Free Republic

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

Jerusalem and Cairo - A new video from Al Qaeda's media arm, with previously unseen and undated footage of Osama bin Laden praising the group's "martyrs," underscores the extent to which the group's propaganda campaign has improved in both production quality and volume over the past year. Experts on the group say that nothing in the video indicates that Al Qaeda is, or is not, planning a major strike on Western targets, despite comments from US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff last week saying that he has a "gut feeling" that Al Qaeda may stage a spectacular attack this summer....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden may be the leading symbol of global Islamist militancy but the al Qaeda leader wields less influence over Islamist ideology than more obscure religious thinkers, according to a new study issued on Wednesday. The study also found that Ayman al-Zawahri, bin Laden's second-in-command, appears to be insignificant among Islamist intellectuals despite his image as a driving force behind the al Qaeda network. The Militant Ideology Atlas, compiled by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, instead showed Palestinian cleric Mohammed al-Maqdisi as the most influential living Islamist thinker. Maqdisi, reportedly a mentor to the...

CAIRO, Egypt - Osama bin Laden praised slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as the "lion of holy war" in a new videotape posted on the Internet on Friday. The 19-minute message shows an old still photo of bin Laden in a split-screen next to images of al-Zarqawi taken from a previous video. A voice resembling bin Laden's narrates a tribute to the Jordanian-born militant, who was killed in a June 7 airstrike northeast of Baghdad. "Our Islamic nation was surprised to find its knight, the lion of jihad (holy war), the man of determination and will, Abu...