MP3: 30-Minute Seg­ment
REALAUDIO
NB: This RealAu­dio stream con­tains FTRs 662 and 663 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute seg­ment.

Con­tin­u­ing For The Record’s exam­i­na­tion of attempts at dis­cred­it­ing Pres­i­dent Obama, the broad­cast exam­ines sin­is­ter Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ele­ments involved with “mod­er­ate” Mus­lim out­reach to the Pres­i­dent. Some of these indi­vid­u­als fig­ured in the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. After not­ing econ­o­mist and colum­nist Paul Krugman’s opin­ion that the GOP is adamantly opposed to a “new New Deal,” the pro­gram high­lights sin­is­ter fore­shad­ow­ing of dev­as­tat­ing ter­ror­ist inci­dents “on Obama’s watch.” As noted by a for­mer Bush speech­writer and for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney (who recently pre­dicted a nuclear or bio­log­i­cal ter­ror­ist inci­dent dur­ing the next five years), such an occur­rence would min­i­mize the Democ­rats’ elec­toral chances for many years to come. It would be fool­ish to dis­miss the pos­si­bil­ity that the GOP would love to see just such an occur­rence. In light of the links between the GOP and ele­ments of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, the pos­si­bil­ity that such an inci­dent might be aided and/or abet­ted by Under­ground Reich ele­ments within the Repub­li­can Party should also be seri­ously considered.

The bulk of the pro­gram con­sists of analy­sis of a very impor­tant arti­cle indi­cat­ing that GOP-connected Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ele­ments are the so-called “mod­er­ates” reach­ing out to Obama. A “mod­er­ate” involved with the AMCE is Abubaker Ahmed al-Shingieti, an assis­tant to Pres­i­dent Omar al-Bashir, the geno­ci­dal head of Sudan’s Mus­lim Broth­er­hood gov­ern­ment. Two of his assis­tants are Jamar [al] Barz­inji and Yaqub Mirza, both cen­trally involved with the milieu that was tar­geted by the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. George W. Bush and Mus­lim Broth­er­hood asso­ciate Talat Oth­man inter­ceded on behalf of those tar­gets, raided for financ­ing Hamas, al-Qaeda and Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad.

If Obama aids and abets these peo­ple, he and the Demo­c­ra­tic Party will be thor­oughly dis­cred­ited if the U.S. is struck by another major major ter­ror inci­dent, as is being fore­shad­owed by Cheney et al.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood links to the head­scarf inci­dent; review of the Talat Othman/George Bush/Operation Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002; review of the links between the Mus­lim Stu­dents Asso­ci­a­tion and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood; review of the links between the MSA branch impli­cated in the head­scarf inci­dent and Hizb ut-Tahrir; review of the oper­a­tional links betwee  Hizb ut-Tahrir and the NPD, the top Ger­man neo-Nazi party.

1. The pro­gram begins by under­scor­ing a com­ment made by Nobel-prize win­ning econ­o­mist Paul Krugman:

“As the debate over Pres­i­dent Obama’s eco­nomic stim­u­lus plan gets under way, one thing is cer­tain: many of the plan’s oppo­nents aren’t argu­ing in good faith. Con­ser­v­a­tives really, really don’t want to see a sec­ond New Deal, and they cer­tainly don’t want to see gov­ern­ment activism vin­di­cated. So they are reach­ing for any stick they can find with which to beat pro­pos­als for increased gov­ern­ment spending. . . .”

“Bad Faith Eco­nom­ics” by Paul Krug­man; New York Times; 1/26/2009; p. A21.

2. More omi­nous is the fore­shad­ow­ing of a major ter­ror­ist inci­dent by a Repub­li­can critic.

” . . . The most insid­i­ous line of attack involves lay­ing the ground­work for blam­ing the new pres­i­dent in the event of a ter­ror­ist attack.

In a remark­ably par­ti­san op-ed piece in the Wash­ing­ton Post last Thurs­day, Marc A. Thiessen, who was a speech­writer for for­mer pres­i­dent George W. Bush, declared flatly: ‘If Obama weak­ens any of the defenses Bush put in place and ter­ror­ists strike our coun­try again, Amer­i­cans will hold Obama respon­si­ble — and the Demo­c­ra­tic Party could find itself une­lec­table for a generation.’

This is dan­ger­ous, both sub­stan­tively and polit­i­cally, and it sug­gests that some of Bush’s loy­al­ists will con­tinue to politi­cize issues related to ter­ror­ism in their efforts to vin­di­cate the for­mer president’s legacy. . . .”

“Repub­li­cans Bet­ting on Obama’s Fail­ure” by E.J. Dionne; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 1/26/2009; p. B5.

3. The above pre­dic­tion was com­pounded and embell­ished by Dick Cheney.

“In an inter­view two weeks after leav­ing office, for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney pre­dicted a ‘high prob­a­bil­ity’ of a nuclear or bio­log­i­cal attack in the next few years and said the Obama admin­is­tra­tion was approach­ing a ‘tough, mean, dirty, nasty busi­ness’ of keep­ing the coun­try safe from ter­ror­ists too timidly.

Mr. Cheney sin­gled out Mr. Obama’s deci­sion to close the deten­tion facil­ity at Guan­tá­namo Bay, Cuba, and to ban coer­cive inter­ro­ga­tion meth­ods as changes in course that could make the coun­try more vulnerable.

He also sought to jus­tify the Bush ter­ror­ist sur­veil­lance pro­gram and the antiter­ror­ism leg­is­la­tion called the USA Patriot Act. . . .”

“Cheney Pre­dicts ‘Prob­a­bil­ity’ of Attack” by Michael Fal­cone; The New York Times; 2/5/2008; p. A21.

4. The bulk of the pro­gram con­sists of analy­sis of a very impor­tant arti­cle indi­cat­ing that GOP-connected Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ele­ments are the so-called “mod­er­ates” reach­ing out to Obama.

“In the 1990s, the extrem­ist Mus­lim Broth­er­hood gov­ern­ment of Sudan, led by Pres­i­dent Omar al-Bashir, was con­tin­u­ing a geno­ci­dal jihad against the Chris­t­ian and ani­mist pop­u­la­tions inhab­it­ing the south of the coun­try that killed nearly two mil­lion peo­ple and forced another four mil­lion from their homes. In July 2008, Bashir was indicted by the Inter­na­tional Crim­i­nal Court for war crimes related to the regime’s sub­se­quent geno­cide in Darfur.

As Bashir was wag­ing his holo­caust against the Chris­tians dur­ing the 1990s, one of his clos­est advi­sors and top aides was Abubaker Ahmed al-Shingieti, who from 1993 to 1995 served as spokesman for Bashir’s gov­ern­ment (as he was iden­ti­fied in a 1994 New York Times arti­cle). Accord­ing to al-Shingieti’s own pub­lished résumé, he later served Bashir as direc­tor of pub­lic affairs for the pres­i­dency from 1995 to 1998, as the geno­ci­dal jihad against the Chris­tians was at its height and Sudan was the hub of the inter­na­tional Islamic ter­ror net­work. As reported by the New York Times, eight indi­vid­u­als charged in the New York land­marks bomb­ing plot in 1993 were trav­el­ing on Sudanese passports.

As a result of those arrests, Sudan was added to the U.S. State Depart­ment list of state spon­sors of ter­ror­ism in August 1993. That was not long after al-Shingieti’s boss began shel­ter­ing Osama bin Laden, who lived in Khar­toum from 1992 to 1996. With the close advi­sory role that bin Laden had with the Sudanese pres­i­dent and other high-ranking offi­cials, it is highly likely that al-Shingieti would have had reg­u­lar direct con­tact with bin Laden, as well as a host of other ter­ror­ist lead­ers who reg­u­larly vis­ited Khar­toum dur­ing al-Shingieti’s tenure.

This is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant as al-Shingieti will be head­ing the U.S. Mus­lim out­reach to the Obama admin­is­tra­tion as the pres­i­dent of Amer­i­can Mus­lims for Con­struc­tive Engage­ment (AMCE), a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort by U.S.-based Mus­lim Broth­er­hood front orga­ni­za­tions to infil­trate our fed­eral gov­ern­ment. A recent open let­ter signed by al-Shingieti iden­ti­fies him as AMCE’s pres­i­dent. The group states its vision as:

The United States Mus­lim com­mu­nity and the United States gov­ern­ment work­ing together con­struc­tively in enhanc­ing national secu­rity and national inter­ests of the United States of America.

The lead orga­ni­za­tion in AMCE, the Inter­na­tional Insti­tute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), which al-Shingieti serves as regional direc­tor, is the cur­rent focus of a fed­eral grand jury probe into ter­ror­ist financ­ing. At least two other AMCE groups, the Coun­cil on American-Islamic Rela­tions (CAIR) and the Islamic Soci­ety of North Amer­ica (ISNA), were named by fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors as unin­dicted co-conspirators in the recent Holy Land Foun­da­tion ter­ror­ism finance trial, which resulted in con­vic­tions on all 108 counts. And the Mus­lim Amer­i­can Soci­ety (MAS) was iden­ti­fied in fed­eral court briefs by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice as ‘the overt arm of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in America.’. . .”

“Geno­cide Hench­man Lead­ing Mus­lim Out­reach to Obama” by Patrick Poole; Paja­mas Media; 1/22/2009.

5. In addi­tion to al-Shingieti, the AMCE fea­tures Jamal al-Barzinji and Yaqub Mirza, two of the key fig­ures in the SAAR net­work and the milieu tar­geted by the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002.

” . . . And doc­u­ments received this past August by the Inves­tiga­tive Project through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request revealed that AMCE steer­ing com­mit­tee mem­ber Jamal al-Barzinji and AMCE advi­sory coun­cil mem­ber Yacub Mirza were listed in FBI memos as ‘mem­bers and lead­ers of the Ikhwan’, which is the Ara­bic term for the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity senior agent David Kane has tes­ti­fied in a fed­eral court affi­davit that ‘Barz­inji is not only closely asso­ci­ated with PIJ [Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad], but also with Hamas.’

A Decem­ber 2002 Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle relates some addi­tional infor­ma­tion about the ter­ror­ist con­nec­tions of AMCE advi­sory coun­cil mem­ber Yacub Mirza:

Accord­ing to court records and Jus­tice Depart­ment doc­u­ments, Mr. Mirza and sev­eral asso­ciates are sus­pected of fund­ing the Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad, which tar­gets Israeli civil­ians with sui­cide bombers. U.S. offi­cials pri­vately say Mr. Mirza and his asso­ciates also have con­nec­tions to al-Qaeda and to other enti­ties offi­cially listed by the U.S. as spon­sors of terrorism.

Another FBI memo obtained by the Inves­tiga­tive Project states that al-Shingieti’s orga­ni­za­tion, IIIT, was one of the “Ikhwan orga­ni­za­tions” that “are involved in orga­niz­ing polit­i­cal sup­port which involves influ­enc­ing both pub­lic opin­ion in the United States as well as the United States gov­ern­ment.” This polit­i­cal influ­ence cam­paign was con­sid­ered the first phase in a plan “to insti­tute the Islamic rev­o­lu­tion in the United States,” accord­ing to the FBI document.

It is appro­pri­ate to revisit these exten­sive con­tacts between AMCE mem­ber orga­ni­za­tions and offi­cials and the inter­na­tional Mus­lim Broth­er­hood net­work, and even activ­ity by AMCE lead­ers in sup­port of Islamic ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, because another Mus­lim Broth­er­hood strate­gic doc­u­ment entered into evi­dence by fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors in the Holy Land Foun­da­tion trial revealed that the activ­ity of these orga­ni­za­tions in the U.S. is part of a “grand jihad” to destroy the West from within:

The process of set­tle­ment is a “civilization-jihadist process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must under­stand that their work in Amer­ica is a kind of grand jihad in elim­i­nat­ing and destroy­ing the West­ern civ­i­liza­tion from within and “sab­o­tag­ing” its mis­er­able house by their hands and the hands of the believ­ers so that it is elim­i­nated and God’s reli­gion is made vic­to­ri­ous over all other religions.

These con­nec­tions and the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s stated goal of wag­ing a “grand jihad” inside the U.S. raise par­tic­u­lar con­cerns con­sid­er­ing state­ments reported by the Wall Street Jour­nal made by al-Shingieti’s cur­rent boss, Jamal al-Barzinji, at a fall 2001 Orga­ni­za­tion of Islamic Con­fer­ence meet­ing in Qatar, brag­ging how he and his asso­ciates had suc­cess­fully infil­trated Washington:

At this time, the pres­i­dent and his admin­is­tra­tion are con­tin­u­ally seek­ing the coun­sel and input of Amer­i­can Mus­lim lead­ers. At no other time has the Mus­lim com­mu­nity in Amer­ica been more effec­tive in rela­tion to the processes of Amer­i­can government.

When con­sid­er­ing the con­certed and exten­sive effort by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood to infil­trate the U.S. gov­ern­ment, we can gain insight into how Abubaker al-Shingieti has tran­si­tioned from being a top offi­cial in the geno­ci­dal Sudanese Mus­lim Broth­er­hood regime, to a top offi­cial in the U.S.-based Mus­lim Broth­er­hood net­work, to lead­ing the U.S. Mus­lim community’s out­reach to the Obama admin­is­tra­tion as the head of Amer­i­can Mus­lims for Con­struc­tive Engagement. . . .”

Idem.

6. Some back­ground on Barz­inji, Mirza and the raids of 3/20/2002–the meet­ing was one of inter­ces­sion on behalf of the indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions tar­geted by the raids. Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Paul O’Neill–the focal point of the intercession–was dis­missed roughly at the end of 2002.

“Among the Mus­lim lead­ers attend­ing [the meet­ing with O’Neill] was Talat Oth­man, a long­time asso­ciate and sup­porter of Pres­i­dent Bush’s fam­ily, who gave a bene­dic­tion at the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion in Philadel­phia in August 2000. . .But he also serves [with Barz­inji] on the board of Amana Mutual funds Trust, an invest­ment firm founded by M. Yac­qub Mirza, the North­ern Vir­ginia busi­ness­man who set up most of the enti­ties tar­geted by the Trea­sury and whose tax records were sought in the raid.

(”O’Neill Met Mus­lim Activists Tied to Char­i­ties” by Glenn R. Simp­son [with Roger Thurow]; Wall Street Jour­nal; 4/18/2002; p. A4.)

7. This milieu is part of the Norquist/Rove/Islamist nexus in the GOP.

“The case also high­lights con­flicts between the Bush administration’s domes­tic polit­i­cal goals and its war on ter­ror. GOP offi­cials began court­ing the U.S. Mus­lim com­mu­nity intensely in the late 1990’s, seek­ing to add that eth­nic bloc to the party’s polit­i­cal base.”

(Idem.)

8. The Amana orga­ni­za­tion headed by Mirza has numer­ous areas of over­lap with orga­ni­za­tions described as being impli­cated in ter­ror­ism and the milieu of Al Queda.

“Two non­prof­its affil­i­ated with Mr. Mirza and named in the search war­rant, the SAAR Foun­da­tion Inc. and the Her­itage Edu­ca­tion Trust Inc., held large blocks of shares in Amana’s mutual funds in 1997, accord­ing to SEC records. The SEC doc­u­ments and other records detail­ing con­nec­tions between Mr. Oth­man and the Islamic Insti­tute [on the board of which Mr. Oth­man serves] and the raided groups were com­piled by the National Secu­rity News Ser­vice, a Wash­ing­ton based non­profit research group.”

(Idem.)

9. Fur­ther details have emerged about the links between Al Taqwa and the GOP/Bush administration.

“Mr. Oth­man also is on the board of Mr. Saffuri’s [and Norquist’s] Islamic Insti­tute, the GOP-leaning group that received $20,000.00 from the Safa Trust, one of the raid’s tar­gets. The pres­i­dent of the Safa Trust, Jamal Barz­inji, is a for­mer busi­ness asso­ciate of Switzer­land based investor Youssef Nada, whose assets were frozen last fall after the Trea­sury des­ig­nated him a per­son sus­pected of giv­ing aid to terrorists.”

(Idem.)

10. Talat Oth­man is part of the slum­lord milieu with which Obama was asso­ci­ated in Chicago. Oth­man is also very close to George Bush.

“Mr. Oth­man has ties to the Bush fam­ily going back to the 1980’s, when he served with George W. Bush on the board of a Texas petro­leum firm, Harken Oil & Gas Inc. Mr. Oth­man has vis­ited the White House dur­ing the admin­is­tra­tions of both Pres­i­dent Bush and his father George H.W. Bush.”

(Idem.)

11. Clos­ing with review from FTR #656. Dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, Obama was obstructed by an inci­dent in which Mus­lim women wear­ing the tra­di­tional head­scarves were asked to leave the stage. As it devel­oped, the women both belonged to the Mus­lim Stu­dents Asso­ci­a­tion, a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood front orga­ni­za­tion. One of the women in ques­tion, Shi­maa Abdelfadeel, worked on behalf of Sami al-Arian, the North Amer­i­can head of Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad, a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood ter­ror­ist group. Note that al-Arian (whom Mr. Emory refers to as “Sammy the Aryan”) was an ardent sup­porter of George W. Bush dur­ing the 2000 cam­paign. It was the inves­ti­ga­tion into Sammy the Aryan that led to the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of March 20, 2002. Those raids exposed the link between the GOP and Bush admin­is­tra­tion ele­ments involved with the slum­lord milieu of which Obama is a part. As noted above, both Barz­inji and Mirza were focal points of the Green Quest investigation.

“LSA Senior Shi­maa Abdelfadeel is mail­ing some­thing other than fruit­cakes this hol­i­day season.

Abdelfadeel, polit­i­cal chair of the University’s Mus­lim Stu­dents’ Asso­ci­a­tion, has col­lected about 20 let­ters of sup­port to send to Sami Al-Arian, an out­spo­ken pro-Palestinian activist and for­mer engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of South Florida.

Fed­eral author­i­ties jailed Al-Arian in 2003 on charges that he sup­ported a cell of Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad, a ter­ror­ist group linked to the deaths of Israelis in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Cur­rently, Al-Arian is in a Florida jail. . . .”

“Stu­dents Sup­port Embat­tled Prof” by Kelly Fraser; The Michi­gan Daily; 12/12/2005.

12. Even more impor­tant for our analy­sis of the head­scarf inci­dent is the fact that the MSA branch at U. of Michigan/Dearborn was largely con­trolled by vio­lent, fascis­tic Mus­lims, who attacked and bru­tal­ized MSA mem­bers who opposed their agenda. Note that the fol­low­ing inci­dent took place in 2004. Hebba Aref was in charge of Dawah in 2002–2003. Note what was con­sid­ered the norm at the MSA’s branch at U. of M. at Dearborn.

“Farhan Latif always knew it was only a mat­ter of time before the slow-burning anger would erupt. His con­ser­v­a­tive Mus­lim ene­mies had made their inten­tions clear to him. They had sent threat­en­ing e-mails and left men­ac­ing mes­sages on his cell phone. In their eyes, Farhan’s ideas were crim­i­nal. The West­ern world might call him a mod­er­ate Mus­lim, but his foes thought he was an apos­tate, lur­ing young Mus­lims away from the faith.

The day Farhan feared came in Sep­tem­ber 2004. As he was about to enter his mod­ern apart­ment in Dear­born, about one mile from his uni­ver­sity, three young men jumped him and pushed him to the ground. They beat and kicked him with­out say­ing a word. Farhan recog­nied one of his attackers–the guy did not bother to hide his face under a mask. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Farhan cried, try­ing to shield his face from their blows.

The attack­ers did not reply. Within min­utes, they got back into their car and tried to run Farhan over before they sped away. He man­aged to avoid the oncom­ing wheels by rolling away just in time.

As he rested in the hos­pi­tal, nurs­ing a swollen head, sev­eral cracked ribs and a bro­ken arm, Farhan was depressed more than shocked over the beat­ing. it was one thing to endure the daily blows from the non-Muslims who crit­i­cized Islam. But now he was in a bat­tle with his fel­low believ­ers. ‘I fight against every­thing peo­ple say against my reli­gion every day, on tele­vi­sion, on the radio, every­where,’ Farhan remarked, reflect­ing on the inci­dent later. ‘I was not so much scared when this hap­pened but sad that fel­low Mus­lims would do this.’

Months before the attack, in the spring of 2004, Farhan was elected pres­i­dent of the Mus­lim Stu­dents’ Asso­ci­a­tion at the Uni­vesity of Michigan’s Dear­born cam­pus. In a short time, he rev­o­lu­tion­ized the asso­ci­a­tion, mak­ing it more attrac­tive to a major­ity of Mus­lim stu­dents on campus–many of whom had refused to join when the con­ser­v­a­tives were in charge. [Ital­ics are mine–DE].

Farhan and the new lead­ers decided there would no longer be rad­i­cal imams unleash­ing hate speech at Fri­day prayers. All lec­tur­ers would be required to fol­low cer­tain rules. They lifted the ban that pre­vented women with­out head­scarves from join­ing the asso­ci­a­tion. [Ital­ics are mine–DE].

All Mus­lims would be wel­come, no mat­ter their polit­i­cal ideas or their sect–minority Shi­ites, often scorned for their sep­a­rate ways and dif­fer­ent approach to the faith, were just as accept­able as the Sunni stu­dent major­ity. . . . None of this sat well with mem­bers of Dearborn’s Mus­lims’ Stu­dents’ asso­ci­a­tion who were either rad­i­cal Salafis or affil­i­ated with the Hizb ut Tahrir al-Islami–the Party of Islamic Liberation.

The move­ment (Hizb ut Tahrir al-Islami)–a clan­des­tine, rad­i­cal Sunni Islamic group that is banned in sev­eral coun­tries around the world–advocates the replace­ment of indi­vid­ual Mus­lim gov­ern­ments with sin­gle caliphate gov­erned under a strict read­ing of the sharia. The stu­dents who are mem­bers of Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami share a com­mon creed that calls for strict adher­ence to the Koran and the rejec­tion of apply­ing human rea­son and logic when inter­pret­ing the Islamic holy texts.

Before Farhan had arrived on the cam­pus, rad­i­cal stu­dents had turned the Mus­lim Stu­dents’ Asso­ci­a­tion into a vir­tual train­ing camp for con­ser­v­a­tive ide­o­logues. Under the influ­ence and guid­ance of an Imam at a Dear­born mosque, the stu­dents believed their fel­low Mus­lims were stray­ing dan­ger­ously from the faith. In their eyes, being a ded­i­cated Mus­lim meant that men should work to pres­sure the U.S. gov­ern­ment to change its poli­cies in the Islamic world, Mus­lim women should wear head­scarves and Mus­lims should have lit­tle to do with Jews and Chris­tians. [Ital­ics are mine–DE.] . . .”

“The Future of the Faith” by Geneive Abdo; The Glob­al­ist; 6/13/2008.

13. As seen above, the MSA chap­ter to which Hebba Aref belonged was strongly asso­ci­ated with Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Idem.

14. Hizb ut-Tahrir works with  the Ger­man NDP, the top Ger­man neo-Nazi party. Achmed Huber of the al-Taqwa milieu also works with the NPD.

“Hizb ut-Tahrir, which was founded by a Pales­tin­ian in 1953, came to the atten­tion of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment in the wake of the attacks on New York City and Wash­ing­ton on Sept. 11, 2001. Sev­eral of the hijack­ers and other fig­ures in that plot belonged to rad­i­cal Islamic groups in Ham­burg. It is not clear if mem­bers of Hizb ut-Tahrir are linked to Al Qaeda, but its Web site calls on its mem­bers to fight against the United States because of what it calls America’s ‘cru­sade’ against Mus­lims. Last Octo­ber, the group staged a demon­stra­tion at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­sity of Berlin at which anti-American speeches were made. In what would seem to be an odd coali­tion, the group main­tains at least some ties with a right-wing Ger­man fringe group, the National Demo­c­ra­tic Party, some of whose mem­bers attended the Berlin rally. The com­mon ground between the two groups would seem to be a hatred of Jews.”

(“Ger­man Police Raid an Islamic Mil­i­tant Group” by Richard Bern­stein; The New York Times; 4/11/2003; p. 1.)

Descrip­tion for FTR #408.