The Epicenters of Terrorism

ajtr

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The Epicenters of Terrorism



There is a popular concept that the root of islamic terror in the modern world lies in the fascist and litteral interpretation of Islam's holy books - the Koran and the Hadiths, by people often devoid of even the basic education that people in the civilized world receive at elementary school level. This is however not a complete representation of the truth. Otherwise, there would be no reason to explain how scientists, doctors, and lawyers are also involved in the preparation and execution of terrorist campaigns throughout the world.


The fact of the matter is that Islamic fundamentalism is nothing new, albeit in the middle ages, it was mainly people of no formal education (feudal warlords, berbers, corsairs etc) who engaged in worldwide conquest in the name of Islam, i.e. Jihad. Well, they were stopped by various people - by the mercenary forces at the gates of Vienna, by the Hospitalier Knights in Malta, by the Rajputs, Marathas and Sikhs in South Asia, by the Chinese, by the Russians in the Caucasus and all those non-descript people who refused to be subdued by the fascist ideologies promulgated under the Islamic Caliphate. If it was not for these people, our world today would have been a desolate world with rampant child abuse, women battering, mercy killings, slave trading and so on and so forth.

However, the present world is a different story. The same illiterate Islamic populace cannot wage wars like they used to in the past, simply because the world is more complex than a flat flying carpet and the civilized nations have much better defence logistics in place to deal with a horde of barbarians. The game has changed. Which is why Islamic extremism needs new blood, military muscle and dollars to subdue the world.

As far as the dollars are concerned, no problem. Saudi Arabia is the motherland of all terro-dollars that can be used to finance the global Jihad. But the main problem is this: Arabia has been, and still is a third world country with a highly undecuated population. Arabs are not known for their work ethic, their intelligence or their ingenuity. In fact, most of the greatest works produced during the Islamic "Golden Age" were by Persians (who are a world apart from Arabs, and who were forcefully converted to Islam through coercion, dhimmitude, genocide, rapes and enslavement). To this day, Arabland is still the same except for the oil. So they have money, but nothing much else.

Where in the world would the Arabs be able to find the new blood, the military muscle required to help them in "Ghazwa-E-Duniya" (world islamic conquest)? Well, it would certainly have to be from an Arab-loving country. That country as we know it is Pakistan. Formed from the remnants of the British Colonization of India, Pakistan was created on the sole basis of religion. The people themselves are descendants of the Hindus from the great Indus Valley civilization, whose ancestors were forcefully converted (just like the Persians - refer above) to Islam by invading arab/turk armies. They are exactly similar to their brethrens in Northern India, speak the same language, but differ in religion and live with a very tangible inferiority complex. They advocate themselves as descendants of the great Arab rulers (who are they kidding? they are Indians, except for the experiment that went hay-wire: Pakistan) and love Arabs to the point of obsession. They were poor, as the British did not leave much for the subcontinent and needed to assert their identity and islamic ideals, and for this they needed - yes you guessed it right - dollars.

The royals of Saudi Arabia saw in experimental Pakistan the opportunity of a lifetime, or of several lifetimes starting from the Islamic Caliphate's decline beginning from the siege of Vienna. Pakistan was the world's largest non-arab muslim population in the world and had unconditional love for the Arabs. The rest is history. Terro Dollars starting flowing into Pakistan for a specific reason: Pakistan represented the best hope for the muslim world to restart global Jihad. For once, they were not Arabs; they hailed from an Indian civilization that was ingenious, hard working and above all easy to manipulate. The Arabs invested heavily in the project Pakistan.

The return on investment? Pakistan has the largest number of university level graduates and professionals in the muslim world (that's just because of the sheer size, they still are a shame in terms of percentage of the population). Pakistan got the Islamic world what it always had dreamed of: the Islamic Hydrogen Bomb. Pakistan boasts the highest number of madrassas that teach Wahhabism in the world. Pakistan has the biggest and most potent military of all muslim nations. Pakistan has become the military arm, the sword of the Islamic Caliphate, whose office lies in Riyadh.

With the Pakistan experiment, Saudi Arabia was able to do two things. First, acquire the most prized weapon in the history of mankind, the h-bomb. At the same time, it was able to still get terro dollars from Americans and the rest of the world since for us, Saudi Arabia was nothing but a corrupt monarchy where the royals were bent on making tons of money by selling petroleum to the world. The facade worked well: it was not Saudi Arabia after all who was building the bomb, it was Pakistan. We know better now... 9/11 taught us what those Saudis were really up to.

Indoctrinated with extreme fundamentalism from the Arabs, the Pakistanis soon forgot the secular ideals of Jinnah, the creator of Pakistan and started madrassas at every street corner to teach an army of jihadists the concept of martyrdom in Islam's name so that they can go on to wage global Jihad in India and the rest of the world.

Well, graduation time came for these madrassas. Just like a fungus spreads millions of spores an each one of them turns into another fungus, Pakistan's madrassas have bloomed with a hundreds of thousands of youngsters whose primary objective in life is to die in Allah's name. They fear nothing, they want nothing but total world conversion and dominance. The majority of them are jobless, but a sizeable number are professionals with college degrees who whenever given the chance migrate to the civilized world and act as sleepers ready to be fielded to the battlefield upon signal from Islamabad, or from Riyadh, or from the dude hiding in the caves along the Pak-Afghan border.

It is no surprise that Pakistanis have allowed the Taliban and the dude hiding the caves to operate freely in their country - their country is the haven for religious fanaticism. But global jihad cannot be won solely by war, it has to be won by diplomacy when the adverse forces are too overwhelming to handle, as taught by the prophet. This is the reason why Pakistan became the US ally in the war on terror - another farce just to avoid facing US wrath and to continue receiving billions of dollars in "aid" to finance its activities.

Make no mistake. The epicenter of terrorism in the world is not Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran for that matter. It is Pakistan, which is a direct subject of the Saudis. Remember, Saudi Terro Dollars + Pakistan = Terrorists Factories churning Jihadists by the thousands and unleashing them onto the civilized world!
 

ajtr

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Pakistan's Links to Western Terror Plots


On September 29, 2010, I wrote about the concerns about a major terror plot that was thought to be developing in Britain, France and Germany. I wrote then that the plot appeared foiled. This now does not seem to be the case. The revelations of the plot's existence in newspapers have not diminished its potential for enactment.

The United States, according to the BBC yesterday, was preparing to issue warnings to American travelers to Britain, France and Germany, suggesting that they stay away from crowded areas. That official warning never came. Yesterday Voice of America news issued an article by Lisa Bryant discussing the warnings, stating:

Washington urged American tourists in Europe to be extra vigilant, while London raised its threat assessment to high for citizens traveling to France and Germany.

This morning, the article had been pulled, and is only visible from its Google cache. The British Daily Mail newspaper for today suggests that:

Fears of an Al Qaeda plot to massacre thousands in Britain appeared to heighten last night.

The threat of a Mumbai-style machine gun assault is now rated so severe that the U.S. is warning its citizens they could be in danger if they travel to the UK.

At the same time, Britons are being told by the Foreign Office that they could face 'indiscriminate' attack from Osama bin Laden-inspired fanatics if they travel to France or Germany.

The Sunday Times (only available online by subscription) reported that GCHQ, Britain's "listening center" at Cheltenham, had been monitoring "chatter." GCHQ was then sending the information to the United States, which acted on the information by sending Predator drones into North Waziristan in Pakistan's border regions. Here,Hellfire missiles were used to destroy targets. During September there were twice as many drone strikes than take place in a normal month.

At the end of 2009, a jihadist website had posted information of a proposed bomb attack similar to that which took place at Mumbai in India over a few days, starting on November 26, 2008. Through this year, the communications of a range of suspects have been monitored, via Blackberrys, walkie-talkies, satellite phones and cellular phones. The Sunday Times (p. 7) stated:

Sources said there may have been up to 15 or 20 Britons whose voices have been picked up by GCHQ intercepts. Several of these have accents linked to the Rochdale area and towns in the Midlands.

The main breakthrough came in July with the arrest of an Afghan-born German national who was apprehended in Kabul and who is currently in US custody. German news sources refer to him as Ahmad S., but his real name is Ahmed Siddiqui. Apparently being questioned at the American base at Bagram, a German official was recently allowed to visit him. It is from Ahmed Siddiqui that most of the information relating to the plot and its related counter-terror operations have come.

According to the Sunday Times, British MI5 operatives are angry that the US press was given information by a senior US official last week, thus exposing an operation which they had been monitoring for some time, involving British suspects, and of a scale that could cause devastation. There are still real fears that British-based jihadists have plans to mount grenade and machine-gun attacks against "soft" targets, such as hotels and restaurants.

David Headley and the Mumbai Attacks

The Mumbai attacks involved an American citizen whose father was a Pakistani diplomat and whose mother was American. David Coleman Headley lived in Chicago. In 2006 he had changed his name from Daood Sayed Gilani, in order to gain easy entry into India. Headley was arrested on October 3, 2009 at O'Hare airport, as he prepared to fly to Philadelphia. On October 18, a Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, a Pakistani Canadian, was arrested in Illinois.

Headley had acted as a "scout," looking for potential target sites in Mumbai, to assist the terrorists who subsequently made their attacks. In March this year, Headley pleaded guilty in a federal court in Chicago to 12 charges of assisting in the reconnaissance that led to the attacks.

Headley's plea arrangement had also provided more details of another plot, to attack the staff at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Headley had traveled to Denmark twice, in relation to do reconnaissance for an attack. On September 30, 2005, Jyllands-Posten had published the notorious Mohammed cartoons after KÃ¥re Bluitgen, an author for a children's book on Mohammed, had said that artists were too scared to assist him, for fear of Muslim violence.

Headley's plea bargain had saved him from the potential of a death penalty, and had also stopped him from being deported to India (where he could also have received a death penalty) or to Denmark. In this plea bargain, he gave useful information. Headley told prosecutors that he had been actively involved with the terrorist group Lashkar e-Toiba (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba or Lashkar-e-Taiba) since 202, and it was this group who had urged him to change his name in 2006.

The fact that there has already been a case of a Chechen bomber arrested after bungling an attempt to send a letter-bomb to the Jyllands-Posten newspaper, and the fact that three Norwegian residents have also been arrested in relation to plots to kill Jyllands-Posten cartoonists, suggests the enormity of the reach of Al-Qaeda inspired terrorists.

On October 15, 2009, Colleen LaRose was arrested in at her home in Pennsburg, Philadelphia, and subsequently indicted for attempting to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who had made several line drawings of Mohammed as a dog. On March 9, 2010, hours after three women and four men had been arrested in Ireland for also plotting to kill Vilks, Ms LaRose's indictment was released.

Pakistan: Corruption and Terror



The sole survivor among the terrorists who carried out the Mumbai attacks was a young Pakistani called Ajmal Amir Kasab. He had been a member of Jamaat ud-Dawa, whose headquarters were in Muridke in Lahore province, Pakistan. Jamaat ud-Dawa was founded by Hafiz Saeed (pictured below), who had also founded the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Jamaat ud-Dawa had been designated as a terrorist entity by the United States on April 28, 2006, even though the Pakistan government at that time refused to outlaw it.



Ajmal Amir Kasab was caught on video brandishing machine guns during the 2008 Mumbai siege. His facial expressions showed he was enjoying the experience. On May 5, 2010, Kasab was sentenced to death, a decision that was greeted with celebrations by Mumbai Muslims. Six days ago, on September 28, Kasab filed an appeal against his death sentence.

After the Mumbai attacks, the Pakistan government announced that it had banned the Jamaat-ud-Dawa group. However, the group has managed to use Pakistan's corrupt legal system to have bans overturned, and at the start of this year, the group has been increasingly active. It frequently calls for the deaths of those who insult Islam. In May this year, the Supreme Court overturned attempts by the Pakistan government to keep Hafiz Saeed in detention.

Jamat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar-e-Taiba are one and the same, with the latter group more closely linked with terrorist operations in Indian territory, while Jamaat ud-Dawa operates in Pakistan. On July 11, 2006, seven crowded commuter trains were subjected to bomb attacks in Mumbai, within eleven minutes of each other. This attack, which killed more than 200 people, was the handiwork of Lashkar-e-Taiba. Previous deadly attacks by the group have also taken place in Delhi and other locations.

In June this year, it was revealed that the Punjab provincial government in Pakistan had given $1 million in funding to Jamaat ud-Dawa. Like many Islamist groups, it operates under aliases. Such techniques are used frequently to allow a group to continue unaffected under another name when subjected to bans. Jamaat ud-Dawa, aka Lashkar-e-Taiba, is also known as Idara Khidmat-e-Khalq and currently it also operates under the name Falah-e-Insaniyat.

Why is it so hard to gain convictions for individuals like Hafiz Saeed, even though he has previously issued death fatwas against Danish cartoonists and also Pope Benedict XVI? In a country where Islam is the basis of its constitution (as happened to Pakistan even though at Independence, under the leadership of Jinnah, it had a secular constitution) criticism of Islamic extremists is seen as an attack upon Islam. When courts are set up to impose sharia law, as happens in Pakistan, the situation is compounded.

Paksitan's corrupt police allow lynch mobs to murder with impunity, and its own laws demand that anyone accused of blasphemy be immediately arrested until trial. Since 1992, the crime of insulting the prophet Mohammed (Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code) has had a mandatory death penalty for anyone convicted, though so far no-one has been executed.

Whenever attempts are made to reform the blasphemy laws, hardline Islamist groups (often groups who also support terrorism, like Jamaat ud-Dawa) have mobilized protests and the governments have backed down. This happened in 2000 under General Musharraf and when in February 2010 the current Pakistann government suggested it would reform the blasphemy laws, nothing happened.

The Times Square Bomber

Faisal Shahzad stood trial at the Federal District Court in Manhattan, accused of trying to set off a car bomb in New York. On Saturday May 1 this year, street sellers in Times Square noticed smoke coming from a Nissan Pathfinder. Two days later, Shahzad was arrested at John F. Kennedy airport as he sat inside a Dubai-bound plane. Fortunately, Shahzad was an incompetent, and his car bomb had not been set up properly. Faisal Shahzad had arrived from Pakistan and though not an American citizen, he had spent much time working in Connecticut.

US investigators rigged up a car bomb as it was originally planned by Faisal Shahzad, and the results can be seen below:



On Monday, June 21 , Faisal Shahzad had pleaded guilty on 10 counts. He told US District Court Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum: "It's a war. I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people."

Faisal Shahzad had been linked to the leadership of the Pakistani Taliban. In February, it was reported that Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban, had been killed after a US drone strike carried out in mid-January 2010, though he is now believed to have survived the attack. A video circulating on YouTube shows Faisal Shahzad meeting Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan:



Several people had been arrested in Pakistan immediately after Shahzad's arrest, including members of Jaish-e-Mohammed and also Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhvangi, vigilante groups related to Al-Qaeda who specialise in attacks against people who are not Sunni Muslims, including Ahmadi and Shia Muslims and also Christians. Many of those were subsequently released. One of the people arrested was Shahzad's father Baharul Haq, who had previously been an Air Vice Marshall in the Pakistan air force.

On July 14, 2010, Al-Arabiya TV released a video in which Faisal Shahzad is shown sitting on a chair beside a gun, and reads from a booklet. In this video, Shahzad declares that it is an obligation upon all Muslims to commit jihad and threatening that democracy will be defeated and Islam will take over the world. The video can be seen below:



In September, three of Shahzad's alleged accomplices were arrested in Pakistan. These men were said by Pakistan police to have given financial assistance to Shahzad. They were members of the Pakistan Taliban.

Shortly after this, in September a Pakstani American based in Long Island was charged with conducting an unlicensed money transfer business and conspiracy to conduct an unlicensed money transfer business. This money transfer system is said to have been used to fund Shahzad. The accused man, Mohammad Younis, is not accused of knowing that the money would be used for bombing.

Two days ago on Big Peace, Dr Andrew Bostom reported that another man had been arrested in Pakistan in relation to the Times Square bomb plot. This man, Faisal ABbasi, was a leading member of the Council for Islamic Ideology (CII), a state-run body that acts in an advisory capacity on issues of Sharia law. In August 2009, CII argued that an act to prevent domestic violence would push up the divorce rate, and therefore should be opposed.

A Pakistani intelligence official has said that while Shahzad was in Pakistan, Faisal Abbasi accompanied him for the whole time and had gone with Shahzad into the northwest of Pakistan to meet militant leaders. Acording to the CII, Abbasi did indeed work with the group, but had been "on vacation" for the last three months.

The Internationalism of Modern Terrorism

Currently, the Al-Qaeda supporting groups are raising their game, and intend to carry out major terror attacks. In Pakistan, female members of the Jamia Hafsia madrassa are said to be planning terror attacks against foreign missions. This madrassa is connected to the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) which was stormed in July 2007 after attacks upon military personnel. The leaders of the Red Mosque had links to Al Qaeda and also supported Taliban-related groups in the northwest of Pakistan. The majority of the students at the madrassas connected to the Red Mosque (Jamia Hafsia and Jamia Fareedia madrassas) came from the northwest regions. IN the recent accusations against the Jamia Hafsia madrassa, one of the girls' tutors is said to be an explosive expert who has been training the girls.

With relatively free borders, terrorism is being allowed to actively involve plots that can involve players who live thousands of miles from each other. Insular national approaches to terror can never be able to successfully defeat the internationalists who involve themselves in terror.

In Britain, for example, there are currently 15 to 20 British Muslims who are known to be currently undergoing terror training in camps in Pakistan's border regions.

In a climate of "multiculturalism" websites that do not use the English language are thriving in Britain and are used to promote terrorism and to recruit terrorists. One such website is called Medad al-Suyuf, and is registered to Walid ElSharkawy, who lives in Camden, North London. 4,000 registered users are members of this website, which supports the actions of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda of the Two Rivers in Iraq. Zarqawi was killed by a US missile in June 2006.
Zarqawi used to saw off the heads of his victims and post videos to Muslim websites such as the At-Tibyan website. Zarqawi's brother-in-law Abu Qudama Salih al-Hami contributes to the Medad al-Suyuf website, as does Yassir al-Sirri. Al-Sirri is an associate of Al-Qaeda promoter Abu Qatada. Sirri was convicted of plotting a bomb attack in which a six year old girl died in Egypt. He walks free in Maida Vale, West London.

Another contributor to the Medad al-Suyuf website is Dr Muhammad al-Massari who fled to Britain from Saudi Arabia. He has a website called al-Tajdeed, which he used in late 2005 to urge European Muslims to copy the French Muslim riots. He uses his website to plot the downfall of the Saudi Kingdom, and was an adviser to the ridiculously named Islamist group "The Islamic Human Rights Commission."

The full report on this and other websites is called "Cheering for Osama". It is written by Mohammed Ali Musawi, and produced by the Quilliam Foundation. It can be downloaded in its entirety here.

The American administration presents to the American public a perspective that Islamic terrorism is rare, and unlikely to take place. In practice, to maintain this illusion, it has been bombarding northwestern Pakistan with Hellfire missiles. Such actions may convince people at home that everything is hunky-dory, but such actions are going to fuel more recruits to terrorism. Terrorist groups need to be fought, and fought hard, but there is a disconnect between what the administration preaches and what it practices. If Islamic terrorism were not real, it would not be bombing tribal villages. And while the terrorists are seen to be "elsewhere" the same administration is courting Muslim Brotherhood members who support terrorism in Israel.

While such tactics may work on a few voters, they do not address the problem. We are in a long slow war of attrition. If one of the first casualties of war is truth, then another of the casualties of war is freedom of expression. Today, Geert Wilders is on trial in the Netherlands, merely for expressing his freedom of speech. He is accused of stirring up hatred against Muslims by criticising their religion.

This is a fundamental problem. There is no reason why anyone in the West should respect any religion. Only fear prevents criticism of Islam, and currently Al Qaeda seems to want to terrorise the world into submission. If Western democracy is to survive, it should boldly assert itself in the face of such insidious and cowardly tactics. Dead prophets should never be regarded as more important than living, breathing sentient people.
 

ajtr

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Hamburg mosque which links 9/11 to the badlands of Pakistan

Ian Traynor reports from Germany on an abandoned prayer hall in the spotlight again after US terror alerts

The most infamous mosque in Europe is a drab, nondescript place. Five minutes from Hamburg's main railway station, above a Vietnamese takeaway and the Olympic Fitness Club, the grimy quarters of the Taiba prayer hall and library occupy mythical status for the jihadists of Europe.

It was here at the mosque formerly called the al-Quds that Mohammed Atta and several of his accomplices prayed and plotted the global gamechanger that was 9/11. And it was here, until last year, that another group of 11 German Islamist militants congregated before taking circuitous routes to Pakistan's tribal belt for, it is assumed, terrorist training.

Over the past week Washington and London have been issuing scary warnings of Mumbai-style massacres in Europe about to be perpetrated by homegrown terrorists operating to a script written in the Hindu Kush. The alarms have refocused attention on the mosque in the north German port because the intelligence source for the US warnings is one of the 11 acolytes who left Germany for the lawless Pakistani-Afghan border region of Waziristan last year.

And on Monday, when an unmanned CIA Predator struck a farmstead in the same border area, the news was that eight German militants were killed, reinforcing the alleged link with the Hamburg Islamists.

A senior security service source in the city, though, is playing down the Hamburg connection: "We don't know if the Taiba people are connected with the [Predator] attack. The IDs of the dead are not known. We would know for sure if any of the victims were Hamburg people, but we have nothing yet."

In Berlin, they are even more sceptical, voicing barely disguised contempt for what they view as American spin.

"What really astonishes me," Thomas de Maizière, the German interior minister, told German radio on Wednesday, "is that this attack is supposed to have taken place with unmanned drones in an inaccessible region the day before yesterday and yet the identities are immediately found."

Whether the American attack foiled or was connected to German Islamists planning for a European bombing spree, it is clear that the Hamburg mosque has served as a recruiting ground for violent Islamism since September 2001. A report by Hamburg's counter-intelligence service in May described the mosque as "the main focus of attraction for the jihadist scene as in previous years". Ralf Kunz, spokesman for the Hamburg security services, said: "The Taiba mosque has been drawing people not only from all over Germany, but from all over Europe. It was a place of pilgrimage."

The two-storey mosque building lies empty and abandoned. At 6am on a Monday two months ago – almost nine years after the Twin Towers attack – the police and special forces moved in, hauled away computers and documents, and closed the place down.

The authorities had repeatedly tried and failed, most recently last spring, to win court approval for the ban. It was the evidence about the 11 who left Hamburg for Pakistan last year, at least two of whom have joined the terrorists of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, that persuaded the magistrates. US intelligence deriving from the same group was also the trigger for the recent US warnings and travel advisories.

Two of the 11 are now in custody. Rami Makanesi, a German national of Syrian origin, is being held by German special branch after being deported from Pakistan this summer. Ahmad Sidiqi, a German national of Afghan origin, is being held by the Americans at Bagram outside Kabul. Both are believed to be talking to their interrogators, although a transatlantic credibility gap has opened up over the value of their testimony.

Both men were regulars at the Hamburg mosque, with Makanesi the younger and more influential in militant circles, according to the Germans.

Sidiqi left Hamburg with his Indonesian wife and younger brother in March last year, pitching up in Peshawar and then Mir Ali, the Taliban and al-Qaida stronghold in Waziristan near the site of the Predator attack.

Both men were arrested within weeks of one another in June and July, Sidiqi by the Americans in Kabul, Makanesi by the Pakistanis while disguised in a full-body burqa, apparently trying to make his way from Waziristan to Islamabad.

According to German accounts, both were fed up with the fight, wanted to return to Germany, and were trying to reach the German embassies in the Afghan and Pakistani capitals to renew their ID papers. The Berlin media reported yesterday that the Americans were about to move Sidiqi from Bagram to the US, viewing him as a source of high-grade intelligence.

A German diplomat in Kabul was allowed to see Sidiqi for the first time last weekend, following weeks of pressure on the Americans. The Germans are also hoping to dispatch a team of spies and interrogators to question him.

The evidence supporting the US terrorism alerts is said to have been gleaned from Sidiqi, who has told the Americans that he met a man claiming to be al-Qaida's new number three, Sheikh Younis al-Mauretani, last spring and that they discussed a fresh wave of attacks in Britain and France, carried out by European passport-holders using sophisticated new encrypted software and laptops. The plot was said to have been blessed by Osama bin Laden.

The problem with all of this, the Germans complain, is that there is no real evidence; the American alerts are so vague as to be meaningless and the detail being leaked in Washington to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News channel and other US networks is all old.

"There is no new security situation in Hamburg," said Kunz. De Maizière was withering in Berlin on Wednesday. He described the risk as "hypothetical. There are no direct and specific plans for attacks "¦ We would rather work seriously instead of talking about it."

Following the US alerts, Britain has been talking up the risks in France, while Paris has been warning of the danger in the UK. Germany has been generally dismissive. If, as Washington contends, Europe is at immediate risk, only Sweden has officially raised the level of terrorism alert.

The real German alarm was last year in the run-up to the general election, when al-Qaida issued bloodcurdling threats about what would happen if Berlin did not pull out of northern Afghanistan. One of the radicals in the video warnings was a German national from the Hamburg group of 11. The rest of the detail about attacks on Berlin landmarks and tourist attractions, broadcast this week by US networks, also stems from the same al-Qaida campaign last year.

Yet Germany, spared the kind of attacks suffered by London and Madrid since 9/11, is nonetheless very worried about the Hamburg group and other German nationals travelling in increasing numbers to Pakistan for training. The security service estimates the number of Muslims in Germany supporting "Islamist aims" at 36,270 last year, the highest figure since the 2001 attacks on America. The assessments also reveal that Hamburg is seen as a magnet in Germany for Islamist "holy warriors". Of an estimated 200 hard-core "jihadists" in Germany, 45 are in the northern port, according to national counter-intelligence.

"They advocate or support the worldwide armed struggle according to al-Qaida ideology in the form of propaganda, logistical, financial or other forms of help and see this as a legitimate means in the fight against 'unbelievers'," said the May counter-intelligence report.

Until recently, Mohammed Atta's mosque continued to play a central role: "The [Hamburg] group was formed in the Taiba mosque "¦ The unifying factor for the radicalisation of the members was certainly the common attendance of this mosque," said the report.

Which raises the question of why the mosque was not closed down earlier or why it was closed down at all since, riddled with intelligence bugs, it was arguably the most closely watched building in Germany.

"Banning the mosque was not right," said Mustafa Yoldas, a Hamburg GP and head of the Schura, an umbrella organisation of more than 30 mosques in the city. "Now these people are all over Hamburg in private flats and you need to watch 20 places instead of one."

Udo Steinbach, a national expert on Islam and former head of Hamburg's German Orient Institute, said the threat of Islamist violence in Hamburg was minimal because of the comprehensive surveillance of suspects.

"There was no need for this step. The mosque used to have clear links to Pakistan, but it was no longer a danger."

Kunz agreed that the August closure of the mosque was not a panacea, but it helped. "These people have not disappeared from the face of the earth," he said. "They've just gone elsewhere."
 

Tshering22

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Wonder how the Western, Indian, Russian and other governments are missing such critical points...
 

ajtr

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Takfir: the ideology of hate
—Dr Mohammad Taqi

An ordinary Salafi may believe in the non-violent call to convert to their version of Islam but the Salafi jihadists are proponents of violent jihad. The doctrinal differences that set the jihadist group apart include practising takfir, i.e. labelling other Muslims as infidels or apostates

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important" — Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

While some in the Pakistani media seem to have bought into Pervez Musharraf's Facebook flight of fantasy and were focused on his 'Desperate Housewives'-style, primetime soap performances, the peddlers of the ideology of hate struck again.

There were two major attacks: one against yet another symbol of South Asian religious diversity — the Abdullah Shah Ghazi shrine in Karachi — and the other before that, which killed the Islamic scholar and practising psychiatrist, Dr Farooq Khan. The assassination of Dr Khan is, by far, the more significant and more ominous of the two because he was a person who had dedicated his life to preserve and promote pluralist thought, which shrines like Shah Ghazi's have epitomised for centuries.

However, the news media, especially the television networks, covered these two stories for just about 24 hours and after that moved on with the preferred national pastime of Zardari-bashing and betting on his exit date. But, given the open jihadist tirades of certain anchors, anti-Ahmediyya vitriol of a particular televangelist and outlets that air the interviews of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, this is hardly a surprise.

Last week, Ms Gulmina Bilal Ahmad, in her article 'Historical distortions' (Daily Times, October 8, 2010), has written eloquently about Dr Farooq, his thoughts and work and has alluded to those who are out to counter this thought. I did not know Dr Farooq except from a conversation we had at the humble yet dignified guest room of the late Professor Saeedullah Qazi, the then Dean of Sheikh Zayed Islamic Centre, Peshawar. His words are rather vague in my mind, but it is hard to forget his soft-spoken mannerism. What Farooq has done in his death — and Ms Ahmad has taken up in her column — is to open the debate about a virulent ideology hell-bent on eliminating anyone who does not conform to it.

In recent times, the biggest manifestation of this ideology has been the suicide bombings or the so-called 'martyrdom missions'. While we focus on suicide bombings as the dastardly acts that have killed thousands, we have been somewhat remiss in assessing the role of the doctrine providing the religious-political and psycho-social 'rationale' of this foremost tactic in the global Salafi jihad.

The Salafi jihadists form an extreme fringe, even of the Wahhabiist-Salafist spectrum itself. An ordinary Salafi may believe in the non-violent call to convert to their version of Islam, but the Salafi jihadists are proponents of violent jihad. The doctrinal differences that set the jihadist group apart include practising takfir, i.e. labelling other Muslims as infidels or apostates (kafir) and concluding, therefore, that violence against the latter is permissible (halal or mubaah), condoning acts of violence against civilians and the use of suicide missions. Violent jihad is held at par with the basic tenets of Islam by the Salafi jihadists. The most explicit endorsement of killing Muslim civilians came from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who said in a 2005 audiotape message: "The killing of a number of Muslims whom it is forbidden to kill is a grave evil. However, it is permissible to commit this evil — indeed, it is even required — in order to ward off a greater evil, the evil of suspending jihad."

Dr Farooq was not the first Islamic scholar to have differed with the hateful ideology of takfir and to have paid with his life for this dissent. Ironically, the grandfather of al Qaeda, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, was killed on November 24, 1989 in Peshawar, in a bomb attack by his own cohorts, for opposing takfir.

The late chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Syed Maududi, had also written against invoking takfir in religio-political polemics. I was told that one cannot find his books in Saudi Arabia and I did find this to be true, as far as the shops around the Holy Ka'aba and the Masjid-e-Nabvi go. This, perhaps, has something to do with his very favourable opinion of Imam Abu Hanifah in doctrinal matters, a tolerant view of the Shiite and a general condemnation of takfir.

Indeed, the key pan-Islamists such as Muhammad Abduhu and Rashid Rida — like Maududi — had tried a selective application of takfir against the relatively newer sects in Islam. They feared that indiscriminate use of the label would lead to endless strife (fitna) within the larger Muslim community and advised their followers that wrongly accusing another Muslim of being an infidel is a major sin in Islam.

However, even this self-serving and rather meek condemnation of takfir is not acceptable to the ardent takfiris who are quick to condemn even Maududi as a kafir. The jihadists and their apologists remain blind to the fact that these attacks, ostensibly against foreign occupiers, have killed more Muslims than any other group, have divided the country deeply and have reinforced the belief that the jihadists consider common Muslims as expendable. Moreover, suicide attacks — though not as common — did take place in Egypt, Algeria and Afghanistan even when there was no foreign occupier.

This suggests that, while challenging the appeal of the takfiri ideology is a crucial component of the counter-terrorism strategy, a scholarly discourse by itself is an insufficient antidote. What is needed is a holistic, multi-pronged approach to stymie the takfiri groups. Civilian law-enforcement officers have made great strides in understanding takfiri terrorism in Pakistan and have apprehended many of its leaders. However, no high profile leader has ever been put on trial or any madrassah shut down — let alone levelled — limiting the deterrence value of counter-terrorism operations.

The trial of the far-right extremist, anti-Islam Dutch parliamentarian, Geert Wilders, resumed yesterday in Amsterdam. He is facing charges of inciting hatred against Muslims. This has some of his friends on the US side of the pond, up in arms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali went on bewailing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Netherlands, a 21st century democracy, has put free speech on trial. What has actually been put on trial, however, is hate speech.

The Dutch law may not make Geert Wilders love Muslims, but chances are that it will prevent him from inciting hate and potential hate crimes. One may woefully concede that for something like this to happen in Pakistan, many Dr Farooq Khans may be lynched first.

The writer teaches and practices medicine at the University of Florida and contributes to the think-tanks PoliTact Official Home - Geopolitical Situation: Alert, Prepare, Avoid and Aryana Institute. He can be contacted at [email protected]
 

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