Free Republic

4 ‘African Socialists’ charged with election meddling for Russia after FIB raided their homes Four American socialists have been charged with election meddling and spreading Putin’s propaganda after they were arrested in dramatic FBI raids. The four, are members of the African People’s Socialist Party. Omali Yeshitela, the group’s chairman was one of the 4 Americans indicted Tuesday for “sowing discord, spreading pro-Russia propaganda and interfering in elections within the United States.” The DOJ says that the 81-year-old veteran leader of the far-left group conspired along with three others to help Russian efforts to meddle in elections. Yeshitela has called...

— A police officer shot and killed a woman outside of City Hall on Friday afternoon after she charged at the officer with a butcher knife, Temple Terrace Police Chief Kenneth Albano said in a news conference. Albano said the woman, identified as 21-year-old Heba Momtaz Alazhari, charged at the uniformed police officer for “unknown reasons” after she had requested assistance. A recording of the incident shows the woman sitting outside of City Hall, waiting for the officer to approach her. Once he was within about five feet of her, she can be seen pulling out the knife. Evidence markers...

Shuttered for teaching radical Islam, a Florida school reopens under a new name – and taxpayers are footing the bill. In July of 2003, the Islamic Academy of Florida (IAF), an elementary/secondary private school for Muslims based in the Temple Terrace suburb of Tampa Bay, was suspended from receiving taxpayer funded tuition vouchers. The voucher program is a statewide government initiative that was devised to help underprivileged students in underachieving schools get a better education. Up until that point, the school had received more than $350,000 in vouchers, the majority of which came from Florida PRIDE, an organization that funds...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - A Florida man is charged with providing material support to the Islamic State extremist group, including attempting to buy multiple weapons and scouting potential targets for an attack in the Tampa Bay area, federal prosecutors said Wednesday. A criminal complaint charges Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen, with attempting to provide material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization. The charge carries a potential 20-year prison term. **SNIP** According to the affidavit, Al-Azhari scouted a number of targets in the Tampa Bay region, including beaches, parks and even the Tampa FBI field...

News stations shill for Palestinian Islamic Jihad member Hatem Fariz and PIJ mosque. Joe Kaufman, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is Chairman of the Joe Kaufman Security Initiative and the 2014, 2016 and 2018 Republican Nominee for U.S. House of Representatives (Florida-CD23). This month, Tampa, Florida’s local news affiliates headed over to the al-Qassam Mosque, a.k.a. Islamic Community of Tampa (ICT), to get footage of the mosque and its director, Hatem Fariz, distributing food, in what ICT and these networks are claiming is an effort to help the neighborhood during the coronavirus crisis. Yet what...

Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his...

The indictment of a former Florida professor on charges of being a Palestinian terrorist has cast a very different light on some past punditry. After flying to Tampa to interview him, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote last year that the University of South Florida's attempt to fire Sami Al-Arian shed light on "what kind of universities we desire, how much dissent we dare tolerate and how we treat minorities in times of national stress." He noted that the proceedings began after "Bill O'Reilly invited Mr. Al-Arian on his Fox News show and virtually accused him of being a...

Former University of South Florida Professor Sami Al-Arian was on the inside of an elaborate international network designed to conceal funding for terrorist organizations, a federal investigator claims in a newly released court document. The network used ``a convoluted web of multiple transactions'' by a network of companies, trusts and charities - mostly run by the same few people - to hide money going to two militant Palestinian groups, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the investigator says. The suspect organizations were part of ``a complex coalition of overlapping companies in northern Virginia controlled by individuals who have shown support...

A fifteen-year-old student pilot apparently trying to recreate the 9/11 kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center slammed a stolen Cessna 172 private airplane Saturday into Tampa, Florida's Bank of America building, the city's tallest structure. Charles J. Bishop, a 15-year-old flight student from Great Britain, stole the small aircraft from Albert Whitted Municipal Airport in nearby St. Petersburg at about 5 p.m., law enforcement sources said. Bishop was killed as the Cessna carrying 56 gallons of fuel slammed into the Bank of America tower, leaving the tail section of the plane dangling precariously from its side. The fuel did ...

  1-5-01 Kid didn't know it was '02 yet. I have prepared this statement in regards to the act I am about to commit. First of all, Osama bin Laden is absolutely justified in the terror he has caused on 9-11. He has brought a mighty nation to its knees! God blesses him and the others who helped make September 11th happen. The U.S. will have to face the consequences for its horrific actions against the Palestinian people and (illegible, could be Iraq?) by its allegiance with the monstrous Israelis who want nothing short of world domination! You will ...

The real battle for religious freedom lurks beneath the Ground Zero mosque controversy. It is sadly ironic that our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty: That includes everyone from imam Feisal Rauf, the project’s sharia-touting sponsor, to President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the rest of the Islamist-smitten Left, to the GOP’s own anti-anti-terrorist wing. Yet, wittingly or not, when they champion this mosque and its sponsors, it is the agenda of an alien and authoritarian Islam that they champion — an Islam against which many American Muslims chafe. When it comes to liberty, no one...

Now that Congress has recessed, and since the conventions aren’t for a couple of weeks, Thursday’s The Situation Room turned back to the "hot" issue of what many liberals are calling on congressional Democrats to do: arrest and lock-up Karl Rove for his failure to testify on the issue of the firing of U.S. attorneys in late 2006. CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, as part of a report on this possible move by the Democrats, conducted a search for the supposed jail inside the U.S. Capitol. He also addressed the little-used power of the legislature to arrest and try government officials...

When two Muslim students were arrested late last year in South Carolina CAIR called it racial and religious profiling. Well the judge has called it terrorism and has sentenced one of them to 15 years in jail.

Two Egyptian students at the University of South Florida were indicted Friday for carrying explosive materials across states lines and one of them was charged with teaching the other how to use them for violent reasons. Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 24, an engineering graduate student and teaching assistant at the Tampa-based university, faces terrorism charges for teaching and demonstrating how to use the explosives. He and Youssef Samir Megahed, 21, an engineering student, were stopped for speeding in Goose Creek, S.C., on Aug. 4, where they have been held on state charges. The two men were stopped with pipe bombs...

A former Florida college professor who pleaded guilty to aiding a Palestinian terrorist group was not immune from a subpoena forcing him to testify in an unrelated probe of Muslim charities, an appeals court ruled Friday. Sami Al-Arian, 50, had argued the terms of the plea agreement exempted him from testifying before a grand jury in an investigation of Islamic charities in Virginia. A federal judge disagreed and found Al-Arian guilty of contempt when he refused to testify. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Al-Arian's appeal Friday, ruling that federal prosecutors did not violate the plea agreement by...

Why Al-Arian Walked By Debbie SchlusselFrontPageMagazine.com | December 9, 2005My friend, Michael Eisenstadt, dedicated his life, among other things, to seeing terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian face justice. In September, Mike, spokesman for Tampa's Jewish community, died of lung cancer. While his passing is a source of great sadness, I'm glad Mike didn't get to see Al-Arian's acquittal, Tuesday.It was a sad day in America, but not one that was unexpected. At least by me. Everyone predicted that the jury would throw the book at the man who was a founder of terrorist group Islamic Jihad, and ran its worldwide...

Does America need a terrorist financier to secure its “freedom”? Sami al-Arian thinks so. His National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom poses as a watchdog for the Constitution, but he has focused his lobbying efforts on repealing anti-terrorist legislation. While Sami al-Arian himself has been arrested for being a prime financier for Palestinian Islamic Jihad (and likely one of its three founders), his political movement continues to threaten homeland security. Al-Arian founded the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom (NCPPF) in 1997 as a reaction to the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996. The coalition’s stated goal “is to help change the...

A former grocery store owner already facing three years in prison for aiding a terrorist group got 14 months tacked onto his sentence Friday for swindling the food stamp program out of $1.4 million. Hatem Fariz, 33, must serve a total of 51 months in federal prison under the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Milton I. Shadur. Fariz, who now lives in Spring Hill, Fla., also was ordered to repay the money he siphoned off by swapping cash for food stamps. At the same time, Fariz pleaded guilty in a federal court in Tampa to conspiring to provide...

American universities rank among the best in the world, but they also boast another, more dubious distinction: They are home to some of the world’s most radical academics. Last month, one of these select individuals, UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, brought his hate-filled show to two extremist Islamic Centers in South Florida. Both of these institutions are in the process of building large-scale mosques in their respective cities. And, given that their guest had previously called for attacks on the United States, the question naturally arose: Were these institutions looking to make friends in the community or to start a holy war?Past...

SPC suspect jailed in Michigan The man, who tried to buy St. Petersburg College vehicles, has terrorist ties, police say. By NORA KOCH, Times Staff Writer Published October 28, 2004 A former Clearwater man who tried to buy an old ambulance and two surplus police cruisers from St. Petersburg College in August is an "affiliate of a terrorist organization," according to police documents obtained Wednesday. Abdalla Deiab, 51, was arrested in Michigan on Wednesday on a warrant charging him with failing to return a hired vehicle, a Largo rental car, Pinellas County sheriff's and Largo police officials said. In a...