md
Rehman
(18), all Bangladeshi nationals.The rest were identified as Mahabu
Basar
(22), Md Junet (28), Basir Ahmad (21), Md Salim (23), Sabir Ahmad (31),
Md
Rohid (17), Abdullah (32), Md Abdul (18), B Ahmad (18) and Sali Ahmad
(32),
all from Myanmar-Bangladesh border, the sources said. They were being
interrogated and likely to be handed over to the police on Monday, the
sources said.”
2. Among the significant seizures from them are reportedly a Thai work
permit and a receipt issued by a bank in Kuala Lumpur. The place of
origin
of the hospital card is not clear. Thailand has a sizeable number of
illegal
immigrants from Bangladesh and from the Arakan area of Myanmar. In the
past,
there had been reports of links between them and the jihadis indulging
in
acts of terrorism in Southern Thailand. There were also reports that
the
jihadis operating in Southern Thailand were being trained in secret
camps of
the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen (JUM)
in
Bangladesh territory.

3. It is, therefore, necessary to thoroughly verify the antecedents of
the
arrested persons and their links, if any, with the ongoing jihad in
Southern
Thailand.


3,860 posted on 08/21/2007 9:12:24 AM PDT by nw_arizona_granny ( God loaned us many of the Brave people, those who keep us free and safe and for balance liberals..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3824 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 3,821-3,8403,841-3,8603,861-3,880 ... 4,101-4,118 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson