Israel: Norwegian ambassador justifies “Palestinian” terrorism

So, let me see: it’s OK for Palestinians to use violence, but not for Breivik. It’s OK to kill Israelis, but it isn’t to kill Norwegian people. Well, for me killers are always killers, and both Palestinian terrorists and Breivik are murderers. If you support violence of one side, the other will sooner or later begin using and defending it too.

Palestinians, [Svein Sevje] the ambassador told Maariv, “are doing this because of a defined goal that is related to the Israeli occupation. There are elements of revenge against Israel and hatred of Israel. To this you can add the religious element to their actions.”

“In the case of the terror attack in Norway, the murderer had an ideology that says that Norway, particularly the Labor Party, is forgoing Norwegian culture,” Sevje said, referring to suspect Anders Breivik, a Christian nativist who is opently anti-Islam and anti-immigration.

via Israel Matzav: Norwegian ambassador to Israel justifies \’Palestinian\’ terrorism.

Related:

• Norway: fighting Jihadists after Oslo (teaandpolitics.wordpress.com)
• Jews leave Swedish city after sharp rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes (telegraph.co.uk)
• Norway: Govt boycotts Israel (teaandpolitics.wordpress.com)

Pakistan: Govt announces the arrest of a high-ranking officer for alleged connections with terrorism

Pakistan on Tuesday said it had arrested a high-ranking army officer for alleged connections to militant groups, a rare public acknowledgment of possible ties between this country’s military and the organizations it is battling.

The arrest comes amid rising concern that Pakistan’s military is penetrated by Islamists who are sympathetic to insurgent groups that have declared war on the state. Last month, a naval base in Karachi was stormed by heavily armed fighters in an attack that was widely believed to have required inside help.

Related articles

• Pakistani army officer arrested for links with militant group (birminghamurbannews.wordpress.com)
• Terror leader lives freely near Pakistani capital (independent.co.uk)
• Call for inquiry into Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad’s murder (independent.co.uk) :The reporter had gone missing two days earlier after failing to arrive at a television studio in Islamabad where he was due to take part in a discussion about his latest article, which highlighted alleged links between al-Qa’ida and members of the Pakistani Navy. Human Rights Watch has said it has credible evidence that he was picked up by the InterServices Intelligence (ISI) agency. His family had been told he would be returned by Monday evening.

  Mr Shahzad, who was married with three children, had been badly beaten and his body bore 15 injury marks. His lungs and liver had also been damaged. “The cause of death is torture and there are several signs of torture on his body and face,” Ashok Kumar, one of the doctors who carried out a post-mortem examination at Islamabad’s Pakistan Institute of Medical

• U.S. Condemns Killing of Pakistan Reporter on Army-Militant Ties (businessweek.com)

Pakistan: 9 year-old girl kidnapped, forced to wear suicide vest

I expect the authors of this horrible deed are Taliban or people linked to them. We have to wait to have more news on this (Of course, if they are published).

Just nine years old. The suicide bomber was a young girl locked in a paramilitary checkpoint in the district of Lower Dir in northwestern Pakistan, according to the local police chief, Salim Marwat. The child had been kidnapped Saturday from the city of Peshawar and had been forced by his captors to wear a explosive vest . The little girl, named Suhana Ali, was captured not far from a checkpoint to Islam Dara, when an agent noticed an unnatural bulge on his body. An inspection has revealed that the girl was wearing an explosives vest ready to be activated.

The police operation, and the small age of the girl, were confirmed by a police officer. “Sushana – he explained – is from the Hashtnagri near Peshawar and was kidnapped by four people, both men and women. His father is disabled and poor, while the mother is a seamstress.” During the interrogation, the girl said that her kidnappers had administered sedatives. “They ordered me to push the button when switching the control post, but the police stopped me before I arrived.”

Terrible.

Austria: convert to Islam arrested for attempting to blow the Bundestag

An Austrian national was arrested in Vienna and charged with terrorism. Detectives believe he was planning to crash a plane into the Bundestag, German parliament headquarters in Berlin. The suspect, 25-year-old Thomas al-J., is a young man who has converted to Islam. He was arrested Wednesday in his apartment in the Austrian capital and has also been accused of recruiting terrorists in order to send them to jihad training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of funding terrorist organizations. The Bundestag hypothesis was published in Austrian newspaper ‘Kronen Zeitung’.

Found here.

Russia: Chechen jihadists turning into global jihadists

Image via Wikipedia

Alexander Cherkasov, who has closely followed the North Caucasus for 15 years for rights group Memorial, said whereas in the past rebels wanted freedom from Russia, a struggle that dates back over 200 years, now they are influenced by jihadism, a global fight against alleged enemies of Islam.

“Part of it is homegrown. Corruption leads many to seek out what they call true Islam, but political Islam, by way of foreign financing and insurgents, is certainly playing a role,” he told Reuters.

In early February, Russia said its forces had killed the al Qaeda operative and Egyptian militant Makhmoud Mokhammed Shaaban in Dagestan, who the FSB security service said had masterminded several bombings.

A myriad of web sites that have come to characterize the insurgency show videos of “martyrs,” something unheard of in the region five years ago. They feature mostly local men, framed by Caucasus flags, chanting in Arabic ahead of suicide missions.

That’s right: political Islam is certainly playing a role.

Related articles

• Another ‘death lab’ destroyed in Dagestan (rt.com)

Al-Shabab, the American connection

Abu Mansur al-Amriki. Image via Wikipedia

The news of another American suicide bomber shows, once again, the deadly allure of jihadism among a small number of young US citizens, but it also casts a light on the potential danger that allowing the conflict in Somalia to continue unabated poses. Now that we are at the third possible American suicide bomber in Somalia, it is time to take stronger measures to solve this problem – before it comes back to haunt us in the west.

In a cynical way, the news is a tidy resolution for security services. The fact that these young men have died abroad means they will no longer be able to pose a threat at home. But this fails to take into account the larger threat that these deaths represent, both in terms of the embedding of jihadist ideas in North America, but also the growing menace internationally of the al-Shabaab group.

The story of the American jihad is not new. At this point, we have seen jihadist plots in the US with links to all of the major jihadist battlefields abroad, and in many cases, they have involved US citizens. And within the US, there have been a number of plots uncovered involving Americans who have radicalised and chosen to participate in plots that may have concluded in terrorist attacks. The conviction of Tahawwur Rana for his role in a plot targeting Denmark was merely the latest manifestation.

Somalia and al-Shabaab (whose name literally means “the youth”) is a subset of this issue, but one that has been growing in importance as it becomes clear that the group has been able to draw to itself both young ethnic Somalis and an ever increasing number of radicalised young men and women from other ethnicities. Young Shabaab leader Omar Hammami, for example, is a Daphne, Alabama native of Syrian descent who left the comfort of the US to serve as a leader in the Somali group using the nom de guerre “Abu Mansur al-Amiriki”. And he is not alone, with some of his compatriots agreeing to act as suicide bombers in that war-torn country.

Found here.

Indonesia: Why Bashir’s sentence does not end the Jihadi threat

An interesting comment on this important sentence, though as the article reveals it is far from ending the Jihadi threat in Indonesia:

Today’s verdict, is, in some ways a victory for Indonesia. Since the bold and bloody Bali Bombings of 2002, the archipelago nation has been under tremendous pressure to tackle terrorism. In 2003, with support from the United States and Australia, Indonesia formed Detachment 88, a counter-terror squad staffed by the elite of the country’s police and special forces. The unit has earned acclaim for its success building an extensive intelligence network and conducting undercover operations. They’ve arrested, detained or killed hundreds of leaders and foot soldiers. They’ve also made modest strides in de-radicalization. “You want to know why Indonesia has done well fighting terrorism? We have no Guantánamo prisons,” psychologist Sarlito Wirawan Sarwono, who instructs Detachment 88 officers in interrogation tactics told TIME last year. “Our police understand the terrorists’ psyches.”

To an extent, sure. But the threat persists. Even as cells are shuttered, or clerics tried, new groups emerge. Maria Ressa, an expert on radical Islam in Indonesia likens it to the spread of a virus: The ‘jihadi virus’ grew out of the crucible of Afghanistan, she says, and was carried to Southeast Asia by veterans who trained and taught in the Philippines and elsewhere.  Their ideology passed, friend to friend, family to family, changing as it spread. “The virus is resilient,” she told me recently. “It mutates.“

Read more.

Related articles

• Indonesia: Bashir rejects terrorism charges (teaandpolitics.wordpress.com)

Internet: Jihadis use Facebook

Image via CrunchBase

Of course, FB is much quicker in expelling Tea Partiers than in expelling these guys:

Jihadi media organizations are forming Facebook pages to bypass restrictions on terrorist organizations, and to pass on videos, pictures, and documents to followers. While Facebook bans inciting violence or hateful content, jihadi media groups slide underneath the restrictions because they are poorly known.

“Watch here live the battle yesterday at Mogadisho as the tanks of the kufaar [disbelievers] burn,” says a post on the new Facebook page of Al-Kataib Media Foundation, a division of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. The post also features a video of an al-Shabaab spokesman who “talks to the reporters at the front line of the jihad,” provides a link to download the clip, and encourages them to “share it with your brothers and sisters.”

Other posts on the Al-Kataib page glorify al-Shabaab’s campaign of suicide bombing, while ‘notes‘ provide detailed accounts of daily battles.

Alongside unofficial pages dedicated to terrorist organizations, al-Kataib’s page suggests that jihadi media can recruit and indoctrinate directly from theworld’s largest social network. The media groups of al-Qaida and al-Shabaab have pages, while popular jihadi blog Ansar al-Mujahideen operates two closed discussion groups.

More here.

Of course, Taliban guys are “peace-loving” guys. Tea Partiers… ufff…

“Prislam”: the threat of Islam inside US prison system

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Wednesday’s hearing focused on the threat from “Prislam,” which Downing described as an extremist “cut and paste” version of Islam practiced by inmates. The resulting ideology is what former Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Smith said he saw in some New Folsom prison inmates whom he prosecuted for plotting to attack Jewish targets in Los Angeles and the LAX airport.

Smith testified that Folsom inmate Kevin James created the radical prison group Jam’iyyat Ul-islam Is-Saheeh (JIS) in 1997. JIS supported the killing of Jews and the implementation of an Islamic government in the United States. James recruited a fellow inmate named Levar Washington, who recruited two others upon his release, including an LAX employee, to assist with the terror plots.

“From the prison [Kevin James] was able to set up and set out an operation cell of would be jihadists on the streets of Southern California,” said Smith. “James set up a system where he would send the protocol to mail on the outside.”

The person on the outside would send the protocol back to inmates inside other prisons, spreading the JIS ideology.

Several factors contribute to inmate conversions to “Prislam,” witnesses testified, including the accessibility of radical literature inside prison walls and prison chaplains who espouse radical beliefs.

Read more.

Related articles

• Radical Islam Infiltrating U.S. Prisons? (foxnews.com)
• Lawmakers disagree on prisons’ role in Islamic radicalization of U.S. Muslims (cnn.com)

US: More than 80% of mosques promote violence

Abu Bakar Bashir, spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, sentenced to 15 years

This is an update on this story:

Image by RubyGoes via Flickr

RADICAL Indonesian cleric Abu Bakar Bashir has been found guilty of terrorism charges and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The 72-year-old has been found guilty of using violence or the threat of violence to incite terrorism, despite the prosecution weeks ago having conceded that it would not be able to prove all elements of that charge.

The prosecution had been seeking a life sentence in relation to charges of funding terrorism, stemming from the discovery last year of a paramilitary camp in Aceh.

However, the panel of judges today effectively reinstated the more serious charge.

More here.

Related articles

• Heavy security for Bashir verdict (heraldsun.com.au)

Al-Qaeda chooses Al-Zawahiri as the new leader

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Fox News is reporting that an Al Qaeda-affiliated website says Egypt-born Ayman al-Zawahri has succeeded Osama bin laden as head of the terror network. Bin Laden was killed in a U.S. commando raid in Pakistan last month.  Al-Zawahri, who will turn 60 next week, had been bin Laden’s second in command.

More here. Found here.

Wikileaks: Ties between the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Saddam’s Iran

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A leaked file says that Jawad Jabber Sadkhan, an Iraqi intelligence officer who moved to Afghanistan in 1998, “admittedly forged official documents and reportedly provided liaison between the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq.” The government of Afghanistan at that time was the Taliban, which employed him as a vicious interrogator for its intelligence service. His driver said he was also close to Osama Bin Laden, who paid him before and after the 9/11 attacks. Another detainee revealed that Sadkhan would travel to Iraq through Iran to retrieve supplies for the Taliban. Sadkhan was not universally popular, as his superior, Abdul-Hadi al-Iraqi, warned Saif al-Adel in November 1998 that he was part of a group of Iraqis “involved in un-Islamic activities.” This accusation did not end the relationship.

According to another detainee named Abbas Habid Rumi al-Naely, Sadkhan was a member of one of Saddam Hussein’s top units tasked with assassinating political opponents. The U.S. government also identified al-Naely as a liaison between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al-Qaeda. He joined the Taliban in 1994 while living in Baghdad. One U.S. government memo shows he was accused of preparing attacks on the U.S. and British embassies in Pakistan in August 1998 with an Iraqi intelligence officer on the orders of Osama Bin Laden. Later memos did not include the charge.

More here.

UN Report: More than 3/4 of people killed in Afghanistan are caused by the Taliban

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The Taliban are not happy about it:

U.N. representatives consider that women and children are being killed and wounded at home more than ever before, due to the intensification of Taliban attacks on the Afghan territory.

About 55 percent more children were killed in the first half of this year by the Taliban, compared to the last year. Thus, 3,268 people were killed from January 1, 2010, and 1,997 were injured and maimed. 2,477 of these people were killed or wounded by anti-governmental forces such as the Taliban, while 386 can be blamed on the pro-governmental forces, including the  International Security Assistance Force and Afghan Security Forces.

More here.

Wikileaks: Saudi Arabia and UAE finance terrorism including usage of 8 year old children

Wikileaks: Saudi Arabia & United Arab Emirates (UAE) are Financing Terrorism… including recruitment of 8 year old children for suicide bombing for the price of $6500 per child. Video inside.

Annual donations for this purpose: approx. 100 million USD.

More here.

Jihadists in Morocco

City of Salé, Morocco. Image via Wikipedia

The Belliraj cell’s release and radical preacher Mohamed Fizazi in April was an error of the regime and has emboldened other jihadi prisoners. Moreover, the fact that the auxiliary forces tried to calm the revolt in the prison of Salé saying that in a month will be a second and broader real grace, isn’t viewed with optimism. These prisoners and their supporters abroad are well organized, making it even out of prison and mobile images feed their victimization and work a battlefront that is extremely worrying in terms of security.

The increasing visibility of the Moroccan Islamist mobilizations under the 20/Feb Movement, and its growing effort to attract support among the diaspora abroad, particularly Europe, increases the problem. Recall that this ideology, though according to some, it’s more moderate, will be the probable winner in the coming elections that will be held in Tunisia, first, and then in Egypt. But its troubling aspect is what it is hiding: its fighting spirit and its radical vision of politics.

More here.

Spain: Barcelona, nest of counter-jihad spies

Barcelona. Image via Wikipedia

The Catalan capital has become a major center of operations of the intelligence services of all countries who are suffering and generate Jihadist terrorism and have diplomatic representation in Spain. The operation goes beyond Barcelona and extends to areas with high density of Muslim population.

The reason why Barcelona has become a nest of spies has its origin in the consideration of Catalonia as a source of primary importance to jihadists based in Europe.

… Among the reasons for considering Catalonia as a “the most dangerous nest of radical Islamists in the Mediterranean, the U.S. Secret Service pointed to the high percentage of legal and illegal immigration from North Africa-Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria- as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh, which in their view is a “magnet for recruiting terrorists. ” The concern has even led authorities meetings of experts and members of various intelligence services accredited in Spain, like the one held in Madrid a few weeks ago. A meeting just to talk of Catalonia as “new epicenter of jihadism. “

Found here.

Background:

Christmas in Bethlehem: the cross banished from souvenirs

For fear of Islamic fundamentalism, textile workshops in Hebron and Jerusalem, produce and sell T-shirts and other items depicting the Church of the Nativity without the cross. Discrimination and economic crisis are forcing Christians to flee from the Palestinian territories and Israel. The risk is to see a future without Christians in the Holy Land.

In an interview with Samir Qumsieh, director of the Catholic television station Al-Mahed Nativity TV in Bethlehem, (…) he said: “I want to launch a campaign to urge people not to buy these products – he says – because the removal of the cross is an intimidation against Christians, it is like saying that Jesus was never crucified” .

Read here.

Background: 1, 2.

Sweden: Imam preaches hate against Jews

Absolutely peaceful guy. I understand why someone would try to kill

Sweden: Extremists recruiting for Jihad in Stockholm’s Grand Mosque

Unfortunately this doesn’t surprise me:

(Swedish politician) Daniel Arrospide (infiltrated in the Muslim community) and says that the imam knew that there are people in the community who belong to extreme groups. There were attempts to recruit people without work or employment and with poor prospects for the future to extreme actions. 

“If the person is single, they pay him a little money. If he has a family, they promise him a lot of money to the family in case he chooses to die in the name of Allah.”

Q: Was there a lot of talk of Jihad in the mosque?

A: Yes, there was a lot of talk about Jihad in the mosque

Q: What did they say about Jihad?

A: That you should continue the war against the impure and infidels.

Q: Against Swedes?

A: Against Swedes, yes

Saturday’s suicide bomber didn’t surprise Daniel Arrospide.

“I had the feeling that something would happen. I had the feeling that there will be a bomb sooner or later in Stockholm. We wouldn’t avoid it, so to speak.”

Background: 1, 2.

More here.

PS: Daniel Arrospide is a local politician for the Green Party in Stockholm.