A War for Eurabia

NURSES TOLD TO TURN MUSLIMS’ BEDS TO MECCA

2007-12-04T13:29:00.000-08:00

One wonders if the Brits have any idea at all of how ridiculous they look with their appeasement and political correctness, especially to all things Islamic.

I saw the headline isolated among dozens of others and just from the headline I said to myself, "It as to be the Brits."

Britain STINKS of this Muslim appeasement in any manner that one can think of.

OVERWORKED nurses have been ordered to stop all medical work five times every day to move Muslim patients’ beds so they face towards Mecca.

The lengthy procedure, which also includes providing fresh bathing water, is creating turmoil among overstretched staff on bustling NHS wards.

But despite the havoc, Mid- Yorkshire NHS Trust says the rule must be instigated whenever possible to ensure Muslim patients have “a more comfortable stay in hospital”.

Brussels: Mohammed, Ayoub, Mehdi and Hamza are preferred names

2007-12-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

Here's a scary post. The link above points to a Belgium blog which recounts a list of names for the last 4 years. The top name is, of course, Mohammed, then Adam, followed by Ayoub, Mehdi and Hamza.

The list is recounted for the past 4 years, but if accurate, 50% of the list are foreign names, mostly, Muslim of course.

Then again, half of all births in the Netherlands are to children named Mohammed so I guess it's all pieces of the same pie.

The percentage may change, but it's the same across the European continent.

Yet, any words about stopping immigration or deportation are foreign to the European psyche. And worse than that, WHO do you deport? Many are now European citizens with theoretically at least, as many rights as native Euro's. So how does this knot get untangled? It doesn't.

But it's not only a sticky wicket for Europe. It is for their allies as well. One of the reasons, I suspect, that Europe took such a fierce anti-American stance is their fear of the "Muslim street" (and the billions they lost in Iraq of course). But this fear is just going to grow in stature as the years go by. Europe's anti-Americanism, both official and unofficial, is just going to grow as the years go on. It HAS to!

Rioters 'were out to kill us', says wounded French officer

2007-12-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

Well, looks like Niko has his work cut out for him in Paris. The most recent set of Paris riots has bred a dangerous new challenge, "youths" with firepower. I've speculated before, wondering what kinds of weapons/explosives they've got hidden in those no-go zones for French police.

And lets make no mistake here! There are in all likelihood far worse than hunting rifles and handguns hidden in those ban lieus. Even though the media won't say it, I will. These are MUSLIM "youths." They have the backing of other Muslims including the oil rich states. These states have plenty of cash thanks to their oil profits and they have military's who are quite capable of getting far heavier firepower than what is currently being shown.

PARIS - "It felt like they were out to kill us. We knew there were weapons in the suburbs, but never turned against us like that," one of the police officers shot during youth riots near Paris told AFP Wednesday.

Sent to the suburb of Villiers le Bel to quell an outbreak of violence that followed the death of two teens in a crash with police, Francois, who asked not to be fully identified, found himself under siege.

"We were attacked from all sides" by youths armed with hunting rifles."

"The kids were shooting at us at close range, loading and reloading their weapons. I've never seen anything like it. It was like in a movie. They were picking us off from 10 or 15 metres away."

"I was hit in the hand with what I thought was a slingshot. I didn't realise right away that it was buckshot, until I saw the hole in my trousers. I tried to protect my younger colleagues, then I fell to the ground."

Police unions say the scale and intensity of the violence unleashed since Sunday is worse than the 2005 riots, also sparked by the deaths of two youths.

A line was crossed, they say, when suburb gangs turned guns on the police, 120 of whom were injured, several by gunwound. The hunting rifles used by the gangs are dangerous anywhere within a 300-metre (yard) range.

Bruno Beschizza of the Synergie-Officiers police union said he had told Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie of the fear sparked among the police rank and file by the recent flare-up.

"We told her that our colleagues, out in the field, were afraid. How would you not be when a guy pulls a gun out of his sleeve?" he told AFP.

"There were not enough of us to sustain that kind of a siege," Francois said. "I had run out of (rubber bullet) ammunition. We really got a fright. We felt they were out to kill us. We didn't know where we were any more."

More ...

It's back from the dead!

2007-12-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

Wow! Hadn't realized its been a year since I've posted here! (Bad Dean, bad, bad Dean!)

But it looks like things are the same ol' same ol'.

Most of Europe is still in appeasement mode. "Youths" are still rioting in the streets of Paris (or is it again?) Brit woman sentenced to 40 lashes for naming a teddy bear Mohammed is now going to just be deported. (Why is deportation a one way process it seems?)

It's nice to see the new French leadership, but it's going to be even more interesting to see what's going on in the future and how he handles the rioting problem (more on that in the next post).

Brown and his pansies in Britain promise to do bad things to the Brits, but that'll be just something we'll have to watch for.

I'll try to set up a posting schedule for two nights a week at least if not more.

Take care folks, and godspeed!

Dean

PS. Be sure to check out or new blog at Future SciTech! A science and technology blog. It's young but I hope that it'll grow into a fascinating read ;)

United Press International - Intl. Intelligence - Analysis: Gallic intifada

2006-10-13T12:19:00.000-07:00

"BRUSSELS, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Turf conscious bloggers in Paris' rundown, mostly Muslim, suburban immigrant housing estates rival in violent messages that threaten to beat senseless and even kill any intruder caught in 'our ghetto.' Almost every word is misspelled, in both argot slang and pidgin French. And these are not empty threats. An average of 14 policemen a day are injured in bloody clashes with jobless youngsters.

France's Interior Ministry said 2,500 police officers had been 'wounded' this year. The head of the hard-line trade union 'Action Police' Michel Thooris wrote to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to describe conditions in housing developments turned slums as 'intifada.' Police cruisers are pelted daily with stones and 'Molotov cocktails' (gasoline-filled bottles with burning wicks that explode on impact) and Thooris said cops assigned to what was rapidly degenerating into 'free fire zones' should be protected in armored vehicles. Entire tall buildings empty into the streets to chase policemen and free an arrested comrade.

'We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,' Thooris told journalists. Sarkozy, the leading center-right candidate for next year's presidential election, responded by dispatching cops in body armor, equipped with automatic weapons and rubber bullets, stun and teargas grenades into several Paris suburbs with orders to 'restore control' from 'organized crime.' In one recent clash 250 cops dispersed a 100-strong Muslim gang armed with baseball bats.

The chaotic conditions in suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois, Montfermeil and St. Denis have grown progressively worse since the nationwide Muslim riots in November 2005 that torched 10,000 vehicles.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin recently criticized as 'overdrawn' President Bush's frequent reference to the 'global war on terror.'

Telegraph | News | Muslims are waging civil war against us, claims police union

2006-10-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Telegraph | News | Muslims are waging civil war against us, claims police union: "Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared 'intifada' against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day.

Nicolas Sarkozy
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy was warned of an 'intifada'

As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were 'in a state of civil war' with Muslims in the most depressed 'banlieue' estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.

It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones.

The number of attacks has risen by a third in two years. Police representatives told the newspaper Le Figaro that the 'taboo' of attacking officers on patrol has been broken.

Instead, officers – especially those patrolling in pairs or small groups – faced attacks as soon as they tried to arrest locals.

Senior officers insisted that the problem was essentially criminal in nature, with crime bosses on the estates fighting back against tough tactics.

The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also the leading centre-Right candidate for the presidency, has sent heavily equipped units into areas with orders to regain control from drug smuggling gangs and other organised crime rings. Such aggressive raids were 'disrupting the underground economy in the estates', one senior official told Le Figaro.

However, not all officers on the ground accept that essentially secular interpretation. Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the hardline Action Police trade union, has written to Mr Sarkozy warning of an 'intifada' on the estates and demanding that officers be given armoured cars in the most dangerous areas.

He said yesterday: 'We are in a state"

Dispatch from the Eurabian Front: Spain, France, Netherlands, Flanders | The Brussels Journal

2006-10-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

What can one say? Watching from the sidelines, I can see Europe crashing into a brick wall at warp 10 through appeasement and hand-wringing.

Islam doesn't even need to fight battles against the wussie Euro's. They'll "what if" themselves into being a caliphate again.

Think I should probably change the name of my blog to "The European Caliphate".

Nonsense first, as usual.

Spain will no longer burn effigies of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslim armies occupied Spain from 711 to 1492. For the past five centuries the Spanish have traditionally celebrated the 1492 liberation from the Moors (as the Muslims were locally called) with local village festivals during which the battles against the Moors were reenacted and effigies of the Muslim prophet – the so-called “la Mahoma” – were mocked, thrown from the windows, and burned.

Last year the town of Bocairent near Valencia decided to discontinue the tradition of centuries. The town did not want to risk becoming the target of Islamic suicide bombers. On Monday the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that this year the other Valencian towns are also abolishing ancient traditions which are perceived to be offensive to Muslims. The people of Beneixama used to stuff the head of the Mahoma with firecrackers which went off as the onlookers applauded. This year Beneixama decided to abolish this part of the celebration. Antonio Valdés, the local mayor, told El Pais: “This was not an essential part of the festivities. It could hurt the sensitivities of some. We decided to avoid that.” The reconquista will still be commemmorated, but without “aggression” towards Muhammad.

Third Night of Ramadan Rioting in Capital of Europe | The Brussels Journal

2006-09-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

"Islam is a religion of peace!"

It looks as if immigrants youths want to turn nightly rioting during the Islamic holy month of ramadan into an annual tradition. Around 8:30pm last night violence erupted again in Brussels, the capital of Europe. The riots centered on the Brussels Marollen quarter and the area near the Midi Train Station, where the international trains from London and Paris arrive. Youths threw stones at passing people and cars, windows of parked cars were smashed, bus shelters were demolished, cars were set ablaze, a youth club was arsoned and a shop was looted. Two molotov cocktails were thrown into St.Peter’s hospital, one of the main hospitals of central Brussels. The fire brigade was able to extinguish the fires at the hospital, but youths managed to steal the keys of the fire engine.

During the month of ramadan Muslims are required to fast during the day and are only allowed to eat after sunset. As Esther pointed out “What should be noticed about the riots is that they start after sunset. Besides the fact that they start after dark, it also gives the rioters enough time to break their fast and enjoy the traditional family meal. Sunset is around 7:30pm.” Tuesday’s and Monday’s riots began around 8:30pm.

Last night the police arrested 45 rioters. One of them will be prosecuted for assaulting the owner of a shop. Philippe Close, the chef de cabinet of the Mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, said that the authorities would continue their efforts to defuse the situation in a peaceful manner, but he announced that the police will be less complacent in future, “since we cannot tolerate that this [Marollen] neighbourhood falls victim to a problem from outside the neighbourhood.”

Mozart Opera Canceled for Muhammad Scene

2006-09-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

I don't know why the Germans don't just convert now and have it over with. Self-censoring like this is NOT going to work. All it's going to do is show weakness which will encourage even MORE "offenses" which will have to be self-censored as well.

I did find this line amusing though:

"Islamic law is interpreted to forbid any depiction of Muhammad for fear it could lead to idolatry."

Obviously they've never counted up the number of muslims who are named Muhammad. Believe me, they idolize him, therefore are idolators.

A leading opera house in Berlin, Germany canceled a 3-year-old production of Mozart's 'Idomeneo' that included a scene showing the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad, unleashing a furious debate over free speech.

In a statement late Monday, the Deutsche Oper said it decided 'with great regret' to cancel the production of the 225-year-old opera after Berlin security officials warned of an 'incalculable risk' stemming from the scene.

After its premiere in 2003, the production by Hans Neuenfels drew widespread criticism over the scene in which King Idomeneo presents the severed heads not only of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, but also of Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha.

'We know the consequences of the conflict over the (Muhammad) caricatures,' the statement said. 'We believe that needs to be taken very seriously and hope for your support.'

Kirsten Harms, director of the Deutsche Oper, told the Berliner Morgenpost on Tuesday that Berlin state police had warned of a possible - but not certain - threat, and she decided it would be in the best interest of the safety of the opera house, its employees and patrons to cancel the production.

Al-Qaida joins Algerians against France

2006-09-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Now, France may learn that all their anti-Americanism, posturing and appeasement of Islamics really hasn't bought them the safety that they'd hoped it would

They've pushed away their allies and encouraged their enemies. Now they're likely to learn just how large a problem they have with millions of Islamics in their country and millions more outside, who want nothing more than the death of France and as many frenchmen as they can possibly manage.

Those "Islamic enclaves" are no-go zones for the french authorities and nobody at all has ANY idea of what's in them. But we may find out sooner, rather than later.

PARIS - Al-Qaida has for the first time announced a union with an Algerian insurgent group that has designated France as an enemy, saying they will act together against French and American interests.

Current and former French officials specializing in terrorism said Thursday that an al-Qaida alliance with the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, known by its French initials GSPC, was cause for concern.

'We take these threats very seriously,' Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said, adding in an interview on France-2 television that the threat to France was 'high' and 'permanent,' and that 'absolute vigilance' was required.

Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, announced the 'blessed union' in a video posted this week on the Internet to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

France's leader have repeatedly warned that the decision not to join the U.S.-led war in Iraq would not shield the country from Islamic terrorism. French participation in the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Lebanon could give extremists another reason to strike.

Minister Welcomes Sharia In Netherlands If Majority Wants It

2006-09-12T15:41:00.001-07:00

What can one say about sentiments like this one. If he wants sharia so bad, why doesn't he go to a country that practices it? Why don't the muslims who moved to the Netherlands? Why import it?

This is why many American just shake their head in amazement at the downright stupid things that flow from politically correct Europe.

Mark Steyn said it best I think: Europe is sleepwalking its way to suicide.

THE HAGUE, 13/09/06 - Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner considers the Netherlands should give Muslims more freedoms to behave according to their traditions. Muslims refusing to shake hands is fine with him. And Sharia law could be introduced in the Netherlands democratically, in the minister's view.

Muslims have the right to experience their religion in ways that diverge from Dutch social codes, accordign to the Christian democrat (CDA) minister. He thinks Queen Beatrix was very wise not to insist on a Muslim leader shaking hands with her when she visited his mosque in The Hague earlier this year.

Integration Minister Verdonk did previously scold an imam who would not shake her hand. Without directly referring to this incident, Donner considers 'a tone that I do not like has crept into the political debate. A tone of: 'Thou shalt assimilate. Thou shalt adopt our values in public. Be reasonable, do it our way'. That is not my approach'.

Donner strongly disagrees with a recent plea by CDA parliamentary leader Maxime Verhagen for a ban on parties seeking to launch Sharia (Islamic law) in the Netherlands. 'For me it is clear: if two-thirds of the Dutch population should want to introduce the Sharia tomorrow, then the possibility should exist,' according to Donner. 'It would be a disgrace to say: 'That is not allowed!'.'

Donner makes his remarks in an interview in a book entitled, 'The country of hate and anger' (Het land van haat en nijd). The book was written by journalists Margalith Kleijwegt and Max van Weezel of weekly magazine Vrij Nederland. Minister Verdonk will be presented with the first copy today.

Tortured screams ring out as Iraqis take over Abu Ghraib

2006-09-10T09:28:00.001-07:00

"'Please help us, we want the human rights officers, we want the Americans to come back'"

This is off topic, but as a Yank, I just couldn't resist it.

Apparently, American "torture" at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq wasn't THAT bad.

After all, panties on the head and being posed for a photo-op aren't THAT bad compared to REAL torture that Arabs can come up with.

It reminds me of a piece written by a chaplain in Guantanamo Bay. They spent 9 hours talking a prisoner who was being shipped back home out of a tree because he preferred Gitmo's prison to what he faced when he went back home.

I'm sure this headline will be splashed all over the NY Times for months as well, just like the original Abu Ghraib pictures were. NOT!

British anti-terror police probing 'thousands' of suspects

2006-09-02T22:16:00.001-07:00

Fri Sep 1, 11:09 PM ET

LONDON (AFP) - British police are currently trying to monitor 'thousands' of potential security suspects, the head of the anti-terrorism unit at London's Metropolitan Police said in an interview to be broadcast Sunday.

In an interview recorded in July, before the arrest of more than two dozen people on suspicion of an alleged plot to blow up US-bound aircraft, Peter Clarke said Britain was facing an increasing threat from homegrown extremists.

He refused to give an exact figure about how many people he said were either directly or indirectly involved in plotting atrocities on British soil but said the number ran into four figures.

'I don't want to go down the numbers game, I don't think it's helpful,' he told a BBC television programme entitled 'Al-Qaida -- Time to Talk?'

'All I can say is that our knowledge is increasing and certainly in terms of broad description, the numbers of people who we have to be interested in are into the thousands.'

He added: 'That includes a whole range of people, not just terrorists, not just attackers, but people who might be tempted to support or encourage or to assist.'

Clarke highlighted the potential for home-grown terrorism in Britain since the September 2001 attacks on the United States, implicitly citing the July 2005 London bombings carried out by four British Muslim suicide bombers.

'What we've learnt since 9/11 is that the threat is not something that's simply coming from overseas into the United Kingdom. What we've learnt, and what we've seen all too graphically and all too murderously, is that we have a threat which is being generated here within the United Kingdom.'

BBC investigators uncovered a route for suicide bombers from Britain to
Iraq by following a French Algerian jihadist who lived in the northern English city of Manchester and is thought to have died in a suicid"

Islamic conversions gain ground in Britain- The Times of India

2006-09-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

Islamic conversions gain ground in Britain- The Times of India: "LONDON: Shoe-bomber Richard Reid; 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay; August 10’s Trans-Atlantic airline alleged conspirators Don Stewart-Whyte, Oliver Savant and Brian Young. All would fail the racial profiling test to screen potential terrorists; all are converts to Islam. So, is the new face of Islam in the UK increasingly white or at least non-Asian and non-typical?

'Yes and no,' says Batool-al Toma, head of the New Muslim Project, set up 12 years ago in the English Midlands city of Leicester as Britain’s first organised one-stop shop for new converts to Islam.

Al-Toma, formerly Mary Geraghty, is a white Irishwoman who converted to Islam 25 years ago. She admits to TOI that 'the numbers of white converts have been steadily rising, my work has increased and the sheer volume of people coming to me every week has risen in the last 12 years'.

But she disputes the easy media shorthand that sees British Islam as increasingly white and dangerously reflected in Reid, Lindsay, Stewart-Whyte, Savant and Young. 'Reid and Lindsay were not of a white background,' she points out, 'and the others are not typical of the white people who convert to Islam.' More crucially, says al-Toma, the New Muslim Project is now busy creating a separate programme of induction for Hindu and Sikh converts to Islam.

'Till now, Hindu and Sikh converts mostly turned to the British Pakistani community but I now realise they have specific issues to do with family and we need to support them.'

Islam poses a threat to the West, say 53pc in poll

2006-08-24T20:19:00.001-07:00

It appears that some Brit's eyes are being opened as to the dangers of rampant immigration of Muslims into the country. However it poses some interesting questions and considerations:

I wonder if the Brits will still allow that 70,000 seat mosque in London for the Olympics. We know how dangerous mosques can be. Wonder if Red Ken Livingstone will still back the project.

I fear to think of what security for the Olympics is going to cost with both imported and domestic muslims looking to blow up and butcher everything in sight.

Didn't the Brits pass some anti-Blasphemy laws after 7/7 to appease Islam and muslims? Wonder how that's working out for them.

Haven't heard much from ol' George Galloway since he was on Al Jazeera a week or two ago begging Islam for money. All the world knows that muslims are true altruists who would NEVER expect anything in return for their donations to him. Wonder what his thoughts on that mass-murder airline plot are.

Now that Brits are starting to wake up to the danger they've imported, they have no weapons available to defend themselves, the govt having confiscated them all. We in America will NEVER give up our rights to defend ourselves in favor of some far away government having to defend us in times of need.

I wonder if the government of Britain will finall get the message that they're PAYING for this terrorism against its citizens. They make sure that they have welfare money for food, housing paid at State expense, health care in the NHS. In fact the muslims, if I have the straight of it, have precious little to do all day, day in and day out, except hang around the mosque and talk shop -- jihad, how to kill all the people providing them with their goodies.

Oh well. Strange system at work in England.

A growing number of people fear that the country faces 'a Muslim problem' and more than half of the respondents to the YouGov survey said that Islam posed a threat to Western liberal democracy. That compares with less than a third after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America five years ago.

SNIP ...

The proportion of those who believe that "a large proportion of British Muslims feel no sense of loyalty to this country and are prepared to condone or even carry out acts of terrorism" has nearly doubled from 10 per cent a year ago to 18 per cent now.
The number who believe that "practically all British Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens who deplore terrorist acts as much as any- one else" has fallen from 23 per cent in July last year to 16 per cent.

SNIP ...

A higher proportion than last year now feels that the police and MI5 should focus their counter-terrorism efforts on Muslims and far fewer people are worried that such an approach risks dividing the country or offending law-abiding Muslims.

Most strikingly, there has been a substantial increase over the past five years in the numbers who appear to subscribe to a belief in a clash of civilisations. When YouGov asked in 2001 whether people felt threatened by Islam, as distinct from fundamentalist Islamists, only 32 per cent said they did. That figure has risen to 53 per cent.

Five years ago, a majority of two to one thought that Islam posed no threat, or only a negligible one, to democracy. Now, by a similar ratio, people think it is a serious threat.
SNIP ...

She said: "Our ideas and policies should not be based on special treatment for minority ethnic faith communities. That would only exacerbate division rather than help build cohesion." [ED: She says at the same time in another article it's reported about this new commission: It will also consider requests from Muslim groups for Islamic festivals to be bank holidays. They're still in appeasement mode.]

Iran 'obtained German guidance gear for drones'

2006-08-22T19:58:00.000-07:00

Here again we see Europe assisting Iran and their proxy Hezb'Allah in their mission to kill Jews wholesale. Why this is not considered genocide is beyond me. Trying to wipe a whole people off the map and out of life is most certainly a crime against humanity.

And Europe is complicit in it. Both with equipment funneled through Iran and cash payments for "humanitarian" assistance to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. All of these groups' avowed aims are to kill every Jew in Israel and I personally consider Europe to be an accessory to this GENOCIDE!

DUSSELDORF - Iran has obtained German guidance gear for its drones, a prosecutor disclosed in Dusseldorf Monday, just hours after the revelation that Britain had supplied night-vision equipment to Iran which ended up in the hands of Hezbollah fighters.

Johannes Mocken, the prosecutor in Dusseldorf, said Tehran had obtained the global positioning systems (GPS) through Iranian merchants living in Germany.

The delivery was first reported by a German television current-affairs programme, Fakt, which said seven German-made systems were exported but German authorities managed to stop three more.

The systems use signals from satellites to help fly unmanned aircraft. Hezbollah deployed several drones of unknown origin in its recent month of fighting with Israel.

Hezbollah night-vision gear was from Britain

2006-08-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

I understand that it's difficult to control every piece of equipment that a country produces, but European countries and in particular the UN seem to be dealing with Iran like it's just another run of the mill player that has only the interest of the world at heart.

When will these soft and squishy lefties come to the conclusion that I came to with the Iranian overthrow of the US embassy that they CANNOT be trusted? I came to this conclusion over 15 years ago, why are Euro's and the UN so thick-headed about it?

Or is it that they're selectively blind when it comes to killing Jews? I'm not a Jew. I don't think that I even KNOW a Jew right now. But right is right and wrong is wrong and Jews are human beings, despite president achmadinutjob and many other "Islamic Scholar's" opinion to the contrary.

Why is Europe aiding and abetting a second holocaust by the new Nazi's???

And it's not just this equipment either. One has to wonder: if this equipment was waived to Iran, what other equipment was?

Israeli officials say they believe the state-of-the-art equipment, found in Hezbollah command-and-control headquarters in southern Lebanon during the just-concluded war, was part of a British government-approved shipment of 250 pieces of night-vision equipment sent to Iran in 2003.
Israeli military intelligence confirmed that one of the pieces of equipment is a Thermo-vision 1000 LR tactical night-vision system, serial No. 155010, part No. 193960, manufactured by Agema, a high-tech equipment company with branches in Bedfordshire, England, and San Diego. A spokesman for Agema in San Diego denied all knowledge of the system.
The equipment, which needed special export-license approval from the British government, was passed to the Iranians through a program run and administered by the U.N. Drug Control Program. The equipment uses infrared imaging to provide nighttime surveillance that allows the user to detect people and vehicles moving in the dark at a range of several miles.
Use of such equipment would have enabled Hezbollah to detect and record the movements of Israeli forces inside Israel, as well as its military advance into Lebanon.
Britain and Italy both have provided specialized tracking and monitoring equipment over the past decade as part of U.N.-sponsored attempts to stem the flow of heroin and opium into Western Europe from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iran is a major route for shipment of narcotics to the West.
A spokesman for the British Foreign Office in London said Saturday, "The Israeli Defense Forces have confirmed to us they have found some night-vision equipment in south Lebanon that is apparently made in Britain. We're trying to get further details to see exactly what the equipment is, who made it and who the original buyer is."
The spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Britain participates, through the U.N. drug-fighting agency, in Iran's interception program, which is run by anti-narcotics forces along the country's eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, both major opium poppy-growing countries.
"We've been encouraging the Iranians as part of their anti-narcotics program, and there was an export in 2003 ... as part of the heroin and opium smuggling program. This is an area where we try not to let the nuclear issue prevent cooperation on countering narcotics," he said, referring to Iran's dispute with the United Nations over its nuclear enrichment program.
The Foreign Office spokesman said officials at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv have requested serial and parts numbers of the seized equipment to try to determine how it ended up in the hands of Hezbollah guerrillas fighting Israeli forces in Lebanon.
The equipment was found by Israeli forces in the southern Lebanese village of Mis-a-Jebel on Aug. 8, in a house belonging to a 60-year-old man whose four sons were all known to be Hezbollah fighters. The discovery was disclosed in a briefing by Lt. Col. Olivier Radowicz, an Israeli army spokesman, and later confirmed in detail by Israeli military intelligence officials, who also provided photographs of the equipment taken in the house where it was discovered.
"These are tactical night-vision systems ... given to Hezbollah by Iran. The Iranians are the 100 percent provider of all the materiel, especially intelligence materiel, to Hezbollah," Radowicz said.
The discovery of the night-vision equipment, together with sophisticated recording and monitoring devices and stashes of antitank missiles and rockets, led the Israelis to believe the five-room house was the command-and-control unit for Hezbollah in the local area, he said.
In the early phases of the Israeli ground advance against Hezbollah positions across the border region, commanders complained to their superiors that nighttime operations had been hampered by the ability of Hezbollah fighters to observe and counter the Israeli moves. In more than six days of bitter fighting around the village of Mis-a-Jebel, the Israeli army lost six soldiers, and more than 20 were injured.
"The night-vision unit was used to observe the movement of troops. It's very close to the border, so it can see Israeli troops. You can also record what you are watching. Then it is connected to computers. You can obtain a perfect intelligence picture in real time about the situation. It is then connected to firing systems or to units that are going to act in accordance with the intelligence they are receiving," Radowicz said during the briefing.

The peacekeepers of Penzance

2006-08-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

I really hate to say it, but Europe's future is indeed bleak. All their braying about the "international community" and "human rights for man" (minus the Jews of course) makes them a laughing-stock around the world.

And nobody moreso than "Black Jaques Chiraq" with his by now infamous 4,000 "peacekeepers" leading the UNIFIL force in Lebanon of 15,000 which suddenly turned into 200 "combat" engineers. (Amazingly, he surrendered even BEFORE they had boots on the ground!)

I understand that it was the intercession of Syria threatening terrorist actions against French troops that halted the French drive for the leadership post in Lebanon. But no matter. That's not important.

What's important is that unless Europe changes its ways TODAY, NOW, there will be no Europe by the turn of this century, at least no Europe that any of the rest of us would recognize.

"A people without progeny will not accept a single military casualty. If this generation is the last, there will be no children for whom to sacrifice. Today's Europeans value their distractions and amusements more than they do prospective children. Germany's 2005 birth rate of only 8.5 per 1,000 inhabitants indicates that Europe is following the low variant of UN population estimates. These guarantee the virtual disappearance of the Europeans by the end of the present century.

Only 300 million Europeans, nearly half of them geriatric, will remain at the end of the present century against more than 700 million (including all of Eastern Europe) today. Europeans younger than 60 years of age now number about 560 million; that number will fall by only 150 million by the year 2100. This number excludes immigrants, overwhelmingly from the Middle East and Africa, who show no signs of assimilating as Europeans.

The number of Americans will exceed the number of Europeans, Russia included, by around the year 2080, although the aggregate numbers mask the true extent of the catastrophe, for nearly half of Europe's survivors will have reached retirement age. A fifth of Europeans are past 60 now; by 2050 more than a third will be above 60; and by the end of the century nearly half. The United States' elderly will number about 30%, so that the number of Americans younger than 60, at 280 million, will be close to double the number of young and working-age Europeans.

It might be objected that Europe's demographic catastrophe lies a generation hence, and that it need not determine European policy today. Just the opposite is true: it is Europe's present attitudes that dictate the demographic catastrophe. Europe began to die in the 1990s when deaths outnumbered births."

The future of Britain and Europe from the horse's mouth.

2006-08-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

Europe, take some lessons from 9/11

Europe is the cancer - Islam is the Answer!

Europe, you will pay - Your extermination is on its way!

Europe, you will pay - Your 9/11 is on its way!

How anybody can misread these messages and their intentions is beyond me. How much plainer can it be made? This is the future of Europe.

Firebrand Islamic academic: 'dying for your beliefs is just'

2006-08-20T18:48:00.000-07:00

To underscore the gravity and nature of the problem that Britain in particular and Europe in general face, here's a quote from Dr. Tamimi during the ExpoIslamia in Manchester England today.

"We are Muslims in Europe, not European Muslims,"

Obviously, this is a very clear indication of how many "Muslims in Europe" see the priority of their alliegance.

Police detain suspect in July bomb plot-report | World News | Reuters.co.uk

2006-08-19T04:01:00.001-07:00

I generally try and keep up with the news as much as one man can, but this one completely slipped by me. A bomb plot on trains in Germany? Hmmm. The last sentence is of particular note:

The explosives had been ignited but failed to detonate.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German security forces have taken into custody a suspect linked to last month's failed plot to explode bombs on German trains, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

In a preview of an article to appear in Bild am Sonntag on Sunday, the paper cited security sources as saying one of two suspects in the case had been seized in the northern city of Kiel and was being questioned by police.

Earlier on Saturday, the train station in Kiel was shut down for five hours. Police said the move was linked to the investigation into two bombs that were discovered in abandoned suitcases on trains in Dortmund and Koblenz last month."

Murder of Pakistani woman shocks Italy -DAWN - Top Stories; August 17, 2006

2006-08-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

Murder of Pakistani woman shocks Italy -DAWN - Top Stories; August 17, 2006

BRIT 'BABY BOMB' BEASTS By ANDY SOLTIS - New York Post Online Edition: News

2006-08-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

One must wonder if there is ANYTHING sacred to Muslims. Ambulances are used to transport murderers, Embassies are taken over and their ambassadors and staff are held, tortured and sometimes executed, Hospitals and daycare centers are used for weapon storage, even their own children, let alone children of infidels are not sacred to them.

I can't think of a law of man or God that these people haven't broken from kidnapping, murder, genocide and other crimes against humanity, arson, rape, torture, extortion, drug running, gun running - the list goes on and on and on, and all with the Ummah's blessing and cheers.

What the outwardly normal couple had secretly plotted is almost too horrifying to consider, cops said.
The Alis planned to use 6-month-old son Zain's baby bottle as a liquid bomb, blowing themselves and their child up, along with hundreds of others aboard the flight.
Cossar was allowed to bring Zain to a police station house so she could breast-feed him there. The baby was later turned over to her grandparents.
To their stunned friends and neighbors in a housing project in north London, the Alis were known as quiet, struggling parents and observant Muslims who showed no signs of terror ties.
"Cossor was not someone I had an argument with, never any problems," said a shocked Bronwene Hammond, who attended London's Walthamstow School for Girls with her.
"She would wear the full Muslim outfit because of her parents, but she was never preaching," Hammond told The Mail on Sunday. "There were a lot more religious people at school."
But British security experts suspect that Cossor Ali is an example of a chilling phenomenon that is growing in popularity among the terror set - a woman willing to use her innocent appearance to allay suspicions and carry out a suicide bombing. At least 20 Muslim women have blown themselves up in such attacks.
Particularly disturbing was Cossor Ali's apparent intent to conceal the liquid trigger for a bomb in Zain's baby bottle when the family boarded a jetliner.
"It may be beyond belief, but we are convinced that there are now women in Britain who are prepared to die with their babies for their twisted cause," a security adviser to the British government told The Times of London.
"They are ruthless, single-minded and totally committed."
Cossor, a British citizen like her husband, lived with her parents and two older sisters before marrying Ali three years ago.
The couple moved into the project and were receiving government assistance.

I truly wonder if the governments and people of Europe will ever catch onto the fact that they are actually PAYING these "people" to murder their native population. The poor natives are chained to a desk 8-12 hours a day and the taxes they pay go to support these murderous jihadi scum whose only aim is to murder the taxpayers. Talk about taking out a contract on yourself!

Europe faces 'very real threat'

2006-08-16T06:29:00.000-07:00

Do Europeans purposely elect stupid people? Not that we in the states don't, but there are times that I wonder what happened to the peoples who elected Reagan and Thatcher.

Islam, whose very name stood for peace.

Islam does not and never will stand for peace. Islam means 'submission'. Submission of the Muslim peoples to the will of Allah and submission of the Dar-al-Harb - the House of War - us infidels, to Dar-al-Salam - the House of Peace - to the Muslim Ummah.

Where these elected politicians got the idea that Islam has anything to do with peace is beyond me and always will be.

Muslims call for special bank holidays | the Daily Mail

2006-08-15T11:35:00.000-07:00

Right dead-center in the middle of this article is a very interesting little tidbit. And please keep in mind that these are the so-called "moderate Muslims"

Muslim leaders summoned to talks with the Government on tackling extremism in their midst called for public holidays to mark their religious festivals.
The Whitehall meeting was set up in response to last week's airline bomb plot discovery.
Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly had prepared an uncompromising message on the need to tackle dangerous radicalism.
But, in what she admitted were 'sharp' exchanges, some senior Muslim figures turned the tables yesterday and made a series of demands which also included the introduction of Sharia law for family matters.
Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, said: 'We told her if you give us religious rights, we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.'
Dr Pasha said Miss Kelly had agreed to look at the proposals, though her spokesman insisted later that she did not favour any legal change which would give 'special treatment' for the Muslim community.
Some of the 30 moderate Muslim leaders at the meeting told Miss Kelly that important days in their two main religious festivals - Ramadan and Eid-ul-Adha - should be made public holidays for followers of the faith.
Sharia law, which is practised in large parts of the Middle East, should also be introduced in Britain, they argued. While it specifies stonings and amputations as routine punishments for crimes, Dr Pasha said he wanted it only for family affairs.

There you have it in black and white. This is the ultimate aim of even the "moderate" Muslims. The Queens law will be relegated to the back of the stage and Sharia will be imposed front and center.

There is no mid-point where you can meet Islam for a meeting of the minds. To them a mid-way point is simply a place to pause while they begin the next route to their objective: the full dominance of Sharia law.

Many British Muslims Put Islam First

2006-08-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

This article should scare the water out of any British citizen. It scares the water out of me and I'm not even British. I don't know any better way to spell out the profoundly massive problem that not only Britain but all of Europe face in their open immigration stance.

The recent homegrown plot in Britain to blow up transatlantic flights will intensify the fear that the country's 1.6 million Muslims are rejecting political tolerance and free speech for a violent, radicalized version of Islam. There is a real concern that British Muslims do pose a threat to that country and its traditional values. So how prevalent are such radical views among British Muslims?

Some answers are provided by the most comprehensive survey to date of Muslim opinion in Britain. The results from NOP Research, broadcast by Channel 4-TV on August 7, are startling.

Forty-five percent say 9/11 was a conspiracy by the American and Israeli governments. This figure is more than twice as high as those who say it was not a conspiracy. Tragically, almost one in four British Muslims believe that last year's 7/7 attacks on London were justified because of British support for the U.S.-led war on terror.

When asked, "Is Britain my country or their country?" only one in four say it is. Thirty percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia (Islamic religious) law than under British law. According to the report, "Half of those who express a preference for living under Sharia law say that, given the choice, they would move to a country governed by those laws."

Twenty-eight percent hope for the U.K. one day to become a fundamentalist Islamic state. This comports with last year's Daily Telegraph newspaper survey that found one-third of British Muslims believe that Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to end it.

The news is no less alarming on the question of freedom of speech. Seventy-eight percent support punishment for the people who earlier this year published cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed. Sixty-eight percent support the arrest and prosecution of those British people who "insult Islam." When asked if free speech should be protected, even if it offends religious groups, 62 percent of British Muslims say No, it should not.

"Twenty-eight percent hope for the U.K. one day to become a fundamentalist Islamic state."
This is a huge number. Out of 1.6 million muslims in Britain, over half a million of them want the UK to become an Islamic state? Amazing.

"Thirty percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia (Islamic religious) law than under British law."
Again 30%, half a million Muslims want Britain to be an Islamic State like Iran.

Britain and the rest of Europe better do something, NOW or this is their future.

And the twaddle about it all being because of the support of Britain going to war with President Bush is pure, unadulterated trash. Bush and Blair have nothing at all to do with Chechnya and Kashmir and all of the other places where Islam is at war with every major power on the planet.

This is simply Islam and it's been the history of Islam for the past 1,500 years. It's not going to change anytime soon.

BBC NEWS | Europe | German births decline to new low

2006-08-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | Europe | German births decline to new low

Passport photo of girl, 5, banned 'in case it offends Muslims' | the Daily Mail

2006-08-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

This isn't even worth commenting on. Apparently, some Brits are doing the Muslims work for them through political correctness.

A five-year-old girl had her passport form rejected when an official said the bare shoulders on her photograph could offend Muslims.
The post office assistant stunned Hannah Edwards's parents by claiming the skin exposed by her daughter's halter-neck dress would not be accepted by the Passport Office as it might prove unacceptable in a Muslim country.
The incident happened when Jane and Martin Edwards took the picture, which was taken in a photo-booth, to a post office in the Sheffield area along with the completed form for checking ahead of a family holiday in the South of France.
The counter clerk told them she was aware of at least two other cases where applications had been rejected because a person's shoulders were not covered in their photo.
Mrs Edwards, a GP in Sheffield, had to rush around for two hours getting new pictures taken and countersigned.
'I was incensed,' she said yesterday. 'I went back home and checked the form.
'Nowhere did it say anything about covering up shoulders. If it had, I would have done so, but it all seems so unnecessary.
'This is quite ridiculous, I followed the instructions on the passport form to the letter and it was still rejected. It is just officialdom pandering to political correctness.
'It is a total over-reaction. How can the shoulders of a five-year-old girl offend anyone?

2006-08-14T19:50:00.000-07:00

Lest anybody think I'm so deluded to consider Europe the only one in a Politcally Correct/Demographic squeeze of nutiness, I present another oldie but a goodie from the irrepressible Mark Steyn, published just over 6 months after 911.

It's a horrendous indictment of the Politically Correct Mindset infecting many of the lefties/Government officials operating all across the West.

Mark Steyn -- Mohammed Atta and his federal loan officer
National Post (Toronto) ^ | June 10, 2002 | Mark Steyn

Posted on 06/11/2002 6:08:11 AM PDT by Clive

Mohammed Atta and his federal loan officer
No matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber

When last in this space, 10 days ago, I was writing about whether political correctness kills. This was apropos the 9/11 nutters: "Everything they did stuck out. But it didn't matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who mattered was trained to look the other way."

I didn't know the half of it. The other day, Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, gave an interview to ABC News in which she revealed that Mohammed Atta and three other September 11th terrorists had visited her Florida office seeking government loans.

America, it seems, came this close to having the World Trade Center incinerated at the taxpayers' expense.

Mr. Atta swung by in May, 2000, and Ms. Bryant remembers quite a bit about it. "At first," she says, "he refused to speak with me," on the grounds that she was, in his words, "but a female." After he'd reiterated the point, she pulled rank: "I told him that if he was interested in getting a farm-service agency loan in my servicing area, then he would need to deal with me." Throughout the hour-long interview, he continued to dismiss her as "but a female."

Ms. Bryant says the applicant was asking for $650,000 to start a crop-dusting business. His plan was to buy a six-seater twin-prop and then remove the seats. "He wanted to build a chemical tank that would fit inside the aircraft and take up every available square inch of the aircraft except for where the pilot would be sitting."

Hmm.

When she explained that his application would have to be processed, Mr. Atta became "very agitated." He'd apparently been expecting to leave the office with cash in hand. "He asked me," recalls Ms. Bryant, "what would prevent him from going behind my desk and cutting my throat and making off with the millions of dollars in that safe." Try this with your Royal Bank loan officer -- I find it works every time. But Ms. Bryant replied politely that there was no money in the safe because loans are never given in cash, and also that she was trained in karate.

His fiendish plan stymied at every turn, Mr. Atta then spotted an aerial view of Washington hanging on the wall behind her. He told her he particularly liked the way it got all the famous landmarks of the city in one convenient picture, pointing specifically to the Pentagon and the White House. "He pulled out a wad of cash," says Ms. Bryant, "and started throwing money on my desk. He wanted that picture really bad."

She told him it wasn't for sale, but he only tossed more dough at her. "His look on his face became very bitter at that point," Ms. Bryant remembers. "He said, 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it,' like the cities in his country had been destroyed?"

Hmm.

Mr. Atta then moved on to other prominent landmarks in other American cities, and enquired about security at the World Trade Center. Ms. Bryant had a Dallas Cowboys souvenir on her desk, and he asked her about their spectacular stadium and, specifically, the "hole in the roof."

At that point, the chit-chat turned to Mr. Atta's own country, which he claimed was Afghanistan. "He mentioned Osama bin Laden," she says. "He could have been a character on Star Wars for all I knew." So Mr. Atta helpfully explained that this bin Laden guy "would someday be known as the world's greatest leader."

Alas, the interview ended badly from the terrorists' point of view when Ms. Bryant informed her visitor that the loan program is for farm-based projects and a crop-dusting business did not qualify.

A few weeks later, another September 11th killer showed up, Marwan al- Shehhi, seeking half-a-million bucks supposedly to buy a sugar-cane farm. Accompanying him was Mr. Atta, but he was cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be someone else entirely, attending in his capacity as Mr. al-Shehhi's accountant. Sportingly, Ms. Bryant went along with the wheeze. I'm reminded of the time my sister tried to wangle her boyfriend a day off work. She called up the receptionist and, adopting a fake accent, told her that she was the dentist's secretary and he needed to come in immediately for critical dental work. "My God, that's terrible," said the receptionist. "I'll tell him at once." She then buzzed through to the boyfriend: "Stewart, Karen just called pretending to be the dentist's secretary. Do you think she needs to see a doctor?"

But Ms. Bryant didn't think Mr. Atta was sick. The safe-breaking, the throat- slitting, the fake specs ... why, he was just being charmingly multicultural! "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she says. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could." Unfortunately, his imaginative business plan for a crop-duster capable of crop-dusting Texas was frustrated by the unduly onerous restrictions and bureaucratic torpor of the USDA program. By late summer, Mr. Atta and his chums had concluded the government was never going to buy them their own twin-props and they'd have to make do with the aircraft that were already up there. So they switched their flight training courses from small planes to large jet simulators, and told their instructors to skip all that takeoff and landing stuff.

Ms. Bryant has come forward now because she thinks "it's very vital that the Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they don't have a big 'T' on their forehead." No, indeed. In some cases, they have a big "T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T" flashing in neon off the end of their nose. Ten days ago, I pointed out that these fellows made virtually no effort to blend in. They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all. Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of it than Leslie Nielsen would have. His one great insight into Western culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out the Pentagon. Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber

"If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta asked me," Ms. Bryant told ABC News, "then perhaps they will recognize a terrorist, and make the call that I didn't make." Meanwhile, here are some signs to look for:

1) He threatens to cut your throat.

2) He talks about the destruction of prominent landmarks.

3) He enquires about security at said landmarks.

4) He hails Osama bin Laden as a great leader.

There'll be more of these stories, tales of men virtually screaming their intentions but up against a culture sensitivity-trained into a coma. A stump- toothed Appalachian mountain man would get slung out on his ear if he was that misogynist and abusive in a government office. In a Hollywood movie, the guy refusing to deal with the little lady and demanding to see the real boss would be a sexist Republican Congressman. In the new motion-picture blockbuster The Sum Of All Fears, the Islamic terrorists of Tom Clancy's novel have been replaced with neo-Nazis -- a safe villain that won't offend our delicate multicultural sensibilities.

The good news is we're up against idiots. The bad news is we're also up against the suppler idiocies of current Western orthodoxy. Thus, the U.S. government's new plans to photograph and fingerprint visitors from countries "believed to harbour terrorists" have already been attacked by Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights honcho who's never met an Arab dictator she didn't like. Islamists want to kill us in the name of Islam. Regrettable, but there it is. If we pretend otherwise, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Society of Britain might be nice to us. But, speaking personally, I can't say I care. If Islamic lobby groups throughout the Western world really want to hitch their star to a bunch of psychopathic morons, good luck to them. It's a free country. Hey, we'll even give you a government grant to tell us how racist we are.

Focus: How liberal Britain let hate flourish - Sunday Times - Times Online

2006-08-14T19:21:00.001-07:00

Here's an oldie but a goodie from February of this year, six months ago. One line sort of leaped out at me:

“Then I discovered how my brothers passed the day. Many were on benefits or living off charity so they could hang about discussing jihad all day. Whenever we were not praying, we were taken to watch TV. There were endless videos of mujaheddin activity around the globe."

This is, as they say, the root of the problem of jihadism in Britain. I'm an American, not a Brit of course, but one has to wonder exactly what kind of benefits this kind of monster (Abu Hamza) draws from the British government and how long it's been going on and how many families he's supporting on it? I think I heard that he's drawing like 4500 pounds every month, plus a housing allowance? For how long? Who knows, but like the jihadi's above, he has nothing to do all day but sit around and talk jihad to the other jihadi's.

Is it any wonder that London earned the sobriquet "Londonistan"?

Telegraph | News | University students at centre of terror plots

2006-08-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

It looks like all western countries need to rethink their wide open admittance policies to their universities. Apparently 5 of the 24 in the airplane mass-murder plot as well as 2 of the 7/7 atrocity were connected to universities. We sponsor these murderers, educate them in the latest technologies while they're educating themselves in the oldest technologies of violent jihad.

Many of the terrorists who have caused so much murder in the past, have graduated with advanced degrees from American and European universities and colleges; educations they could never have even dreamed of in their native countries.

This group is no different; University Students at center of terror plots

A dossier of extremist Islamic literature has been uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph on the campus of a north London university, one of whose students has suspected links to the alleged terrorist attack.

-- Snip --

Extremist Muslim groups had been detected at more than 20 institutions, both former polytechnics and long-established universities, over the past 15 years, Prof Glees said.

Cassette tapes produced by al-Muhajiroun, the disbanded militant organisation that praised the "Magnificent 19" who carried out the September 11 2001 attacks, were also discovered at the university's portable buildings used as a prayer room and library.

Al-Muhajiroun was headed by Omar Bakri Mohammed, the radical London cleric

forced into exile in Lebanon last year. The portable buildings are on land owned by the university, which also part-funds the Islamic Society.

According to security sources, "several" of the 23 people still in custody over the alleged plot last week are suspected of links to universities, appearing to confirm growing fears that campuses are providing Britain's biggest security threat.

Telegraph | News | Terror police target 70 'plots'

2006-08-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

Terror police target 70 'plots'
By John Steele, Toby Helm and David Derbyshire

(Filed: 14/08/2006)

More than 70 anti-terrorist investigations involving over 100 suspected Islamic extremists are under way in Britain in an operation unmatched even at the height of the IRA's mainland campaign.

Wish we weren't here: Air travellers wait in the rain at Heathrow after being prevented from checking in

John Reid, the Home Secretary, confirmed yesterday that police and security services were aware of about 24 "major conspiracies".

They are believed to be "multi-handed" terrorist plots, such as the alleged plan to blow up transatlantic airliners that led to the arrest of 24 people last Thursday.

Sources say that, on top of the inquiries confirmed by Mr Reid, up to 50 more are being conducted by anti-terrorist police, most of them involving Scotland Yard and MI5.

Some relate to fund-raising activity - aimed at Iraq or other foreign hot spots, as well as the UK - and intelligence-gathering, such as details of potential targets.

A significant amount of the activity involves internet communication between groups, often young Muslim men at college or university.

The total number of suspects in Britain has not been disclosed and security sources say it is often fluid.

Individuals sometimes drop in and out of suspect groups and, at times, obvious overlaps emerge between terrorist gangs.

"The numbers are very difficult," a source said. "Some may not be about to launch a bomb attack but may be suspected of background help."

Mr Reid told BBC News 24: "There would be more [plots] which are not at the centre of our considerations and there may be more that we don't know about at all."

He said that four major plots had been thwarted since the July 7 bombings in London last year in which 56 people died.

Mr Reid also disclosed that the al-Qa'eda threat to Britain dated from a planned attack on Birmingham which was thwarted in 2000.

For the fourth day, tightened security caused queues and chaos at airports.

A third of scheduled flights from Heathrow were cancelled and a fifth of flights are expected not to take off from the airport today. Some flights that escaped cancellation left virtually empty.

An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 passengers were prevented from checking in at Heathrow, although their planes were leaving on schedule, because the queues at security were too long. Delays at other airports were less severe.

Wilfully blind to terror's source

2006-08-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

Wilfully blind to terror's source

National Post
Mon 14 Aug 2006
Page: A11
Section: Issues & Ideas
Byline: Lorne Gunter

In light of Thursday's thwarted terror plot to explode Transatlantic airliners, outbound from Britain to the United States, can we all now please stop pretending that the problem isn't the present state of Islamic culture?

For there to be enough Muslims terrorists to feed the manpower needs of the London plots (last week's, and last summer's 7/7 attack on the Underground and buses), the Toronto 17, the Miami 7, the Mumbai train explosions last month, the Afghan insurgency, the Iraq insurgency, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Islamic Jihadi, Madrid, Bali, Mogadishu, Chechnya, LAX, the Danish cartoon riots and so on, there must be literally millions of Muslims vehemently hateful of Western culture and democracy. Not every fanatic is capable of martyrdom, nor do martyrs operate alone ---there must be a vast network to produce and feed them.

To produce the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Muslims fighters and terrorists that exist worldwide, there must be millions more funnelling support and money, hateful preaching, deadly training, poisonous school lessons and so on into the tip who are the actual plotters and bombers.

Yet even as they announced the arrests of 24 middle-class British Muslims late this week, representatives of the British government and Scotland Yard assiduously avoided saying that any of the arrestees were followers of Islam, even though all were. Officials steadfastly referred to them as "British Asians," as if either their British-ness or Asian-ness was the cause of their desire to sneak explosives aboard 10 aircraft filled with civilian travellers and detonate them mid-flight.

They were not prepared to blow themselves up and take 200 or 300 innocent flyers with them because they were fanatical devotees of cricket, nor because they were worshippers of Vishnu, the Hindu god of creation.

Being British and Asian had almost nothing to do with their being suspected conspirators in the largest terror plot since 9/11.

It was the same in June when Canadian security forces arrested 17 Muslims plotting to attack targets in this country using fertilizer bombs and perhaps even kidnap the Prime Minister and saw off his head.

When announcing those arrests, Mike McDonell, an assistant commissioner of the RCMP, insisted -- in what may be the most politically correct whitewash in the history of Canadian policing -- that those in custody represented "the broad strata of our society. Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed."

Yeah, sure. But all of them were Muslims, right?

And it was not their scholastic careers nor their employment status that compelled them to scheme to bring down the Peace Tower and CSIS's offices in Toronto.

For his part, too, Bill Blair, Toronto's police chief, boasted that "there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to 'Muslim' or 'Muslim community.'"

As if it were a good thing; as if it would help end terror for police to be wilfully blind to the source of the threat.

A story on British Muslims in Sunday's New York Times reported that 81% identify themselves as Muslims first and British second, with similar levels among Muslims in other Western nations. Even among Muslims not radical enough to be either bombers or their supporters -- among moderate Muslims -- Muslim-ness was more important than British-ness.

They would not identify themselves are "British Asians," so why should police and government ministers?

More

Yes, the problem is 'Islamic fascism' | Jerusalem Post

2006-08-14T06:46:00.000-07:00

Aug. 13, 2006 22:35
Yes, the problem is 'Islamic fascism'
By WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

It took President George W. Bush to tell the truth to Britain about the massive plot to blow US-bound airliners out of the sky. In his first comment on the apparently foiled attempt to explode airliners flying from Britain to the US, Bush put it simply: "This was a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists."

He is right. But in the early news reports in Britain the words "Islamist" or "Muslim" were hardly emphasized. Let alone "extremist" or the dread word "fascist." Instead the common code words on television were that the 24 men arrested were "British-born" and "of Pakistani origin."

No mention of their Islamist ideology. Did the BBC think they might turn out to be from Pakistan's embattled Christian minority? I don't think so.

In Europe the truth is so terrible that we are in denial. Perhaps it is understandable. We simply do not wish to face the fact that we really are threatened by a vast fifth column - that there are thousands of European-born people, in Britain, in France, in Holland, in Denmark, everywhere - who wish to destroy us. They are part of a wider war, what Tony Blair rightly calls an "arc of extremism" - Islamist extremism.

YOU SEE this denial in the coverage of Israel's war against Hizbullah.

Civilian deaths in Lebanon are utterly tragic. But if you watched only British television, particularly the BBC, you would be hard-pressed to understand that Israel has been forced into a war for its survival, one in which Iran has empowered its proxy, Hizbullah, to undertake the final solution of "the Zionist entity."

The fact that since Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon six years ago Hizbullah has been allowed to hijack the whole area to create a vast attack station whose purpose is only to destroy Israel, is taken for granted and certainly not shown to be a cause for opprobrium.

Protesters in London have been marching through the streets carrying banners proclaiming "We Are All Hizbullah Now."

News of the World - Online Edition

2006-08-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

Personally, I found this article very scary. 30 "Priority" plots under investigation. This is above and beyond the little stuff. Heavens only knows how many are ongoing that the authorities have no idea of.

And in this airline plot, they got lucky and a British muslim came forward and reported it. Without that tip, they'd have no idea that this was happening.

Also, consider that the airplane mass-murder plot alone took 1500 people investigating it. This is a massive undertaking.

What follows are some selected snippets from the article.

BRITAIN is facing a horrifying Summer of War blitz from Muslim terrorists—and police fear last week's foiled airline plot was just the beginning.

The News of the World can reveal that security services are also secretly battling ANOTHER 30 Islamist murder plots.

Some are simple single-cell operations planning relatively small-scale atrocities.

But others are multi-cell groups plotting attacks of incredible complexity to rival or even surpass last week's 9/11-style operation to blast multiple airliners out of the air.

Last night one Whitehall source said: 'It will be impossible to stop them all. There WILL be another 7/7 style spectacular and there WILL be terrible loss of life.

'This is at nightmarish proportions. All we can do is our best and we'll stop most of them. But its impossible to believe we'll get them all.'

-- SNIP --

The sheer scale of what Britain faces has shocked officials made privy to intelligence reports. One Whitehall insider said: "It is dreadful. There are at least 30 PRIORITY cases being investigated as we speak quite apart from the airline plot.

"They range in size from single cells operating alone—perhaps three or four fanatics with their own plan.

"Elsewhere is what they call multi-cells which is whole groups of people, perhaps 20 or 30 strong, who are planning simply massive attacks."

"ALL those 30 are seen as serious, determined attacks by fanatics that will happen unless we stop them."

One Washington official said: "What's plain is the level of threat is absolutely dreadful."

Alton Towers calls off "Muslim Fun Day" - Yahoo! News

2006-08-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

This is a followup to an older story. A couple planned to have their wedding reception at Alton Towers, then the park hit on the (bizarre) concept of "Muslim Fun Day". Suddenly, the bride and all of the females would have to wear chadors and all were to follow muslim laws for the wedding, even though the wedding had nothing at all to do with the muslim "celebration".

But obviously, fun has nothing to do with Islam since they couldn't sign up enough muslims to have any fun as follows.

Alton Towers calls off "Muslim Fun Day"

Wed Aug 2, 12:42 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's biggest theme park has called off the country's first "National Muslim Fun Day" because of lack of interest, the park said on Wednesday.

Alton Towers in Staffordshire was to open on September 17 for Muslims -- with halal food, a strict dress code and prayer areas.

Music, gambling and alcohol were to be banned for the day and theme park rides such as "Ripsaw", "Corkscrew" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" all segregated by sex.

But the park said the event's organisers, Islamic Leisure, who rented the park for the day and were marketing the event, had called it off due to "insufficient ticket sales".

BBC NEWS | Europe | EU to hold talks on UK jet 'plot'

2006-08-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

EU to hold talks on UK jet 'plot'

The European Union will hold a meeting of aviation and security experts next week on the suspected plot to blow up planes that was uncovered in the UK.

Finland, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said the meeting was needed to discuss anti-terrorism measures.

The UK says 23 people are being held over the alleged plot to blow up several planes with liquid explosives.

France on Friday announced a temporary ban on liquids in hand luggage on flights to the US, UK and Israel.

'Mass murder'

Finnish State Secretary Kari Salmi said the meeting would be in Brussels although the exact date has not yet been set.

Mr Salmi said: 'The aim is that experts will go through the situation in aviation security. Are the regulations in place? Are communications, both on EU and national level synchronised?'

A statement from the Finnish presidency said another 'restricted' meeting was being considered of ministers responsible for internal security."

BBC NEWS | Europe | EU to hold talks on UK jet 'plot'

Homegrown terrorists puzzle Britain - Yahoo! News

2006-08-14T05:31:00.000-07:00

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writers Fri Aug 11, 5:33 PM ET

LONDON - One was an athletic teenager who had grown into a devout young man, another a soccer-loving convert to Islam. The youngest was 17, the oldest 35. Many were born in Britain and all were reared here.

As police held 23 young British Muslims accused of plotting devastating airline bombings, both the authorities and their neighbors sought Friday to understand how ordinary communities spawned a terrifying plot.

Police had arrested 24 people but late Friday Scotland Yard said one person was released without charge. It did not identify the person released.

Authorities have not identified suspects, but 19 names were made public Friday by the Treasury after the government froze their bank accounts. They have names of Muslim origin, including many that are common in Pakistan. At least 14 live in London, four in leafy High Wycombe, 30 miles away, and two in the central city of Birmingham.

It is unclear how the men met or who the ringleader is, although suspicion has fallen on the only one identified who is over 30 — Shamin Mohammed Uddin, 35, of east London.

The father of three of the arrested men, Faisal Hussain, collapsed into tears, telling Britain's ITV News that his sons — Nabeel, Umair and Mehran — weren't involved any plot.

"They went to prayer and they were Muslims, that is the only thing they were guilty of," he said through an interpreter in an interview broadcast Friday.

At least nine of the suspects lived in Walthamstow, a typically polyglot London neighborhood of modest brick houses and small apartment blocks, halal butchers, pubs and fast-food restaurants. It is an ethnically mixed community with a smattering of affluent professionals and a large Muslim population served by several mosques.

"Walthamstow's a happy, chilled-out community," said resident Hajra Mir. "We weren't expecting this."

That sense of shock was repeated across the neighborhood. Residents said it is a friendly, quiet area where people respect their neighbors. Several of the suspects had lived there for many years and attended local schools.

But several men from the neighborhood have been linked to the Saviour Sect — an offshoot of a disbanded radical Islamist group, al-Muhajiroun, which was based in nearby Tottenham and gained notoriety for praising the Sept. 11 hijackers.

More

Investigators Tracing Terror Plot Money Trail

2006-08-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

Investigators Tracing Terror Plot Money Trail
Friday, August 11, 2006

LONDON — Investigators on three continents worked to fill in the full, frightening picture Friday of a plot to blow U.S. jetliners out of the Atlantic skies, tracking the money trail and seizing more alleged conspirators in the teeming towns of eastern Pakistan.

One arrested there, a Briton named Rashid Rauf, is believed to have been the operational planner and to have connections with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistani and U.S. officials said.

British and Pakistani authorities have arrested as many as 41 people in the two countries in connection with the alleged suicidal plan, broken up by British police this week, to detonate disguised liquid explosives aboard as many as 10 planes bound from Britain to the United States.

"The terrorists intended a second Sept. 11," said Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser.

New information underlined how close they were to mounting attacks.

After the first arrests in Pakistan some days ago, word went from Pakistan to the London plotters to move ahead quickly, a message intercepted by an intelligence agency, a U.S. official disclosed on condition of anonymity. That prompted British police to move in on the conspirators, long under watch.

British Home Secretary John Reid told reporters officials were confident the main suspects in the plot were in custody. But authorities "would go where any further evidence takes us," he said.

"I think it's pretty clear that in this case, we don't have everybody," Townsend told The Associated Press in Washington.

The British government released the names of 19 of the 24 arrested in Britain — many apparently British Muslims of Pakistani ancestry — and froze their assets. One of the 24 detainees later was freed.

The record of financial transactions, along with telephone and computer records, may help investigators trace more people in the alleged plot.

More

The Blotter

2006-08-14T05:01:00.000-07:00

The Blotter: "British Penetrate Terror Cell

August 10, 2006 9:06 PM

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

"Overt, the British called it, though they cracked it using covert means.

They had an undercover operative deep inside the group of at least 30 terrorists who had developed a simple, effective and potentially devastating plan to close the world's busiest airport, Heathrow, by carrying on small but deadly bombs concealed in sports drink containers and detonated by the flash of a disposable camera, intelligence and law enforcement officials told ABC News.

Even with an undercover operative on the inside, the British may not have known the full scope of the plot until it grew close to fruition, and authorities learned that the terrorists intended to assemble their bombs onboard at least six and as many as nine or 10 passenger jets that would depart from that airport. The goal was to deal out mass death and destruction and a crippling blow to Heathrow, a top al Qaeda target since September 11th.

The airlines targeted included United, Continental and American, and the cities to which flights would have headed included New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Miami -- all spots popular with British tourists as well as with Americans returning from trips abroad, sources said.

The planes were not to be blown up as they arrived at the cities, but in mid flight."

ClickOnDetroit.com - Local News - Officials: Martyrdom Tape Found In Terror Plot

2006-08-14T04:35:00.000-07:00

This mass-murder plot was where it all started. 24 people planning to bring down up to 10 planes. 10 still on the loose. 40 arrested in Italy and 7 in Pakistan. Gatorade sports drink bottles modified to hold a peroxide based liquid bomb that would be set off by a camera flash or mp3 player.

British police allegedly found the tape during raids that netted 24 people. More arrests are expected.

The terrorist attack foiled by British authorities on Thursday was aimed at blowing up as many as 10 airplanes on trans-Atlantic flights, and plotters had hoped to stage a dry run within two days, U.S. intelligence officials said. The actual attack, they said, was expected just days after that.

The officials said the test run was designed to see whether the plotters would be able to smuggle the needed materials aboard the planes. They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject matter.

American law enforcement sources said terrorists planned to use a peroxide-based explosive that would have been detonated by power from a camera, a digital music player or other electronic device.

The plane bombings could have come just ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaida.

The details of the alleged plot surfaced as the administration posted a maximum code-red alert for passenger flights from England to the United States and banned liquids from all carry-on bags.

The security upgrade triggered long lines at airports across the country, and governors in at least two states activated National Guard troops to help provide protection.

"This was a well-advanced plan," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters as British authorities announced the arrests of 24 alleged plotters. "In some respects suggestive of an al-Qaida plot."

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said as many as 10 flights had been targeted.

Other officials said they were United, American and Continental Airlines routes from Britain to the major U.S. summer tourist destinations of New York, California and Washington, D.C. These officials declined to provide details on when the plotters intended to strike.

Virginia's deputy homeland security director, Steven Mondul, said that in a morning conference call, federal officials pointed to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, Los Angeles International and Dulles Airport outside Washington as "major destinations for flights originating from the United Kingdom." No specific warnings were issued for these facilities, he added.

The red alert for flights from Britain was the first since the color-coded warning system was developed in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks. The decision to ban nearly all liquids from passenger cabins was reminiscent of the stringent rules imposed when planes were allowed back in the skies for the first time afterward the Sept. 11 attacks.

Been away, BUT BACK NOW!

2006-08-13T20:47:00.000-07:00

Well folks, I've been away for about 6 months now keeping busy with a new job as an application developer. It was time out well needed and now I'm back and we can all watch Europe fall apart together due to their ill-advised unrestricted immigration from various Islamic countries.

I'll work on catching up on some news from the past few weeks at least over the next week or so. A lot of things are popping, VERY FAST so it's going to take some time to catch up.

Thanks for visiting and come back soon!

Infidel Bloggers Alliance: The Infidel Bloggers Alliance Mohammed Cartoon Contest

2006-02-05T19:25:00.000-08:00

Infidel Bloggers Alliance: The Infidel Bloggers Alliance Mohammed Cartoon Contest

Let's all show our support for our rights of Free Speech and Freedom of the Press. Draw a cartoon of Big Mo and enter it into the Infidel Bloggers Alliance Mohammed Cartoon Contest!

Protests Over Muhammad Cartoon Grow - Yahoo! News

2006-02-04T23:37:00.000-08:00

Protests Over Muhammad Cartoon Grow - Yahoo! News: "Protests Over Muhammad Cartoon Grow

By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer Mon Jan 30, 1:26 PM ET

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The controversy over Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad escalated Monday as gunmen seized an EU office in Gaza and Muslims appealed for a trade boycott of Danish products. Denmark called for its citizens in the Middle East to exercise vigilance.
ADVERTISEMENT

Denmark-based Arla Foods, which has been the target of a widespread boycott in the Middle East, reported that two of its employees in Saudi Arabia were beaten by angry customers. Aid groups, meanwhile, pulled workers out of Gaza, citing the threat of hostilities.

The 12 drawings — published in a Danish paper in September and in a Norwegian paper this month — included an image of the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse. Islamic tradition bars any depiction of the prophet, even respectful ones, out of concern that such images could lead to idolatry.

Danish government officials have expressed regret over the furor but have refused to get involved, citing freedom of expression. The Jyllands-Posten newspaper has refused to apologize for publishing the drawings and has said it did not mean to insult Islam."

More: Protests Over Muhammad Cartoon Grow - Yahoo! News

The Sun Online - News: Hate demo over cartoon

2006-02-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

The Sun Online - News: Hate demo over cartoon:

By PAUL THOMPSON
THEIR eyes are full of hate and their banners call for a new 7/7 terror attack.

This is the way a baying Muslim mob reacted to the row over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons on the streets of London yesterday.

More than 400 protesters — including small children — carried placards scrawled with messages of hate. A baby girl even had “I Love al-Qaeda” on her bonnet.

The parents of pretty Farisa Jihad, 20 months, proudly proclaimed she is the youngest member of the terror group.

She was brought to the protest by her father Abu, 38. Next to her was a huge poster exclaiming: “Whoever insults a prophet, kill him.”

Another placard nearby said: “Britain you will pay — 7/7 is on its way.”

Threat ... demonstrators warn of a 9/11 style response to newspaper cartoon insults

More: The Sun Online - News: Hate demo over cartoon

Opinion: Democracy in a Cartoon - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

2006-02-04T23:16:00.000-08:00

Opinion: Democracy in a Cartoon - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News: "

By Ibn Warraq

Best-selling author and Muslim dissident Ibn Warraq argues that freedom of expression is our western heritage and we must defend it against attacks from totalitarian societies. If the west does not stand in solidarity with the Danish, he argues, then the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest.

Ibn Warraq: 'How can we expect immigrants to integrate into western society when they are at the same time being taught that the west is decadent, a den of iniquity, the source of all evil, racist, imperialist and to be despised?'
Zoom
AP
Ibn Warraq: 'How can we expect immigrants to integrate into western society when they are at the same time being taught that the west is decadent, a den of iniquity, the source of all evil, racist, imperialist and to be despised?'
The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, 'Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.'

The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of people sacrificed their lives?

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth.

Unless, we show some solidarity, unashamed, noisy, public solidarity with the Danish cartoonists, then the forces that are trying to impose on the Free West a totalitarian ideology will have won; the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest. Do not apologize.

More: Opinion: Democracy in a Cartoon - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News: "

How cartoons fanned flames of Muslim rage

2006-02-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

While I HATE the Guardian and regret giving them the hits, here's a pretty good background on the cartoon controversy.

How cartoons fanned flames of Muslim rage

Embassies burning. Riots and demonstrations across the globe. Journalists in hiding. Presidents and preachers joining the furious debate. But just how did a series of second-rate cartoons buried deep inside the pages of a small Danish newspaper produce such an incendiary dispute?

Jason Burke in Paris, Luke Harding in Berlin, Alex Duval Smith in Copenhagen and Peter Beaumont in Ramallah
Sunday February 5, 2006
The Observer

If the consequences are global, the source is almost farcically local. You reach number 3 Grondals Street by taking the number 9 bus to the outskirts of the Danish city of Aarhus and getting off by the red post box half way up the hill. The modest single-story yellow brick building is the head office of Jyllands-Posten, a national newspaper with a circulation of 150,000. It is where Flemming Rose, the arts editor, decided that publishing a page of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad would provoke a debate on multiculturalism and spice up a paper whose daily highlight for many readers is the diamond wedding listing on page 18.

This weekend, the fallout from that editorial whim six months ago has left half the globe reeling. A week of violent rhetoric and action, of statements by scores of heads of states, of commercial boycotts and diplomatic intervention, of strife and anguish and emotion, has exposed deep tensions and fissures at the heart of the modern world, tensions between the Islamic world and the West, between religion and secular society, between journalists and politicians, between different conceptions of the role of faith and a free press in society, tensions that look unlikely to disappear soon.

Jan Lund, the Jyllands-Posten's foreign editor, said there was little discussion when the decision to run the cartoons was taken. 'I don't remember anyone raising any objections. The idea seemed good. The intention was to provoke a debate about the extent to which we self-censor in our coverage of Muslim issues.'.

Rose said the exercise had been inspired by a conversation with Danish comedian Frank Hvam, who said he did not dare make fun of the Koran. Rose added that children's writer Bent Blüdnikow, who had written a book about the Prophet Muhammad, had lamented the fact that all the illustrators he approached wanted to work anonymously.

Rose said that last autumn's Danish theatre season included three productions in which President George W Bush was either criticised or ridiculed, but not one featuring Osama bin Laden.

The result was 12 cartoons published on 30 September on page 3 of the second section of the paper. One showed the prophet with a bomb as a head, another with either horns or half a halo growing out of his head, a third showed a ragged line of suicide bombers arriving in heaven to be greeted by an anxious-looking prophet telling them: 'Stop stop, we ran out of virgins!'.

More: How cartoons fanned flames of Muslim rage

How a Town Became a Terror Hub

2005-11-23T22:10:00.000-08:00

How a Town Became a Terror Hub

Belgian Haven Seen At Heart of Network

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 24, 2005; A01

MAASEIK, Belgium -- The phones at city hall began ringing nonstop one morning last year when several masked figures were spotted walking through the cobbled streets of this pastoral town. A small panic erupted when one of the figures, covered head to ankle in black fabric, appeared at a school and scared children to tears.

It turned out the people were not hooded criminals, but six female residents of Maaseik who were displaying their Muslim piety by wearing burqas , garments that veiled their faces, including their eyes. After calm was restored, a displeased Mayor Jan Creemers summoned the women to his office.

'I said, 'Ladies, you can be dressed all in Armani black for all I care, but please do not cover your faces,' ' Creemers recalled. 'I tried to talk to them about it, but it was impossible. They said, 'We are the only true believers of the Koran.' '

What the city elders did not know at the time was that the women came from households in which several men had embraced radical Islam and joined a terrorist network that was setting up sleeper cells across Europe, according to Belgian federal prosecutors and court documents from Italy, Spain and France.

Over the next nine months, Belgian federal police arrested five men in Maaseik, a town of 24,000 people tucked in the northeast corner of Belgium. Each was charged with membership in a terrorist organization, the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, a fast-growing network known by its French initials, GICM.

With each arrest, investigators uncovered fresh evidence that placed small-town Maaseik at the center of a terrorist network stretching across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The town had served as a haven for suspects in the Madrid train explosions that killed 191...

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Fresh violence hits Paris suburbs

2005-11-03T09:23:00.000-08:00

Fresh violence hits Paris suburbs
Last Updated: Thursday, 3 November 2005, 15:33 GMT

Fresh violence hits Paris suburbs

Riots in Paris
Rioting youths opened fire on police and set dozens of vehicles ablaze in a seventh night of violence in Paris.

In escalating unrest, shots were fired at police and firefighters, while gangs besieged a police station, set fire to a car showroom and threw petrol bombs.

At least 15 people were arrested and nine injured across north-east Paris.

France's government is facing mounting criticism of its handling of the riots, triggered by the deaths last week of two teenagers of African origin.

Bouna Traore, aged 15 and Zyed Benna, 17, were electrocuted at an electricity sub-station. Local people say they were fleeing police during a disturbance, a claim the authorities deny.

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy met with the boys' families on Thursday, as a criminal investigation and an internal police inquiry into their deaths were opened.

Map of riot areas

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Mr Sarkozy cancelled overseas trips to hold a crisis meeting in the face of the growing dissatisfaction with the government's failure to quell the violence.

Both men are likely rivals for the presidency in 2007, and their different approaches to the rioting has split the cabinet.

Mr Sarkozy has caused controversy by labelling the rioters as 'scum' and saying many of the suburbs need 'industrial cleaning', but Mr de Villepin has preached a more conciliatory message, urging ministers not to 'stigmatise' vast areas.

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French government in crisis mode, tries to cope with suburban Paris riots

2005-11-02T21:32:00.000-08:00

French government in crisis mode, tries to cope with suburban Paris riots
17:20:49 EST Nov 2, 2005
JOCELYN GECKER

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France (CP) - France's government went into crisis mode Wednesday to deal with spreading rioting in the suburbs of Paris, with the prime minister postponing a trip to Canada and the president calling for calm.

In tough northeastern suburbs around Clichy-sous-Bois, where the accidental deaths of two teenagers last week first prompted angry youths to rampage, the hulks of burned-out cars littered streets and young men prepared for a seventh consecutive night of fighting with riot police.

Leaders at Clichy-sous-Bois' mosque prayed for peace and asked parents to keep teenagers off the streets.

The violence, which spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, laid bare the despair, anger and deep-rooted criminality in France's poor, unemployment-hit suburbs - some of them ghettos where police hesitate to venture despite proof they are fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.

The unrest, concentrated in neighbourhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European countries face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from Europe's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values.

'They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place,' said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, where a tear gas grenade exploded Sunday, fuelling the anger of local youths who suspected a police attack. Authorities are investigating the incident.

To deal with the unrest, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin postponed a visit to Canada and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy cancelled a Nov. 6-9 trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In Ottawa, Melanie Gruer, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Paul Martin, said Villepin's visit will be rescheduled. The Canadian government is disappointed but understands the postponement, she said.

French President Jacques Chirac, meanwhile, told a weekly cabinet meeting that "the law must be applied firmly" but "in a spirit of dialogue and respect" to prevent "a dangerous situation" from developing. He acknowledged the "profound frustrations" of troubled neighbourhoods but said violence is not the answer.

"Zones without law cannot exist in the republic," he said.

More

CBS News | 13 Arrested In Paris Suburb Riots | November 2, 2005 07:30:05

2005-11-02T21:18:00.000-08:00

13 Arrested In Paris Suburb Riots

PARIS, Nov. 1, 2005
After rioters torched several cars outside of Paris on the evening of Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, police work to extinguish flames. (AP /APTN)

Previous ImageNext Image

Fast Fact

(Interior Minister Nicolas) Sarkozy recently referred to troublemakers in the suburbs as "scum" or "riffraff" and in the past vowed to "clean out" the suburbs.

(AP) Youths torched cars, set garbage bins alight and threw stones at police in a fifth night of rioting in a Paris suburb, and set two primary school classrooms on fire as rioting spread to two other suburban towns, police and an official said Tuesday.

Police said that 19 people were detained in the late Monday and early Tuesday rioting in Clichy-sous-Bois and three other suburbs and 13 of them jailed. A total of 21 cars — two of them police cars — were burned, police said.

The mayor of Sevran said youths set two rooms of a primary school on fire, along with several cars. Police said three officers were slightly injured in Sevran.

"These acts have a direct link to the events in Clichy-sous-Bois," Sevran Mayor Stephane Gatignon said in a statement.

The troubles started Thursday night in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, following the accidental electrocution deaths of two teenagers who hid in a power substation to escape police whom they thought were chasing them. Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys, aged 15 and 17, at all.

Suburbs that ring France's big cities suffer soaring unemployment and are home to immigrant communities, often from Muslim North Africa. Disenchantment, and anger, run high.

Besides Clichy-sous-Bois and Sevran, troubles also erupted in Aulnay-sous-bois and Bondy, police said. All communities are in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, considered a "sensitive" area of immigration and modest incomes. "
After rioters torched several cars outside of Paris on the evening of Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, police work to extinguish flames. (AP /APTN)

(Interior Minister Nicolas) Sarkozy recently referred to troublemakers in the suburbs as 'scum' or 'riffraff' and in the past vowed to 'clean out' the suburbs.

(AP) Youths torched cars, set garbage bins alight and threw stones at police in a fifth night of rioting in a Paris suburb, and set two primary school classrooms on fire as rioting spread to two other suburban towns, police and an official said Tuesday.

Police said that 19 people were detained in the late Monday and early Tuesday rioting in Clichy-sous-Bois and three other suburbs and 13 of them jailed. A total of 21 cars — two of them police cars — were burned, police said.

The mayor of Sevran said youths set two rooms of a primary school on fire, along with several cars. Police said three officers were slightly injured in Sevran.

'These acts have a direct link to the events in Clichy-sous-Bois,' Sevran Mayor Stephane Gatignon said in a statement.

The troubles started Thursday night in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, following the accidental electrocution deaths of two teenagers who hid in a power substation to escape police whom they thought were chasing them. Officials have said police were not pursuing the boys, aged 15 and 17, at all.

Suburbs that ring France's big cities suffer soaring unemployment and are home to immigrant communities, often from Muslim North Africa. Disenchantment, and anger, run high.

Besides Clichy-sous-Bois and Sevran, troubles also erupted in Aulnay-sous-bois and Bondy, police said. All communities are in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, considered a 'sensitive' area of immigration and modest incomes.

Books | No kids please, we're selfish

2005-09-21T05:39:00.000-07:00

No kids please, we're selfish

The population is shrinking, but why should I care, says Lionel Shriver. My life is far too interesting to spoil it with children
Lionel Shriver
Saturday September 17, 2005

Guardian
Meet the Anti-Mom. A story of motherhood gone dreadfully wrong, my seventh novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, has drawn fire from Catholic websites for being hostile to "family", while grotesque distortions of the book's underlying theme ("It's all right to hate your own child, and if they turn out badly it's not your fault") have spored from article to article like potato blight. Devastated mothers send me confiding letters detailing horror stories of offspring just like the wicked boy in my book. Women who'd declined to have children flock to my readings, raising the novel as proof they were right.

Yet even as "Kevin" won the Orange Prize in July, when my role as poster-girl for "maternal ambivalence" jacked up yet another power, something strange was starting to happen. I sometimes departed from script. When a Sunday Times reporter (who clearly thought me a chilly, arrogant creep) asked if I didn't think that declining to reproduce was essentially "nihilistic", I piped readily, "Of course." And when a reporter from Birmingham asked tentatively in a phone interview, "Wasn't refusing parenthood a little ... selfish?" I bellowed into the receiver, "Absolutely!"

The truth is, I had started to feel guilty.

Childless at 48, I'm now old enough for the question of motherhood to have become merely philosophical. Still, I've had all the time in the world to have babies. I am married. I've been in perfect reproductive health. I could have afforded children, financially. I just didn't want them. They are untidy; they would have messed up my flat. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

Nevertheless, after talking myself blue about "maternal ambivalence", I have come full circle, rounding on the advice to do as I say, not as I did. I may not, for my own evil purposes, regret giving motherhood a miss, but I've had it with being the Anti-Mom, and would like to hand the part to someone else.

Allusion to Europe's "ageing population" in the news is now commonplace. We have more and more old people, and a dwindling number of young people to support them. Not only healthcare and pension systems but the working young will soon be overtaxed, just to keep doddering crusties like me alive. Politicians sensibly cite age structure when justifying higher rates of immigration, and not only because Europeans so fancy themselves that they refuse to clean toilets. Even if the job appealed, there are already too few of the native-born of working age to clean all those toilets.

Yet curiously little heed is paid to why the west is "ageing". Our gathering senescence is routinely discussed as an inexorable force of nature, a process beyond our control, like the shifting of tectonic plates or the ravages of a hurricane. To the contrary, age structure is profoundly within human control. Remarkably resistant to governmental manipulation, it is the sum total of millions of single, deeply private decisions by people like me and a surprisingly large number of people I know.

We're not having kids.

Western fertility started to dive in the 70s - the same era when, ironically, the likes of alarmist population guru Paul Ehrlich were predicting that we would all soon be balancing on our one square foot of earth per person, like angels on the head of a pin. Numerous factors have contributed to the Incredible Shrinking Family: the introduction of reliable contraception, the wholesale entry of women into the workforce, delayed parenthood and thus higher infertility, the fact that children no longer till your fields but expect your help in putting a downpayment on a massive mortgage.

Yet all of these contributing elements may be subsidiary to a larger transformation in western culture no less profound than our collective consensus on what life is for.

Statistics are never boring if you can see through the numbers to what they mean, so bear with me. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is the number of children the average woman will bear over her reproductive lifetime. The TFR required to maintain a population at its current size is 2.1. ( It takes two children to replace the mother herself and her partner; the .1 allows for the fact that, in a fraction of births, the baby will not survive.) Higher than the European average, the UK's TFR is 1.7. Yet that's well below replacement-rate, so the seven million extra Britons predicted by 2050 will almost entirely comprise immigrants and their children.

The figures on the continent are even more striking. Italy, Greece and Spain, countries once renowned for their family orientation, all have a meagre TFR of 1.3, as does Germany, where a staggering 39% of educated women are having no children whatsoever. The cumulative TFR for all of Europe is only 1.4, expected to translate into a net loss of 10% of the population by 2050, by which time eastern Europe is likely to experience a population decrease of 22%. By 2000, 17 European countries were recording more deaths than births, and without immigration their populations would already be contracting.

Elsewhere, couples still heed the Biblical admonition to be fruitful and multiply. Niger, currently suffering from famine, has the highest TFR in the world at 8.0. By 2050, Yemen - a little smaller than France - is projected to have increased its 1950 population by 24 times, exceeding the population of Russia. At 3.0 (3.5 without China), the poor nations' TFR is twice that in the wealthy west, and these countries will provide virtually all of the extra three billion people expected to visit our planet by mid-century.

As for what explains the drastic disparity between family size in the west and the rest, sure, we have readier access to contraception. But medical technology is only one piece of the puzzle. During the industrial revolution of the 19th century, fertility rates in the west plunged in a similar fashion. This so-called "demographic transition" is usually attributed to the conversion from a rural agrarian economy to an urban industrialised one, and thus to children's shift from financial asset to burden. But what is fascinating about the abrupt decrease in family size at the turn of the last century is that it was accomplished without the pill. Without caps, IUDs, spermicides, vaginal sponges, oestrogen patches or commercial condoms. Whether through abstinence, backstreet abortion, infanticide or rhythm, people who couldn't afford more children didn't have them. Therefore the increased availability of reliable contraception around 1960 no more than partially explains plummeting birth rates thereafter. The difference between Germany and Niger isn't pharmaceutical; it's cultural.

I propose that we have now experienced a second demographic transition. Rather than economics, the engine driving Europe's "birth dearth" is existential.

To be almost ridiculously sweeping: baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lower-case gods of our private devising. We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don't especially care what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not 'Did I serve family, God and country?' but 'Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?' We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backwards, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from 60s catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upside. There has to be some value to living for today, since at any given time today is all you've got. We justly cherish characters capable of fully inhabiting "the moment", of living, as a drummer might say, "in the pocket". We admire go-getters determined to pack their lives with as much various experience as time and money provide, who never stop learning, engaging, and savouring what every day offers - in contrast to dour killjoys who are resentful and begrudging as they bitterly do their duty. For the role of humble server, helpmate and facilitator no longer to constitute the sole model of womanhood surely represents progress for which I am personally grateful. Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.

Yet the biggest social casualty of Be Here Now is children, who have converted from obligation to option, like heated seats in the car. In deciding what in times past was never a choice, we don't consider the importance of raising another generation of our own people, however we might choose to define them. The question is whether kids will make us happy.

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FOXNews.com - U.K.: Al Qaeda Plot Foiled

2005-08-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

U.K.: Al Qaeda Plot Foiled

Sunday, August 21, 2005

LONDON — Scotland Yard believes it has thwarted an Al Qaeda gas attack aimed at ministers and members of parliament. The plot, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded e-mails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan.

Police and MI5 then identified an Al Qaeda cell that had carried out extensive research and video-recorded reconnaissance missions in preparation for the attack.

The encrypted e-mails are said to have been decoded with the help of an Al Qaeda “supergrass.” By revealing the terrorists’ code he was also able to help MI5 and GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre at Cheltenham (search), to crack several more plots.

The discovery of the suspected Commons nerve gas plot was behind the decision to increase security around parliament this summer.

A senior officer said the scheme had led to the intervention of Eliza Manningham-Buller (search), head of MI5, to assess parliament’s security.

The operation to deter the sarin gas attack is referred to in an internal police document obtained by The Sunday Times.

It is a minute of a meeting of senior police officers held last month at Specialist Operations 17 (SO17), the unit responsible for protecting parliament, and reveals that the team were waiting to be briefed on the plot.

This weekend a senior officer disclosed that the thwarted plot mentioned in the document involved a gas or chemical “dirty bomb” attack against parliament. “The House of Commons was one of their targets as well as the Tube,” he said.

“They were planning to use chemicals, a dirty bomb and sarin gas. They looked at all sorts of ways of delivering it.”

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VirtueOnline-News - As Eye See It - THE ISLAMIZATION OF EUROPE - by Patrick Sookhdeo

2005-08-17T15:27:00.000-07:00

VirtueOnline-News - As Eye See It - THE ISLAMIZATION OF EUROPE - by Patrick Sookhdeo

by Patrick Sookhdeo

11 August 2005

On Friday 20th May 2005 a crowd of some 300 Muslims burned a wooden cross outside the American embassy in London. This was part of a protest against the rumoured desecration of a Qur'an by American soldiers in Guantanamo Bay, during which British and American flags were also burned. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this event was that it was not deemed to be newsworthy, receiving little attention in the national press.

The whole scenario is reminiscent of what happens in so many Muslim-majority countries: a rumour of an insult to Islam, a violent and blasphemous anti-Christian reaction, police watching idly, and a complete lack of public interest let alone outrage. It could have been Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia or Northern Nigeria. But it was the UK.

Europe is undergoing a rapid process of change as Muslims make their presence felt in politics, economics, law, education and the media. While there is a wide range of attitudes amongst Muslims in Europe, with many who are broadly content with the status quo and just want to live their lives peacefully, others are striving deliberately to drive forward the changes.

As a result of the efforts of the latter, Europe is gradually being transformed into a society in which Islam takes its place, not just as an equal alongside the many other faith communities, but often as the dominant player. This is not purely, or even primarily, a matter of numbers, but is more a matter of control of the structures of society. It is not happening by chance but is the result of a careful and deliberate strategy by certain Muslim leaders.

Though the effects are only now becoming noticeable, the planning was done decades ago. In 1980 the Islamic Council of Europe published a book called Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States which clearly explained the Islamic agenda in Europe. When Muslims live as a minority they face theological problems, because classical Islamic teaching always presupposed a context of Islamic dominance; hence the need for guidance on how to live in non-Muslim states. The instructions given in the book told Muslims to get together and organise themselves with the aim of establishing a viable Muslim community based on Islamic principles. This is the duty of every individual Muslim living within a non-Muslim political entity. They should set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. At all costs they must avoid being assimilated by the majority. In order to resist assimilation, they must group themselves geographically, forming areas of high Muslim concentration within the population as a whole. Yet they must also interact with non-Muslims so as to share the message of Islam with them. Every Muslim individual is required to participate in the plan; it is not allowed for anyone simply to live as a "good Muslim" without assisting the overall strategy. The ultimate goal of this strategy is that the Muslims should become a majority and the entire nation be governed according to Islam. (M. Ali Kettani "The Problems of Muslim Minorities and their Solutions" in Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States (London: Islamic Council of Europe, 1980) pp.96-105) Not all Muslims would support this action plan. The more secularized are happy to become integrated within the majority society. Even amongst those who agree on the ultimate goal of creating an Islamic state, there are differences about methodology i.e. whether this should be a slow and peaceful transition, or whether it should be hastened by means of political dominance or even - say some - by violence.

Despite the variety of opinion amongst Muslims, it is not hard to recognize the different stages of the Islamic Council of Europe's strategy being put into practice within today's Europe. Muslims do tend to live in tightly concentrated areas, and show little sign of integrating into wider society. Saudi funding is paying for the erection of large and beautiful mosques, staffed by imams brought over to Europe from the "home countries". Sweden's third largest city, Malmø, is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslims, and some of the Muslim residents of the city still cannot read or write Swedish though they have lived there for 20 years. Denmark has recently seen the Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus become the first school in the country to have 100% Muslim pupils. Britain's Muslim population (variously estimated at between 1.6 and 3 million) is concentrated in three areas: north-west England, the midlands and London. In some of these areas Muslims are now targeting the remaining Christian presence, arsoning churches, physically attacking church leaders and their property; the aim seems to be to "cleanse" these areas of non-Muslims.

European Muslims are Islamizing many aspects of life that also affect non-Muslims. Spanish Muslims have expressed their desire to "regain" the mosque of Cordoba. This building was originally a church, then turned into a mosque, and then turned back into a place of Christian worship. Halal meat is now routinely served in many British prisons, schools and hospitals, sometimes to Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and the hijab [Islamic headscarf] is worn in British schools. Muslims in the London borough of Tower Hamlets have forced name-changes for districts and local amenities if the existing name sounds too Christian for their liking.

In the UK, where Islam is making its most rapid advance, Islamic law (shari'a) is already practised unofficially, with shari'a councils and shari'a courts giving judgments on Muslim family matters. In education numerous concessions are being made to British Muslims, Islam often being given more prominence and respect than other faiths at state schools. An increasing number of university posts are being funded from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries on condition that a certain line of thinking is promoted.

The ultimate goal of taking control of society, as depicted by the Islamic Council of Europe in 1980, is clearly in the minds of at least some Muslim leaders. A Dutch Imam has stated that Islamic law is superior to other forms of legislation so there is no need to obey other laws. Some Finnish imams preach on the Islamic duty to kill a Muslim who converts to another faith, adding that it is difficult to carry this out in Finland at present because Muslims do not yet "own the state". Furthermore, the freedoms of European society are being exploited by Islamic militants and their supporters to plan terrorist activities around the world. London - or "Londonistan" as it is becoming known - is one of the most important bases for Islamic terrorism worldwide. This has been illustrated by the July bombings in London itself.

SPIEGEL's Daily Take: Schroder Plays Iran Card in German Election

2005-08-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Bash the US all you want Herr Schroder, but on the morning of the day after the election, the German economy is still going to SUCK! As the US economy continues to grow at 3.6% and the German economy continues to grow at .01%, US influence grows and German influence whithers.

We all want to be "peace-loving" people Gerhard, but until you can say the same about the Mullahs in Iran, you're spitting into the wind. Europe is just as far from the Iranian's missiles as Israel is and stands at least as great a chance of being the target. Israel may be filled with Jews who they hate rabidly, but Europe is filled with infidels who they hate only a little less rabidly.

We've already seen that the Iranians were simply using the negotiations with the EU3, including Germany as a way to buy time to build their uranium processing plants. If Europe is going back to the bargaining table after being laughed at by the Iranians it can only mean one thing. EUROPE DOES'NT HAVE THE ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING BUT NEGOTIATE.

Offering a non-agression pact with these madmen was madness in itself. It showed the Iranians just how weak Europe's position is. Europe has allowed their military forces to deterioriate to such an extent that they CAN'T do anything but talk. They can of course refer it to the UN Security Council, but the Iranians would just laugh at that. They've seen that coming and have stockpiled what they need to keep their nuclear program on track. Besides of course, Russia and China would veto any moves against their customer and oil supplier.

Now, the US needs to pull all its military forces from Europe and withdraw from NATO. I for one am tired of protecting EUnuchs. We spend a fortune, we prop up their economies with billions earned from our bases, we protect them and all we get for the trouble is kicked in the teeth every election cycle.

Get us out of all of these foreign entanglements, Mr. President!

SPIEGEL's Daily Take: Schroder Plays Iran Card in German Election

AP
August 15, 2005

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has publicly warned the US against military action in Iran. Opposition leaders have accused Schröder of exploiting a sensitive international issue to curry votes with peace-loving Germans. Echoes of 2002?

The chancellor likes to criticize US foreign policy. First it was Iraq -- Now it's Iran.
In an election hitherto dominated by rows over economic policy, German foreign policy has suddenly taken center-stage. Prior to the last German election, Gerhard Schröder went on the offensive against US military intervention in Iraq, and now -- like the leopard who cannot change his spots -- Schröder has pulled the same trick again, warning the US against an invasion of Iran.

At a meeting of Social-Democrat supporters in Hannover on August 13, Schröder proclaimed -- to peals of applause -- "Let's leave the military option aside; we have already seen that it doesn't amount to anything." In an interview with the tabloid Bild am Sonntag, the chancellor then repeated his warnings. "I consider the military option to be extremely dangerous. So I can definitely rule that a government under my leadership would not take part."

This last remark, directly linking his re-election to commitment against military action in Iran, particularly riled opposition parties, who have since resoundingly attacked Schröder for shameless and irresponsible electioneering.

Wolfgang Schäuble, the foreign-policy chief of conservative opposition party CDU, told Die Welt today that, "Schröder is acting completely irresponsibly for electoral purposes. He's acting as thought the problem were in Washington, rather than in Tehran even though he knows that isn't the case." "The chancellor is creating the fatal impression in Tehran that the international community is not resolute," he added.

The liberal foreign-policy expert Werner Hoyer of the Free Democratic Party echoed Schäuble's remarks in a interview with der Tagesspiegel. "The subject is too serious for it to be introduced into the German election campaign, in any form." Hoyer then pointedly referred to the last election campaign: "We have already experienced the situation, when frivolous comments -- that time from Vice President Dick Cheney -- can affect the outcome of a German election," he said.

Hoyzer was referring to a speech which US Vice President Dick Cheney made on August 26, 2002 to a meeting of the "Veterans of Foreign Wars". In it, he affirmed US preparedness for unilateral intervention in Iraq. Schröder immediately called a press conference to brand such a policy a "mistake", which led to a rapid upswing in Schröder's election fortunes. The chancellor's opposition to military intervention in Iraq was largely credited for securing his "miracle" re-election, after his Social Democrat Party looked doomed to defeat.

This time round, the chancellor seized on comments US President George W. Bush made to Israeli TV from his ranch at Crawford, Texas on August 12. When asked about the possible use of force against Iran -- which last week restarted its nuclear enrichment program -- the President answered, "All options are on the table." "The use of force is the last option for any president. You know we have used force in the recent past to secure our country," he warned ominously.

What Schröder Is Saying about Iran

The following quotations have been excerpted from an interview with German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder which is to be published in Thursday's issue of Super Illu, a general interest magazine targeted at readers in eastern Germany. The fact that Schröder chose an eastern German publication for his comments is a strategic move that comes like a hard punch in the gut for a handful of reasons. First, it plays to eastern German pacifism which could translate into votes for Schröder's Social Democrats. Second, it shows Schröder taking a firm stance on foreign policy at a time when his Christian Democratic opponents have made no firm stance on the issue. And finally, it shows Schröder illustrating firm leadership in the east at a time when his Christian Democratic detractors are stumbling and alienating potential voters in that part of Germany.

SUPER ILLU: Regarding foreign policy. There are concerns that the nuclear dispute with Tehran could escalate, that Iran could become the next Iraq. Should we be concerned?

SCHRÖDER: The situation is serious. I consider a military option to be extremely dangerous. For that reason I can, with certainty, rule out that a German government under my leadership would participate. I continue to believe that we can arrive at our goals in negotiations with persistence and patience.

SUPER ILLU: Will the USA play along?

SPIEGEL: My impression is that people in the USA must also realize that you may be able to win a war alone, but you cannot ensure peace afterwards alone. This is evident in Afghanistan, but even more so in Iraq.
Schröder is no doubt hoping to drive opposition parties into a tight spot by forcing them to declare their political standpoint on military action in Iran. In 2002, he accused conservatives of playing poodle to Washington, and this proved a hit with the electorate. Now, conservatives have responded by accusing the chancellor of endangering an already fragile trans-Atlantic relationship.

It is at yet unclear whether voters will be persuaded by Schröder's anti-American hyperbole, for the chancellor must do more than just overturn a far greater conservative political lead in the polls this time. The public is also far less concerned by the possibility of a military invasion of Iran in the first place.

Social Democrat Party Leader Franz Münterfering went on the radio Monday to defend his colleague and to reject claims of Machiavellian political opportunism. "The chancellor didn't direct the statements at anyone, rather he has generally made it clear that we want to be a peace-loving power," he said.

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London Bomb Suspects Stood Out as Radicals - Los Angeles Times

2005-08-16T06:19:00.000-07:00

One has to wonder if the Western Liberal tradition and Captialism doesn't work too well in some ways.

The first set of London bombers were 3 out of 4 from if not wealthy, then at least middle class families.

The second set were just the opposite. Largely criminals and grifters, several of them had 5-6 different identities, with which they were able to bilk the British social services system for large amounts of money. They received welfare checks, rent subsidies, child support subsidies, free medical care in the NHS and heavens only knows what else.

These people were PAID to kill native British citizens. They received gobs of government largesse and what did they have to do for a living? Absolutely nothing, above and beyond plan how they were going to murder innocent civilians, having no gainful employment.

They had plenty of cash available to purchase and peddle Islamic hate literature. Having no steady jobs, they were able to spend plenty of time at the Finsbury Park mosque where so many other Islamist murderers received instruction, including Richard Reid the shoe bomber and Zacharias Moussaui, the 20th hijacker. British authorities knew what was going on in that mosque. One can only see so many banners hung out at fundamentalist gatherings with such wonderful sentiments as "Sharia is the future of Britain", and not have SOME idea of what was transpiring inside.

Abu Hamza al-Masri, the one time leader of the Finsbury Park mosque is cooling his heels in a British jail on 14 anti-terrorism charges for soliciting murder etc. However, his Sharia law group and its website at www.shareea.org are still in operation, so in effect even though he's been arrested, he hasn't been silenced and continues to spew his hate worldwide. While he's still in prison, his wife is drawing British welfare checks and get this: he even has a special nurse, at British taxpayer expense, to wipe his butt, since he has two hooks for hands which he lost in Afghanistan fighting the Russians.

What's wrong with this picture?

So lets get this straight:

The 5 people who attempted the second group of murders in London, shouldn't have been in the country. They got in by lying about being Somali immigrants which get special immigration treatment in Britain (for what God forsaken reason is beyond me).

At least one of them improperly received British citizenship, even though he had a record for crimes committed in Britain.

They had 5-6 different id's which they used to bilk the British social services system.

They received welfare checks.

They received rent subsidies.

They made absolutely zero attempts to hide their islamist feelings.

And yet they got away with it.

Yes, the Western Liberal system is broken.

London Bomb Suspects Stood Out as Radicals

By Jeffrey Fleishman and Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writers

LONDON — They first became known to the world as blurry images from subway cameras. But the men accused of attempting to bomb London's transit system July 21 had clearly defined their militancy in the months leading up to the failed attacks.

The suspects had sharpened their radicalism in the streets, mosques and housing projects of rough ethnic neighborhoods, investigators, witnesses and friends say. They were brazen voices in an unsuspecting city, marginalized East Africans who lived by their wits, dabbling in street crime and reportedly manipulating the immigration and welfare systems. During workouts at a West London gym, they channeled their private rage into public diatribes.

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Brothers Ramzi and Wharbi Mohammed sold Islamic literature and recited religious verses on a gritty North Kensington street of antiques stores and cafes, skirmishing with a shop owner who chased them away. Hamdi Issac, now jailed in Rome, belonged to a gang of extremists who waged a belligerent campaign to take over a mosque in South London. Roommates Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar were loud militants, praising Osama bin Laden to neighbors at the rundown building where Ibrahim is accused of preparing five backpack bombs.

Their agitation allegedly gave way to action after July 7, when four young British Muslims, three from the northern city of Leeds, ignited bombs on three subway cars and a bus, killing themselves and 52 others. Issac claims that his group struck two weeks later in an improvised, independent tribute to the dead bombers. Despite similar methods and targets, British authorities say they have found no link between the two plots.

In any case, those who had run-ins with the July 21 suspects remember aggressive rhetoric rooted in anger against Britain's support of U.S. policy in Iraq. During interrogations in Italy, Issac has returned obsessively to the war in Iraq, a senior Italian anti-terrorism official said.

"He's calm — he seems scared," said the Italian official, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. "He's open, gentle, polite; he doesn't get mad even when you provoke him. But when you ask him why he did it, he starts with the speech about Iraq: They are killing women and children, no one's doing anything about it, on and on. That's when you can see there has been a brainwashing."

The men's outspokenness reflects the unpredictability of potential jihadis. The 19 hijackers involved in Sept. 11, for example, masked their deadly intentions by trying to blend into Western society. Militants in Europe in other cases have been less discreet: Before setting off to fight and die with militants in Iraq last year, a group of young Parisian jihadis first caught the attention of police with aggressive behavior at street protests against banning Islamic head scarves in schools.

The suspects in the attempted London bombings were also preoccupied with other things: They dedicated themselves to ripping off the state, authorities say. They resided in public housing, collected unemployment and welfare benefits and used multiple identities to bilk the government for large sums, investigators say.

"These were people who came as refugees, were made welcome and treated properly," said a British official who asked to remain anonymous. "And they decided to abuse the social security system to a huge degree."

Months before the failed attacks, the Mohammed brothers strolled amid the shopkeepers and cafe owners on Golborne Road in North Kensington, a stretch of dusty awnings, shops and Moroccan grills where incense whirls with scents of mint tea and fish on ice. Golborne is a testament to the neighborhood's shifting ethnic dynamic: The Portuguese who first migrated here have given way to Moroccans and East Africans and, according to residents, rising crime.

Ramzi and Wharbi set up a tarp-covered stall on the corner of Golborne and Wornington roads, half a block from the clattering cups at Lisboa Patisserie, where the men often relaxed over coffee.

"They were handing out Islamic literature, and I had a kind of altercation with them," said a neighborhood antiques dealer, who feared retribution and gave his name only as Jerome. "There were four or five of them. They spoke in Arabic and English. I thought they were being unbearable and intense and I asked them to leave. They had had the stall for months and didn't have a license."

The brothers moved down the street and eventually disappeared. Ramzi, 23, lived about two miles away in Dalgarno Gardens, a maze of brick buildings that shadow drug dealers and working-class families.

"Ramzi was a cool guy," said Jamal Kamiri, sitting the other day on a bench behind Ramzi's apartment. "When I was younger, he used to play football with us. He used to carry a 9-millimeter pistol, but guns are common here and he wasn't a troublemaker. He carried it for protection.

"Ramzi disappeared for about nine weeks in 2003. I don't know where he went. When he came back, he was more religious. He started carrying the Koran and dressed in more traditional clothing like those long Pakistani shirts."

The Mohammed brothers are now in jail. Wharbi is charged as an accomplice.

On July 21, the short, sturdily built Ramzi was photographed wearing a New York sweatshirt while sprinting away from the scene of the attempted bombing at the Oval subway station in South London, police say.

Issac, the suspect being held in Rome, lived in a ground-floor two-bedroom apartment near that station.

Neighbors remember Issac, 27, as a muscular man with a long beard who wore Islamic robes even while riding his mountain bike in the predominantly black Stockwell area. He regularly made the long trek to the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London, a notorious crossroads for multiethnic terrorist networks, according to Issac's confession in Rome.

When London police cracked down on the mosque in 2003, Issac set his sights on his own neighborhood. He joined a group of about 20 militants who had left Finsbury Park and tried to take over a mosque in Stockwell, said Toaha Qureshi, a mosque trustee.

Telegraph - By breaking the seals at Isfahan, the Iranian president has deliberately set up a showdown with the West

2005-08-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

Telegraph | News | By breaking the seals at Isfahan, the Iranian president has deliberately set up a showdown with t

By Con Coughlin
(Filed: 14/08/2005)

They smuggle arms to kill our troops, they encourage Shi'ite Muslim clerics in Iraq to set up their own independent state, and now they want to build an atom bomb.

More than 25 years after the ayatollahs first seized power in Teheran, the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to pose a grave threat to Western security.

Just as the West's impotence was exposed when Iran's Revolutionary Guards seized control of the American Embassy in Teheran in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, so Western diplomats have been deeply embarrassed to discover that they are rapidly running out of options to prevent Iran from pushing ahead with its plans to build its own nuclear weapons arsenal.

Certainly that is the calculation being made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Iranian president, after he authorised his nuclear scientists last week to unseal a key uranium conversion plant at Isfahan that had been mothballed by United Nations weapons inspectors at the end of last year over fears that it was being used as part of a bomb-making programme.

Uranium conversion is a key process in producing weapons-grade material for a nuclear bomb. By ordering work to resume at Isfahan, Mr Ahmadinejad has deliberately set the scene for a showdown with the West over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The Iranians, of course, have always insisted that their "national nuclear industry", as they refer to it, is for purely peaceful purposes. This is despite the fact that, with known oil reserves in excess of 90 billion barrels, the country has more than enough energy reserves to last it until well into the next century.

Suspicions have been steadily growing about Iran's true intentions since the summer of 2002 when the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) revealed the existence of a top-secret underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Teheran is obliged to disclose all aspects of its nuclear programme to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.

Even though the Natanz complex covers 250,000 acres and employs 1,000 personnel, the Iranians somehow managed not to inform the IAEA about it. Only when the NCRI provided evidence did the Iranians own up to its existence.

When UN nuclear experts were eventually allowed to inspect the site, they were amazed to find a massive underground complex, including two large halls designed to carry out uranium enrichment sunk 25ft deep with an 8ft thick concrete shell to protect them from air strikes. Once inside the complex, officials found 1,000 gas centrifuges, used for enriching uranium, and components for the manufacture of up to another 50,000 centrifuges.

None of this had been disclosed to the UN inspectors. But the most damning discoveries were the traces of enriched uranium found in soil samples taken from the site. Enriched uranium is a key component of a nuclear bomb, and when questioned on its provenance Iranian officials came up with the somewhat lame excuse that the particles has been "inadvertently" imported into the country in equipment purchased from abroad.

That country is most likely to have been Pakistan, which managed to develop and test its own nuclear weapons arsenal without the outside world knowing about it until it was too late.

British intelligence suspects that A Q Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, sold key nuclear technology to Iran to fund his own research programme.

In return, the Iranians sold technology from their Shahab 3 ballistic missile to Islamabad, which might explain Pakistan's successful launch of its own cruise missile - the Hatf VII Batr - at the end of last week.

Nor was the Natanz complex the Iranians' only embarrassing omission. Questions were also asked about the development of a secret heavy water plant at Arak. If the sole purpose of Iran's nuclear research were to develop an alternative fuel supply, it would have no use for a facility to make heavy water, another key component in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Iran's controversial Busheyr nuclear power complex, which is nearing completion on the Gulf coast, is designed to run a light water nuclear reactor.

Faced with what, by any test, was pretty damning proof of Iran's duplicity with regard to its nuclear programme, the so-called EU3 - Britain, France and Germany - have spent the past two years in a wearisome game of diplomatic cat-and-mouse, trying to cajole Teheran into giving up the more sinister elements in its nuclear programme.

In return they have indicated that they would allow the Iranians to continue developing an indigenous nuclear power industry.

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Britain keeps distance from talk of strike on Iran - Sunday Times - Times Online

2005-08-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

I have to wonder exactly where the EU3 negotiators learned the art of negotiation. What kind of negotiators leave the sticks at home and only bring carrots along?

Well, it's hardly surprising I suppose. With the trashing of the European militaries in order to feed their socialist states, they have very little sticks. In fact, their main stick seems to be, to sic the US on the bad guys if negotiations break down.

Both Britain and Germany have resolutely stated that they will have nothing to do with any attack on Iran and have subsequently sent new offers to the Iranian nuclear team to renew discussions. After offering Iran a non-agression pact, Europe has left itself few options outside of bigger and bigger bribes and appeasements.

Of course if the EU were to raise their hands to the Iranians, the billions of Euros worth of business they do with Iran on a yearly basis would probably dry up immediately. At the moment, the Eurozone economies would take a serious hit and probably end up in recession should these "business" dealings disappear.

Rolling out the red carpet for Mugabe, Khomeni, Arafat and now the Mad Mullahs of Iran, the EU seem to have found their soulmates and are not only are militarily unable to mount an attack on Iran, they're philosophically unable to as well.

I really don't understand why the US is still a member of NATO. If they didn't have the US military to use as a crutch, Europe might have to develop their own military. The US pulling out of NATO and pulling its troops from Western Europe where they've been posted for almost 60 years would leave Europe all but defenseless and put them in a position of sink or swim.

Britain keeps distance from talk of strike on Iran - Sunday Times - Times Online

August 14, 2005

Andrew Porter and Tom Walker

THE foreign secretary Jack Straw sought to distance Britain yesterday from comments by President George W Bush that he would not rule out a military strike against Iran.

It came as diplomats gave warning that British attempts to solve the crisis prompted by Tehran’s resumption of its nuclear programme last week were doomed to failure.

Bush raised the temperature by giving an interview to Israeli television from his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Asked if he would consider force, he replied: “All options are on the table.” He added: “The use of force is the last option for any president and you know we’ve used force in the recent past to secure our country.”

The Foreign Office reacted swiftly. “Our position is clear and has been made very, very clear by the foreign secretary,” a spokesman said. “We do not think there are any circumstances where military action would be justified against Iran. It does not form part of British foreign policy.”

So soon after the invasion of Iraq, which has led to so much political turmoil for Tony Blair’s administration, Straw is anxious not to be seen trying to talk up any future forays. But some rightwingers in Washington have criticised Straw’s position, saying that every time the foreign secretary rules out any remote chance of military action the Iranians know there is no need to compromise.

Bush’s veiled remarks came as Foreign Office negotiators launched a new round of shuttle diplomacy to try to persuade Tehran to reverse last week’s decision to resume its enriching of uranium — seen by Washington and the European Union as a smokescreen for a secret nuclear weapons programme.

A spokesman said Britain’s negotiators had “worked their socks off” to convince a meeting in Vienna of the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to call on Iran to freeze activity at its Isfahan and Natanz plants.

Britain has made it clear that if Iran has not backed down by September 3, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s secretary-general, is to report on the country’s nuclear programme, it will push for Tehran to be taken to the United Nations security council. Officials in Vienna warned, however, that any attempt to impose sanctions on Iran would be likely to be vetoed by Russia and China.

“Iran has all the cards,” said one official close to the talks. “It’s going to be embarrassing for the Brits.”

Russia has a civilian nuclear contract with Iran worth £500m while China is increasingly reliant on Iranian oil and gas. Last October Sinopec, the Chinese state oil company, signed a £39 billion deal giving it a 51% stake in Yadavaran, Iran’s largest onshore oilfield.

KCTV5 - Iran calls for talks with E-U, says it will never stop uranium conversion

2005-08-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

Not content with rubbing the EU's nose in the fact that the past 2 years of steady negotiating has been nothing but a sham, Iran has offered to enter negotiations anew, but dealing with unspecified goals, merely "another facility."

Your loyal editor suspects that the Iranians have need of another 5 years of negotiating sessions in order to actually construct their nuclear weapons, and since the US and Israel would undoubtedly balk, boors that they are, Tehran's nuclear officials are certain that the EUnuch negotiators will keep these inconvenient infidels off their back while they undergo their full weapons development program.

At the same time, the Iranian team has great expectations that the EU will once again offer their non-aggression pact, will assist Iran in its WTO bid and if the cards fall right, will even offer Iran a UN Security Council seat, though the last is improbable.

One has to wonder how long it will be before Europe understands that Iran is not suseptible to their chief negotiating tactics: bribery and appeasment. Their mission isn't to enrich themselves with things they can already buy. Their mission is to kill Jews, the Great Satan and every infidel on the planet.

Nuclear weapons to Tehran are nothing more than terrorism by other means. They have set up 4,000 centrifuges and have the materials necessary to set up 50,000 more. Their main heavy water plant (only usable in nuclear weapons) covers 250,000 acres of ground. They're taking this VERY seriously. They don't intend to make a bomb then forget about it. They fully intend to mass-produce these weapons and spread the knowledge far and wide thoughout the Muslim world.

A Chinese curse states: May you live in interesting times. We certainly are.

KCTV5 - Iran calls for talks with E-U, says it will never stop uranium conversion

TEHRAN, Iran A top Iranian nuclear official says his country will never again suspend uranium conversion. But he's still calling for more talks with Europe on uranium enrichment.

Conversion is a step before enrichment. Enriched uranium can be used as fuel at nuclear power plants and also as material for atomic bombs.

Last week, Iran rejected a United Nations resolution that urged it to stop the conversion. The foreign ministry spokesman says that issue "is over," but another facility is up for discussion.

Telegraph | News | Iran 'kept EU talking' while it finished nuclear plant

2005-08-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

I find it more than a little frightening that a group of nations with any number of nuclear weapons at their disposal could be so gullible as the EU/EU3 has recently proven to be with their negotiating position re Iran.

With fantastical delusions to superpowerhood, they allowed themselves to be batantly hoodwinked by the Mad Mullahs in Tehran as the following article shows.

How the EU3, led by Jack Straw could possibly not know that they were being duped by a regime who violated the sanctity of an Embassy and completely ignore Ambassadorial rank; could send their children into minefields to clear it for their soldiers and holds nothing sacred, would suddenly have a change of heart and hold a negotiating position and a resulting treaty sacrosanct, is frankly, beyond me.

I knew it was a con. The US govt knew it was a con. Most people I know politically knew that it was a con. How could the EUnuchs not know? One word: Multiculturalism. Everybody's equal. No people or cultures are better than any other people or culture. All people in all times are equally trustworthy. As long as the EU negotiated in good faith and appeased to its utmost, then anybody they were sitting across the table from would do the same.

What I find truly astounding, is that this isn't exactly the first time this has happened. I remember when Lord Owen was negotiating with the "Bosnian Serbs" every week they came out with a new agreement which was broken, literally, before the ink was dry. 12 agreements and not one of them was worth a damn.

And it's no different than pre-war Germany in the British negotiating position with Hitler. "Peace in our time."

This is going to get a LOT of people killed one way or the other. We're either going to have to disarm Iran like we did Iraq, or we're going to have to hide in holes in the ground when they start launching nuclear missiles at the demon Jews or the Great Satan. But not the EUnuchs. They'll sit safely on the sidelines, wringing their hands and continuing to count the profits that they're making from these madmen ruling from Tehran while other people shed their blood to make up for the dispicable arrogance and willful blindness of European "soft power."

Hey, EU diplomats, repeat after me: We're only infidels. We're only infidels. We're only infidels!

As Winston Churchill declared to Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich with Hitler's worthless treaty: "You had the choice between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor, but you will have war." There will be war over Iran and its nukes, no question.

Telegraph Iran 'kept EU talking' while it finished nuclear plant

By Colin Freeman

(Filed: 14/08/2005)

An Iranian foreign policy official has boasted that the regime bought extra time over its stalled negotiations with Europe to complete a uranium conversion plant.

In comments that will infuriate EU diplomats, Hosein Musavian said that Teheran took advantage of the nine months of talks, which collapsed last week, to finish work at its Isfahan enrichment facility.

Technicians working at the Isfahan uranium conversion facility
"Thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year in which we completed the [project] in Isfahan," he told an Iranian television interviewer.

Mr Musavian also claimed that work on nuclear centrifuges at a plant at Natanz, which was kept secret until Iran's exiled opposition revealed its existence in 2002, progressed during the negotiations.

"We needed six to 12 months to complete the work on the centrifuges," said Mr Musavian, chairman of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council's foreign policy committee. He made his remarks on August 4 - two days before Iran's foreign ministry rejected the European Union offer of incentives to abandon its uranium enrichment programme.

Critics of the regime will see his comments as confirmation that Iran never contemplated giving up its programme, despite top-level diplomacy involving Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and his French and German counterparts.

The US was always pessimistic about the talks' chance of success. Yesterday President George W Bush refused to rule out using military force to press Iran into giving up its nuclear programme, which Washington suspects is a front for weapons-making. "All options are on the table," Mr Bush told Israeli television.

Mr Musavian, whose remarks were translated by the Middle East Research Institute based in Washington, was responding to criticism from Iranian hardliners that Teheran should never have entered into the EU negotiations.

He said that until then, Iran had dealt solely with the UN-backed International Atomic Energy Authority, which had given it a 50-day deadline to suspend uranium enrichment on pain of referral to the UN Security Council.

"The IAEA give us a 50-day extension to suspend the enrichment and all related activities," he said. "But thanks to the negotiations with Europe we gained another year, in which we completed the [project] in Isfahan."

The plant, about 250 miles south of Teheran, carries out an early stage of the cycle for developing nuclear fuel, turning yellowcake into UF4 and then into UF6, a gas essential to enrichment.

"Today, we are in a position of power," Mr Musavian said. "Isfahan is complete and has a stockpile of products." Mr Musavian also said that Iran had further benefited from sweeteners offered by the EU, including the invitation to enter talks on Iran joining the World Trade Organisation.

BBC NEWS | Politics | The last days of 'Londonistan'

2005-07-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | Politics | The last days of 'Londonistan'

By Paul Reynolds - World Affairs correspondent, BBC News website

Massari's case highlights difficulties the UK government faces

The London bombings have spurred the British government into proposing a series of new laws designed to put an end to the reputation of the capital as "Londonistan", a centre for militant Islam.
It wants to create offences such as "indirect incitement to terrorism", "acts preparatory to terrorism" and using the internet for terrorist recruitment and training.

It also wants to make it easier to deport foreign nationals who openly preach jihad and violence.

However, one attempted deportation shows how human rights legislation and its interpretation by the judiciary can prevent the executive in a Western democracy from simply exercising its will.

At a time when al-Qaeda and its associates are showing a resilience and ability to strike at widespread targets in London and Egypt - let alone Iraq - the government feels such legal protections must be looked at again.

The Massari case

The case in point is that of Muhammad al-Massari, an exile from Saudi Arabia, who runs a website that shows videos of suicide bomb attacks in Iraq, including one in which three British soldiers were killed.

An extended interview with Mr Massari was shown in a BBC television documentary about how the internet is an integral part of the far-flung al-Qaeda network, of which the Iraqi insurgents led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi are part.

[Mr al-Massari] opposed the Saudi royal family from an Islamist point of view... The royal family was not greatly amused

British official

In the 1990s, Mr Massari ran a group in London called the Committee for the Defence of Legal Rights. At that time, he specialised in sending faxes into Saudi Arabia to promote his cause.

According to a British official who has tracked the case, the Saudi government told the British authorities at the time that he was more Islamic militant than human rights activist.

"He opposed the Saudi royal family from an Islamist point of view. He thought, and probably still does, that it was not Islamic enough, that it was corrupt and decadent," the official said.

"The royal family was not greatly amused."

Attempt to deport

During the Conservative government of John Major, a high-level assurance was given to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah that Britain would send Mr al-Massari back.

That is when the legal problems began.

The case was handed to an unusually senior British official, a sign of how important it was deemed.

For the next 18 months, this official spoke to almost every lawyer in the government but was blocked at every turn.

The issue was that of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, which says in Article 32: "The Contracting States shall not expel a refugee lawfully in their territory save on grounds of national security or public order."

Government lawyers said that British national security was not sufficiently engaged, even though the then-Home Secretary Michael Howard argued that British interests in the Gulf were at risk from Mr Massari's activities.

The Dominica solution

Eventually, another route was explored.

"We looked at whether another country might take him," said the British official. "We narrowed it down to about 10. They all said that they would like to help but always added that their relations with Saudi Arabia might be jeopardised. Finally it came down to one - Dominica."

"Other countries have managed perfectly well, consistent with human rights, to expel people who are inciting in other countries

Tony Blair

Dominica, a former British colony, is a volcanic dot in the Caribbean, one of the lushest of the West Indian islands and about as far away from the Middle East as you can get.

It had been run for 15 years by a tough prime minister named Eugenia Charles, an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Dominica agreed to take the Saudi exile.

"Massari appealed and the court upheld his appeal," said the official.

" It held that although Dominica had signed the 1951 Convention, this was not incorporated into its domestic law, so there was a chance he would be sent on somewhere else. We could not get rid of him."

The promise to the Crown Prince could not be fulfilled. The Saudis were not pleased.

Guardian journalists condemn sacking of radical Muslim

2005-07-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Guardian journalists condemn sacking of radical Muslim - Brand Republic

by Gordon MacMillan Brand Republic 28 Jul 2005

McCall: NUJ has condemned her sacking of Aslam

LONDON – Guardian journalists have condemned the sacking of Muslim journalist Dilpazier Aslam, who was revealed by bloggers to be a member of the anti-Semitic Islamic group Hizb'ut Tahrir.

His sacking was discussed at a National Union of Journalists meeting, at which Aslam was present. According to political blog Harry's Place, part of Aslam's defence was his surprise at the outrage caused by his 7/7 article in The Guardian, in which he called the suicide bombers who killed 52 people "sassy".

Aslam said that he had worked closely on the piece with Guardian comment editor Seumus Milne, who he said had suggested certain phrases that appeared in the controversial article.

At the NUJ meeting, Aslam is understood to have been asked several pointed questions about the anti-Semitism of Hizb'ut Tahrir. Aslam is reported not to have given satisfactory answers to these questions.

Despite this, the meeting still narrowly backed him and condemned his sacking by Guardian Newspapers chief executive Carolyn McCall.

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News | This is London - Suspect paid thousands in benefits

2005-07-28T19:21:00.000-07:00

Suspect paid thousands in benefits

26 July 2005

One of the would-be suicide bombers who tried to blow up a London Tube train had been handed thousands of pounds in taxpayers' money.

Yasin Hassan Omar, 24, was given 75 pounds a week in housing benefit to pay for the one-bedroom flat where he has been the registered tenant since February 1999.

His housing benefit stopped in May but he may have been given up to �24,000 over the last five years.

The flat, on the ninth floor of a 12-storey tower block in New Southgate, north London, is believed to
have been used as a bomb factory by the suicide team who unsuccessfully targeted the London transport network last Thursday.

Explosives experts were examining material found inside.

Neighbours said another suspected bomber Muktar Said-Ibrahim, 27, had also been staying at the flat.

And they described seeing men lugging boxes into the flat only a few weeks ago. The men said the boxes contained wallpaper stripper.

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BreakingNews.ie: London bombers 'had 16 unexploded bombs'

2005-07-28T19:14:00.000-07:00

London bombers 'had 16 unexploded bombs'

27/07/2005 - 15:45:52

The London bombers left a stash of 16 unexploded bombs in a car, some packed with nails, it was revealed today.

Security experts believe the July 7 plot, which killed 56 people, may have been much larger and the explosives intended for a second strike.

The bombs were recovered from a car believed to have been rented by suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, according to ABC News.

The vehicle was found five days after the attacks in Luton, where the bombers boarded a train to London.

Exclusive pictures obtained by the US network show some of the bombs flat-packed like pancakes, while others were packed with nails to use as shrapnel.

An X-ray picture of one of the bombs shows nails bulging out of the side of a bottle-shaped bomb.

Security analyst Robert Ayers, told ABC: "Bombs don't kill by concussion. Small bombs, they kill by the blast effects of fragments of glass or metal, and this is designed to kill people."

He said he believed the explosives were left for a second strike.

The first pictures of the bloody wreckage deep in the London underground tunnels have also been obtained by ABC.

The extent of the devastation at Edgware Road station and on the train between King�s Cross and Russell Square, where 27 were killed, was shown on World News Tonight.

Mr Ayers said you could see how the bomb had blown out the train�s sides, and the roof had been blown to bits."

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Mirror.co.uk - AT LAST WE'VE WOKEN TO HATE IN OUR MIDST

2005-07-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

Mirror.co.uk - News - Sue Carroll

27 July 2005

BY THE time four young British Muslim men had turned themselves into human bombs and murdered 52 innocent people, I'd left London behind.

At dawn on July 7, the city was still basking in the glory of winning the bid to host the 2012 Olympics. The spirit of optimism was palpable.

London was definitely looking up. Two weeks later, it feels as though I've been through a time warp.

The capital is now a dramatically different place. But for all the tragedy, carnage and mayhem I'm not altogether sure that it's a worse one. The picture is crystal clear and the enemy exposed.

We're in no doubt now about the kind of terrorist we're dealing with. Not illegal immigrants or refugees raised on a diet of hatred and fear but young men who appeared, on the face of it, to be polite and courteous citizens.

They've enjoyed, as much as anyone else in Britain, opportunities to make a decent life for themselves. The state, it now emerges, was even bankrolling two of them.

Fugitive bombers Yasin Hassan Omar, a 24-year-old Somali, and flat-mate Muktar Said-Ibrahim had been living rent-free in their council flat and receiving income support. You can't say fairer than that, can you?

And yet still the woolly liberals wring their hands and wonder where we all went wrong. The truth is, we didn't.

The suicide bombers of July 7 came from backgrounds that were no more or less dysfunctional than your average child in Britain today.

Some grab their chances with both hands to succeed in life. Others succumb to the super-chav ambition of acquiring designer clothes and breeding a succession of illegitimate babies.

This lot turned, instead, to religious extremism and embraced the insane, impossible dreams a jihad offered them, of martyrdom and heavenly virgins.

Intellectual or political reasoning has nothing to do with their cause. The foreign policy of the West is a useful weapon of propaganda but at the heart of their terrorism is the desire - irrational though it may seem to us - that we should live by their religion.

For years, they've worshipped at the altar of mad mullahs like Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, both of whom have been allowed to preach their messages of hate and pure venom in this country, with impunity.

What's happened in Britain is a wake-up call. A shocking reminder that we're not exempt from the brain-washed, murderous young man trained to deceive and groomed to kill.

I wonder how many of us, as we grieve for those killed by car bombs in Sharm-el-Sheik, spared a thought for the 40 people who also lost their lives in an Iraq blast - all victims of a lorry containing 500lb of explosives driven into a police station.

Al-Qaeda, make no mistake, holds no mercy for Iraqis, who are, in the main, Shia Muslims.

The dreadful, appalling fact is that we needed an atrocity to truly understand the horror other nations have suffered for years. (Let's not forget that it was in 1993 - long before the war in Iraq - that al-Qaeda set off a truck bomb in the World Trade Center.)

And, more importantly, we needed it to recognise that what's happened in Britain these past two weeks has been simmering for just as long. Finally, the government has woken from its slumber to do something about it. Proposals to outlaw acts preparatory to terrorism and the "indirect" incitement of violence should have been in place long ago.

Had they been, imams able to poison the minds of young recruits - now in place to carry out their suicide missions - would have been silenced.

Yes, like everyone else in London, I feel anxious on the underground and buses. I'm also furious to be robbed of the freedom we've all taken for granted.

We should be entitled to go round the city without looking over our shoulders. Instead we travel in nervous silence, staring at the floor and looking suspiciously at young Asian men carrying rucksacks.

But I feel a lot less nervous knowing our police are visible and will employ a shoot-to-kill policy, that finally our immigration services will do their job more rigorously and that the mullahs who refuse to condemn terrorism will be deported.

We are no longer sleepwalking into a disaster. We've faced the nightmare.

Now we just have to get through it.

Pakistani is a bad word in Britain

2005-07-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

Pakistani is a bad word in Britain

July 25, 2005

It has been thirty years since I first set foot in London, and I can't help musing over the changes that have been wrought in those decades. You can no longer ask your taxi driver to take you past Downing Street, the men at the immigration counter peruse you much more intently (though they are still as polite), and there is a definite chill in the air which has nothing to do with London's famously gloomy skies and everything to do with how one looks. Until they are reassured that I am a (Hindu) Indian and not a (Muslim) Pakistani, there is a wariness everywhere.

'Paki' has long been a term of abuse in Britain (though not in the United States). It goes back at least twenty years to the days of the infamous race riots. But where it was once mere tinged with contempt there is now more than a little loathing and hatred too.

"Don't be fooled by the apparent normalcy," was the grim warning delivered by a senior figure in the police services, "London has changed after the blasts, and so has Europe." And it all has to do with the apparent role of the 'Pakistanis' in the London blasts. The quotation marks are deliberate since the criminals who carried out the explosions were not really Pakistanis, but British citizens of Pakistani origin. That is a significant difference.

In the past, so the wry quip goes, they were born in Pakistan and would come to Britain for higher studies; today they are born in the United Kingdom but make the trip to Pakistan to finish off their education. My interlocutor may have been speaking tongue in cheek, but I cannot imagine such a comment being made three decades ago.

The old illusion that the terrorists are simply a misguided minority is fast giving way to the new conventional wisdom, namely that the terrorists are simply the most visible face of militant Islam. The second point being hammered away by the security forces into the heads of their political masters is that the most advanced colleges of terrorism, their Oxford and Cambridge as it were, are all in Pakistan. Hasib Hussain, Mohammed Sidique Khan, and Shahzad Tanweer -- three of the four suspects in the London blasts -- were either of Pakistani origin or attended some institution in that country. Other British citizens of Pakistani origin are being questioned in connection with the case.

The three men named above died in the July 7 blasts they are suspected of having set off, and cannot speak for themselves. In the popular imagination, however, the voice of Islamic fundamentalism was heard loud and clear across the Channel in The Netherlands. Muhammad Bouyeri is on trial for murdering Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh (a distant relative of the famous painter) because the director had been critical of some Islamic customs in one of his films. (Never having seen the film, I am not sure what the fuss was about.) Confronted with the victim's mother, Bouyeri contemptuously told her that he could feel no pity for an 'infidel.' He followed this with the defiant proclamation, 'If I'm ever released, I'd do the same again. Exactly the same!'

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Mark Steyn: Wake up, folks - it's war!

2005-07-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

Mark Steyn: Wake up, folks - it's war!

07/30/05

A couple of items from Tuesday’s papers. On the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian pilot programme for the Met’s new shoot-to-kill policy, the Daily Telegraph reports:

‘A Home Office spokesman last night admitted that it had not yet identified his immigration status: “We are looking into the case and will provide more information as soon as we are able to do so.’’’

Meanwhile, the Times includes this background information on one of the thwarted bombers of the 21 July attacks — Yassin Hassan Omar, a Somali ‘asylum-seeker’:

‘Omar, who was last seen vaulting a barrier at Warren Street station, has been the registered occupant of the flat since 1999. Ibrahim, who was last seen in Hackney Road, East London, after his failed attempt to blow up a No. 26 bus, shared it with him for the past two years. Omar received £88 a week in housing benefit to pay for the council property and also received income support, immigration officials say.’

So here’s how things stand:

1) Four days after Mr de Menezes became the most famous foreigner in the United Kingdom, Her Majesty’s Government is unable to give a definitive answer on his immigration status.

2) Four years after 9/11, British taxpayers are subsidising the jihad — in Mr Omar’s Bounds Green council flat and in many other places.

There’s a pleasant thought the next time you’re on a bus when some Islamakazi self-detonates: it’s on your tax bill; P-A-Y-E — pay as you explode.

Number One comes at a time when the relevant department, the Home Office, not content with being unable to run its existing records system for foreigners, is determined to inflict an expensive and cumbersome bureaucracy on every non-foreigner in the land. Indeed, the Home Secretary has now upgraded it into a fundamental human right: ‘Just let us put in place our hierarchy of rights,’ Charles Clarke told MEPs just before the second attacks. ‘The right to live. The right to go to work on the Underground. The right to have an ID card.’ Human rights-wise, that last one is right up there with the right to be subject to confiscatory taxation.

And Number Two isn’t some stunning shocking development, either. In The Spectator of 29 December 2001, I noted the likes of Zac Moussaoui, the French citizen who became an Islamist radical while living on welfare in London, and wrote:

‘If you’re looking for “root causes” for terrorism, European-sized welfare programmes are a good place to start. Maybe if they had to go out to work, they’d join the Daily Mirror and become the next John Pilger. Or maybe they’d open a drive-thru Halal Burger chain and make a fortune. Instead, Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot.’

I wasn’t the first to notice the links between Euro-Canadian welfare and terrorism. Mickey Kaus, an iconoclastic California liberal, was way ahead. But, after three-and-a-half years, one would be entitled to assume that a government whose fortunes are as heavily invested in the terrorist threat as this one’s might have spotted it, too — especially given the ever greater numbers of British jihadi uncovered from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Israel and America.

That’s why I regretfully have to disagree with the editor of this great publication in his prescription of the current situation which appeared in these pages a week or two back under the headline ‘Just don’t call it war’. As you’ll have gathered, the boss objects to the language of ‘war, whether cultural or military.... Last week’s bombs were placed not by martyrs nor by soldiers, but by criminals.’

Sorry, but that’s the way to lose. A narrowly focused ‘criminal’ approach means entrusting the whole business to the state bureaucracy. The obvious problem with that is that it’s mostly reactive: blow somewhere up, we’ll seal it off, and detectives will investigate it as a crime scene. You could make the approach less reactive by a sustained effort to improve scrutiny of immigration, entitlement to welfare and other matters within the purview of government. But consider those two snippets from the Tuesday papers and then figure out the likelihood of that happening. A ‘criminal’ approach gives terrorists all the rights of criminals, and between British and European ‘human rights’ that’s quite a bundle. If it’s a war, you can take wartime measures — including withdrawal from the UN Convention on Refugees, repeal of the European Human Rights Act, and a clawback of sovereignty from the EU. But if you fight this thing as a law-enforcement matter, Islamist welfare queens will use all the above to their full extent and continue openly promoting the murder of the Prime Minister, British troops, etc. with impunity.

Softly-softly won’t catchee monkey. Slo-mo conflicts are the hardest to win, in part because in advanced societies the public finds it hard to stay focused. Granted, there are exceptions to that rule: the government, battling the commies in Malaya, went the Boris Johnson route and declined to call it a war; and the eventual victory in the Malayan ‘Emergency’ might tend to support his thesis. It was said that London was reluctant to use the term ‘war’ for reasons of home and business insurance, but it’s also a broader kind of insurance: it lowers the stakes, it softens the people up for a non-victory — as in the Irish ‘Troubles’. Sometimes, as in Malaya, you happen to win one of these ‘emergencies’ or ‘troubles’, and that’s a bonus. But the point is, by designating something as other than a war, you tend to make it peripheral, and therefore loseable.

That’s not an option here. Madrid and London — along with other events such as the murder of Theo Van Gogh — are, in essence, the opening shots of a European civil war. You can laugh at that if you wish, but the Islamists’ most often-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate living under Sharia that extends to Europe; and there’s a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behaviour is consistent.

Furthermore, there’s a lot more of the world that lives under Sharia than there was, say, 30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984.... Fifty years ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it’s in the grip of Islamic law. So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: since the beginning of the year, for example, some 10 per cent of southern Thailand’s Buddhist population have abandoned their homes — a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet all but unreported in the Western press. And whatever one’s opinion of the various local conflicts around the world — Muslims vs Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs Jews in the Holy Land, Muslims vs Russians in Chechnya, Muslims vs Christians in Africa — the fact is that the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

If the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As fascism and communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world’s grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency — not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the malign strain of Wahabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalising force in contemporary Islam, from Indonesia to Leeds. Europeans who aren’t prepared to roll back Wahabism had better be prepared to live with it, or under it.

Mustering the popular will for that sort of struggle isn’t easy. But the longer you leave it the harder it becomes. Whether or not one accepts the Johnson line that Iraq is irrelevant to the war on terror, it requires a perverse genius on the part of Tony Blair to have found the political courage to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore but not the political courage to wage it closer to home where it would have commanded far more support.

On a couple of very fleeting visits to London and Belfast in recent weeks, I had the vague feeling that Britain is on the brink of a tragedy it doesn’t quite comprehend. America’s post-9/11 muscular nationalism was easily mocked by Europeans, but its absence in London is palpable: try to imagine Mayor Giuliani uttering half the stuff Ken Livingstone said in the last fortnight (‘The bombings would never have happened if the West had simply left the Arab nations alone in the wake of the first world war’). Even if he’s right, the message it communicates is weakness: bomb us, and we apologise — or at the very least go to comically absurd lengths to distinguish terrorism against London from terrorism against Israel. Tony Blair, in his recitation in the House of Commons of nations afflicted by terrorism, couldn’t even bring himself to mention the Zionist Entity. Boris Johnson, in his call to non-arms, began with an elaborate riff on the difference between Brits and Jews in these matters:

‘If we were Israelis, we would by now be doing a standard thing to that white semi-detached pebbledash house at 51 Colwyn Road, Beeston. Having given due warning, we would dispatch an American-built ground-assault helicopter and blow the place to bits. Then we would send in bulldozers to scrape over the remains....’

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CNN.com - UK 'blocked bomb plotter' arrest - Jul 28, 2005

2005-07-28T18:19:00.000-07:00

UK 'blocked bomb plotter' arrest

British police continue to make arrests in July 21 incidents

Thursday, July 28, 2005; Posted: 7:44 p.m. EDT (23:44 GMT)

Police detained nine people in an early morning raid in south London on Thursday.

Nine more arrests in connection to July 21 failed bombings. (4:34)

Four suspects arrested in Birmingham (5:32)

(CNN) -- About a month before the July 7 bombings in London, British authorities balked at giving U.S. officials permission to apprehend a man now believed to have ties to the bombers, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Haroon Rashid Aswat, 30, of Indian heritage, is currently in custody in Zambia, U.S. and Zambian officials told CNN.

U.S. authorities wanted to capture Aswat, who was then in South Africa, and question him about a 1999 plot to establish a "jihad training camp" in Bly, Oregon.

According to the sources, U.S. officials had located Aswat in South Africa weeks before the July 7 attacks that killed 52 bus and subway travelers and the four bombers.

U.S. authorities had asked South Africa if they could take Aswat into custody. South Africa relayed the request to Britain, but authorities there balked because he was a British citizen, the sources said. While the debate was ongoing, Aswat slipped away. (Full story)

British authorities now suspect Aswat lent support to the July 7 bombers.

According to U.S. officials, Aswat was an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorist camp case, which resulted in a guilty plea in 2003 by the main defendant, James Ujaama, of Seattle, Washington. (Full story)

Meanwhile Thursday in Britain -- one week after failed attacks on London's transit system that appeared to imitate the July 7 bombings -- a nationwide manhunt focused on three of the suspected terrorists.

Authorities have taken 20 people in custody, including one of the suspected bombers, as part of the investigation into the July 21 attacks on three Underground trains and a double-decker bus.

Nine men were arrested in the Tooting area of south London early Thursday -- six at one address and three at another, according to Metropolitan Police. Searches at the addresses were ongoing.

But as those arrests were announced, the country's top police official said more attacks were possible if the three other suspects in the attempted bombings remained at large.

"It does remain possible that those at large will strike again," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said. "It does also remain possible that there are other cells who are capable and intent on striking again."

As part of its investigation into the attempted bombings, police have taken 1,800 witness statements, have received 5,000 calls to the terrorist tip line, and are examining 15,000 closed-circuit television tapes.

The British government also announced that the Brazilian man mistakenly shot and killed by police at an Underground station last week had a false stamp on his passport and had been in Britain for two years with an expired visa. (Full story)

Police arrested three women Wednesday night on suspicion of "harboring offenders" in connection with the July 21 plot.

They were taken from a south London apartment raided by armed police and remained in custody Thursday in central London.

Three neighbors told CNN that one of the suspected would-be bombers -- the one who allegedly tried to set off a bomb at the city's Shepherd's Bush Underground Station -- lived there, having recognized him in a new photo released by police.

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Dutch Filmmaker's Killer Gets Life Sentence - Yahoo! News

2005-07-26T06:48:00.000-07:00

Dutch Filmmaker's Killer Gets Life Sentence - Yahoo! News

Dutch Filmmaker's Killer Gets Life Sentence

By ANTHONY DEUTSCH, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 43 minutes ago

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - A Dutch court sentenced the killer of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh to life in prison Tuesday, the harshest sentence possible for a murder that heightened ethnic tensions and raised concerns about homegrown Islamic terrorism.

Mohammed Bouyeri, 27, had mounted no defense at his two-day trial earlier this month for the Nov. 2 slaying of Van Gogh, whom he accused of insulting Islam, and told the court he would do it again if given the chance.

Presiding judge Udo Willem Bentinck said life in prison was the only fitting punishment for a crime that sought to undermine Dutch democracy and the political system. He said the three-judge panel had concluded there was no possibility for Bouyeri to return to society, citing his lack of remorse.

Bouyeri, wearing a black and white checkered headscarf, showed no emotion as he shook his lawyer's hand following the verdict. He had earlier told the court he had intended to die in the action and become a martyr for his faith.

Bouyeri has two weeks if he wants to lodge an appeal, but that appeared unlikely.

He was convicted of the murder, described in the judgment as a terrorist attack, the attempted murder of bystanders and police officers, illegal possession of firearms and of impeding the work of a member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom he had threatened to kill in a letter impaled in Van Gogh's chest.

The judgment said Bouyeri had shown "a complete disregard for human life." Van Gogh was "butchered mercilessly," it said, and it was "a miracle that only two bystanders were hit by stray bullets."

Mirror.co.uk - News - EXCLUSIVE: THEY TRIED TO MAKE ME A SUICIDE BOMBER

2005-07-14T06:36:00.000-07:00

14 July 2005

EXCLUSIVE: THEY TRIED TO MAKE ME A SUICIDE BOMBER

Matt Roper

THREE years ago Muhammed Yusuf was approached by two strangers who tried to recruit him as a suicide bomber.

The 18-year-old has already informed anti-terrorist police about his encounter with the hardliners at a North London mosque. Here he tells MATT ROPER what happened:

THEIR words, spoken with calm and conviction, were powerful and persuasive. But as I realised they wanted me to become a martyr for the cause of Islam I felt sick to the stomach.

"You'll go instantly to heaven," they repeated. "All the problems and pain in your life will go away. You'll be rewarded for all eternity."

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For two weeks two men had befriended and groomed me. I was just 14, naive yet idealistic, and I had no idea why they were so interested in me. But after days of observing me, the moment had arrived to finally come clean.

They wanted me to avenge the deaths of my Muslim brothers and sisters around the world.

And they cynically exploited a time of turmoil and confusion in my life to convince me to end it - not shamefully but gloriously - by blowing myself to bits in a terrorist attack.

I was prime recruitment material. I was young and malleable, I had never been in trouble with the police and I'd never had anything to do with extremist groups.

I attended a good Muslim school and came from a respected family from north London.

But my father, a pillar of the community and a regular at our mosque, had recently passed away suddenly and I was trying to come to terms with my grief.

After my father's death I had started attending the local mosque more regularly. I wanted to know my dad better and lead the same exemplary life he'd lived.

I started going to prayers five times a day, even getting up early to attend the 6am prayer meeting.

I also got involved in many other activities at the mosque, such as teaching groups and day trips.

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Terrorists Have Feelings Too

2005-07-14T00:50:00.000-07:00

The American Spectator

Terrorists Have Feelings Too
By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Published 7/14/2005 12:08:07 AM

LONDON -- Well, in less than a week it appears the British authorities got them! But what are they? The BBC last week edited out the word 'terrorist' in its coverage of July 7th's subway and bus bombings in favor of the word 'bombers.' The BBC believed that the word would be less offensive to certain aggrieved British groups. Yes, terrorists have feelings too. Now that the men who committed these grisly crimes appear to be Islamicists with terrorist sympathies and suicidal intent, can we call them terrorists? Can we call them Muslim terrorists? Can we call them Muslim suicide bombers and terrorists?

London was stalwart and inspiring last week. In the aftermath of the, dare I say, terrorist attacks, the Londoners went about their business, vowing to apprehend the criminals and otherwise carrying on just as they had during the War whose victory they celebrated on the weekend -- German sensibilities be damned. But the longer I am in London, the more I discover that there are unsettling undercurrents within the government and among elites. One is the application of politically correct rules to coverage of the news. Another is to outlaw free speech as it relates to the treatment of Islamofascism and the bloody consequences of Islamofascism.

They have been very effective. As Mark Steyn pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, "In most circumstances it would be regarded as appallingly bad taste to deflect attention from an actual 'hate crime' [last week's bombings] by scaremongering about a non-existent one." Yet apparently this has been going on for some time, and now Prime Minister Tony Blair is hustling through Parliament a so-called Racial and Religious Hatred Bill. If passed it would send a person to jail for seven years if he is accused and convicted of authoring words found offensive by aggrieved religious and racial groups, for instance, I suppose, aggrieved terrorists. Opponents argue that would protect Satanists and other unusual believers.

How would it affect another journalist writing recently in a British paper, Charles Moore, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph and London's Spectator? Recently he quoted from a Saudi imam welcomed to Britain by Mohammed Abdul Bari of the East London Mosque. The Rev. imam a couple of years back in Mecca described Jews as "scum of the earth," "rats of the world," "monkeys and pigs who should be annihilated." When the imam is criticized by the likes of Moore, Abdul Bari furiously defends him. Moore went on to quote the local Muslim Weekly's Sheikh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi writing that parliamentary democracy in Britain must be replaced by "a new civilization based on the worship of Allah," and he described the leader of the Tory party as "an illegal Jewish immigrant from Romania." He also referred to the "near-demented Judaic banking elite.

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Terror Strike- London!

2005-07-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of links to the London events at this url:

Terror Strike- London!

BBC NEWS | UK | London blasts: 'People were screaming'

2005-07-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

Last Updated: Thursday, 7 July, 2005, 10:51 GMT 11:51 UK

London blasts: 'People were screaming'

The blasts caused panic across London

At least 50 people have been killed and hundreds injured, some seriously, after a series of explosions on London's underground network.

BBC News website reader Scott Wenbourne was on the train travelling in to Aldgate station when there was an explosion in the carriage in front of him.

It was about 8.50am when it happened. I was one carriage down from where it happened and had my back to the carriage door.

All of a sudden there was a loud bang and a flash of bright light. It threw me to the floor in the middle of the train.

At first some people thought it wasn't serious, perhaps just a minor derailment, although some people were screaming.

But straight away, as soon I hit the floor my first thought was 'it's a bomb', although I can't be sure.
It all happened in slow motion, I thought the windows would blow through.

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Suspect in Dutch filmmaker's murder makes dramatic court room confession

2005-07-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 12, 9:51 PM

Suspect in Dutch filmmaker's murder makes dramatic court room confession

The man accused of killing Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh confessed to a Dutch court that he acted out of his religious beliefs, saying he would do 'exactly the same' if he were ever set free.

'I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion,' 27-year-old Dutch-Moroccan national Mohammed Bouyeri told the court in Amsterdam on the final day of his trial.Prosecutor Frits van Straelen demanded a life sentence for Bouyeri for killing Van Gogh on an Amsterdam street on November 2, 2004. He recalled the particular brutality of the murder in broad daylight saying Bouyeri not only shot Van Gogh 15 times but also stabbed him and finally slit his throat.

According to the prosecutor the murder of Van Gogh, an outspoken columnist who often criticised Islam and the multi-cultural society, deeply shocked Dutch society.

The killing -- which happened in plain view of more than 50 witnesses while the filmmaker was cycling to work -- stoked ethnic tensions and sparked a wave of reprisal attacks primarily directed at the Muslim community here.

In addition to a life sentence, the prosecution also demanded that Bouyeri be stripped of his right to vote or stand for election for the rest of his life, 'to literally place him outside of our democracy'.

After the prosecution's closing statement Bouyeri, who had refused to say anything about his motives during the trial, took the opportunity to make a final statement.'I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do exactly the same thing.

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Hate mob attacks Galloway

2005-04-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

Hate mob attacks Galloway

By Paul Waugh And Flora Stubbs, Evening Standard

20 April 2005

The bitter election battle in the East End has spilled into violence, with extremist Muslims and anti-war protesters targeting George Galloway and Oona King.

Anti-war campaigner Mr Galloway was forced to take refuge from Islamic militants who denounced him as a 'false prophet'.

The former Labour MP said 'the police saved my life' after supporters of radical group Hizb-Ut-Tahrir clashed with members of his Respect party last night.

Labour's Ms King had her car tyres slashed and the vehicle was pelted with eggs by a gang of youths angry at her support for the Iraq war. Both incidents triggered fears for the safety of Mr Galloway and Ms King as they prepared for a stormy hustings meeting in Bethnal Green and Bow tonight.

Labour's 10,000 majority in the seat is under serious threat from Respect and the contest has been marked by some of the most vitriolic campaigning in the general election.

Mr Galloway was electioneering on the Osier council estate in Bethnal Green last night when a gang of 30 Muslim fundamentalists, who claim voting is un-Islamic, surrounded him and his supporters.

The men said they were angry at Mr Galloway's attempt to woo Muslim voters. They said they were "setting up the gallows" for him and warned any Muslim who voted for his anti-war Respect party that they faced a "sentence of death".

After a fight broke out between the two groups, police were called and Mr Galloway was forced to hide in his car in an alley until the violence calmed down. Two men were later arrested.

One resident said: "I heard shouting and looked out into the street to see a large group of Asian men. Many of them were fighting.

"There were punches and kicks thrown, then a large number of police arrived and broke up the riot."

Speaking to the Standard minutes after the attack, Mr Galloway said it was clear the men were worried that he could become MP for an area with a large Muslim population.

"I was meeting people who live in the flats. Hizb-ut-Tahrir suddenly filled the room and blocked the door. I tried speaking calmly. They then said I was parading as a false prophet and served a sentence of death on me. They were claiming I was representing myself as a false deity and for this apostasy I would be sentenced to the gallows," he said.

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The Next Pope and Islamic Prophecy

2005-04-14T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Next Pope and Islamic Prophecy

By Steven Stalinsky

FrontPageMagazine.com | April 14, 2005

Following Pope John Paul II's visit to the Middle East in 2000 and 2001, some prominent Muslim leaders openly discussed the future dominance of Islam in Europe, including conquesting the Vatican.

While the identity of the next pope is decided, one of the pressing issues he will have to deal with is the growing Muslim community in Europe, part of which have Islamist inclinations. As the New York Times reported this week, the next pope will be facing 'increasing secularism in Europe, contrasting with the religious revival in the Islamic world… and the rising number of Muslim immigrants in Europe.'

Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd Al-Rahman Al-'Arifi, Imam of the mosque of King Fahd Defense Academy, discussed the coming Muslim conquest of the Vatican. Citing a Hadith in an article posted on the Kalemat website in 2002, he stated: '… We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians, who carve crosses on the breasts of the Muslims … will yet pay us the Jiziya [poll tax paid by non-Muslims under Muslim rule], in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam…'

Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and head of The European Council for Fatwa and Research and the founder of European based International Council of Muslim Scholars (Imams) posted a fatwa on the website www.islamonline.net, in 2002 about the 'signs of the victory of Islam' in Europe.

Also citing a well-known Hadith, Al-Qaradhawi wrote: '… The Prophet Muhammad was asked: 'What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?' He answered: 'The city of Hirqil [i.e. the Byzantine emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first' - that is, Constantinople… Romiyya is the city called today 'Rome,' the capital of Italy."

Expatica - Living in, moving to, or working in the Netherlands, plus Dutch news in English

2005-04-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

Expatica - Alarm over radicalisation of Dutch youth

4 April 2005

AMSTERDAM — Police have sparked alarm about the speed with which youths are becoming radicalised in the Netherlands, with the Utrecht intelligence service RID claiming it potentially poses a threat more dangerous than Islamic terrorism.

Police and municipal councils have started investigating 'Lonsdale youths', typified by native Dutch teeangers who wear the Lonsdale clothing brand.

These hardcore youths are responsible for more racist incidents, street disturbances and violence than previously estimated, newspaper NRC reported on Saturday.

The Leiden University and Anne Frank Foundation recorded 106 violent anti-Muslim incidents in the month after the November 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected Islamic militant.

Lonsdale youths were involved in about 25 percent of these cases and new incidents have occurred recently.

An Islamic primary school in Uden was set on fire earlier this month, the second arson attack against the school since Van Gogh's death. A 17-year-old boy has been arrested for the attack.

Researcher J. van Donselaar is still compiling the nation-wide incidents involving Lonsdale youths from recent months, but asserts that the figures show a multiplication on previous statistics.

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Outside View: Immigrants in France - (United Press International)

2005-03-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

Outside View: Immigrants in France

By Robert Levine
Outside View Commentator

Washington, DC, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- The United States and France face the parallel problem of assimilating large groups of culturally different immigrants: Hispanics in the United States, North Africans in France. History suggests the United States will incorporate the new entrants more or less smoothly while the French are likely to fail.

The first immigrants to enter the United States in large numbers were the Irish in 1845. Italians and East European Jews followed, starting 40 years later. The key to their assimilation has been that U.S. culture has changed even as it 'Americanized' the newcomers. In spite of current alarms, the Hispanic wave looks little different.

France remains the European nation most open to immigrants, assimilating individuals into traditional French culture. The North Africans constitute the first massive wave. Many want to retain elements of their own culture and the other French are resisting mightily.

Until 1845, the United States could be characterized as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant society; although black slaves modified the culture from the start. Catholicism was tolerated but mistrusted. Germans constituted a small node.

The Irish potato famine forced emigration so rapid that by 1850, 10 percent of the U.S. population was Irish. They were different. Anti-Catholicism burgeoned and employers refused to hire the Irish, forcing them to depend on their own economy. Communal clashes were common. They gradually found public jobs, many as policemen. They forced their way into politics -- in 1905, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's grandfather became the first Irish mayor of Boston.

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The Death of France's "Multiculturalism" by Nidra Poller

2005-03-30T11:46:00.000-08:00

The Death of France's "Multiculturalism" by Nidra Poller

By Nidra Poller

FrontPageMagazine.com | March 30, 2005

October 2000, Place de la République in Paris: the first of what would become an endless series of ambiguous pro-Palestinian demonstrations welcomed the snake of anti-Semitism into its heart. “Death to the Jews” rang out loud and clear that day as policemen stood by, journalists watched with apparent indifference, and the mass of demonstrators thronged and thrust as demonstrators do.

8 March 2005, Place de la République: a thousand young toughs pierced the heart of a student demonstration and unleashed their rage…not against the police but against the “privileged classes” in their own age group—the protesting lycée students. Operating in gangs of ten and twenty, the casseurs (smashers) in brand-name sweat suits swept through the march like pirate ships, zeroed in on their prey, attacked from behind. They threw kids to the ground, gratuitously beating and kicking them, snatching handbags, ipods, wallets, and cell phones. Riot police looking like robots with their thick leather padding stood by as the predators cut through the crowd wielding knives, clubs, and tear gas bombs.

In the space of a few hours the hallowed tradition of student protest imploded. But trouble had been brewing since January when the lycée students started organizing to oppose la loi Fillon, an umpteenth educational reform project proposed by the current Minister of Education, François Fillon. The previous minister was brought down by similar protests against a different sort of reform. This is the way the system goes, educational reform followed by protest and so on and so forth, while no one is offering any project that could address the acute crisis that is shaking the very foundations of the French educational system. And, precisely, the lycée--which is the equivalent of high school

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Fjordman: Muslim Rape Epidemic in Sweden and Norway - Authorities Look the Other Way

2005-03-21T21:39:00.000-08:00

Fjordman: Muslim Rape Epidemic in Sweden and Norway - Authorities Look the Other Way

"She deserved what she got --the whore lived like a German." - Berlin's Honor Killings by Sonia Phalnikar

2005-03-02T13:03:00.000-08:00

FrontPage magazine.com :: Berlin's Honor Killings by Sonia Phalnikar

Berlin's Honor Killings
By Sonia Phalnikar

Frontpage Magazine via Deutsche Welle | March 2, 2005

On a cold afternoon this week, Hatin Sürücü gazed gravely from a large poster behind a bus stop lined with flowers, cards and candles.

To the people who came to this bleak part of Berlin's Tempelhof district for Tuesday's solemn vigil -- called not by the city's Muslim community but a gay and lesbian organization -- the image of the young woman in a headscarf, a baby in her arms, was familiar from newspapers and television. A few notes at the memorial read, 'Hope you get a better deal in your next life,' and 'Live a life on your own terms.'

'It's a scandal,' said Ali K, 33. 'All Muslims in Berlin should take to the streets to protest.' Yasemin, 22, said, 'It's horrific. All Hatin was doing was leading her life the way she wanted.'

But it was a choice she paid for with her life. On Feb. 7, 23-year-old Hatin Sürücü was gunned down at the aforementioned bus stop. She died on the spot. Shortly afterwards, three of her brothers -- who reportedly had long been threatening her -- were arrested. Investigators suspect it was a so-called 'honor killing,' given the fact that Sürücü's ultra-conservative Turkish-Kurdish family strongly disapproved of her modern and 'un-Islamic' life.

Sürücü grew up in Berlin and was married off at 16 to a cousin in Istanbul. After a few years, she returned to the German capital with her young son, moved into a home for single mothers, completed school and began to train as an electrician. She stopped wearing a headscarf and was said to be outgoing and vivacious.

"She lived like a German"

Though not the first of its kind, the brazen shooting has sent shockwaves through Berlin, home to a large foreign community and which for years has fretted over steady ghetto-building in districts dominated by Turkish and Arab immigrants. While the incident has reopened debate on the integration of immigrants and the compatibility of Islamic values with Western ones, it’s the reaction of a small group of Turkish students to the murder that has rattled the German capital.

Days after Hatin Sürücü was killed, some male students of Turkish origin at a high school near the scene of the crime reportedly downplayed the act. During a class discussion on the murder, one said, "She (Hatin Sürücü) only had herself to blame," while another remarked "She deserved what she got --the whore lived like a German." The school's director promptly dashed off a letter to parents and students, castigating the students and warning that the school didn’t tolerate incitement against freedom.

"Her lifestyle didn't fit"

The comments have sparked outrage and left many asking if it was just a one-off or whether such thinking is in fact not entirely uncommon among sections of the Muslim community in the city.

According to some, it isn't. "There isn't a single school with a high foreign population where teachers haven't faced this kind of thing, where individual students sometimes regard murder as a just sentence," said Heinz Wagner, head of school and education policy at the VBE teachers trade union and a school director himself. Referring to the controversial remarks on Sürücü's murder, he said, "The very fact that they decided to provoke with something like that tells you that they're getting their ideas from somewhere."

At Berlin's Turkish-dominated neighborhood near Kottbusser Tor in the Kreuzberg district, 17-year-old Erkan, a high school student of Turkish origin, was divided about the issue. "I'm not saying you should murder, but Hatin's lifestyle just didn't fit the way traditional Muslims live," he said.

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The emerging 'Eurabia' - The Washington Times: Editorials/OP-ED - February 18, 2005

2005-02-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

The emerging 'Eurabia' - The Washington Times: Editorials/OP-ED - February 18, 2005

The emerging 'Eurabia'

By Diana West

It was just a coincidence that 'Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis' appeared in the mail the same day a New York Times article on the subject of Eurabia landed on the doorstep. 'Eurabia,' the long-awaited book by Bat Ye'or, is a comprehensive, even overwhelming and absolutely shocking explication of how and why it is that Europe is transforming itself into what the Egyptian-born historian calls 'a new geopolitical entity ' Eurabia.' The New York Times article, on the other hand, a muddled analysis by Craig S. Smith about the 'fear of Islamists' and the 'far right' in Belgium, is one more illustration of how desperately Bat Ye'or's trail-blazing work is needed.

Few of us have the long-view vision to make sense of the sweep of history as it smokes past our eyes; Bat Ye'or, as a historian of Islam, and, in particular, the dhimmi (the non-Muslim peoples who live as second-class citizens under Islamic rule), has precisely the laser-lens required. She also has the fortitude of the historian/gumshoe to wade through the stacks of articles, memoranda and conference declarations generated by something called the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD).

Created 30-odd years ago at the instigation of France and the Arab League, the practically unknown EAD has provided structural and theoretical underpinnings to a Euro-Arab axis ' Eurabia. These have fostered the political, economic and cultural bonds between Europe and the Arab world that Bat Ye'or maintains were designed to create 'a global alternative to American power.'

How? Very basically ' and this is detailed in the book ' by shepherding a meeting of Euro-Arab minds, first and foremost, on the Arab League war on Israel. This would come about in exchange for freely flowing Arab oil into Europe, which would come about in exchange for freely flowing Muslim immigration into Europe, ...

The emerging 'Eurabia' - The Washington Times: Editorials/OP-ED - February 18, 2005

Encounter with Islam

2005-02-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

Encounter with Islam

Encounter with Islam

The nexus has given rise to incidents of terrorism, complications in integrating the European Union and a rethinking of foreign policy.

By Diane Wolff
Special to the Orlando Sentinel

February 13, 2005

The Europeans have discovered they, too, have a terrorism problem, which is exacerbated by demographics and geography.

Europe is having a new encounter with Islam, in domestic politics and foreign affairs. However, it's not the first; the two have had 13 centuries of ups and downs.

The new European-Islamic nexus has given rise to incidents of terrorism, a shift of some traditional European political parties to the right, complications in integrating the European Union and a re-thinking of foreign policy.

Immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, Europe stood shoulder to shoulder with America.

Time and political differences, including but not limited to disagreement about the war in Iraq, have led to frosty relations between Washington and much of Europe.

The realization is dawning on the members of the European Union that their initial notion that terrorism was only America's problem is wrong. In fact, there now may be more reason for concern in Paris than Philadelphia, Amsterdam than Albany and Bonn than Boston.

Timothy Savage, division chief of the Office of European Analysis at the U.S. State Department, explains the situation well.

'The Islamic challenge that Europe faces today is twofold. Internally, Europe must integrate a ghettoized but rapidly growing Muslim minority that many Europeans view as encroaching on the collective identity and public values of European society. Externally, Europe needs to devise a viable approach to the primarily Muslim-populated volatile states stretching from Casablanca to the Caucasus,' he wrote last summer.

After Sept. 11, the thinking on the Continent was that Europeans were tolerant and progressive and Americans were unenlightened. We went after the radicals. They opened their arms to their Mediterranean neighbors. They concluded that we were wrong and they were right.

Europe's attitude changed with the Madrid train bombings March 11 that killed 191 people. It was a devastating wake-up call for Europe, a different kind of terrorism than the homegrown Irish Republican Army or Basque separatist movement.

It is beginning to dawn on the Continent that things could get much worse. In preparation for President Bush's visit later this month, security police have been rounding up terror suspects by means the American Civil Liberties Union would take to court.

French law permits detention for three years of people suspected of terror. Britain has proposed placing electronic-surveillance monitors on suspected terrorists to keep track of their whereabouts. This is Britain's way of avoiding the U.S. practice of detention.

Below the surface, there are less immediate, but much more serious, concerns.

More than 23 million Muslims live in Europe, 5 percent of the population. If Turkey joins the European Union, that figure will increase to 90 million, or 15 percent of the total. As EU citizens, they could reside anywhere in Europe, work and cross borders without passports.

This comes as many EU nations have decided that to balance America's status as the lone superpower, they want to carve out their own foreign and security policies. This has led to disputes with Washington about Iraq, how to deal with the emerging possibility of a nuclear threat in Iran, the Kyoto Treaty on global warming and myriad other issues.

But, when it comes to the war on terror, the EU attitude may have more to do with Europe's growing Muslim minorities than with the United States.

In the quarter-century before George W. Bush became president, many European nations increasing found themselves at odds with the U.S. policy on the Middle East, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The EU tilt toward the Palestinians in that confrontation and a generally more sympathetic view of Arab causes is at least partially a result of immigration from Europe's former colonies.

Efforts to assimilate the newcomers, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, into European life has been aimed at building interfaith societies. Yet, there is a segment of the immigrants who are resistant to the secular nature of 21st-century Europe.

They think that once Islam has conquered a territory, as it conquered Spain, Portugal, Italy and parts of France in the Middle Ages, it will remain Muslim.

Europe has done a poor job of integrating its Muslim immigrants. The Madrid bombings, numerous examples of street violence and recruitment efforts by al-Qaeda on the Continent suggest that militant Islam has become a problem.

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Spain starts illegal immigration amnesty

2005-02-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

Spain starts illegal immigration amnesty

Spain starts illegal immigration amnesty

07.02.2005 - 18:10 CET

By Honor Mahony

EUOBSERVER/BRUSSELS - Madrid's decision to grant an amnesty to illegal immigrants living and working in the country is set to have consequences well beyond Spain.

The amnesty, which is likely to affect up to one million immigrants, began on Monday (7 February).

Over the coming three months, Madrid will accept applications from immigrants who can prove that they have been in Spain for at least six months and who have a job.

The government's aim is to get some control over the country's illegal immigration problem.

But Madrid's move could have consequences for the rest of Europe as granting Spanish residency to the immigrants means that they would have the right to live and work anywhere in the European Union.

Its decision has caused anger in some other capitals.

'Those affected can simply travel further to France or Germany', said German interior minister Otto Schily.

'We should have first examined what consequences this initiative would have for the rest of Europe', he added.

He was backed up by Dutch immigration minister Rita Verdonk.

The European Commission, which is pushing for common rules in this area, said Spain was within its rights to introduce these measures.

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European Cinema Exposes Anti-Muslim Practices

2005-02-07T22:06:00.000-08:00

European Cinema Exposes Anti-Muslim Practices

European Cinema Exposes Anti-Muslim Practices

Yasmin wears her hijab in the house and takes it off while with workmates.

By Khaled Shawkat, IOL Correspondent

ROTTERDAM, February 7 (IslamOnline.net) – Two European films shown at the 34th Rotterdam international film festival caused quite a stir among cinema critics and the audience.

Reason? Presenting anti-western attacks by extremists as a retaliation for the mounting hate and persecution campaigns targeting Muslims in the West in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

An Arab film critic hailed the two movies as “a way more effective than bullets to expose the unjust practices” perpetrated by some Western governments against their Muslim communities.

Scottish movie “Yasmin”, directed by Kenny Glenaan, blamed the “racism” of British authorities in dealing with Muslims after the 9/11 attacks as the main reason for many young British Muslims joining Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups.

“Private”, an Italian film directed by Saverio Costanzo, featured the detentions and killing of children and women, in addition to other repressive practices by the Israeli occupation army against the Palestinians, as the main driving force behind Palestinian attacks.

Identity Crisis

The events of “Yasmin” take place in a Scottish city, centering around the life of a Muslim family -- of a Pakistani origin – whose widower head owns a store for fixing TV and radio sets, while posing as a mosque imam at the same time.

The father lives with his son “Nasser”, while his daughter “Yasmin” lives at another house in the same street with her husband, who is also a relative of the family.

The film depicts both Nasser and Yasmin as an example of the second Muslim generation in the West, living a deep identity crisis and torn apart between two contradicting principles.

The first is an Islamic one, represented in a pious father, the second is represented in the culture and habits of Western society that seems to give little consideration to the rules of religious ethics.

That crisis was clearly reflected in the duplicate behavior of both Nasser and Yasmin, with the latter appearing in her hijab and living a traditional conservative Muslim life among her family, while taking off her hijab and following Western traditions among her workmates.

The film highlights how the violent attitude of British security and judicial authorities, coupled with the racist anti-Muslim tendency that gripped British society after 9/11 have haunted Nasser and Yasmin.

They are left with the impression that the country where they were born and grew up (Scotland) still views them as Muslim migrants, posing a risk to its security and stability.

The film ends with Yasmin going to the mosque to pray, while Nasser migrates to Afghanistan to join a militant group, stressing his next destination would be occupied Palestine.

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[ The march toward dhimmitude continues ]

lgf: More Dhimmitude by the Dutch

2005-02-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

lgf: Iran is Laughing at the West

OT - More Dhimmitude by the Dutch -

link from the Netherlands, in Dutch, described as -

In the Netherlands the national flag is now banned on most schools. If a student wears the national flag of his own country he will be suspended or expelled from school. The reason for this is that this provokes the immigrants (the muslims) and therefore it is considered discrimination if you wear your country's flag in your own country. Even people who have an bumpersticker whit the flag on their car are harassed and called a facist by the Muslims. Most schools also ban certain clothing like the Lonsdale brand and combat boots with white or red laces. This is also concidered a sign of racism.

There are of course no restrictions for the immigrants on clothing. "

[ I have no way to verify this personally as I don't speak Dutch. Here's the link to the original: http://www.telegraaf.nl/binnenland/17755231/Vlagverbod_is_wijdverspreid.html so take this with a dose of skepticism ]

The New York Times: Militant Imams Under Scrutiny Across Europe

2005-02-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

Militant Imams Under Scrutiny Across Europe

By DON VAN NATTA Jr.
and LOWELL BERGMAN

Published: January 25, 2005

LONDON, Jan. 24 - In nightly sermons broadcast on the Internet, Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a 46-year-old Syrian-born cleric, has urged young Muslim men all over the world to support the Iraq insurgency on the front line of "the global jihad," investigators say.

He struck a similarly defiant tone this month at a rally attended by 500 people at a central London meeting hall, where a giant screen behind him showed images of the World Trade Center falling. "Allah akbar!" - "God is great" - some audience members shouted at the images.

After eavesdropping for months on his nightly praise of the Sept. 11 hijackers and of suicide bombings, Scotland Yard said last week that it was investigating Sheik Omar, the leader of Al Muhajiroun, Britain's largest Muslim group, and officials are exploring whether they can deport him. "We're fed up with him," said a senior British official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He needs to be stopped, or he needs to go."

The more aggressive approach toward Sheik Omar is part of an increasing effort to monitor and restrict militant imams in Britain and across Europe. Authorities have stepped up surveillance of militant mosques in several countries, including Germany and France. French officials deported an imam this month after officials said he was inspiring men to join the jihad.

One major concern, officials say, is that more heated religious rhetoric is encouraging young men to leave home to fight in Iraq.

Although the dimensions of the recruitment effort from Europe to Iraq are not clear, there are indications that it is intensifying.

On Sunday, the German police arrested a man suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda and charged him with recruiting men to carry out suicide bombings in Iraq. These arrests were part of an ongoing investigation in cooperation with the United States of recruitment and other terrorist activities in Europe. A senior German official said he was certain there would be additional arrests of militants inside the country who have set up sophisticated recruitment and smuggling networks that lead to Iraq.

Italian investigators say several recruits from Italy carried out bombing attacks in Baghdad. Swiss officials say they are concerned that several militant clerics have openly urged men to become terrorists. And in Jordan, senior officials say they have recently arrested several dozen men who intended to cross the Iraqi border to serve as foreign fighters.

Bohre Eddine Benvahia, the 33-year-old imam recently deported by France to Algeria, had urged young men in a working-class neighborhood of L'Ariane, outside Nice, to join jihad, French intelligence officials said.

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Expatica - Dutch Muslims find a voice - of reason?

2005-01-31T17:04:00.000-08:00

Expatica - Living in, moving to, or working in the Netherlands, plus Dutch news in English

Dutch Muslims find a voice - of reason?

The establishment of a political party to represent Muslims in the Netherlands is as welcome as it is overdue. But it also entails very real risks.

The announcement by columnist Mohammed Jabri that moves are afoot to launch a political party for Dutch Muslims by the beginning of summer should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed events in the Netherlands in recent years.

The Muslim Democratic Party (MDP) could be a real force for good if it plays a positive role. It should forthrightly defend aspects of Muslim life that are worth defending; help spread understanding and acceptance of Muslims among the native Dutch and vice versa; and perhaps most importantly, expose as a lie the convenient myth that Muslims are the root of all that is wrong or bad in the Netherlands today.

On the other hand, if the MDP fails to get off the ground, embroils itself in extremist rhetoric or suffers the internal disputes that have set the anti-immigration LPF on the way to an agonisingly slow self-destruction, the consequences would be terrible. Politics would be seen by many in the Muslim community as a dead-end, leaving imams and radical thugs to represent the community.

Already there are daily reports of young Muslim men — a minority, but an active one — in the major cities who look on the native Dutch as the enemy and fair game for crimes of theft. It is common for unveiled women, both Muslim and native Dutch, in parts of Amsterdam to be branded "whores" and "sluts" by self-righteous Muslims.

But giving Muslims a real voice on the political stage — and who knows, perhaps a seat at the Cabinet table — would go a long way to helping Muslims to look on Dutch society as their society also.

A Muslim party would have real potential: there are an estimated one million Muslims in the Netherlands and the number is growing.

[ The European march to dhimmitude continues apace. Godspeed Holland! (err, that's Allahspeed in Dutch) ]

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International News Article | Reuters.com

2005-01-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

Islamists Arrested in Paris Planned France Attacks

Fri Jan 28, 2005 2:48 PM ET

By Thierry Leveque

PARIS (Reuters) - Suspected Islamists arrested by secret service agents in Paris this week were plotting terrorist attacks on French and foreign targets in the country, the Paris public prosecutor's office said on Friday. Anti-terrorism magistrates are to prosecute three of the 11 people detained in a series of swoops in a northern district of the French capital on Monday and Tuesday, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.

The others have been released or will be shortly.

'This network is suspected of drawing up plans for attacks in France against French and foreign interests,' said the prosecutor's office in a statement. It did not elaborate.

The prosecutor's office confirmed two people had been charged with association with criminals engaged in a terrorist enterprise. They were to be remanded in custody later on Friday.

A third was to be questioned on Saturday by the anti-terrorism judges leading the investigation, Jean-Louis Bruguiere and Jean-Francois Richard.

Intelligence services believe the trio were part of an 'Iraq network' recruiting guerrillas to fight U.S.-led forces. Officials said the network had now been dismantled.

Anti-terrorism experts fear Iraq, like Afghanistan in the 1980s, will attract Islamic militants bent on resorting to political violence once they return home.

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Quelling Racist Murder in France - January 28, 2005 - The New York Sun

2005-01-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

Quelling Racist Murder in France - January 28, 2005 - The New York Sun

Quelling Racist Murder in France

BY NIDRA POLLER - Special to the Sun
January 28, 2005

The murder of Sebastien Selam, one of the most popular DJs in France, has been widely ignored. Sebastien lived with his widowed mother in a modest but comfortable low-rent apartment building in the 10th arrondissement, a half hour from the Place de la Republique. In November 2003, during the month of Ramadan, Sebastien was murdered by a neighbor, Adel Boumedienne. The Selams are Jewish, of Algerian origin; the Boumediennes are Muslims from Morocco. Relations between Jews and Muslims in the neighborhood, which had been normal or even cordial, radically deteriorated in the fall of 2000.There were incidents, anti-Semitic graffiti, ominous signs of violent hostility. And yet Sebastien let Adel get into his car as he was going into the underground garage to park. There, Adel slashed Sebastien's throat almost severing his head, and mutilated his face beyond recognition with a carving fork. The coroner states in his report that he had never seen such severe mutilation in all his decades of practice.

Aside from a brief article filled with factual errors in the tabloid Le Parisien and an equally incompetent article in a Jewish weekly paper, there was hardly any press coverage of the Selam murder. When Israeli photographer Avi Rosen, who was in Paris at the time, heard what happened to the DJ, he immediately recognized the hallmarks of ritual murder. He took photos of the crime scene, interviewed the Selam family, and has stood by them ever since in their almost hopeless efforts to bring the murderer to justice and expose the true nature of the crime not only for the honor of Sebastien, but to warn others of the danger that confronts them.

Adel's mother saw her son take the carving knife and fork from the kitchen; he came back a short time later, covered in blood, and told her, "I've killed my Jew, I can go to paradise." He told the police that he had no remorse, no regrets, because Allah told him to kill Sebastien. They transferred him from the police station to a general hospital and from there to a psychiatric hospital. As of this writing, the Selam family lawyer is playing his last card; he has one last chance to convince the court to open an investigation. If the request is denied, the case will be closed. No investigation, no arrest, no trial. The murderer will some day be released from the mental hospital. The Selam family is sentenced to a life of mourning.

Chantal Piekolek was murdered in her shoe store in the 17th arrondissement of Paris earlier that same November day. The murderer, a hardened criminal recently released from prison, stabbed her 25 times. He was quickly apprehended and jailed, but died of cancer before he could be put on trial. Piekolek, who was Jewish, was murdered by a Muslim. Did he know she was Jewish? If robbery was the motive, why did he stab her 25 times? The mystery died with him. But one day the press, including the Jewish press, may be asked to explain why they transformed a Jewish divorcee - who had recently taken over a store after her father died - into the Christian widow of a Jewish husband. Why? Were two Jewish murders in one day during the month of Ramadan too much to bear? Or too much to hide?

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[This is why Islam can NEVER be reformed. Christians go to hell for murder, Muslims go to heaven.]

Expatica - PM, Nato boss 'included on terror suspect's death list'

2005-01-28T13:19:00.000-08:00

Expatica - Living in, moving to, or working in the Netherlands, plus Dutch news in English

PM, Nato boss 'included on terror suspect's death list'

28 January 2005

AMSTERDAM — Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm were allegedly on a death list drawn up by suspected terrorist Jason W., who was arrested after a 14-hour stand-off with police in The Hague last November.

The stand-off developed after hand grenades were thrown at a specialist police unit moving in to arrest W. and another man.

Current affairs programme Nova reported on Thursday night that internet chat sessions indicated that W. was thinking about killing Balkenende and several other high-profile politicians. The chat sessions are part of the public prosecutor's evidence against the 19-year-old convert to Islam.

W., whose father is American and his mother Dutch, became a Muslim at the age of 14.

The names of Nato Secretary-General and former Dutch foreign minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer (who took over as Nato chief in January 2004), populist LPF MP Mat Herben and Liberal VVD MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali and "all the fake Muslims" on the board of management of Dutch Muslim broadcaster NMO were also allegedly on W.'s death list.

The names appeared in a chat session that W. was involved in on 19 September 2003, in which W. is said to have used the internet name Mujaheed. He chatted with another person identified as Galas. Parts of the chat session were broadcast by Nova on Thursday night.

The chat session files were found on W.'s computer in his home in the central Dutch city of Amersfoort on 17 October 2003 when he was arrested with several others on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack. The computer was seized by police, but the suspects were released eight days later and the case was dismissed.

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[ www.armenialiberty.org ] Wednesday 26, January 2005

2005-01-28T11:25:00.000-08:00

Turkey Wins Removal Of Armenian Genocide From German Schools

Turkey Wins Removal Of Armenian Genocide From German Schools

(dpa) - Pressure from Turkey has resulted in the removal of a reference to the Armenian genocide from a German school curriculum, reports said Wednesday.

The eastern German state of Brandenburg has eliminated half a sentence on the Armenians included in ninth and tenth grade history classes after a Turkish diplomat complained to state Prime Minister Matthias Platzeck, the newspaper Die Welt reported.

In a chapter entitled 'War, Technology and Civilian Populations' the school book text said 'for example, the genocide of the Armenians population of Anatolia.' That passage has now been removed from school textbooks, the newspaper said.

Platzeck met regularly with Turkish diplomats and was 'steeled' against their influence, the newspaper quoted him as saying. The prime minister added that genocide was too important an issue to be dealt with in just half a sentence. 'Brandenburg's curriculum was the only one in Germany which up until now included a reference to the murder of the Armenians,' said Die Welt.

Most historians say that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed in 1915 and 1916 under the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The Turkish government, which denies that a genocide took place, speaks of 200,000 dead.

A Turkish embassy spokesman in Berlin declined to comment directly on the report, but noted the initiative had come from the Turkish consulate responsible for Berlin and Brandenburg - not from the embassy itself.

Prime Minister Platzeck is a member of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD). Schroeder is a strong supporter of Turkey's bid to become a member of the European Union. Germany has almost two million resident Turks - the biggest Turkish minority in the EU.

Yahoo! News - France Worried About Terrorism at Home

2005-01-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! News - France Worried About Terrorism at Home

By JAMEY KEATEN, Associated Press Writer

France Worried About Terrorism at Home

PARIS - The ongoing violence in Iraq (news - web sites) "encourages terrorism," has created instability and has pushed some French youths toward holy war, France's defense minister said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie appeared eager to rebuild frayed French-U.S. ties, but expressed deep concern about the insurgency ahead of Sunday's election in Iraq.

She pointed to arrests this week of 11 French youths as part of an investigation into a network suspected of dispatching Islamic combatants from France to Iraq. One of the youths was later released.

"France cannot be satisfied with the situation in Iraq," she said in Thursday's interview. "What's happening in Iraq is bad for everyone. It encourages terrorism and creates a zone of instability that can spread."

Alliot-Marie expressed concern that the young French fighters "could one day carry out suicide attacks elsewhere ... that worries us." France itself could be targeted, she said.

France's DGSE spy agency, which works for the Defense Ministry, was active in helping counterintelligence agents ahead of the arrests, providing information on "routes of passage" to Iraq, the minister said.

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TCS: Tech Central Station - Where Have All the Children Gone?

2005-01-27T14:07:00.000-08:00

TCS: Tech Central Station - Where Have All the Children Gone?

"Go to any child-care store in Vienna. Its clients will be predominantly Arabic, Iranian, Pakistani, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Black African. Viennese women never bear children -- they cherish their figures and careers instead. The Western-European pension systems made the bringing up of children less advantageous than social climbing and maximization of income.

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Most Dutch see Muslims as a threat

2005-01-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

Most Dutch see Muslims as a threat

International news from swissinfo, the Swiss news platform

January 22, 2005 3:30 PM

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A large majority of Dutch people are afraid of Muslims, according to a poll taken after the murder
of a Dutch filmmaker critical of Islam.

The poll, conducted by TNS NIPO in The Netherlands, as well as in Spain and Italy, since the November murder of Dutch
filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a suspected radical Islamist, showed only 19 percent of Dutch people do not see the presence
of Muslims in the country as a threat.

Home to almost 1 million Muslims or 6 percent of the population, The Netherlands' reputation for tolerance and social
harmony has been shattered by the murder and a wave of attacks on mosques and churches and death threats against
politicians.

Racial tensions surfaced again this week after a Dutch woman killed a youth with Moroccan roots after he stole her bag.

Highlights of the poll, to be launched formally on Monday, were published by De Volkskrant daily on Saturday.

The newspaper said the results were surprising given that Spain and Italy were much more frequently confronted with illegal
immigration of Muslims from North Africa than the Dutch.

The survey showed 67 percent of Dutch people had no contact with Muslims and 65 percent hardly know anything about
Islam in spite of broad coverage in the media.

Those who see Muslims as a threat say they are afraid they will eventually have to live under Islamic religious rules. Those
living outside big cities, women and the well educated were more likely to have negative views, the newspaper said.

Half the Dutch polled said they would move house if their neighbourhood became more dominated by immigrants and the
same proportion said they were afraid women would no longer be able to move about freely in public because of Muslims.

Yahoo! News - Germany to Deport Hundreds of Islamists - Magazine

2005-01-22T15:30:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! News - Germany to Deport Hundreds of Islamists - Magazine

Germany to Deport Hundreds of Islamists

Sat Jan 22,11:10 AM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) - German officials are drawing up lists of hundreds of Islamic militants to be deported from the country under a new law making expulsions easier, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel said on Saturday.

Der Spiegel said authorities were already using their powers under an immigration law introduced this month in conducting an operation dubbed 'Aktion Kehraus' ('Action Sweep Out').

The Interior Ministry declined to comment on the report beyond saying that deportations were a matter for Germany's 16 federal states.

Under new rules, potential deportees will not be able to use normal legal channels to challenge an expulsion order. A special panel of the Federal Administrative Court will be responsible, with no right of appeal.

Der Spiegel said judges were expected to deal with up to 2,000 cases per year.

Since the revelations in 2001 that Arab students who had lived for years in Hamburg led the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Germans have questioned their liberal laws under which some suspected militants even draw welfare benefits.

Interior Minister Otto Schily has suggested that evidence of training at an al Qaeda camp should be clear grounds for expelling a foreign national. Distributing videos calling for 'holy war' could also be punished the same way.

"

Bag thief death fans Dutch racial tensions - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

2005-01-21T22:37:00.000-08:00

Bag thief death fans Dutch racial tensions - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

Bag thief death fans Dutch racial tensions

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The death of a man with Moroccan roots who was run over by a woman after he stole her bag has inflamed Dutch racial tensions that have smouldered since the murder of a filmmaker critical of Islam.

Several hundred people, including many Moroccans, marched on Friday from the site in an immigrant neighbourhood in Amsterdam where the 19-year-old died on Monday. The woman whose bag he stole drove her car into his moped, crushing him against a tree.

The friends and family of the youth, named by the media as Ali El Bejjati, say his death was a racially motivated murder. Two months ago, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in the same district, allegedly by a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan.

The story has been front-page news all week in the Netherlands, home to about one million Muslims, more than a quarter of Moroccan descent. De Telegraaf daily said on Friday it was the man's own fault.

Geert Wilders, an anti-immigration politician whose popularity has soared since Van Gogh was murdered, called for the government to strip criminals with dual citizenship of their Dutch nationality.

'Arresting the woman makes the victim the criminal and the criminal a victim. It's turning the world on its head,' he said.

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Muslim group targets poster nudity

2005-01-21T22:31:00.000-08:00

Muslim group targets poster nudity - Britain

Muslim group targets poster nudity
By Nicola Woolcock

Activists are getting bolder in a campaign of vandalising adverts that display naked flesh

BILLBOARD adverts featuring partial nudity are being defaced by Muslim activists who are offended by displays of flesh.

The advertising watchdog has confirmed that increasing numbers of posters are being torn down or painted over in predominantly Islamic areas.

A website giving advice on how to vandalise billboards and listing potential targets has been set up by a group calling themselves Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD).

The campaign has gathered momentum since the Advertising Standards Authority banned an underwear advert from being sited near mosques.

Advertisements for perfume, hair dye, bras and television programmes are among those that have been attacked. Photographs of semi-dressed women are the most frequently targeted, with the offending body parts painted over or ripped off.

A poster advertising the Channel 4 programme Desperate Housewives is the most recent target; the images of two scantily-clad actresses have been torn from an East London billboard but three fully-dressed characters were left intact. Adverts bearing Dove’s “Real Women” adverts — six ordinary women pictured in their underwear — were painted over at several locations last year.

MAAD, based in Birmingham, gives an index of defaced adverts in the city, including Levi’s, Wonderbra, PaddyPower, a radio station and a strip club. It says on its website that it believes in “direct action” and “has paint and isn’t afraid to use it”, adding: “There is no longer any need to cringe as you walk past a sleazy poster, we’ll improve it.”

Advice on how to attack posters is also given: “The procedures outlined here are based on our six months’ experience of executing poster attacks professionally, safely and without injury or arrest.

“A paint roller, a blithe spirit and a balmy night are all you really need.

“After choosing your board, be sure to inspect it both during the day and at night. Take note of all activities in the area. Who is about at 2am? How visible will you be?

“Bring a camera — it’s a good cover for doing anything you’re not supposed to. Check your escape routes.

“For work on larger boards we recommend walkie-talkies . . . the ground crew should monitor oncoming traffic and maintain radio contact with the lookout on the board.”

The ASA told Triumph to remove its advert for Sloggi thongs from a billboard near a mosque in Bury, after complaints and a petition.

One Muslim reportedly complained that it was “insulting” and constituted “environmental pollution”.

An advert for hair dye, which showed a woman peering into her bikini bottoms, was painted over by Muslims in Luton. A spokesman said the poster would be “extremely offensive” to a Muslim man if he passed it on his way to prayers.

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The Scotsman - International - Self-doubt leaves French feeling down in the mouth

2005-01-21T21:51:00.000-08:00

The Scotsman - International - Self-doubt leaves French feeling down in the mouth

Self-doubt leaves French feeling down in the mouth

SUSAN BELL
IN PARIS

IT IS official: the French are a nation of depressed pessimists, wracked with self-doubt and unable to see a positive future.

This gloomy portrait of the current state of Gallic morale - or rather the lack of it - was made public yesterday in a damning report by France’s prefects, the country’s top administrators.

"The French no longer believe in anything," the report said. "That is the reason that the situation is relatively calm, for they believe that it is not even worthwhile expressing their opinions or trying to be heard any more."

The country’s 100 prefects went on to use the words "lifelessness", "resignation", "anxiety" and "pessimism" to describe the attitudes they believe prevail in France today.

The report, which is dated December 2004 but has only just been made public, would appear to be contradicted by the three days of strikes launched by public sector workers this week.

However, analysts point to the fact that disillusionment and apathy are so great that not even France’s formerly powerful unions were able to predict the turnout for the strike. Opinion polls show that 65 per cent of the French support the strikers, leading observers to say that the country is showing its discontent by proxy via the strikers.

"It’s a fact: France and the French are pessimists," said Alain Duhamel, a respected French commentator.

He said: "The French doubt themselves and worry about the future. They do so more than the citizens of neighbouring countries, even when those neighbouring countries are doing less well than we are and have a more negative future ahead.

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Stop playing victim, Forum tells Moroccans - Expatica

2005-01-21T21:41:00.000-08:00

Stop playing victim, Forum tells Moroccans - Expatica

Stop playing victim, Forum tells Moroccans

21 January 2005

AMSTERDAM — As mourners marched on Friday to commemorate the death of a Moroccan man during an alleged bag snatch, multicultural institute Forum urged Moroccan immigrants in Amsterdam to stop portraying themselves as victims.

Forum spokesman Halim el Madkouri said Moroccans are not victims and should stop blaming the rest of Dutch society for everything, newspaper De Volkskrant reported.

His comments came after El B. was killed on Monday night after he and an accomplice allegedly stole a bag from a woman's car. The motorist reversed her car to try and reclaim the bag, but collided with the mens' scooter and crushed the victim up against a tree.

Outrage
erupted in Amsterdam East around the scene of El B.'s death as many people from the immigrant community claimed that the 43-year-old woman killed the 19-year-old on purpose. They claim it was evidence that Moroccans are victims of serious injustice in the Netherlands.

"Nonsense, of course, because the woman who crashed into him did not really think: 'Hey, a Moroccan. I'm going to kill him'. Moroccans are in a vicious circle of frustration and dissatisfaction. They continually feel they are a victim," El Madkouri said.

A spokesman for the Koepelorganisatie van Marokkaanse Moskeeën (a Moroccan mosque association) blamed the emotional outbursts by Moroccans after El B.'s death on negative publicity in the media.

"But some of them have contributed to this picture themselves. It is time Moroccans looked into the mirror and recognised their own faults," he said.

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