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Muslim activists called on Pace University yesterday to crack down on hate crimes after a second copy of the Koran was found in a toilet at its Manhattan campus. "This incident meets the legal definition of a hate crime," said Aliya Latif, a member of the Association of Muslim American Lawyers. "Indeed, this is no different from placing a burning cross in front of a house or painting a swastika on a locker." The discovery of the holy book in a toilet at Pace's lower Manhattan campus on Oct. 13 follows a similar act at Pace on Sept. 21. Earlier...

"Nicholas Berg screamed as one of the executioners wielded a large knife. The man sawed off Berg's head while the other captors shouted "Allahu Akbar!" Arabic for "God is great" " (1) This is the reality of terrorism. It's bloody and gruesome and perpetrated on innocent Americans and Iraqis alike. Americans have to see the horror and believe what they see. Don't think it can't happen here. It's time for a gut check. You must admit this torture of Nicholas Berg and all his fellow beheaded and bodies burn victims is a thousand times worst than having a dog snarl...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1133908/posts The Beheading of an Innocent FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | 5/12/04 | Walid PharesThe slaughtering of Nick Berg is one small step for terrorists and a major leap for the West’s encounter with Jihadism. The videotape, posted on the Ansar web site, was one of many horrifying acts perpetrated by the followers of Osama bin Laden. It ended up becoming a shameful benchmark in the West’s liberal media reporting.     http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1133894/posts Islamic website shows beheading of American (U.S. Media says Abu Ghraib more important)WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Wednesday, May 12, 2004     http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1133906/posts Images of an Execution (WARNING Graphic Images)FrontPageMagazine.com...

If you are looking for the legacy of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, do not look in the concrete rubble of so-called safe house in Baqubah that became his final resting place. Instead, look less than 10 miles to the west, on the side of the road in the desert town of Hadid, for a pile of cardboard banana boxes. Inside those boxes were nine human heads. Some of the heads still had their blindfolds on. Iraqi police are still attempting to identify the murdered men. Days earlier, in Baquba, Iraqi police found another eight severed heads. One of those heads...

Was executed American contractor Nicholas Berg's decision to share his computer password with alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui during a 1999 encounter in Norman, Okla., just a coincidence, as Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the nation last week? Or was there more to this bizarre development than meets the eye? Oklahoma City bombing investigator, former NBC reporter Jayna Davis, has been exploring some of the more troubling aspects of the Berg-Moussaoui meeting, especially in light of the role the city of Norman played in events leading up to 9/11. First, says Davis, the official story which had Berg, then a...

CAIRO, Egypt - The kidnappers of U.S. businessman Nicholas Berg refused a ransom and beheaded him to avenge what American-led forces had done to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a recording purportedly issued by militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The 60-minute recording, which was posted on Islamic Web sites Tuesday, said unidentified people had tried to persuade the kidnappers to spare Berg's life. "They were ready to give us whatever sums of money we asked ... to save this infidel's life," said the voice, purportedly that of al-Zarqawi, "But despite our desperate need of money to fund our...

Scenes in Fahrenheit 911 of U.S. soldiers taunting and sexually humiliating Iraqi civilians following the successful invasion were shot by Urban Hamid, an embedded Swedish-Iraqi journalist who is presently a doctoral candidate at the University of Colorado, the university's student newspaper Camera disclosed today (Tuesday). Moore has declined to respond to questions from interviewers about whether he resorted to subterfuge in order to embed photographers among U.S. forces and has been criticized for not showing footage of the abuses to U.S. military authorities earlier. But Camera reported that the controversial footage by Hamid was actually shown at a theater in...

Berg beheading: No way, say medical expertsBy Ritt Goldstein American businessman Nicholas Berg's body was found on May 8 near a Baghdad overpass; a video of his supposed decapitation death by knife appeared on an alleged al-Qaeda-linked website (www.al-ansar.biz) on May 11. But according to what both a leading surgical authority and a noted forensic death expert separately told Asia Times Online, the video depicting the decapitation appears to have been staged. "I certainly would need to be convinced it [the decapitation video] was authentic," Dr John Simpson, executive director for surgical affairs at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi police have arrested four people in the killing of American Nicholas Berg, an Iraqi security official said Friday. The suspects were former members of Saddam Hussein 's Fedayeen paramilitary organization, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They were arrested a week ago. Berg's body was found in Baghdad on May 8. He had been decapitated. He was last seen on April 10 when he left his Baghdad hotel.

HERE'S today's head-scratcher in the stranger and stranger case of Nick Berg, the Philadelphia-area man whose videotaped beheading in Iraq has caused an international uproar. Why did campus police at the University of Oklahoma - where Berg somehow got entangled with 9/11 terrorism suspects back in 2000 - arrest Berg two separate times for trespassing?

Part 8 in my continuing series on the mysterious demise of Nick Berg, an American. Some brand new information about Berg's past, specifically his time spent in Oklahoma. We already know that somehow "on a bus" he met an unidentified man and Berg shared his password and email information with this man. This man then later distributed that pw/email info to Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th" hijacker allegedly involved in 9/11. Berg was questioned by the FBI about this before 9/11 and most definitely a second time, AFTER 9/11. He was then questioned at least 3 times in Iraq, making Nick...

Prometheus Methods Tower Services Inc., the business that cost Nick Berg his life in Iraq, has no records with the Pennsylvania Department of State. The company that specialized in building communications towers never registered with the Pennsylvania Corporation Bureau, said Brian McDonald, spokesman for the state department. McDonald conducted a search of the bureau’s online list of registered businesses, but found no matches. The same search done by a Daily Local News reporter produced the same results -- several businesses contained the word "Prometheus" in their names. Only one is located in West Chester, and it is not related to...

IRAQ OPPORTUNIST Last week the campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry made much of the fact that their boy spoke with the father of Nicholas Berg, the American murdered by Muslim extremists with ties to al Qaeda. Kerry, who was campaigning in Arkansas with Wesley Clark spoke by phone to Michael Berg for about ten minutes. Kerry's camp claimed that Berg had "reached out" to Kerry and that Kerry had returned the phone call. But according to a Kerry campaign staffer, it was the campaign that initiated the call to Berg. "People in our Pennsylvania operation had...

WEST CHESTER, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- When Nicholas Berg took an Oklahoma bus to a remote college campus a few years ago, the American recently beheaded by terrorists allowed a man with terrorist connections to use his laptop computer, according to his father. [snip] Government sources told CNN that the encounter involved an acquaintance of Zacarias Moussaoui -- the only person publicly charged in the United States in connection with the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

It's easy to say he should not have been in Iraq, but Nicholas Berg was a type familiar to all danger zones: an adventurous and naïve young man who was perhaps keen to do a bit of business, but keener yet to test himself; old enough to understand the danger, but young enough to defy it. It is impossible not to feel grief, and horror, at his terrible end. The claim of this young American's murderers that they were retaliating for the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is a cruel ruse. They killed him out of the same madness that drove...

Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor at Reason magazine. It's a tough call whether Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the Jordanian militant who is reportedly responsible for the videotaped butchery of Nicholas Berg — is more stupid than he is brutal, or whether he is a bigger monster than he is a fool. Zarqawi's own nauseating videotape makes the case for his indescribable brutality and may have inadvertently delivered his enemy from its own demoralization. Americans were feeling so shamed, dishonored and demoralized by the repulsive images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that even many prominent war supporters were...

A CIA official said Thursday that U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was, in "high probability," the person shown on a video beheading American Nicholas Berg, based on an analysis of the voice on the video. The speaker on the video, now believed to be al-Zarqawi, reads a lengthy statement criticizing Islamic scholars and taunting the crusaders. Standing alongside four other militants wearing headscarves and masks to disguise themselves, al-Zarqawi then kills Berg. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told reporters Thursday in Baghdad that it appears al-Zarqawi was responsible. The...

The Sacred Muslim Practice of BeheadingBy Andrew G. BostomFrontPageMagazine.com | May 13, 2004 Reactions to the grotesque jihadist decapitation of yet another "infidel Jew," Mr. Berg, make clear that our intelligentsia are either dangerously uninformed, or simply unwilling to come to terms with this ugly reality: such murders are consistent with sacred jihad practices, as well as Islamic attitudes towards all non-Muslim infidels, in particular, Jews, which date back to the 7th century, and the Prophet Muhammad's own example. According to Muhammad’s sacralized biography by Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad himself sanctioned the massacre of the Qurayza, a vanquished Jewish tribe. He appointed...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The young American decapitated on a videotape posted by an al-Qaida-linked Web site was never in U.S. custody despite claims to the contrary by his family, U.S. authorities said Wednesday. Statements by American officials in Iraq leave many unanswered questions, including why Iraqi police jailed Nicholas Berg for nearly two weeks and why U.S. officials repeatedly questioned him in custody. Also unknown is where and under what circumstances Berg disappeared. He was last in contact with U.S. officials in Baghdad on April 10, and his body was found Saturday in Baghdad. Staff members at the...

May 12, 2004THE FAMILYFrom a Strange Encounter With Iraqi Police to Fatal CaptureBy LAURA MANSNERUS and JAMES DAO EST WHITELAND TOWNSHIP, Pa., May 11 - Nicholas E. Berg wanted to help rebuild Iraq. Far from having opposed the war, he believed that the American presence there was a positive thing, his family and friends said. And he saw it as a business opportunity as well.So defying State Department warnings, Mr. Berg, 26, traveled to Iraq late last year in search of work for his small company, which builds and maintains communication towers and is based in Pennsylvania.He did not...