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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, we delve further into the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic fascist organization at the foundation of so much of the jihadist terrorism afflicting the world.
Predictably, the aftermath of the incident(s) has seen the well-worn rhetoric about “Islam” and “Muslims.” “Is Islam a violent religion?” “Why don’t more Muslims protest against this kind of activity?” Other equally threadbare commentary has occupied much of the editorial discussion of the events.
What is missing is analysis of the relationship between the Brotherhood’s Islamic fascism and the terrorist groups that occupy the headlines–Al Qaeda and ISIS (both of which loom large in the backgrounds of the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaily), Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Chechen terrorists.
Beyond that, the corporatist economic doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood and the apparent use of its knockoff terrorist groups as proxy warriors by elements of Western and Saudi intelligence are as fundamental to a true understanding of the phenomenon and they are absent from the vast bulk of media discussion.
Brotherhood offshoots have proved particularly valuable as proxy warriors in petroleum and mineral-rich areas of the Earth Island.
Very, very tragically, the world has chosen to ignore the fundamentally important Operation Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002, which revealed profound links between the Bush administration, the Islamic Free Market Institute of Grover Norquist and the funding apparatus supplying Al Qaeda and Hamas with liquidity.
The continued bloodshed is part of the price people are paying for that deadly failure.
It might be difficult for some people to understand this. A duality dominates analysis of the dynamics of this situation–a duality similar to one underlying both the Second World War and the Cold War. World War II was a very real conflict, with American service men and women, as well as those of the other Allied countries, fighting against the armies of fascism. At the same time, dominant U.S. and Western financial and industrial interests favored their cartel partners in the Axis nations and the corporatist economic philosophy they embraced.
After the official end of the combat of World War II, the U.S. and U.K. incorporated the residua of the Third Reich’s national security establishment into their own and saw to it that the fascist infrastructure in Germany, Japan and elsewhere was maintained in power, behind a thin facade of democracy.
In addition, they supported and enlisted fascists from other countries to assist with the fight against Communism. The Muslim Brotherhood was one of those.
The political duality we are experiencing is similar to that of World War II–even as American service personnel and those of other countries are fighting a very real war against Islamic fascism, powerful corporate interests are supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood fascists and their corporate philosophy.
The resulting conlfict will, ultimately, have the result of destroying civil liberties and freedom of the press.
After highlighting several articles about the apparent Al Qaeda and ISIS links of the attackers, the program details some recent stories about CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations)–an insidious Muslim Brotherhood front group that has successfully portrayed itself as a Muslim civil rights organization, sort of an Islamic NAACP.
Officially labeled a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates, CAIR has been very active in the wake of the Ferguson incident, apparently seeking to capitalize on the anger of African-Americans. Coincidentally or otherwise, Ismaaiyl Brinsley–the killer of two New York City police officers–alleges a relationship with INSA (the Islamic Society of North America), a Muslim Brotherhood subsidiary organization.
Much of the program focuses on the corporatist economic philosophy of the Brotherhood. It is this economic philosophy that has endeared it to powerful corporate interests in the U.S. and the GOP.
In a textbook manifestation of Machiavellian strategy, European fascist groups that are successfully targeting Muslim immigrants as a political scapegoat stand to gain from the Paris attacks, this as apparent operational links between European and American fascists and Islamic fascists from the Brotherhood have gone unrecognized.
European fascists of the National Front variety can point to the attacks and say “See! We told you so! You can’t trust these (‘Muslims;’ ‘immigrants;’ ‘Muslim immigrants’ etc.)! We are your only hope! Join with us!”
By the same token, the Islamic fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood can point to the xenophobic reaction and say “See! We told you so! You can’t trust these infidels! We are your only hope! Join with us!”
In that context, we should note that both non-Muslim Europeans and Muslim residents of that continent are being squeezed to the breaking point by the austerity mandate being imposed on the EU by Germany and its corporate allies–von Clausewitzian economics.
In addition to corporatist economic philosophy, the fascists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the European and American fascist elements with which they network have much in common, from an ideological point of view. They dislike: Jews, women, gays, blacks and democracy. The very much like, in turn, the institutionalization of the privileges of great wealth.
Program Highlights Include: Ismaaiyl Brinsley’s visit(s) to a jihadist mosque in Brooklyn; allegations of Turkish governmental support for Uighur terrorists in China; Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s public statement that women are inferior; review of operational links between Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood mentor and predecessor as Turkish PM Necmettin Erbakan and Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front.
1a. Some background info on the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack. And, shocker, they’re associated with al-Qaeda:
The youngest suspect in today’s deadly attack at a satirical newspaper’s office in Paris has turned himself in, French police said.
French authorities have named the three suspects who they believe are responsible for the shooting deaths of 12 people, U.S. law enforcement officials told ABC News.
The officials identified the suspects as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, two relatives both in their 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad.
Cherif Kouachi, 34, is on Global watch list, ABC News has confirmed.
Kouachi, along with six others, was sentenced in May 2008 to 3 years in prison for terrorism in Paris. All seven men were accused of sending about a dozen young Frenchmen to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, after funneling them through radical religious establishments in Syria and Egypt. French authorities believed Kouachi had been planning to go to Syria for training in 2005.
Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman earlier today told ABC News that two of the assailants went inside the offices of Charlie Hebdo and listed off the names of their targets before shooting them execution style. The third man was waiting outside the building.
The French president called the attack a “terrorist operation.”
...
The newspaper had been targeted in the past over its content, often aimed at religious groups.
French officials confirmed that there are believed to be three attackers, all of whom were seen in videos wearing black from head-to-toe. Their identities and affiliations have not been revealed but one of the men is heard screaming “Allahu Akbar,” an Islamic phrase meaning “God is great,” in one of the scene videos.
...
Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, has come under attack before. Their office was firebombed in 2011 and its website was hacked after its cover featured the prophet Muhammad. Nearly a year later, the publication again published crude Muhammad caricatures, drawing denunciations from around the Muslim world.
The cover of this week’s issue of the newspaper focuses on a new book by Michel Houellebecq, “Submission,” which depicts France led by an Islamic party that bans women from the workplace.
...
Muslim Brotherhood Coat of (ahem) Arms
1b. Amedy Coulibaly–the gunment who took prisoner, and then executed, hostages at a kosher eating place–pledged allegiance to ISIS.
The gunman who killed four people in a Parisian kosher grocery store and a policewoman pledged allegiance to Islamic State in a video published online on Sunday, two days after his death.
In the seven-minute video, Amedy Coulibaly is described as a “soldier of the caliphate” and is filmed declaring allegiance to the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Coulibaly shot dead a Parisian policewoman on Thursday and four hostages at a kosher supermarket on Friday. . . .
1c. More about the Kouachi brothers, Coulibaly and the milieu to which they belong:
. . . . After French authorities swept up members of the Buttes-Chaumont group in the 2005, during his time in prison Chérif Kouachi came under the sway of an influential French-Algerian jihadist who had plotted to bomb the United States Embassy in Paris in 2001.
There, he also recruited a holdup artist named Amedy Coulibaly, the man who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday.
It is unclear if his older brother, Saïd Kouachi, who also took part in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office, was a member of the Buttes-Chaumont group, but the authorities have confirmed that the older brother spent time in Yemen between 2009 and 2012, getting training from a branch of Al Qaeda. . . .
. . . . Already, a few young Muslim men from the 19th Arrondissement had fought in Iraq, most notably Boubaker al-Hakim, who had volunteered to defend the government of Saddam Hussein against the American invasion in 2003.
There, according to Mr. Filiu’s study, Mr. Hakim made connections with Syrian and Iraqi security services, and fought. His brother, Redouane, 19, was killed during an American bombing raid in Iraq in July 2004.
Two other French 19-year-olds also died fighting in Iraq, while Boubaker al-Hakim granted an interview to the French news media in which he called for his friends from the 19th Arrondissement to come join him. . . .
. . . . Mr. Hakim, the man who had fought in Iraq, is now a member of the Islamic State and has been actively recruiting and building a network of fighters across Northern Africa and in European immigrant communities in recent years.
Just as in 2003, when he exhorted his fellow Muslims from the 19th Arrondissement to join the jihad, Mr. Hakim released a video in December, claiming responsibility for the Tunisian assassinations and vowing that the Islamic State was coming to Tunisia, once a colony of France. He was a long way from Paris, but France clearly remained on his mind. . . .
2. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been identified by key Muslim Brotherhood cleric Youssef Qaradawi as a “former” member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the article below, note that Qaradawi notes the key terrorist leaders that were “former” members of the Brotherhood. The “former” is to be taken with a huge dose of salt–Muslim fascists are as capable as European and American fascists at implementing “plausible deniability.”
The GMBDW has discovered what appears to be the first English translation of the video in which Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi can be seen referring to what is almost certainly Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and explaining that he was once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. At time 0:44 of the video, posted on the Brotherhoodwatch.co.uk website, Qaradawi refers to “this youngster” who once belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood but desiring leadership and after a period in prison (al-Baghdadi is thought to have spent five years in an American detention facility) went on to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS). It would appear that al-Baghdadi joins the ranks of other infamous terrorist leaders such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Khalid Meshalal who once belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood before going on to joining leading terrorist organizations. In the video (time 1:12), Qaradawi also refers to unidentified “youngsters” from Qatar who also joined ISIS. . . . .
3.The United Arab Emirates has designated the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a terrorist organization. CAIR–represented as a Muslim civil rights organization–is a Muslim Brotherhood front organization.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has reacted to its inclusion on a list published by the UAE that designates as terrorists a large group of organizations in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. According to a CAIR statement, it finds the UAE designation “shocking and bizarre” . . . .
. . . . The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as “a grassroots civil rights and advocacy group and as “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group.” CAIR was founded in 1994 by three officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine, part of the U.S. Hamas infrastructure at that time. Documents discovered in the course of the the terrorism trial of the Holy Land Foundation confirmed that the founders and current leaders of CAIR were part of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood and that CAIR itself is part of the US. Muslim Brotherhood.In 2008, the then Deputy leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood acknowledged a relationship between the Egyptian Brotherhood and CAIR. In 2009, a US federal judge ruled “The Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), and with Hamas.” CAIR and its leaders have had a long history of defending individuals accused of terrorism by the US. government, often labeling such prosecutions a “war on Islam”, and have also been associated with Islamic fundamentalism and antisemitism. The organization is led by Nihad Awad, its longstanding Executive Director and one of the three original founders.
4.CAIR has been seeking to capitalize on the Ferguson, Missouri controversy.
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today called for a “national action” to address issues of racism in the aftermath of a Missouri grand jury’s decision to not indict a police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager who was shot to death in August.
CAIR also questioned the “problematic” grand jury process that resulted in a failure to indict the officer. . . .
. . . . Following Brown’s death, CAIR joined the NAACP and other civil rights groups in calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the shooting. CAIR representatives also took part in a national American Muslim call-in discussion of the shooting and joined almost 100 national civil rights groups, coordinated by The Leadership Conference and Civil and Human Rights, in calling for federal action to prevent discriminatory profiling. . . .
5.Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, the deranged killer who slew two New York City cops, has been influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. His Facebook page claimed that he worked for the Islamic Society of North America–a Muslim Brotherhood front group. We take this with a grain of salt. There is a LOT of fresh fertilizer on people’s Facebook pages–Brinsley may well NOT have worked for them. Perhaps he attended a meeting–obviously, we don’t know.
What is important here is that he has fallen under the jihadist sway, perhaps manifesting “leaderless jihad.”
NB: the Charles C. Johnson who uncovered the information about Brinsley’s Facebook page is a screaming ultra-right media propagandist and should NOT be viewed as a credible source under normal circumstances. He is the classic broken clock that is right twice a day. This was one of those two daily occurrences. (Charles C. Johnson is NOT to be confused with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.
The Muslim NYPD cop killer Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley worked for a Muslim Brotherhood front group, according to his Facebook page.
GotNews.com has confirmed and exclusively discovered that Brinsley went by another name — Ismaaiyl Abdullah-Muhammad — and that he worked for the Islamic Society of North America.
The Islamic Society of North America is a Muslim Brotherhood front group that was described as an unindicted co-conspirator by the Justice Department in the 2007 Holy Land terror cases.
Brinsley a.k.a. Muhammad’s Facebook page includes liking pages like “I love Islam” and “I Have To Be More Philosophical, About My Life.”…
6. Brinsley visited a jihadist mosque, which had links to numerous Muslim Brotherhood-linked terror elements. Its imam was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Blind Sheikh-led plot to blow up New York City landmarks.
The abandoned YouTube channel of cop-killer Ismaaiyl Brinsley contains a video showing him heading to pray at Brooklyn’s Masjid At Taqwa, a mosque that has been linked to terrorist and anti-police activity.
That is one of several new pieces of information gleaned from Brinsley’s old social media accounts which could shed more light on what made the 28-year-old tick.
Brinsley murdered two New York City police officers on Saturday as they were sitting in their patrol car in Brooklyn, just hours after he had shot his girlfriend in Baltimore.
Before shooting the officers, Brinsley posted his intentions on Instagram, writing that he planned to murder cops. Brinsley referenced Michael Brown and Eric Garner — two black men whose police-related deaths have sparked mass protests — on his final social media posts.
Questions are swirling about what caused Brinsley to shoot the officers. The obvious answer is Brinsley’s thirst for revenge for the death of Brown and Garner. But others blamed Brinsley’s history of mental illness . . . .
7. More about the Brooklyn mosque that Brinsley visited:
“Letter from Peter G. Farrell to Judge Joan M. Azrack”; nyc.gov; 9/10/2013.
. . . . The NYPD’s investigation of certain individuals associated with Plaintiff Masjid At Taqwa was based upon information about their lengthy history of suspected criminal activity, some of it terroristic in nature. This information includes but is not limited to: illegal weapons trafficking by members of the mosque’s security team and the mosque caretaker both within the mosque and at the store adjacent; illegal weapons trafficking by certain attendees of the mosque; allegations that the mosque ran a “gun club”; and allegations that the assistant Imam had earmarked portions of over $200,000 raised in the mosque to a number of US Government designated terrorist organizations.
Certain individuals associated with Masjid At Taqwa have historical ties to terrorism. The mosque’s Imam, Siraj Wahhaj, was named by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to bomb a number of New York City landmarks in the mid-1990s (the “Landmarks Plot”). Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for his role in the Landmarks Plot, lectured at Masjid At Taqwa. Wahhaj testified as a character witness for Abdel Rahman during Abdel Rahman’s terrorism trial. Wahhaj also testified as a chancter witness for Clement Hampton El, a Masjid At Taqwa attendee who was convicted as one of the Blind Sheikh’s coconspirators in the Landmarks Plot. . . .
8. A review of Dollars for Terror from Publishers Weekly:
In a provocative expos, Swiss TV journalist Labeviere argues that the real threat to the West from radical Islamic fundamentalism comes not from Iran or Iraq but rather from America’s solid allies—Saudi Arabia and neighboring oil monarchies. Based on his four-year investigation, Labeviere charges that Saudi Arabia is the principal financial backer of extremist Islamist movements around the world. The linchpin in this operation, he states, is Saudi billionaire Osama bin Ladin, trained by the CIA, who recruited, armed and trained in turn Arab volunteers to fight the Soviet army in the Afghanistan war, thereby strengthening the totalitarian Muslim Taliban regime. Bin Ladin, who, according to the author, maintains close ties with the Saudi and Pakistani secret services, now bankrolls terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and abets Islamist extremist movements in Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, South Africa, Algeria and elsewhere. Veterans of the Afghan “holy war” have been implicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City and the attempted murder of Egyptian president Mubarak in 1996. In Labeviere’s riveting, often shocking, analysis, the U.S. is an accessory in the rise of Islam, because it manipulates and aids radical Muslim groups in its shortsighted pursuit of its economic interests, especially the energy resources of the Middle East and the oil- and mineral-rich former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Labeviere shows how radical Islamic fundamentalism spreads its influence on two levels: above board, through investment firms, banks and shell companies, and clandestinely, through a network of drug dealing, weapons smuggling and money laundering. This important book sounds a wake-up call to U.S. policy makers. (May)
Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
9. The broadcast delineates Labaviere’s allegations concerning the profound relationship between the Saudis, the Muslim Brotherhood, elements of U.S. intelligence and the Bin Laden organization.
. . . . Many times over, American, European and Arab diplomats and public officials advised me to follow the trail of ‘the dollars of terror.’ . . Every time, I was brought back to both the official and the secret structures of Saudi finance. Every time, I stumbled on the fraternity of the Muslim Brothers. . .Where does the money for this dangerous proselytism come from? . . . Saudi Arabia and other oil monarchies allied with the United States. The greatest world power is fully aware of this development. Indeed, its information [intelligence] agencies have encouraged it . . . . The CIA and its Saudi and Pakistani homologues continue [as of 1999] to sponsor Islamism. . . .
10. Highlighting the comparisons between the Brotherhood’s program and those of Mussolini and Hitler, the broadcast continues:
. . . . Taking Italy’s choices under Mussolini for inspiration, the economic program set three priorities . . . The social policy foresaw a new law on labor, founded on corporations. This economic program would more directly reveal its relationship to totalitarian ideologies a few years later, with the works of Mohamed Ghazali . . . . Mohamed Ghazali recommended ‘an economic regimen similar to that which existed in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.’ . . . The moral code is also an important component in this program, which is intended to create the ‘new Muslim man.’ . . . The notion of the equality of the sexes is inherently negated by the concept of the supremacy of male social responsibilities. . .the ‘natural’ place of the woman is in the home. . . .
11. About the Muslim Brotherhood’s economic doctrine:
“Islam in Office” by Stephen Glain; Newsweek; 7/3–10/2006.
Judeo-Christian scripture offers little economic instruction. The Book of Deuteronomy, for example, is loaded with edicts on how the faithful should pray, eat, bequeath, keep the holy festivals and treat slaves and spouses, but it is silent on trade and commerce. In Matthew, when Christ admonishes his followers to ‘give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,’ he is effectively conceding fiscal and monetary authority to pagan Rome. Islam is different. The prophet Muhammad—himself a trader—preached merchant honor, the only regulation that the borderless Levantine market knew. . . .
. . . In Muslim liturgy, the deals cut in the souk become a metaphor for the contract between God and the faithful. And the business model Muhammad prescribed, according to Muslim scholars and economists, is very much in the laissez-faire tradition later embraced by the West. Prices were to be set by God alone—anticipating by more than a millennium Adam Smith’s reference to the ‘invisible hand’ of market-based pricing. Merchants were not to cut deals outside the souk, an early attempt to thwart insider trading. . . . In the days of the caliphate, Islam developed the most sophisticated monetary system the world had yet known. Today, some economists cite Islamic banking as further evidence of an intrinsic Islamic pragmatism. Though still guided by a Qur’anic ban on riba, or interest, Islamic banking has adapted to the needs of a booming oil region for liquidity. In recent years, some 500 Islamic banks and investment firms holding $2 trillion in assets have emerged in the Gulf States, with more in Islamic communities of the West.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown wants to make London a global center for Islamic finance—and elicits no howl of protest from fundamentalists. How Islamists might run a central bank is more problematic: scholars say they would manipulate currency reserves, not interest rates.
The Muslim Brotherhood hails 14th century philosopher Ibn Khaldun as its economic guide. Anticipating supply-side economics, Khaldun argued that cutting taxes raises production and tax revenues, and that state control should be limited to providing water, fire and free grazing land, the utilities of the ancient world. The World Bank has called Ibn Khaldun the first advocate of privatization. [Emphasis added.] His founding influence is a sign of moderation. If Islamists in power ever do clash with the West, it won’t be over commerce. . . .
12. In addition to the apparent use of Muslim Brotherhood/Islamist elements as proxy warriors against Russia and China, the Brotherhood’s corporatist economics are beloved to Graham Fuller, as well as corporate elements cdhampioned by Grover Norquist.
“Chechnyan Power” by Mark Ames; nsfwcorp.com; 6/5/2013.
. . . Fuller comes from that faction of CIA Cold Warriors who believed (and still apparently believe) that fundamentalist Islam, even in its radical jihadi form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the simple reason that fundamentalist Islam is conservative, against social justice, against socialism and redistribution of wealth, and in favor of hierarchical socio-economic structures. Socialism is the common enemy to both capitalist America and to Wahhabi Islam, according to Fuller.
According to journalist Robert Dreyfuss’ book “Devil’s Game,” Fuller explained his attraction to radical Islam in neoliberal/libertarian terms:
“There is no mainstream Islamic organization...with radical social views,” he wrote. “Classical Islamic theory envisages the role of the state as limited to facilitating the well-being of markets and merchants rather than controlling them. Islamists have always powerfully objected to socialism and communism....Islam has never had problems with the idea that wealth is unevenly distributed.” . . . .
13. Fuller has long been an advocate of a “turn to the Brotherhood.”
. . . Some federal agents worry that the Muslim Brotherhood has dangerous links to terrorism. But some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials believe its influence offers an opportunity for political engagement that could help isolate violent jihadists. ‘It is the preeminent movement in the Muslim world,’ said Graham E. Fuller, a former CIA official specializing in the Middle East. ‘It’s something we can work with.’ Demonizing the Brotherhood ‘would be foolhardy in the extreme’ he warned.” . . .
14. More about the corporatist economic philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood follows. Note that Khairat el-Shater was alleged by Egyptian intelligence to have been running Mohamed Morsi. (We covered this in FTR #787.) In turn, he was reported to be serving as a liaison between Morsi and Mohamed Zawahiri, the brother of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri. Shater was also networked with: Anne Patterson, U.S. ambassador to Egypt, GOP Senator John McCain and GOP Senator Lidsay Graham. In turn, Shater was alleged to have transferred $50 million from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaeda at the time that he was networking with the Americans and Morsi. Hey, what’s $50 million between friends?
“The GOP Brotherhood of Egypt” by Avi Asher-Schapiro; Salon.com; 1/25/2012.
While Western alarmists often depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a shadowy organization with terrorist ties, the Brotherhood’s ideology actually has more in common with America’s Republican Party than with al-Qaida. Few Americans know it but the Brotherhood is a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment while spurning labor unions and the redistribution of wealth. Like the Republicans in the U.S., the financial interests of the party’s leadership of businessmen and professionals diverge sharply from those of its poor, socially conservative followers.
The Brotherhood, which did not initially support the revolution that began a year ago, reaped its benefits, capturing nearly half the seats in the new parliament, which was seated this week, and vaulting its top leaders into positions of power.
Arguably the most powerful man in the Muslim Brotherhood is Khairat Al-Shater, a multimillionaire tycoon whose financial interests extend into electronics, manufacturing and retail. A strong advocate of privatization, Al-Shater is one of a cadre of Muslim Brotherhood businessmen who helped finance the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party’s impressive electoral victory this winter and is now crafting the FJP’s economic agenda.
At Al-Shater’s luxury furniture outlet Istakbal, a new couch costs about 6,000 Egyptian pounds, about $1,000 in U.S. currency. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, Istakbal’s clientele is largely limited to Egypt’s upper classes.
Although the Brothers do draw significant support from Egypt’s poor and working class, “the Brotherhood is a firmly upper-middle-class organization in its leadership,” says Shadi Hamid, a leading Muslim Brotherhood expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Not surprisingly, these well-to-do Egyptians are eager to safeguard their economic position in the post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite rising economic inequality and poverty, the Brotherhood does not back radical changes in Egypt’s economy.
The FJP’s economic platform is a tame document, rife with promises to root out corruption and tweak Egypt’s tax and subsidies systems, with occasional allusions to an unspecific commitment to “social justice.” The platform praises the mechanisms of the free market and promises that the party will work for “balanced, sustainable and comprehensive economic development.” It is a program that any European conservative party could get behind. . . .
15.We note that the attacks in Paris stand to provide political benefit to the National Front, which has made Muslim immigrants in France a major target. Other European fascist groups–such as the misnamed Sweden Democrats (financed to a large extent by Carl Lundstrom, who was the chief financier of the Pirate Bay website on which WikiLeaks held forth)–stand to benefit as well.
. . . . But no one expects this mood of solidarity to last very long; indeed, the attacks have already sharpened his clash with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Mr. Hollande remains the most unpopular French president since World War II. He is troubled by a weak economy, high unemployment and an underlying atmosphere of anxiety and even fear, among both Muslims and Jews, about the impact of homegrown Islamic radicalism. . . .
. . . . The homegrown terrorism here, with its apparent links to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, will also be used by other far-right, nationalist and anti-immigration movements in Europe, from the United Kingdom Independence Party to the Sweden Democrats and Germany’s Pegida — Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. That is another reason so many European leaders from the mainstream parties of the center right and center left, from Angela Merkel of Germany to David Cameron of Britain and Mariano Rajoy of Spain, came to show their own solidarity with France and Mr. Hollande. . . .
16. Supplementing analysis highlighted in FTR #787, we reiterate that Tayyip Erdogan’s supposedly “moderate Islamic democracy” is nothing of the sort. With roots in the Al-Taqwa milieu and the Muslim Brotherhood, his government is manifesting the Islamic fascism at the core of the Ikwhan.
Manifesting his “moderation,” Erdogan has explicitly stated his view that women are not equal to men.
Nice.
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan has said that gender equality is contrary to nature and feminists did not recognise the value of motherhood, at a meeting on women’s rights.
The conservative president said women’s “delicate” nature meant it was impossible to place them on an equal footing with men. . . .
17a. Note that Erdogan’s mentor was Necmettin Erbakan.
“Turkey Offers Support for Controversial Islamic Group”; Deutsche Welle; 4/23/2003.
. . . . Some observers say the attempt [by Milli Gorus] to reform its public image could be at least partly linked to the rise of Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his AK party. Coming to power in a landslide victory last year, Erdogan styles his party as a modern conservative group based on Muslim values. He has distanced himself from former mentor Necmettin Erbakan, who founded the Islamic-influenced Welfare Party. Erbakan’s nephew, Mehmet Sabri Erbakan, was IGMG chairman until he left office after allegedly having an extra-marital affair.
17b. Fleshing out discussion of Necmettin Erbakan, his Refah party and the Muslim Brotherhood, the program highlights Erbakan’s relationship with Ahmed Huber and the manner in which that relationship precipitated Huber’s ascension to his position as a director of Al Taqwa.
Closely associated with the AK Party’s predecessor Refah organization, Huber’s concept of “moderation” might be gleaned from the photographs of some of the “moderates” he admires.
Note that Erbakan, mentor to Tayyip Erdogan, networked with Jean-Marie Le Pen, courtesy of Bank Al-Taqwa’s Achmed Huber.
Note, also, that they arrived at a political concensus, working to coordinate the Islamic fascism of the Muslim Brotherhood with the Euro-fascism of the National Front, Sweden Democrats and others.
Speaking of the décor of Huber’s residence:
. . . . A second photograph, in which Hitler is talking with Himmler, hangs next to those of Necmettin Erbakan and Jean-Marie Le Pen [leader of the fascist National Front]. Erbakan, head of the Turkish Islamist party, Refah, turned to Achmed Huber for an introduction to the chief of the French party of the far right. Exiting from the meeting (which took place in September 1995) Huber’s two friends supposedly stated that they ‘share the same view of the world’ and expressed ‘their common desire to work together to remove the last racist obstacles that still prevent the union of the Islamist movement with the national right of Europe.’. . .
. . . . Lastly, above the desk is displayed a poster of the imam Khomeini; the meeting ‘changed my life,’ Huber says, with stars in his eyes. For years, after the Federal Palace in Bern, Ahmed Huber published a European press review for the Iranian leaders, then for the Turkish Refah. Since the former lacked financial means, Huber chose to put his efforts to the service of the latter. An outpost of the Turkish Muslim Brothers, Refah thus became Huber’s principal employer; and it was through the intermediary of the Turkish Islamist party that this former parliamentary correspondent became a shareholder in the bank Al Taqwa. . . .
18. Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood government may well be supporting the Turkophone Uighurs in their effort to oblige the secession of oil and minieral rich Xinjiang Province.
“Turks Are Held in Plot to Help Uighurs Leave China” by Edward Wong; The New York Times; 1/14/2015.
The police in Shanghai have arrested 10 Turkish citizens and two Chinese citizens and accused them of providing altered Turkish passports to terrorist suspects from the western region of Xinjiang, a state-run newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The people trying to use the passports — nine ethnic Uighurs trying to leave China illegally through a Shanghai airport — are also under arrest, according to the newspaper, Global Times.
All of the suspects were detained in November and formally charged recently, the report said. It added that the nine Uighurs were planning to go to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria after leaving China. Audio and video materials with content related to terrorism were found on those trying to leave, the report said.
Those involved in providing the forged passports have been charged with smuggling terrorists and altering legal documents, Global Times reported. On Wednesday afternoon, calls made to the Shanghai police seeking comment were not immediately answered.
The Uighurs are a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group in Xinjiang. . . .
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
You know you’re organization is experiencing a crisis of leadership when your leader has to clarify that he had to step down because of the crazy things he wrote online, and not because of the photo of him posing as Hitler:
“I am an impulsive person...I regret I didn’t resist my impulsiveness,” says the guy that called for the Greens be “summarily executed”. So the ex-leader of the hot new political movement in Germany apparently suffers from an undiagnosed and untreated case of low-level Tourette’s syndrome that causes him to blurt out horrible statements that one might normally attribute to a Nazi. But he’s too embarrassed to tell anyone and now he’s got a bunch of far right nut jobs following him around. It all makes sense and it’s quite tragic, really.
Although that still doesn’t explain all the allegedly non-far right members of the general public that continue to flock to movement led by a man with impulse control issues that cause him say horrible things:
“Well, it’s impossible to predict, but perhaps a terrorist attack could galvanize the people. But again, there is no way of predicting what circumstances or events could influence the popularity of such a movement.” Huh. It doesn’t seem that hard.
Still, as Rucht points out, it’s an overall puzzling situation:
Yeah, it does make you wonder very ordinary middle class citizens would want to go marching with right-wing extremists. It also makes you wonder why the best hope for PEGIDA fading away is rooted in its stunningly rapid growth that seems to be drawing in a large number of mainstream protestors marching side-by-side with far right extremists as Dieter Rucht suggests.
Of course, a Rucht also suggests:
So once the far right determines it’s not as important as it thinks it is, the wind will be taken out of its sails and this will all blow over. Good to know.
Also, it’s still feeling pretty windy out there...
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died which means the Saudi Queen is now ruler of the Kingdom! Haha! No, it actually it means it’s time for the West to keep ignoring its complicity in this horrible mess:
Quite a reformer! Maybe the Pope will make him a saint, and maybe the U.S. could give him the medal of freedom posthumously.
@GK–
Do you mean Machiavelli?
It is unclear who the “him” is in your comment.
Best,
Dave
@Dave
Sorry for being unclear. I meant the late King Abdullah, and my comment was a reaction to the Kings unexpected passing and Pterrafractyl’s posting about the King in a preceding comment on this thread. It was one of those death of a feeling things you’ve talked about, that wasn’t very good.
Sorry,
GK
This is Breitbart, so naturally they leave out the fact that it was Norquist and Rove who brought these people into high DC places in the first place. Nor do they mention that the Mohammed Magid was the “token Muslim” at the Reagan funeral. But it is a pretty good indicator that the Brothers are not done in the White House. This is the Green Quest crowd, doing what they do best...
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/02/07/the-muslim-brotherhood-comes-to-the-white-house/
The Obama White House has finally released the names of the fourteen Muslim “leaders” who met with the President this past week. Among the group — which included a comedian, along with a hijab-wearing basketball player and a handful of left wing activists — were a select few individuals with disturbingly close ties to the global Muslim Brotherhood.
As previously uncovered by Breitbart News, the White House confirmed that Azhar Azeez, President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), was one of the Muslim leaders that met with President Obama. ISNA was founded in 1981 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial. Federal prosecutors have previously described how ISNA funneled its money to Palestinian terrorist group Hamas (via Investigative Project):
ISNA checks deposited into the ISNA/NAIT account for the HLF were often made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahadeen,” the original name for the HAMAS military wing. Govt. Exh. 1–174. From that ISNA/NAIT account, the HLF sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to HAMAS leader…
Azeez’s bio also reveals him as a founding member the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Dallas/Fort Worth Chapter. CAIR has also allegedly funneled money to Palestinian terror groups and was also started by members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In October, 2014, Azeez signed a letter endorsing Sharia Islamic governance. Under the Sharia, non-Muslims are treated as second-class citizens. The Sharia also endorses the hudud punishments in the Koran and Hadiths, which state that apostasy from Islam is punishable by death.
Hoda Elshishtawy of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) was also in attendance at the Muslim leaders’ meeting with President Obama.
MPAC, just like CAIR and ISNA, was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood. The group has written and often endorsed a paper rejecting the United States’s designation of Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations, and has insisted that the Jewish state of Israel be added as a state sponsor of terrorism. The group’s former president, Salam al-Marayati, has publicly encouraged officials to look at Israel as a suspect in the 9/11/01 attacks.
He has said that Hezbollah’s attacks against Israel should be seen as “legitimate resistance.” In a 1998 speech at the National Press Club, an MPAC senior official described the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah as one that fights for “American values.” In an MPAC-sponsored March 2009 protest to “Defend al-Aqsa Mosque and al-Quds,” participants could be heard chanting slogans encouraging Palestinians to wipe out Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” demonstrators chanted.
Mohamed Majid, who serves as Imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), was also in attendance at the White House meeting with the President, and senior advisors Ben Rhodes and Valerie Jarrett.
In 2002, ADAMS was raided as part of a U.S. government initiative called “Operation Green Quest,” where federal agents suspected the group of supporting terrorist organizations. Government documents said that the ADAMS Center was “suspected of providing support to terrorists, money laundering, and tax evasion.”
Majid is also an official with the brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).
He also signed the October 2014 letter, along with White House meeting attendee Azhar Azeez, insisting that Sharia law should be an acceptable political system worldwide.
It remains unclear why President Obama remains a stalwart believer that the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates should be treated as legitimate political entities, when history reveals the organization as one with radical goals. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Islamic cleric (and Hitler admirer) Hassan al-Banna after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The group seeks as its end-game to install a Sunni Islamic caliphate throughout the world. al-Banna said of his organization’s goals, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” Both Former Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi were members of the Brotherhood. Its current spiritual leader, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, has a knack for bashing Jews and praising Nazis. The Muslim Brotherhood’s motto remains: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
Wow, America’s social media vigilantes are at it again, because they certainly know more about a 48 hour old case than the police or federal prosecutors. And, yes, sadly, the Muslim Brothers are ALL OVER this story. Also, some liberal American commentators (and, yes, I’m a liberal still) are saying this was “typical white Nazi Christian behavior”. The reality is that the alleged killer was actually pretty far to the left and an avowed atheist. That angle is being very downplayed. Hell, his politics and antagonism to religion as a whole aren’t that far from my own! Except I’m not crazy and don’t bring weapons to parking disputes with my neighbors.
And, no despite my questions about this case and hostility towards the Muslim Brotherhood, in NO WAY does that justify this horrible slaughter and this jerk deserves a life sentence. By most accounts, these were fairly model Muslim Americans and decent folks. However… the Brothers lurk.
http://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/13/muslim-students-funeral/23337467/
…U.S. Attorney Ripley Rand, the district’s top federal prosecutor, had said Wednesday that there was no immediate evidence Muslims were being targeted.
…Barakat and Yusor Abu-Salha were newlyweds who met while helping to run a Muslim student association before Barakat moved to Chapel Hill to study dentistry at UNC.
NOTE: A “muslim student association”? You mean THE Muslim Student Association, the college campus front of the Muslim Brotherhood. At least two of the victims were members. This does not mean they subscribed to all the tenets of the Brothers, but they are certainly in the background of this story.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/obama-condemns-murders-muslim-students-193919944.html#Ps1WF4v
US President Barack Obama has condemned the “brutal and outrageous” murders of three Muslim students in North Carolina.
“No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship,” he said in a statement, offering his condolences.
….Mr Obama’s remarks on Friday follow criticism from Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim, of his US counterpart’s “telling” failure to speak out about the killings.
NOTE: Of course I agree with Obama’s remarks. But why even mention it when there is NO EVIDENCE yet that this was a killing based on bigotry? And I’m not assuming Obama made these remarks in response to Erdogan’s criticism (and the fact that ANYBODY gives a shit what Erdogan thinks scares the hell out of me!), but it is an interesting juxtaposition.
(continuing)
…Chapel Hill police are also investigating whether the killings involved a hate crime but say a preliminary investigation points to a long-simmering spat over parking.A woman who lives near the scene of the shootings described Hicks as short-tempered.“Anytime that I saw him or saw interaction with him or friends or anyone in the parking lot or myself, he was angry,” Samantha Maness said of Hicks. “He was very angry any time I saw him.”
NOTE: Yep, just an angry psycho, it sounds like to me. America is a violent country with a growing Muslim population (not trends I’m interlinking). Are we now going to assume that any time a Muslim is murdered here that it inevitably must be based on their religion? Sometimes it will be, perpetrated by Nazi or KKK types and those should be investigated as thoroughly as any other murders.
OK, so here’s where things get interesting… remember the plot to behead Marines at Quantico? Look at what mosque the plotters attended. It’s the same damn one as the victims in this weeks’ murders! And, yes, this was blowback from our role in the Kosovo war and efforts to bring Kosovars into the US. And they showed their appreciation for our war effort there…
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/north-carolina-terror-suspect-plotted-kill-witnesses-fbi-article‑1.1011549
…Hysen Sherifi, 27, was sentenced to 45 years in prison earlier this month in what prosecutors described as a conspiracy to attack the Marine base at Quantico, Va., and targets abroad. Five others, including construction contractor Daniel Patrick Boyd, have been sentenced to federal prison terms for terrorism charges related to raising money, stockpiling weapons and training in preparation for jihadist attacks.
…The affidavit provides no information about the nature of the relationship between Hysen Sherifi and Elshiekh, but a woman with that same name was quoted in media reports from last year’s terrorism trial in New Bern. The names of the witnesses allegedly targeted were redacted from the affidavit.Nevine Elshiekh is listed as a special education teacher on the website for Sterling Montessori Academy, a charter school in Mooresville. Bill Zajic, the school’s executive director, did not return a message from the Associated Press on Tuesday.
No one answered the phone at Elshiekh’s Raleigh home Tuesday. The Sherifi brothers and other family members emigrated from Kosovo following the wars that ravaged the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A call to the Sherifi family home in Raleigh on Tuesday was not returned.
Hysen Sherifi and others arrested in the terrorism conspiracy were members of the Islamic Association of Raleigh, the largest Muslim congregation in the Triangle. Several members of the mosque also routinely made the 4‑hour round trip for the trial in New Bern to support the accused, who they described as innocent men being railroaded by overzealous federal authorities.Messages to the media contact listed for the mosque were not returned.
NOTE: While the internet certainly has played a role in the radicalization of some Western jihadists, I suspect that is becoming a scapegoat and diversion, at least in some cases, from the reality that many of them are radicalized by imams that are HERE, working in Brotherhood or Wahhabi-sponsored mosques. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read that a terror suspect “was radicalized online, according to Imam Magid of the Islamic Center of____ (fill in the town)”. The media takes the quote and never asks questions about what is going on in the mosque. Then it turns out that the Islamic Center is directly tied to the Brothers.
This story claims that supporters of the defendants from the Mosque regularly attended the trial, claiming that the they were being “railroaded”.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nc-terrorists-brother-pleads-guilty-in-beheading-plot/
…The Sherifi family fled Kosovo in 1999 during a brutal sectarian war between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Shkumbin Sherifi lived at home with his parents and sisters, occasionally taking classes at a nearby community college and recording vengeful rap music in his native Albanian.
Earlier deemed a flight risk by a federal judge, Sherifi will remain in detention until sentencing.
Elshiekh will remain free on bond pending sentencing. She and her lawyer declined comment as they walked out of the courtroom.
Born in the United States to Egyptian parents, Elshiekh worked until her arrest as the director of special education at Sterling Montessori Academy, a state-supported charter school in Morrisville. She had also served as a teacher at a religious school affiliated with the Islamic Association of Raleigh, the city’s largest mosque.
The elder Sherifi was one of six Raleigh Muslims convicted last year of being part of a homegrown terrorist plot to attack the U.S. Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va., and targets overseas. The case hinged largely on surveillance tapes made by confidential informants paid by the FBI, with no direct evidence any of the men had actually agreed to kill anyone.
A family friend of one of the defendants, Elshiekh was among a group of supporters from the Raleigh mosque who attended the month-long trial and claimed the men were being railroaded by an overzealous federal government.
NOTE: And here is the mosque’s website itself, where services are being held for the three victims. Note who is sponsoring the press release. MAS- Muslim Brotherhood. MPAC-Muslim Brotherhood. Muslim American Society-Muslim Brotherhood. Am I starting to sound like a broken record yet? I think it is a good bet that all of these mosques are Brother mosques as well. And they will milk these murders to the furthest extent possible…
http://www.raleighmasjid.org/index.html
We call upon the global community to remember and follow Deah, Yusor and Razan’s legacy of peace, service and caring. Please continue to keep the Barakat and Abu-Salha families in your thoughts and prayers.
This press release is a result of coordination and work of the following organizations:
• Islamic Association of Raleigh (IAR)
• Apex Mosque
• Masjid Ibad Ar-Rahman of Durham
• Muslim American Society (MAS)
• Muslim American Public Affairs Council (MAPAC)
• Islamic Association of Cary
• Islamic Center of Morrisville (ICM)
• United Muslim Relief
This is a great article on the incredible management of First Look/Intercept by Omidyar and Greenwald from a former employee.
However, what really stood out to me was that we ONCE AGAIN see Greenwald walking in goosestep with the Muslim Brotherhood. You won’t get what I’m referring to until you read the second half of this post after Ken Silverstein’s article.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/ken-silverstein-the-intercept-115586.html#ixzz3TekTKMbm
Where Journalism Goes to Die
Glenn Greenwald, Pierre Omidyar, Adnan Syed and my battles with First Look Media.
By KEN SILVERSTEIN
February 27, 2015.
…The beginning of the end for me, though, came as The Intercept launched into what would turn out to be basically the biggest story of its short existence: The Serial chronicles.
In my final months, I helped edit and write a few stories for The Intercept with Natasha Vargas-Cooper about the wildly popular podcast Serial. Natasha landed two key interviews with figures in the murder case and she wrote a series of stories that I helped edit and shared a co-byline on two of them. The stories challenged, directly and indirectly, the narrative laid out in the unexpected podcast hit by the makers of This American Life. The podcast’s narrative followed the investigation and prosecution of Baltimore teen Adnan Syed, who was convicted and is serving a life sentence for the murder by strangulation of a teenage girl (and who dumped her body in a park in Baltimore). Serial’s thesis was straightforward: Syed did not get a fair trial.
Our stories, though, showed the opposite—documenting the work of the prosecutor and the star witness. Given the viral success of the show, our follow-up stories were a huge success—possibly the biggest thing The Intercept has ever published. They were, though, hugely controversial inside our organization. Why wouldn’t a huge editorial success be celebrated inside The Intercept? Because we were siding with The Man.
Now I believe the American justice system is badly flawed and often racist, but in this instance, I firmly believe, the system worked. I believe Adnan Syed murdered Hae Min Lee and was rightly prosecuted for it.
But I came to realize that the system working correctly—and the right people going to jail—isn’t a good narrative to tell at The Intercept.
Publishing the Serial stories was a huge headache: There were constant delays and frustrations getting them out, even after it became clear they were drawing huge traffic. Our internal critics believed that Natasha and I had taken the side of the prosecutors—and hence the state. That support was unacceptable at a publication that claimed it was entirely independent and would be relentlessly adversarial towards The Man. That held true even in this case, when The Man successfully prosecuted a killer and sent him to jail.
Some colleagues, like Jeremy Scahill, were upset after the first installment of Natasha’s interviews with Jay, the state’s flawed-but-convincing key witness, and our co-bylined two-part interview with the lead prosecutor, Kevin Urick, both of whom had refused to speak to Sarah Koenig for her Serial podcast. Jeremy even threatened to quit over the second installment, according to two of my colleagues who witnessed what they described as his “temper tantrum” in the New York office. He told them he couldn’t believe that we’d so uncritically accepted the state’s view of the murder—even though our stories were backed up by our own research, our unique reporting and our reading of court documents. One day at the office, frustrated, Natasha wrote “Team Adnan” on a sign on Jeremy’s office door.
NOTE: I had previously poked around some “oddities” in the phenomenon of Serial. I have only listened to it a little bit, but the general impression I got was “reporter looking for story who finds one… kind of”. It was this below article that made things REAL interesting for me. Rabia Chaudry, who leads the “Free Adnan” movement, is NOT just any Muslim lawyer. Oh, no, she is bigtime in the collaboration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Feds! As soon as I saw her name in one of the stories about Serial, I freaked out. “THAT Rabia Chaudry?”
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/baltimore-insider-blog/bs-ae-rabia-chaudry-profile-20141218-story.html
....In one entry, Chaudry described her reaction when Koenig presented her with a document prosecutors had commissioned from a consultant who discussed Islam, honor killings and sexism.
“I think I cursed a lot,” Chaudry wrote. “But I felt my face get hot and angry and was hopping around in my chair, gobsmacked and horrified.”
Chaudry addressed the end of her post to the consultant.
“Pakistan, dear consultant, is not exactly what you think it is,” she wrote. “I take personal exception to your characterization because it just so happens that [I] was born there.”
NOTE: Pakistan is a country where 75% of the women are in prison because they were RAPED and convicted of adultery for reporting being raped. And because it takes FOUR male witnesses to convict a man of rape under Islamic law, their rapists generally go unpunished. I dont know enough about the case to comment on whether or not it was an Islamic honor killing, but there are approximately 500 Islamic honor killings of women in Pakistan each year, at least that are reported. No, Rabia, Pakistan is exactly what the consultant thinks it is. Chaudry is a paid Muslim Brotherhood shill. I also note that she doesn’t live in Pakistan.
...Chaudry’s family became friends with the Syeds through their mosque, The Islamic Society of Baltimore. Both Syed’s parents and her own are Pakistani natives who settled in Maryland.
NOTE: Islamic Society= Muslim Brotherhood front. This will become a theme in my post... Reporter is clueless. No big deal, most of them are and I expect little else.
...Chaudry is accustomed to being involved in high-profile — and contentious — issues. She has led efforts to dispel negative stereotypes of Muslims among law enforcement officers while also working to combat violent extremism within the Muslim community.
NOTE: Take that last part with a whopping grain of salt. She has also told Muslims not to talk to police about terror cases.
...“Not a lot of community people are willing to put their reputation on the line and say the messages coming out of ISIS and al-Qaida are not messages that represent the Muslim community,” said Haris Tarin, who as director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council works closely with Chaudry. “She’s been willing to take that fight on.”
NOTE: Again, Muslim Public Affairs Council, you guessed it... Muslim Brotherhood front!
A graduate of University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the George Mason University School of Law, Chaudry became involved in national security issues while working as an immigration attorney in Connecticut. She heard complaints from Muslim clients, including an imam, that FBI agents were trying to force them to spy on others in their community.
Chaudry moved back to the Washington area with her husband and two daughters and became a fellow in a program for emerging Muslim leaders.
She founded an organization, The Safe Nation Collaborative, that provides training on the Islamic faith and countering violent extremism and fosters dialogue between law enforcement and Muslim communities. She is a national security fellow with the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.
NOTE: Safe Nation is a thinktank with all kinds of powerful funders and sketchy connections. Note also that George Mason U. is a front for Cato/Koch/libertarian interests. Totally spooky. She also spoke at an ISNA convention... the BIGGEST Muslim Brother front in the US. This is from Pam Geller, who is not my cup of tea, but is not known to misrepresent the kinds of things that are discussed at these conventions. Chaudry’s effort to rewrite training manuals was DIRECTLY targeted to make it tougher for the feds and cops to detect signs of jihadism. One of Obama’s biggest mistakes in his administration, in my opinion.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/09/muslim-brotherhood-isna-convention-dont-talk-to-the-fbi
Chaudry repeatedly made it clear that the FBI, NYPD ‑who she called the “Big Bad Wolf”- and other agencies were not to be trusted. Chaudry works with the Saudi-funded front group Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, serves as an immigration lawyer, as well as a board member of the Connecticut ACLU and is President of the Safe Nation Collaborative. As President of the collaborative, Chaudry is working with the Obama Administration to rewrite the training manuals used to teach law enforcement personnel about the Islamist threat to America.
CONCLUSION: Adnan Syed may be innocent... but having Chaudry as his main supporter sure as hell makes me think he isn’t.
Following a terror suicide attack in Paris by what appears to be a group of eight ISIS-affiliated individuals, France responded in exactly the way one would expect France to respond to an attack of that nature by ISIS: France declared war on ISIS:
“The big question on everyone’s mind is: Were these attackers — if they turn out to be connected to one of the groups in Syria — were they homegrown terrorists or were they returning fighters?”
That is indeed going to be a big question, especially in the context of a growing Syrian refugee crisis that’s catalyzing a surge in support for the far-right across Europe. And while the identities are origins of the attackers has yet to be publicly released, early reports indicate that, not surprisingly, it was a mix of homegrown and foreign individuals:
So it’s looks like fears of “homegrown” terrorism are likely to spike not just in France but across Europe in coming months. Which, of course, is exactly what groups like ISIS intend when they plan such attacks. Creating an ‘us vs them’ “clash of civilizations” that sows paranoia and discord between Europe’s Muslim populations and the rest of society isn’t just in the interest of Europe’s far-right. Goading the West into the kind of rage-induced response that ISIS can portray as a modern-day Crusade is one of the best recruitment tools the group has, as they admitted in their statements claiming responsibility for the attacks:
And that’s part of why crafting a response to this attack is so tricky. Despite the claims that the attacks were in retaliation for the French airstrikes that began in September, ISIS’s leaders, Assuming they were involved in planning this attack, were obviously expecting that the results would be a dramatic escalation of France’s military involvement in Syria. There’s just no other response they could plausibly expect. And given the group’s reliance on the steady flow of young foreigners to keep the ISIS meat-grinder running, it’s not hard to imagine that a significant Western military escalation, one which could be portrayed as a “Crusade” by ISIS’s propaganda outlets, was exactly the goal.
It’s all part of what makes ISIS’s such an unusual terrorist group. Unlike many groups that resort to terrorism but perhaps have at least a quasi-legitimate grievance that motivates their actions, even if their methods for airing that grievance are reprehensible, when it comes to ISIS, its non-terrorist day-to-day actions and ideology, like genocide and sex slavery, are so reprehensible that it’s hard to conceive of not responding with with overwhelming military action following something like the Paris attacks because it was already hard to conceive of not responding with military action even before the Paris attacks. Because ISIS has been consistently that awful. France, like virtually every other country, has a long history filled with plenty of positive and negative contributions to the world. National histories are like that. But in the few years that ISIS has existed as an entity, it’s hard to think of a single noble or positive act that can be attributed to the group.
And yet, thanks to the support for ISIS from the governments of Turkey and the Gulf monarchies (who aren’t ideologically much better), combined with an ongoing black market oil and human-trafficking trade that has made it one of the wealthiest militant groups ever(wealth that doesn’t actually trickle down to the locals), ISIS remains in power and hold territory.
How does one respond to a group that clearly benefits from an escalation of violence and it willing to escalate the violence in order to realized that escalated violence? The answer isn’t obvious. ISIS wants to radicalize young Muslims living in Europe and start a “clash of civilizations”. That’s clearly at least one of the goals here. And a massive military campaign in response to these attacks that ISIS could have easily predicted is the obvious means of achieving that goal. At the same time, an escalation of the existing bombing campaign against ISIS is almost certainly going to happen and who can blame the French for doing it at this point.
So if an increased bombing from not just France but its allies too is highly likely at this point, some of the biggest questions right now is about non-military responses. And not just the obvious non-military response one like cutting off ISIS’s access to the oil markets and weapon supplies. What about the ideology that continues to attract young disaffected Muslims? There’s clearly a great deal of appeal to ISIS’s ideology for a deeply troubled subset of the Muslim youth, and yet countering that ideology isn’t easy since it would sort of entail countering the strict fundamentalist Wahhabism promoted by regimes like the Saudi monarchy as the only acceptable form of Islam.
But while countering the promoting of ideology ISIS relies on isn’t readily attainable (since that would simultaneously entail countering the profound influence the top ultraconservative clerics in places like Saudi Arabia), that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of things Western nations can do to limit the appeal of not just ISIS but all Islamist ideologies. For instance, how about trying to find ways to make life in general suck less for young, sexually frustrated Muslim men. That’s it. Why might achieving that goal reduce the appeal of groups like ISIS? Well, as the article below points out, when you examine the young men that actually join these groups, a consistent pattern you find is deep psychological vulnerabilities and a sense of of isolation from society resulting from a strained relationship with a deeply religious parent who is both domineering and non-attentive, manifesting as a profound need for parental approval which is filled by seductive radical clerics:
“They’re being failed by everybody—their family, their local community and us...The fact that somebody is able to sell them death and make death look appealing to them and we’re not able to sell them life… That’s not just their fault that’s also a failure on our part.”
Keep in mind that every population is going to contain at least some individuals that are susceptible to violent extremist ideologies, as the appeal of the far right across the non-Muslim communities in the West make abundantly clear. Similarly, there’s always going to be families where the kids and parents don’t quite connect and we can’t start blaming the spread of ISIS simply on parental issues. That would just be silly.
But if there is indeed a pervasive pattern where the of young radicalized Muslims of Europe tend to come from situation where their only real sense of comradery and parental bonding comes from a militant cleric that’s trying to seduce them with the promise of religious glory, and women, well, that seems like a pretty obvious place to start in terms of countering the militant Islamist appeal. Especially given the reality that the primary source of Islamic radicalism, the Wahhabist clerics of the world, aren’t about to stop spreading it.
Of course, giving a sense of community and an alternate path forward for young, isolated Muslim men is a lot easier said than done. Sure, ending the immoral and egregious austerity policies embraced by the EU that inevitably hits the poorer immigrant communities with already high rates of youth unemployment is an obvious option. But that’s clearly not enough and what Europe can do break that sense of isolation for young men caught between deeply fundamentalist cultures and the their Western host societies isn’t clear either. Although there is one very obvious solution: embrace the refugees who are fleeing the kinds of sociopaths that carried out the Paris attacks as fellow humans that could be awesome fellow friends and neighbors. Make those refugees your Muslim friends and neighbors who are not just welcomed in a society that rejects tribalism and sectarianism in all forms but celebrated as potentially the best allies the world has against fundamentalist Islam. If anyone knows first hand what happens when an al-Qaeda-like group takes over society and is free to help counter the fundamentalist mind-virus within Islam, it’s those refugees.
So there are options for Western nations for combating ISIS in addition to the obvious option of bombing the hell out of ISIS, even if they aren’t particularly popular options at the moment. But those options are are there and while they aren’t remotely the kinds of short-term fixes people are looking for and more of a generational solution, they’re still urgent.
Here’s a helpful emergency response tip: If you come across a burning building with people inside, be sure bar all exit points. Doors, windows, anything that might let someone out. The fire could have been started by an arsonist, after all, and you wouldn’t want them escaping into the larger community because that would be a disaster. Feel free to apply this same principle of harm reduction to all sorts of emergency situations:
“Republican presidential candidates vowed on Monday to take a tougher approach toward Islamic State, with Donald Trump saying he would consider closing some mosques and Ben Carson saying that Congress should cut funding for all programs that bring people fleeing violence in Syria”
It will be interesting to hear which “tougher approaches” the GOP candidates for president end up proposing. Hopefully it will involve not doing exactly what ISIS has explicitly said it wants:
“The strategy is explicit. The Islamic State explained after the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine that such attacks “compel the Crusaders to actively destroy the grayzone themselves. ... Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between one of two choices, they either apostatize ... or they [emigrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the Crusader governments and citizens.” The group calculates that a small number of attackers can profoundly shift the way that European society views its 44 million Muslim members and, as a result, the way European Muslims view themselves. Through this provocation, it seeks to set conditions for an apocalyptic war with the West.”
For a group that bans music, ISIS sure is adept at playing reactionaries like a fiddle.
@Pterrafractyl–
Not to blow my own horn, but FTR #830 analyzes the Charlie Hebdo attacks only too accurately.
The ISIS strategy articulates in the most brutally precise strategy exactly what I said in the broadcast to which you attached this comment.
It will be MORE than a little interesting to see if there is an attack in the U.S.
IF there is such an attack, that will probably give the GOP some ammo to attack Obama for being “weak.”
Stay tuned!
Best,
Dave
@Dave: Part of what’s going to make the prospect of a terrorist attack in the US over the next year such an ominous possibility is that, as the article below points out, the the GOP’s primary voters are likely to reward candidates for taking positions on issues like the Syrian refugee crisis that may not actually play out very were in the general election. So we should probably expect more and more of the GOP candidates to mimic Ted Cruz’s proposal to establish a religious test for refugees and only accept non-Muslims fleeing for their lives because in today’s political environment, setting up religious litmus tests for refugees is good politics...at least in the GOP primaries:
“Like it or not, that is a message virtually certain to win Cruz voters — or at least nodding heads — within the Republican primary electorate he is trying to convince to be for him. The politics of such messaging in a general election is far more dicey. It open up Cruz as well as the Republican party as a whole to allegations of xenophobia not to mention potentially furthering the idea that the GOP remains unfriendly to immigrants of all sorts — a belief that is already hugely problematic for Republicans with the broader electorate.”
Part of what makes the political calculus that justifies calls for religious litmus tests so alarming is that Ted Cruz’s message isn’t just going to resonate with the GOP’s primary voters. It’s going to resonate with ISIS too. If, for some strange reason ISIS wasn’t favoring a GOP president before, they sure will now! Just imagine what President Ted Cruz would do for the popularity of not just ISIS but Islamist groups everywhere after he basically frame any and all anti-Islamist terror efforts as some sort of anti-Muslim crusade. The “I told you so“ ‘s from militant extremists across the world would be deafening.
And as you point out, it’s just going to take a handful of successful attacks to sway the US electorate, so the temptation to ISIS for successfully attacking the US over the next year is going to be potentially higher than ever. If they do it, and the US electorate reacts predictably, hello President Ted Cruz and Holy War!
It all raises a grimly fascinating question: Who does ISIS prefer in the GOP primary? Ted Cruz has a very obvious appeal. But he does have competition. For example, John Kasich just proposed creating a government agency dedicated to promoting Judeo-Christian values around the world and Chris Christie wouldn’t even allow 5 year old Syrian orphans into the US if we was president. And then, of course, there’s The Donald, who not only pledged to send back any Syrian refugees that are already here should he get elected, but he also has psychic powers and can just ‘feel’ when terrorism is coming (he actually said this).
So ISIS has a variety of options for their preferred future US President/geopolitical foil. And thanks to the current competition among those candidates to out-‘anti-Muslim’ each other that isn’t going to end any time soon (or at all), it’s hard to imagine ISIS viewing any of them becoming president as anything other than a big step towards their much desired War of Civilization.
And as you say, if there is such an attack, it will probably give the GOP quite a bit of political ammo. It’s all a reminder that the GOP Clown Car will probably become less and less of a laughing matter in a growing number of ways the closer we get to November 2016 election.
If there’s one thing that’s inevitable in any contemporary GOP primary, it’s that new lows won’t just inevitably be reached, but repeatedly reached. Here’s the latest iteration of the inevitable:
“And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we’re going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
Well, yes, Muslim ID cards would indeed be quite unthinkable. And, fortunately, following a backlash to Trump’s comments that even included his fellow GOP candidates, it turns out that setting up a special Muslim database and issuing religious ID cards is still largely unthinkable. So now we have Donald Trump walking back his remarks and asserting that he wasn’t referring to a Muslim database at all. Whether or not we’re looking at a real pull back from our new new low or just a political-decency dead cat bounce, remains to be seen:
“I do want surveillance. I will absolutely take database on the people coming in from Syria if we can’t stop it, but we’re going to”.
So the proposed database for all Muslims in the US has been scaled back to just a database of Syrian refugees which, of course, would exist anyways since they all have to go through an extensive vetting process which would obviously involve a database of ALL the refugees’ names, regardless of religious affiliation. Again, this could just be a political-decency dead cat bounce which new lows rapidly on the way in keeping with the tenor of the GOP primary thus far, but who knows, maybe we’ve seen the last of the Muslim database idea for the current campaign season. We can always dream!
Either way, let’s hope this whole notion of declaring all Muslims potential terrorist isn’t simply refuted but actually used to highlight a key tactic that could be used to undermine the ideas underpinning ISIS’s appeal to disaffected youths that is largely ignored by the global community. Putting aside militant Jihadist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda that obviously need to be countered in every way possible, there is actually one group of Muslims that really needs to be singled out by the global community and asked to change their ways. And fortunately it’s a very tiny group. And a powerful one: the Saudi royal family:
“The king and his princes have dug a hole for themselves by harnessing religion in the pursuit of power. Religious credentials bolstered their claim to legitimacy and helped them assert their authority. For a long time, those credentials served them well, but now they are becoming a liability and it may be too late to unfasten the harness.”
Harnessing religion in pursuit of power is pretty much always an awful idea. But as history has shown over and over, it’s quite effective too. But in the case of the Saudi royal family, that power includes who rules over Mecca and sit on the largest oil reserves in the world, that domestic political and financial power gets translated into a profound theocratic influence on how Islam is practices and taught around the globe. And it’s a little hard to get the globe to rally around the idea that ISIS is completely insane when one of the most powerful clans are the planet has spent decades and billions of dollars aggressively promoting ideas that are only somewhat less fanatical.
At the same time, it’s a little hard to take seriously the idea that all Wahhabist are potential terrorists since people have been living under zany authoritarian ideologies and theologies (that they were mostly just born into) since the dawn of civilization, and it’s pretty obvious that the vast vast majority of any group of people just want to live their lives in peace regardless of what they’re born into. That said, the ideas embedded in Wahhabism and their aggressive promotion by not just the Saudi royal family but all the Gulf monarchies as the only acceptable form of Islam have clearly played a major role in the rise of group of ISIS and its long string of al Qaeda-like predecessors.
It’s pretty obvious that the most conservative sects of Sunni Islam are long overdue for a period of reform and modernization that the royal clans won’t allow to happen. Feat of losing a theologically-backed grip on power is a pretty powerful motivator for letting nothing change. So, barring just waiting for these sclerotic regimes to collapse (while hoping that an ISIS-like group doesn’t replace them), how can the rest of the world help convince the royals to allow and even catalyze that period of reform? That’s unclear, although it might help to recall that the Saudi royals, in particular, are in store for a number of major reforms that are going to threaten their grip on power whether or not there’s a theological renaissance, because the Saudi kingdom isn’t just reliant on the theological backing of Wahhabist clerics to maintain its claim to legitimacy. It’s also reliant on oil. And unlike religious fervor, the Saudi’s supply of cheap oil isn’t endless, and even if it was, we still need to all stop using it:
Yes, the Saudi government is reading the wall about its own ability to export oil which it seems to accept:
but also the writing on the wall over the world’s urgent need to cut back on fossil fuels, which it doesn’t seem to find so acceptable:
Whether or not the world kicks its oil addiction, earth shattering changes to how the Saudi regime finances itself are probably on the way within the next quarter century. And it’s pretty clear that those earth shattering changes just might include the overthrow of the Saudi regime if that previously endless supply of oil money dries up (not to mention its water supplies). Don’t forget that the unemployment rate for ages 16–29 is almost 30 percent and two thirds of its population is under 30 and a quarter of the population lies below the poverty line. And the IMF released a report last month on Saudi Arabia’s finances: The country could go bankrupt by 2020. In other words, the Saudi regime is a ticking time bomb. And it knows it.
So how about, as a counter-proposal to Donald Trump’s proposal to demand that all Muslims in the US register themselves for a database, we see the global community do the opposite and make one tiny, but very powerful and influential, group of Muslims a free offer that could end up helping exactly the Muslims Donald Trump wants to vilify: If the Saudi royals and other Gulf monarchies promote a period of Sunni Islamic renaissance that explicitly involve of rapid modernization of Wahhabism and a transition towards democracy and the kinds of other vital social reforms, the West will commit itself during this long transition period to economically assist a regime that is otherwise doomed. And yes, democratic rule would potentially threaten the royal family’s grip on power. But it’s not like a democracies won’t vote for insanely rich guys.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/deep-concern-over-return-of-anti-muslim-pegida-protests-a-1057645.html
This is a long article and one may read it and become concerned of a potentially fascist polictical shift in Germany. The key excerpt is at the end:
“In Bavaria, officials at the state chapter of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which monitors extremist activity, are speaking of a “massive verbal escalation” on the part of the anti-Muslim scene. The agency found it of particular concern that that the right-wing extremists had clearly begun reaching previously untainted people with their “campaigns of hate.” This group, too, could become a future source of “xenophobia-inspired attacks,” they warn. The closing of ranks between right-wing extremist parties and German citizens irate over the refugee influx is a phenomenon that is worrying officials at virtually every domestic intelligence agency in the country. Now officials at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution are hoping to find ways to track down ringleaders of the NPD and other neo-Nazi parties like Die Rechte (“the Right”) and The Third Way and to find ways to unsettle the scene.”
“Something is heading our way,” says one high-ranking member of German domestic intelligence. “We need to try and stop it.”
It’s worth noting that an arms dealer who specialized in buying and then modifying starter guns that shoot blanks and selling them on the Darknet probably sold the Paris attacks four of the assault rifles used in the attacks:
“Four emails on his smartphone had shown that he sold “four Kalashnikov assault rifles to an Arab in Paris”, added the newspaper.”
That’s sure sounds like investigators found their man. But, of course, there were more than four rifles used in that attack. So it’s also worth noting that the plotters probably didn’t need the Darknet to acquire the rest of their weapons.
President Obama gave his Oval Office address tonight following the attacks by an apparently ISIS-inspired San Bernardino couple to soothe the perpetually freaked out American public over growing anxiety over why not just ISIS hasn’t been magically defeated yet via some sort of specially ISIS-version of “The War on Terror” (and that doesn’t involve a massive ground-invasion and long-term occupation of Syria since the public doesn’t want that either).
During the address, President Obama use the analogy for the conflict between US and groups like al Qaeda and ISIS that’s worth examining: The conflict between groups with ISIS-like ambitions and the US is like “a cancer that has no immediate cure”.
Beyond the obvious comparison of cancer to the kinds of virulent ideas (memetic oncoviruses) that enable groups like ISIS to recruit the Islamist equivalent of the Joker’s streetgang and grow the tumor, it’s a useful analogy in ways that may not seem apparent at first. If you think about it, many of the causes of cancer (chronic stress, poverty, pollution, etc) are quite often catalyst for the kind of lunacy and despair that drives extremism and allows a group like ISIS or al Qaeda to thrive. Cancer is a diverse disease, and while some tumors can aggressively grow on their own soon after becoming a tumor, other tumors need a lot of “help”, in terms of chronic stress, metabolic disruptions, carcinogens, and other biochemical insults. And a tumor like ISIS isn’t going to pop out of the blue and start growing. It’s too messed up. The ISIS tumor needs a REALLY messed up body to grow and thrive. It needs help. Help that goes far beyond oil, arms and new fighters. People aren’t normally suicidal and that’s why the ISIS tumor of militant irrationalism and fundamentalism needs pervasive conflict and despair. And boy has that tumor received the help it needs!
But while it’s easy to identify many of the environmental factors that are helping to drive the growth of the ISIS tumor, there’s still another basic problem that that these easy-to-identify problems are often intractable. And that intractable nature of, for instance, the civil war in Syria or hyper sectarian polarization of Iraq that’s, paradoxically, going to be critical to keep in mind when crafting a therapeutic response to the ISIS tumor. Why is it paradoxical? Well, because intractable problems tend to be despair inducing, and that’s exactly what’s growing the tumor. And yet it’s still vital we recognize the intractable nature of the problem because, as Josh Marshall points out below, there’s another analogy that works to describe the nature difficulty in crafting a response to something like ISIS: Intractable problems are intractable because they’re paradoxical too. Effective solutions to paradoxes are extremely hard to come by and the obvious solutions tend to aggravate the problem. It’s like the Chinese finger trap of reactionary despair:
“On all these fronts we face something like a a Chinese finger puzzle: the things we do to arrest the problem draw us deeper into it, paradoxically deepen the threats facing us. The conundrum requires a mix of force and restraint, vigilance and pluralism. It is genuinely complicated and a balance our politics — any democratic society’s politics — is challenged to summon.”
How does one extricate themselves from a finger trap that demands absolute obedience to its death cult or it will hunt you down and blow you up and only seems to benefit from your attempt to stop it? Well, there is one obvious solution, albeit not an easy one: transcend the finger trap. For instance, moving in 4‑dimensonal space should do the trick. Or, in the case of the ISIS finger trap, transcend ISIS’s appeal to isolated, disaffected Muslim youths by being more appealing:
Yep, using the US’s freedom of religion and security as a “safe space” for Muslims to come from around the world and create communities that stand as non-fundamentalist models for the world is one of the best possible strategies the US can use. It’s a point that, sadly, has become particularly important given the endless political whining over Obama not explicitly declaring that the US is “at war with radical Islam”.
And yes, there are inevitably going to be extremists within the US Muslim community given the influence of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood who may not be quite as bad as ISIS theologically but are still pushing a strain that is obviously in need of profound reform. But, again, as Josh pointed out, the best way to promote any of the various strains of radical Islam is to “turn American Muslims into a suspect population, walled off from the mainstream of American life by fear, bigotry and even well-intentioned broad and aggressive surveillance.” Sure, authorities shouldn’t play dumb in the face of real threats, but it’s hard to see how the growing GOP calls for aggressive surveillance aren’t going to foster exactly the kind of isolation and despair that groups like ISIS rely on.
Instead, an embrace and celebration of modernized Islam, coupled with a collective eye-roll and “*sigh* not these nut jobs again” response every time there’s a militant Islamist attack, is actually going to be a far more effective approach to creating the kind of environment that not only prevents the kind of isolation in the US that promotes the spread of militant Islamist sentiments but also really changes the environment groups like ISIS are operating in globally by allowing a non-fundamentalist community to really thrive as a model to the world. In other words, random hugs for Muslims in the face of Islamist terror is a critical ingredient to defeating groups like ISIS. Or how about no hugs at all because there’s no special “othering”, positive or negative, that takes place because we’re the kind of appealing society that doesn’t do stuff like that? Wouldn’t that be part of the long-term solution to groups lie ISIS? Yes, being a really really nice, forgiving, understanding, patient, and not bigoted society is key sending the ISIS tumor into remission.
It’s all quite paradoxical, except not actually.
Well, if any American members of ISIS fighting over in Syria decide to send in an absentee ballot in the upcoming US elections we can be pretty sure who their candidate of choice is going to be:
“Trump spokesman Corey Lewandowski confirmed to the AP the proposal would apply to Muslims who are tourists as well as those seeking immigration visas. Another campaign spokeswoman told The Hill the ban would also apply to Muslim-Americans traveling abroad.”
French investigators appear to be getting closer to answering the question of whether or not Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man who drove the 19-ton truck through the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, France, had outside help or was a true “lone nut”. Based on the seven people arrested so far, it appears he had help. At a minimum, he had an arms dealer who apparently accepted orders via text messages:
“Seven people, including a woman, were in custody last night after the arrests earlier in the day of an Albanian couple suspected of aiding Bouhlel, described by the so-called Islamic State as one of its “soldiers”.”
It doesn’t look like Bouhlel operated alone. And while potential ISIS influences and contacts are indeed disturbing, it’s arguably less disturbing than the idea the guy spontaneously plotted and executed this himself as part of an ISIS copycat attack. At least, it’s not obvious what situation is a worse sign. Is a centralized Joker’s Army of crazy people worse than a decentralized Joker’s Army of crazy copycat people?
Another question raised by the text messages for more guns just minutes before his rampage is whether or not he thought he was going to drive that truck to a location where he would meet accomplices who would then use all those extra guns. Considering that most of the weapons found in the truck were fake you also have to wonder if they were obvious fakes, like toy guns, or Bouhlel wound up buying fake guns or being given fake guns by accomplices. In other words, was Bouhlel told by ISIS or some other group that he was part of a big multi-person attack and his job was to first drive the truck through the crowd to a location for an even bigger final shootout and then given fake guns? At this point it’s a possibility that’s hard to rule out because it’s not like ISIS has a problem using their recruits as explosive human sacrifices.
But if Bouhlel was coordinating with ISIS only recently and really only had his religious conversion in the last few months, it will be interesting to learn more about whether or not the 84,000 pounds he sent back home really was the savings he had accumulating over the time he’s been working or if he suddenly received a mysterious cash windfall. Does ISIS offer cash-for-suicide-attack compensation? It’s hard to see why ISIS’s ‘death and destruction at all costs’ style would have a problem with that. At least if the money is available.
Either way, it’s a reminder that if your violence-prone acquaintance who recently experienced a militant religious conversion suddenly gives you their life savings to pass along to their family, as was the case with Bouhlel who gave acquaintances the 84,000 pounds in cash to give to his family Tunisia days before the attack, maybe that’s a good time to call the cops.
You have to wonder what’s under this rock. There’s an unfolding mystery in New Mexico that ties to the shows on the far right’s encouragement of school shooters to strategically destabilize society (see FTR#1002, #1003, and #1011), but in this case it involves a group of apparent Muslim extremists:
There was a makeshift compound discovered in New Mexico that was recently raided over child abuse concerns. Authorities discovered 5 adults and 11 children living in filthy conditions. That alone is pretty disturbing, but it gets much darker and weirder.
It turns out three of the adults were children of Imam Siraj Wahhaj of Brooklyn’s Masjid At Taqwa mosque: Siraj Wahhaj (same name as father) and his sisters Hujrah Wahhaj and Subhannah Wahhaj. The two other adults, Allen Morten and Jany N. Leveille, are the husbands of Hujrah and Subhannah. So these 11 kids are apparently Imam Siraj Wahhaj’s grandchildren.
Recall that Imam Sirah Wahhaj was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and testified as a character witness for Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”). Also recall how the social media accounts of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the guy who set out to kill police officers in 2014 and succeeded in killing two NYC police officers, indicated that he had attended the Masjid At Taqwa mosque.
It’s pretty disturbing scenario so far. And it gets worse. The 11 children were found to be starving and living in squalor. The compound lacked electricity or plumbing. It also appeared to have a makeshift shooting range and what could be an escape tunnel.
The decomposing remains of one child was also found. And while they have haven’t yet identified the body, suspicions are that dead child is Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, the son of Siraj Wahhaj who was abducted from his mother by Siraj nine months ago. Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj had severe brain condition and suffered from seizures.
But it gets even worse. According to a foster parent who took in one of the children, the kids were being trained in the use of assault rifles in preparation for future school shootings. Yep.
So we have a makeshift compound discovered in New Mexico where the adult children of Imam Siraj Wahhag were living with 11 children, a shooting range, an escape tunnel, and claims by one of the children that they were being trained for future school shootings. Again, you have to wonder what’s under this rock:
“The five suspects accused of abusing 11 children at a New Mexico compound were training them to commit school shootings, prosecutors said Wednesday.”
5 adults training 11 children in squalid conditions to commit future school shootings. That’s pretty much the worst kind of child abuse:
In addition, a boy’s remains were found, which is possibly the body of 4‑year-old Abdul-Ghani who was taken by his father Siraj Wahhaj from his mother last year:
So all of these adults were either the children or in-laws of Imam Siraj Wahhaj of Brooklyn’s Masjid At Taqwa mosque:
And as the following article points out, the compound appeared to have a makeshift shooting range and what appeared to be an escape tunnel:
“On Sunday KOB got a closer look at the makeshift compound, and the conditions its occupants were enduring.”
So a local news outlet takes a closer look at the compound with the neighbors, Tanya and Jason Badger:
And it sounds like the Badgers had been trying for months to get Wahhaj to either sell the land or get them kicked out. They even spotted the still-missing Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj there back in February and told authorities, but these attempts to get the authorities to intervene failed. An eviction notice was dismissed in court back in June, despite the site being technically illegal. But authorities did start surveilling the compound and even asked the Badgers to go in undercover with a hidden camera:
And note that, while the compound wasn’t hooked up to the electrical grid, there were video cameras and laptops spotted there:
And it wasn’t just local authorities who investigated and surveilled this compound. As the following article notes, the FBI has been investigating for the past two months, and surveilled the compound several weeks ago, but did not find probable cause to conduct a search:
“For months, neighbors worried about the squalid compound built along the remote New Mexico plain, saying they took their concerns to authorities long before sheriff’s officials raided the facility described as a small camping trailer in the ground.”
For months, the neighbors took their concerns to authorities. And it wasn’t just local authorities involved. The FBI had been investigating for the last two months and was surveilling the area a few weeks ago, but did not find probably cause to search the property:
Recall that the Badgers apparently told authorities they saw the missing child there back in February, so if there was no probably cause for searching the compound that’s a pretty remarkable finding.
Also note that the veracity of the allegations that they were training these kids for school shootings is unclear. The prosecutors did not bring it up during the initial court hearing:
Also note that the presences of laptops and video cameras is probably explained by a neighbor who helped them install solar panels:
So what eventually led to the raid on the compound? Apparently it was message sent over Facebook from one of the women there to a man in Atlanta. The message said “we need food, we’re starving.” The man passed along the message to Imam Siraj Wahhaj. The imam says he passed the information on to the police after he learned the location of the compound and that’s what triggered the raid:
“The imam says the plea for help came through Facebook: We need food, we’re starving.”
It was a plea for help over Facebook’s messaging service that allowed the Imam to learn the location of the compound. And it was when the Imam passed this information to police that the raid happened:
Of course, local and federal authorities were already well aware of the location of the compound since they already had it under surveillance so it seems likely that the pleas for food and presence of children were what triggered the raid.
And that’s part of what makes this story so bizarre: after all the surveillance and warnings from neighbors about the compound, and the spotting of the missing child there back in February, it was apparently Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who himself has terror ties, who eventually forced the raid on the compound after contact the police with information about the plea for help, leading to the raid of the compound and subsequent revelation that they may have been training these kids to become school shooters. WTF is going on here?
It looks like the bizarre case of the New Mexican makeshift compound started by the children of Imam Sirah Wahhaj, where the children were allegedly being trained to become future school shooters, is getting weirder. There’s also conflicting accounts about what this group was up to according to interviews of their relatives.
First, a quick correct on the previous comment on this story: Jany Leveille is one of the women at the compound and not one of the husbands and is the current wife of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj (recall that the mother of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj’s dead son divorced him in December). Most of the following article centers around Jany.
The brother of Jany, Von Chelet Leveille, claims he talked to her every day and she described incredible events taking place in the desert. Events like seeing a face appear in the sky or clouds taking the shape of winged creatures. Janey apparently also told her brother that the now-deceased child of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj would soon come back to life as Jesus. So that raises the obvious question as to whether or not they were using hallucinogens or something like that. And if they were being drugged, there’s still the question of whether or not they even realized it. Given the cult-like nature of the story, the possibility of brainwashing and hallucinogens probably shouldn’t be rules out. Especially if they really were training these kids to be school shooters.
It’s also worth recalling how Islamist terrorists who carried out the 2008 suicide assaults in Mumbai, India, were found be largely street children recruited by Lashkar-e-Taiba and trained using LSD and cocaine, which was found in their systems after the attack. So if it turns out this New Mexican compound really was training these kids to be terrorists it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve heard about an Islamist terror training program involving hallucinogens.
Von Chelet also tells us that it was a recent trip to Saudi Arabia by Siraj Ibn Wahhaj that made the group realize how different life can be living only among Muslims. So they went out to the desert to get away from secular society. Siraj Ibn Wahhaj’s father, Imam Sirah Wahhaj, was apparently against this move.
An FBI agent who testified during a bond hearing claimed that the children were told the dead child would come back as Jesus and then instruct them which “corrupt institutions” to eliminate. The FBI agent also told the court that Jany Leveille told others at the camp she believed the child had already been dead and was only still animated because he was possessed by demons. Tariq Abdur Rashid, an associate of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, denies this and asserts they were all very peaceful (keep in mind there was a gun range on the compound).
The FBI also assert that Jany was trying to use “black magic” to rid her son of his ailments. Rashid also suggests that Jany did actually practice “black magic” and claims that Jany once buried a leather patch or pouch in the ground as part of a ritual. Von Chelet denies that Jany ever practiced black magic. Rashid and Von Chelet both told the reporter that the other one was lying. So there’s a black magic angle to this story already, as well as a ‘rising from the dead to be Jesus’ angle.
Von Chelet also pushed back on the assertion that they were training the kids to be school shooters and said two of the kids had asked to learn how to shoot but it was all innocent. So it sounds like the older kids were indeed being taught to shoot.
And in perhaps that weirdest part of this entire case, the judge order all the adults to be released on bond except for Siraj because he is wanted on kidnapping charges. They apparently didn’t pose any sort of potential threat.
So, yeah, one of the weirdest cases of putative Islamist terror in a while somehow got a lot weirder:
“Before his sister’s arrest, Von Chelet Leveille says he talked to her every day and she told him about incredible things happening on her secluded desert compound.”
Incredible things were happening at the compound. Sirhaj’s son, Abdul-Ghani, died, but he would return as Jesus. And once a face appeared in the sky:
Prosecutors assert that Jany believed in “black magic”, and was trying to use ritual on her son to rid him of his ailments:
Von Chelet counters that he didn’t know of his sister practicing black magic, although she did believe in it. Instead, Von Chelet asserts that the group was peaceful. The older children being taught to shoot had asked to learn and it was innocent. Also, the whole reason they decided to go live in the desert was due to a trip to Saudi Arabia Siraj took that made him realize how different life could be just around Muslims. They wanted to get away from a society mostly populated by non-Muslims:
The FBI agent who testified at the bond hearing backed up the claim that Jany believed the dead child would return as Jesus. And he was apparently going to then instruct which “corrupt institutions” need to be eliminated:
Tariq Abdur Rashid, who studied under Imam Wahhaj and knows Siraj Ibn Wahhaj well, also asserts this group was entirely peaceful. He said the rituals sound like a ruqya, a Muslim ritual meant to rid a body of evil spirits. Rashid also says Wahhaj had recently visited an imam in England to learn how to do this ritual:
Interestingly, though, Rashid also recalls suspecting Jany was indeed performing black magic:
So Rashid dismisses the notion that Siraj Wahhaj was performing black magic, but did recall Jany doing so.
And finally, the judge is potentially going to allow the adults to be released on bond, except for Sirah who is held on a warrant over the missing child case. Although none of them are released yet:
So we’ll see if they do end up getting released.
We’ll also see how much weirder this story gets before it’s done. We’ve already got claims of faces in the sky, black magic, and a dead child returning as Jesus. Can it even get and weirder? We’ll see. We’re already in ‘Pet Cemetery Muslim Jesus’ weirdness territory here. That’s a pretty high bar.