Al Qaeda, ex-Gitmo detainee involved in consulate attack, intelligence sources say

/in /by

September 20, 2012

Foxnews.com

Read the story at Foxnews.com

Intelligence sources tell Fox News they are convinced the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was directly tied to Al Qaeda — with a former Guantanamo detainee involved.

That revelation comes on the same day a top Obama administration official called last week’s deadly assault a “terrorist attack” — the first time the attack has been described that way by the administration after claims it had been a “spontaneous” act.

“Yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” Matt Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.

Olsen echoed administration colleagues in saying U.S. officials have no specific intelligence about “significant advanced planning or coordination” for the attack.

However, his statement goes beyond White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, saying the Sept. 11 attack on the consulate was spontaneous. He is the first top administration official to call the strike an act of terrorism.

Sufyan Ben Qumu is thought to have been involved and even may have led the attack, Fox News’ intelligence sources said. Qumu, a Libyan, was released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2007 and transferred into Libyan custody on the condition he be kept in jail. He was released by the Qaddafi regime as part of its reconciliation effort with Islamists in 2008.

His Guantanamo files also show he has ties to the financiers behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The declassified files also point to ties with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a known Al Qaeda affiliate.

Olson, repeating Wednesday that the FBI is handling the Benghazi investigation, also acknowledged the attack could lead back to Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

“We are looking at indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda’s affiliates, in particular Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” he said at the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.

Still, Olsen said “the facts that we have now indicate that this was an opportunistic attack on our embassy, the attack began and evolved and escalated over several hours,” Olson said.

Carney said hours earlier that there still is “no evidence of a preplanned or pre-meditated attack,” which occurred on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

“I made that clear last week, Ambassador Rice made that clear Sunday,” Carney said at the daily White House press briefing.

Rice appeared on “Fox News Sunday” and four other morning talk shows to say the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was “spontaneous” and sparked by an early protest that day outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, over an anti-Islamic video.

“It was a reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States,” Rice told Fox News. “The best information and the best assessment we have today is that this was not a pre-planned, pre-meditated attack. What happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo.”

However, that account clashed with claims by the Libyan president that the attack was in fact premeditated. Other sources, including an intelligence source in Libya who spoke to Fox News, have echoed those claims. The intelligence source even said that, contrary to the suggestion by the Obama administration, there was no major protest in Benghazi before the deadly attack which killed four Americans. A U.S. official did not dispute the claim.

In the face of these conflicting accounts, Carney on Tuesday deferred to the ongoing investigation and opened the door to the possibility of other explanations.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, called Wednesday for an independent review of the attack.

“A State Department Accountability Review Board to look into the Benghazi attack is not sufficient,” Collins said. “Given the loss of the lives of four Americans who were serving their country and the serious questions that have been raised about the security at our Consulate in Benghazi, it is imperative that a non-political, no-holds-barred examination be conducted.”

Fox News’ Bret Baier contributed to this report.

 

Why is the Arab world so easily offended?

/in /by

Why is the Arab world so easily offended?

By Fouad Ajami, Published: September 14, The Washington Post

Modernity requires the willingness to be offended. And as anti-American violence across the Middle East and beyond shows, that willingness is something the Arab world, the heartland of Islam, still lacks.

Time and again in recent years, as the outside world has battered the walls of Muslim lands and as Muslims have left their places of birth in search of greater opportunities in the Western world, modernity — with its sometimes distasteful but ultimately benign criticism of Islam — has sparked fatal protests. To understand why violence keeps erupting and to seek to prevent it, we must discern what fuels this sense of grievance.

There is an Arab pain and a volatility in the face of judgment by outsiders that stem from a deep and enduring sense of humiliation. A vast chasm separates the poor standing of Arabs in the world today from their history of greatness. In this context, their injured pride is easy to understand.

In the narrative of history transmitted to schoolchildren throughout the Arab world and reinforced by the media, religious scholars and laymen alike, Arabs were favored by divine providence. They had come out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, carrying Islam from Morocco to faraway Indonesia. In the process, they overran the Byzantine and Persian empires, then crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Iberia, and there they fashioned a brilliant civilization that stood as a rebuke to the intolerance of the European states to the north. Cordoba and Granada were adorned and exalted in the Arab imagination. Andalusia brought together all that the Arabs favored — poetry, glamorous courts, philosophers who debated the great issues of the day.

If Islam’s rise was spectacular, its fall was swift and unsparing. This is the world that the great historian Bernard Lewis explored in his 2002 book “What Went Wrong?”The blessing of God, seen at work in the ascent of the Muslims, now appeared to desert them. The ruling caliphate, with its base in Baghdad, was torn asunder by a Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Soldiers of fortune from the Turkic Steppes sacked cities and left a legacy of military seizures of power that is still the bane of the Arabs. Little remained of their philosophy and literature, and after the Ottoman Turks overran Arab countries to their south in the 16th century, the Arabs seemed to exit history; they were now subjects of others.

The coming of the West to their world brought superior military, administrative and intellectual achievement into their midst — and the outsiders were unsparing in their judgments. They belittled the military prowess of the Arabs, and they were scandalized by the traditional treatment of women and the separation of the sexes that crippled Arab society.

Even as Arabs insist that their defects were inflicted on them by outsiders, they know their weaknesses. Younger Arabs today can be brittle and proud about their culture, yet deeply ashamed of what they see around them. They know that more than 300 million Arabs have fallen to economic stagnation and cultural decline. They know that the standing of Arab states along the measures that matter — political freedom, status of women, economic growth — is low. In the privacy of their own language, in daily chatter on the street, on blogs and in the media, and in works of art and fiction, they probe endlessly what befell them.

But woe to the outsider who ventures onto that explosive terrain. The assumption is that Westerners bear Arabs malice, that Western judgments are always slanted and cruel.

In the past half-century, Arabs, as well as Muslims in non-Arab lands, have felt the threat of an encircling civilization they can neither master nor reject. Migrants have left the burning grounds of Karachi, Cairo and Casablanca but have taken the fire of their faith with them. “Dish cities” have sprouted in the Muslim diasporas of Western Europe and North America. You can live in Stockholm and be sustained by a diet of al-Jazeera television.

We know the celebrated cases when modernity has agitated the pious. A little more than two decades ago, it was a writer of Muslim and Indian birth, Salman Rushdie, whose irreverent work of fiction, “The Satanic Verses,” offended believers with its portrayal of Islam. That crisis began with book-burnings in Britain, later saw protests in Pakistan and culminated in Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989. The protesters were not necessarily critics of fiction; all it took to offend was that Islam, the prophet Muhammad and his wives had become a writer’s material. The confrontation laid bare the unease of Islam in the modern world.

The floodgates had opened. The clashes that followed defined the new terms of encounters between a politicized version of Islam — awakened to both power and vulnerability — and the West’s culture of protecting and nurturing free speech. In 2004, a Moroccan Dutchman in his mid-20s, Mohammed Bouyeri, murdered filmmaker Theo van Goghon a busy Amsterdam street after van Gogh and a Somali-born politician made a short film about the abuse of women in Islamic culture.

Shortly afterward, trouble came to Denmark when a newspaper there published a dozencartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad; in one he wears a bomb-shaped turban, and another shows him as an assassin. The newspaper’s culture editor had thought the exercise would merely draw attention to the restrictions on cultural freedom in Europe — but perhaps that was naive. After all, Muslim activists are on the lookout for such material. And Arab governments are eager to defend Islam. The Egyptian ambassador to Denmark encouraged a radical preacher of Palestinian birth living in Denmark and a young Lebanese agitator to fan the flames of the controversy.

But it was Syria that made the most of this opportunity. The regime asked the highest clerics to preach against the Danish government. The Danish embassies in Damascus and Beirut were sacked; there was a call to boycott Danish products. Denmark had been on the outer margins of Europe’s Muslim diaspora. Now its peace and relative seclusion were punctured.

The storm that erupted this past week at the gates of American diplomatic outposts across the Muslim world is a piece of this history. As usual, it was easily ignited. The offending work, a 14-minute film trailer posted on YouTube in July, is offensive indeed. Billed as a trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims,” a longer movie to come, it is at once vulgar and laughable. Its primitiveness should have consigned it to oblivion.

It was hard to track down the identities of those who made it. A Sam Bacile claimed authorship, said that he was an Israeli American and added that 100Jewish businessmen had backed the venture. This alone made it rankle even more — offending Muslims and implicating Jews at the same time. (In the meantime, no records could be found of Bacile, and the precise origins of the video remain murky.)

It is never hard to assemble a crowd of young protesters in the teeming cities of the Muslim world. American embassies and consulates are magnets for the disgruntled. It is inside those fortresses, the gullible believe, that rulers are made and unmade. Yet these same diplomatic outposts dispense coveted visas and a way out to the possibilities of the Western world. The young men who turned up at the U.S. Embassies this week came out of this deadly mix of attraction to American power and resentment of it. The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that took the lives of four American diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, appeared to be premeditated and unconnected to the film protests.

The ambivalence toward modernity that torments Muslims is unlikely to abate. The temptations of the West have alienated a younger generation from its elders. Men and women insist that they revere the faith as they seek to break out of its restrictions. Freedom of speech, granting license and protection to the irreverent, is cherished, protected and canonical in the Western tradition. Now Muslims who quarrel with offensive art are using their newfound freedoms to lash out against it.

These cultural contradictions do not lend themselves to the touch of outsiders. President George W. Bush believed that America’s proximity to Arab dictatorships had begotten us the jihadists’ enmity. His military campaign in Iraq became an attempt to reform that country and beyond. But Arabs rejected his interventionism and dismissed his “freedom agenda” as a cover for an unpopular war and for domination.

President Obama has taken a different approach. He was sure that his biography — the years he spent in Indonesia and his sympathy for the aspirations of Muslim lands — would help repair relations between America and the Islamic world. But he’s been caught in the middle, conciliating the rulers while making grand promises to ordinary people. The revolt of the Iranian opposition in the summer of 2009 exposed the flaws of his approach. Then the Arab Spring played havoc with American policy. Since then, the Obama administration has not been able to decide whether it defends the status quo or the young people hell-bent on toppling the old order.

Cultural freedom is never absolute, of course, and the Western tradition itself, from the Athenians to the present, struggles mightily with the line between freedom and order. In the Muslim world, that struggle is more fierce and lasting, and it will show itself in far more than burnt flags and overrun embassies.

Al-Azhar sheikh demands new international law criminalizing defamation of religion

/in /by

al-Masry Al-Youm

Egypt Independent, 9/15/12

Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar Ahmed al-Tayyeb has demanded a UN resolution criminalizing blasphemy against Islam and other world religions, as well as demanding that those he described as “misled” be punished for committing “these heinous acts of abuse to the Prophet.”

In a statement released Saturday, Tayyeb called on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to criminalize the defamation of religion, saying that such actions and words threaten world peace and international security.

“Is not that irresponsible tampering, Mr. Secretary General, similar to the issue of [anti-Semitic] prejudice, which you condemn all the time, and [against] which verdicts were issued against alleged perpetrators in many countries of the world, even if they are great thinkers and scientists?”

Tayyeb asked in the statement. Tayyeb also called on all Egyptians to keep calm and condemned attacks on innocent people and expressed sympathy for victims of the recent violence. He also stressed the need to protect diplomatic missions and the headquarters of international organizations. Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm

Morning Bell: New Wave of Attacks on U.S. Embassies

/in /by

Morning Bell: New Wave of Attacks on U.S. Embassies

Amy Payne, September 13, 2012, The Foundry

Protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Yemen today and set fire to a building. Like the mob in Egypt on Tuesday, they tore down the American flag. Reports are also circulating of a separate protest in Tehran today with about 500 Iranians chanting “Death to America.” Meanwhile, a onetime mentor of Osama bin Laden called on his followers to replicate what happened in Libya and Egypt.

Following the deaths of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other embassy staff, it is realistic to fear other attacks on U.S. diplomats. “Our men and women—in and out of uniform—are out there every day, protecting us and our interests. And that will always make them a tempting target,” Heritage expert Jim Carafano reminds us, commenting on the attacks in Libya and Egypt. Heritage’s Jim Phillips wrote in June about a larger Iranian campaign to assassinate foreign diplomats, including Israeli and Saudi diplomats, in at least seven countries over 13 months.

At this time, America’s first priority is the security of our personnel, and President Obama has ordered heightened security at America’s posts around the world.

We cannot allow terrorists and rioters to dictate U.S. missions and policy, and Washington must avoid knee-jerk reactions, such as yanking foreign aid, before we know the facts on the ground. As Phillips explained, the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Egypt reflects the internal divisions in that country. At the same time, while there are dangerous anti-American factions in Libya, there are also many that appreciate the U.S. assistance and, and according to some reports, fought to help protect the U.S. compound before it was overrun.

There are still too many questions to be answered about the origins of the attacks, the state of security at the U.S. facilities, and the responses of the host governments. We should get the facts before we draw too many conclusions about what happened and why, much less what this should mean for the future of U.S. policy.

That said, this is no cause for declaring a moratorium on debate about U.S. policy in the region. There is plenty worth debating.

President Obama has consistently shown more enthusiasm in engaging hostile regimes in the Middle East than in protecting the interests of allies such as Israel. He has shown more concern about restraining Israel from acting than stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

In fact, this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. is “not setting deadlines” for Iran and still considers negotiations “by far the best approach” to prevent the Islamic Republic from developing nuclear weapons. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public response was that “Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”

President Obama made matters worse by declining an offer from Netanyahu to meet when Netanyahu visit the U.S. later this month—despite the fact that Obama found time in his schedule for an appearance on David Letterman’s late-night comedy show and an interview with Miami rapper and radio personality DJ Laz.

The United States’s dysfunctional engagement with Israel and Iran is not the only problem. From North Africa through sub-Saharan Africa, al-Qaeda and its affiliates seem determined to plant the flag for new Afghanistans. Across the Middle East, the Arab Spring is far from unfinished business. Current U.S. policies clearly aren’t working. It is time to change course.

 

Carney: Protests not directed at the United States

/in /by

 Washington Free Beacon, September 14, 2012 11:59 am

‘This is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims’

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday the violent protests throughout the Middle East are not directed at the United States or U.S. policy but are a response to a YouTube video:

CARNEY: We also need to understand that this is a fairly volatile situation and it is in response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, or the American people, but it is in response to a video, a film that we have judged to be be reprehensible and disgusting. That in no way justifies any violent reaction to it, but this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy, this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.

Again, this is not in any way justifying violence, and we have spoken very clearly out against that and condemned it. And the president is making sure in his conversations with leaders around the region that they are committed as hosts to diplomatic facilities to protect both personnel and buildings and other facilities that are part of the U.S. representation in those countries.

The protests which began earlier this week have expanded rapidly across the Middle East on Friday.

Protesters attacked the U.S. Embassies in Tunis and Sudan; Tunisian protesters smashed windows and lit fires inside the embassy compound, while gunfire could be heard. Images of a dark column of smoke over the Tunisian site have circulated on the Internet Friday.

According to a page on the State Department’s website describing what an embassy is, an attack on an embassy is considered an attack on that country.

“Because an embassy represents a sovereign state, any attack on an embassy is considered an attack on the country it represents,” the page reads.

This entry was posted in Middle East, Obama Administration, Video and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Turkish professor given prison sentence over headscarf ban

/in /by

13 September 2012 / TODAYSZAMAN.COM,

An İzmir court has handed down a prison sentence to a Turkish professor from Ege University after he repeatedly blocked headscarved women from entering the faculty building where he worked.
The court accused the professor of infringing on citizens’ constitutional right of access to education and sentenced him to over two years in prison.

The professor, Esat Rennan Pekünlü, from the university’s department of astronomy and space sciences, was caught on camera in May taking photographs of headscarved students and preventing them from entering the building.

The Higher Education Board (YÖK) lifted a ban on the wearing of the Muslim headscarf on university campuses in 2010. However, some universities continue to impose the notorious ban. Opponents of the ban, including conservatives and many liberal intellectuals, think that such a ban contravenes fundamental rights as it deprives some citizens of their right to education.

Pekünlü was captured by cameramen of the Cihan news agency while he was standing at the door of his faculty building and taking photos of headscarved students. Cameramen had arrived at the faculty after some students tipped them off that the professor was violating the rights of women wearing headscarves at their university.

Pekünlü repeatedly blocked those students from entering the building when they tried to attend their classes. He would, however, pay no attention to male students or female students who were not wearing headscarves.

The Ege University administration had earlier announced that an investigation had been launched into the professor’s actions. In October 2010, YÖK sent a circular to university administrations, asking them not to send students away from class or campus for wearing the headscarf.

The İzmir 4th Criminal Court of First Instance charged the professor with violating the privacy of the Fatma Nur Gidal — one of the women he prevented from entering the building and the plaintiff in the case — as well as violating her right to access to education.

Gidal’s lawyer demanded the maximum prison sentence for the professor and asked the court not to postpone the punishment, as he had previously been charged with similar crimes.

Pekünlü’s lawyer cited a 2008 decision by Turkey’s Constitutional Court upholding headscarf bans in universities, as well as a 2004 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) that said such bans do not violate freedom of religion.

Speaking following the decision, Gidal said she was not able to enter the building, let alone the classrooms. She said she had no choice but to file the complaint against her professor.

Deadly embassy attacks were days in the making

/in /by

Deadly embassy attacks were days in the making

by Sara Lynch and Oren Dorell, USA TODAY, 9/12/12

CAIRO — Days of planning and online promotion by hard-line Islamist leaders helped whip up the mobs that stormed the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that killed an ambassador and three others.

As the U.S. tightened security worldwide at embassies and Libya’s president apologized for the attack, details emerged of how the violence began, according to experts who monitor Egyptian media.

Christopher Stevens, 52, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was killed, along with three other Americans, on Tuesday night when a mob of protesters and gunmen stormed the embassy in the eastern city of Benghazi.

The killings there followed demonstrations in front of Cairo’s U.S. Embassy, where protesters tore down the U.S. flag and scaled the embassy’s wall.

The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

When the video started circulating, Nader Bakkar, the spokesman for the Egyptian Salafist Noor party, which holds about 25% of the seats in parliament, called on people to go to the embassy. He also called on non-Islamist soccer hooligans, known as Ultras, to join the protest.

On Monday, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Mohamed al Zawahiri, tweeted that people should go to the embassy and “defend the prophet,” Trager said.

Zawahiri justified al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in an interview with Al Jazeera last month.

“If America attacks the Arab peoples and their regimes do not defend them, somebody who does defend the Arab and Muslim peoples should not be considered a criminal,” Zawahiri told the television network, according to a translation by MEMRI. “We have done nothing wrong.”

A U.S. official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly, said the Obama administration is investigating whether the assault on the U.S. consulate in Libya was planned to mark the anniversary of 9/11.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose political arm holds 47% of seats in parliament and is led by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, announced new protests against the film to take place Friday at Tahrir Square, Trager said.

“They’ve made no statements in Arabic against violence over this video,” he said. “They’ve also pinned this video incorrectly on the Coptic (Christian) diaspora. They’ve used this video to advance sectarian tensions in Egypt.”

The Muslim Brotherhood on Wednesday condemned the violence.

Islamist terrorism is the biggest threat in Europe

/in /by

Islamist terrorism is the biggest threat in Europe

RT, 30 August, 2012

Islamist terrorism and the radicalization of young Muslims has taken center stage in Europe. With schools, universities and even sport clubs becoming hotbeds of Islamism, experts argue that some European countries have willingly allowed it.

Claude Monique, an expert on counterterrorism and extremism and the director of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, told RT that while European intelligence was engaged in battling a bigger threat – communism and the former Soviet Union – it ignored what has become a defining threat of the modern age.

RT: Terrorism in Europe: We’ve seen acts of terror from Breivik in Norway to Mohamed Merah in Toulouse, and we have also seen riots based on ideology. Based on what you’ve seen so far, where is the biggest threat coming from?

Claude Moniquet: I think that we have three different threats today in Europe. The biggest one clearly is still Islamist terrorism. Why it is the biggest? Because we have a large number, thousands of people involved – not in special interest actions but in extremist actions, and are able to become terrorists in the future. We don’t have thousands of such people on the right wing, for instance.

So we have thousands of people who have a very clear political and religious agenda. We have a radicalization process which is ongoing for years now, so I think clearly, Islamist terrorism is the biggest threat in Europe.

After this, we have two different threats. The first one is right-wing terrorism like Breivik, but if we accept the Breivik case, we didn’t have real large-scale act of terrorism from the right wing for 20 years.

And the last threat would be the left-wing terrorism. Which for the moment doesn’t exist in Europe, but it existed 20 years ago – we have clear signs that in Italy, in Greece, we have some anarcho-Marxist groups at work, but very small and on a very low scale

RT: Different though their ideologies may be, these three groups are extremes. You mentioned the radicalization process, and how difficult it is to intercept. Where is the radicalization process actually happening? Are we talking about schools, universities, mosques, prisons? How do we identify it?

CM: Radicalization is going on through different channels. First of all, it is going on in areas, in the cities, in municipalities, in the sports facilities, in the gym clubs, in the football clubs, of course in schools.

So that is the base. After this you have different ways or different places, like prison of course, and universities.

Most of the radicalization is done at a young age and it’s done in the streets, it’s done in the municipalities, in some schools. When people come to university for instance, those who are radicalized are already radicalized, and the others will probably not be radicalized. It’s a minority, we must understand that clearly, radicalization could be a concern of maybe ten to 15 percent of the young Muslims in Europe.

RT: In terms of the demographic grouping, is there a specific group in a society that is more susceptible to such radicalization?

CM: It’s difficult to say, because we would probably think that a poor young boy who feels excluded is more likely to be radicalized, because it’s common sense. But we have also people who have university degrees. We have people who are fully integrated.

If you take for instance the perpetrators of the July 2005 terrorist attack in London, they were fully integrated. One of them was the son of a shop owner, he was working in education, he had a job, he was apparently fully integrated. And he was radicalized.

And if you are in a personal crisis, this crisis being social, being cultural, being familial – a family crisis, a crisis with your girlfriend – you are weak, and you could be radicalized exactly as you could be radicalized in a Christian extremist sect.

RT: Going back to the biggest threat you mentioned – the Islamic extremism here in Europe. The justice minister of Belgium said that she has been told by the state security that Saudi Arabia is funding around 10 schools in Belgium that are teaching radical Islam. How would you assess this threat?  

CM:  We must understand that in a part of Europe – in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Germany – we have large Muslim communities today, but [those countries] didn’t have Muslim colonies in the past.

France had Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. France has colonies, so most of the Muslims in France came from those ex-colonies

Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany did not have those colonies, so the majority of Muslims came in the 60s and the 70s because most of Europe was in need of workforce to build new infrastructure.

Those people came but everybody at the time thought they would just stay for two years, three years, just for work; after, they will return to their countries. Of course, they didn’t.

The Belgians, as the Dutch, didn’t understand the problem very well, and they were looking desperately for someone who could help them

And the Saudis told the Belgian authorities: “No problem, we’ll take care of it,” as they also said to the Netherlands. So they sent money, they sent people, and this was of course a hidden agenda. Their idea was of course to radicalize people.

Islam seems to be a unique thing. It is not a unique thing. You have an Islam of Asia, you have Islam of North Africa, Islam of the Gulf, Sunni, Shiites and so on. And clearly the Wahhabi Islam from Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with the Islam of the Moroccans, of the Turkish.

But this Islam was imposed on those people by the Saudi with the help of the Belgian and Dutch authorities, and this was imposed for 20 years, 25 years. And for 25 years, 30 years, the Saudis were funding, were sending people. For instance, in the Netherlands, in 2003 after the murder of Theo van Gogh, Dutch security monitored all Muslim clerics in the Netherlands and they found that 60 to 70 percent of them were unable to understand, read or speak Dutch.

So very clearly they cannot be a factor of integration. They cannot. They cannot understand the society in which they live, in which their followers live. They cannot help them with good advice, because they don’t know. And most of them were coming from outside, from Saudi Arabia or Gulf States, with no knowledge of the language, no knowledge of the society.

RT: You were in the French intelligence service. Did you or those in the authorities not see that was coming, the signs coming from the Saudi Arabia at the time?

CM: At the time – this was true for the French intelligence, for the US, for all the Western intelligence – we were not very interested in those cases. The big enemy was the Soviet Union and communism. So, we had no real interest in monitoring Saudi Arabia. It was something going on, but invisible.

RT: Well, you have, for example, the State Security in Belgium warning against the threat that Saudi Arabia poses in terms of imposing extreme ideology on people in Europe. But on the other hand, Saudi Arabia is painted as an ally of the West. How do you reconcile this? 

CM: The ambiguity of the situation is that the Saudi Arabia is clearly an ally of the West because it was against communism, it was against the former Soviet Union and so on, against Iran today for obvious reasons. So it is an ally, and at the same time, it could be considered an enemy because they have this hidden agenda.

But even inside Saudi society at the highest level, you have two tendencies. In the royal family in Saudi Arabia, you have people who are genuine and honest advocates of working with the West and modernizing Saudi Arabia, and we have other princes saying ‘No!,’ we must keep, stand firmly in our beliefs, and we are still the Saudi and Wahhabi.

RT: Looking at what some governments in Europe are doing, for example imposing a ban on the burqa, or minarets or other such laws, do you think they actually work? Or do they just create a backlash from the general Muslim community, who are not extremists?

CM: Both, I think both. First of all, I think we must help and support the average Muslim guy or woman who is just trying to live a normal life and who wants to have a better future for his or her children. And clearly those people are demanding that we take a firm position against the extremists.

They are worried for their children. When you are a Muslim parent in Belgium or France, and you see Muhammed Merah and you see that a young boy of 21, 22 had bad connections, went to an extremist mosque, or wanted to go to Pakistan, I suppose you’re afraid and you want the help of the state. And the help of the state is to set some limits.

At the same time, very clearly, it is a way of radicalization for some people. But these people would be radicalized anyway. It’s just an occasion, it’s just a pretext, but if it is not the burqa, it will be the obligation of Halal food in the school; if it is not this, it will be the mixing of boys and girls in school, or another subject. But a part of this community is moving to radicalization, the ten to 15 percent. The question is how to protect the rest, and of course how to contain the extremists.

We must help free Rimshah Masih

/in /by

We must help free Rimshah Masih

BY , August 23, 2012, Toronto Sun

TORONTO – In sharia-benighted Pakistan, an eleven-year-old Christian girl with Down’s Syndrome has recently been incarcerated for blasphemy.

Rimshah Masih allegedly burned pages of the Quran and other Islamic textbooks, including a Quran primer. The girl was found holding the charred pages. She was subsequently beaten by an angry Islamist rabble which, supported by the usual obscurantist mullahs and bigots, is demanding the severest penalty for this disabled girl.

Unfortunately, Rimshah is not the only Pakistani facing such charges. Asia Bibi, another Christian accused of blasphemy, has languished in prison since 2010. She is the unfortunate woman on death row for allegedly showing disrespect for the Prophet Mohammad.

Pakistanis collectively have shown little outrage at these travesties. In fact, the religious climate of the country has turned even educated Pakistanis into dogmatists who think that freedom of expression stops at religion. The media have reinforced this, especially popular talk shows and television dramas.

Concern from the international community has dwindled disturbingly, as Pakistani clerics await Asia Bibi’s hanging.

In both cases the charges appear unfounded. No one knows how Rimshah acquired pages of the Quran or the primer—or if the charred pages were indeed taken out of these books. And no one really knows what Asia Bibi actually said to the women who accused her of blasphemy.

Bibi, a mother of four, dared to touch the eating utensils of nearby Muslim women. When she merely expressed displeasure at segregated and elitist eating practices, she was accused of blasphemy. Since then, fanatics have harassed her family. Rimshah’s family has fled, as have hundreds of other residents of her Christian neighborhood.

Christians suffer daily in Muslim countries. Their lives are in constant peril because of radical Islam’s assault on beleaguered Christian communities.

Attacks on Christian churches have become common. While all religious minorities are targeted in Muslim countries where radical Islam has taken root, Christians are particularly vulnerable because they are accused of allying themselves with the “crusader” West, particularly after 9/11.

In yet another outrageous case, eleven nurses—including three Christians—were recently poisoned in a Karachi hospital for not fasting during Ramadan. Fortunately all are recovering. We now also hear reports of Samuel Yacoob, an eleven-year-old Christian boy, who was tortured and beaten to death in Faisalabad, Pakistan.

Christians in Islamic countries are voiceless and suffer under an intolerable legal framework, with its archaic and reprehensible blasphemy laws. They also endure attacks on places of worship, economic hardship and workplace discrimination.

Muslims everywhere must protest blasphemy laws, demand freedom for Rimshah and Asia Bibi and offer protection for members of their religious community. Blasphemy laws in Pakistan must be repealed.

The international community can also help. France has taken up Rimshah’s cause. Canada must also put pressure on the Pakistani government to release these victims of religious bigotry.

The legal framework of Pakistan requires an overhaul. More fundamentally, the masses need to be educated to respect human rights and freedom of expression, even in religion. Only when its citizens can be persuaded that civic responsibility begins with tolerance will Pakistan step out of the dark ages and strive for the dignity all of its diverse people deserve.

Egypt’s Christians organizing first protest against Muslim Brotherhood leadership

/in /by

Egypt’s Christians organizing first protest against Muslim Brotherhood leadership

‘We are oppressed and humiliated,’ Copts say, warning country’s civil character is under threat

By  August 22, 2012, The Times of Israel

Egypt’s Christians will take part in the first mass demonstration against the country’s Muslim Brotherhood government on Friday, a statement by the Coalition of Coptic Egypt declared Wednesday.

The August 24 demonstration will call for Egypt to remain a civil state and demand the separation of Islamic influences from state institutions. It is being planned as the first large-scale protest against the new government of Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, appointed by President Mohammed Morsi and sworn in on August 2.

In its statement, the Coalition of Coptic Egypt, a grassroots umbrella organization dealing with legal issues, spelled out its list of grievances against Muslim Brotherhood President Morsi.

‘We do not wish to topple the president but want to realize the demands of the revolution,’ the group’s statement read

“There is an attempt by the Brotherhood to take control of state institutions,” Fady Youssef, founder and deputy president of the Coalition of Coptic Egypt, told the Times of Israel. “The civil character of the state is under threat.”

According to Youssef, Muslims in Egypt currently enjoy privileges which Christians do not. “Christians are oppressed and humiliated,” he said.

In early August, 130 Christian families were forced to leave their homes in the village of Dahshour, near Giza, after their houses and shops were burned by Muslims following a dispute between a Muslim and a Christian in the village.

The remedy to sectarian violence, Youssef argues, is in amending legislation that discriminates against Christians, such as a law which prohibits Christians from testifying in court and a constitutional article prohibiting Muslims from converting to Christianity.

“We do not wish to topple the president but want to realize the demands of the revolution,” the group’s statement read. “The affairs of the president must be separated from the affairs of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

‘Christians are oppressed and humiliated,’ says Fady Youssef

Although Morsi resigned from the Muslim Brotherhood upon his election as president in June, Youssef claimed that the presidency is still intimately connected to the Islamic movement.

Another longstanding demand of the Egyptian Christian community is the legislation of a “unified law on places of worship,” which will allow churches to be built with the same ease as mosques. The government has agreed on the need for new legislation, Youssef said, but the law has not been promoted.

“Today, you need the governor’s permission to renovate the bathroom in a church,” Youssef said. Christians comprise some 10% of Egypt’s 85 million citizens.

A number of opposition parties have announced they would not participate in the August 24 demonstration.

“Those who call for this gathering refuse an Islamic president, even if he was elected by the will of the people,” Yahya Abul Hassan, a member of the liberal Wasat party, told Al-Ahram news website Wednesday.