8/5/13 Al-Qaida chief’s message led to embassy closures

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Source:  Military Times

WASHINGTON — An intercepted secret message between al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahri and his deputy in Yemen about plans for a major terror attack was the trigger that set off the current shutdown of many U.S. embassies, two officials told The Associated Press on Monday.

A U.S. intelligence official and a Mideast diplomat said al-Zawahri’s message was picked up several weeks ago and appeared to initially target Yemeni interests. The threat was expanded to include American or other Western sites abroad, officials said, indicating the target could be a single embassy, a number of posts or some other site. Lawmakers have said it was a massive plot in the final stages, but they have offered no specifics.

The intelligence official said the message was sent to Nasser al-Wahishi, the head of the terror network’s organization, based in Yemen, known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

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7/12/13 Malala at U.N.: The Taliban failed to silence us

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By Ashley Fantz, CNN

(CNN) — A Pakistani teenager nearly killed by Taliban gunmen for advocating that all girls should have the right to go to school gave her first formal public remarks Friday at the United Nations. It also happened to be Malala Yousafzai’s 16th birthday.

“Today, it is an honor for me to be speaking again after a long time,” she said. “Being here with such honorable people is a great moment in my life.”

She looked out at an audience of hundreds of children from around the world and U.N. members, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and told them that she was wearing a pink shawl that once belonged to Benazir Bhutto, the two-time prime minister of Pakistan who was killed in 2007 in a suicide attack at a political rally.

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Egypt’s Christians worried by Islamists’ rise

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By , Published: January 7

The Washington Post

GIZA, Egypt — Egypt’s Christians were worried about their safety on Monday as they marked the first Christmas under Islamist rule, with Coptic Pope Tawadros II urging worshipers “not to be afraid” and some complaining that their lives had gone from bad to worse in the nearly two years since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak.

At St. Mary’s Church in the dense and religiously mixed neighborhood of Imbaba, where sectarian clashes have flared before, midnight Mass on Christmas Eve started early because of safety concerns. The church, which was torched by an Islamist mob in 2011, was protected Sunday by a larger police presence than in past years, a signal to some that the Islamist government wanted to avoid trouble after political clashes flared last month on Egypt’s streets.

To read full story

 

10/03/13 Assad starves those that gas did not kill: Obama’s negotiations over chemical weapons do little to stop genocide of Syrian people

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MEDIA CONTACTS:         Gregg Edgar

Gordon C. James Public Relations

gedgar@gcjpr.com

602-690-7977

 

Assad starves those that gas did not kill

Obama’s negotiations over chemical weapons do little to stop genocide of Syrian people

 

 

PHOENIX (October 2, 2013) – Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith” released the following statement on behalf of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) regarding the decimation of the people of Moadhamiya, Syria.

 

“It has been almost a month now since President Obama threatened limited reprisals against the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons.  Now that the U.S. is in a protracted negotiation with Russia for Assad’s WMD, the genocidal tyrant feels secure enough to systematically starve the people of Moadhamiya, Syria, a suburb of Damascus and one of the neighborhoods targeted by the Assad regime in the infamous sarin gas attack that took 1,400 lives.

 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that 12,000 people are trapped inside Moadhamiya and over a half a million people are trapped in suburbs and rural towns outside of Damascus. This is the same town in the area of Ghouta attacked by a sarin gas attack which invoked the verbal wrath of the West on August 21.

 

Despite being ground zero of the chemical attack, Moadhamiya’s plight is attracting little attention of western media. The moral equivalency of 1,400 killed in a chemical attack and over 12,000 being killed through starvation is simply astounding. The continued focus of this administration on their supposed victory in securing Syria’s chemical weapons continues to degrade U.S. impact in the region.  In the Journal’s article, Khaled Erksoussi, head of disaster response for the Syrian Red Crescent, expressed deep disappointment with an international community more concerned with legal and technical aspects of chemical weapons than its victims.

 

Genocide is ongoing in Syria and the rate of death has only climbed since the chemical attack in the suburbs of Damascus.  This is not just a civil war. This is not a legitimate government fending off Islamist terrorists.  If anything it is a brutal tyrant and a negligent U.S. President and free world creating the breeding grounds for now the world’s worst Islamist radicalization.

 

Over 120,000 people are dead. At least 500-600 people are being killed each week. With a reported half a million trapped in their neighborhoods, there is every reason to believe that Assad is willing to kill all of them if not a majority of Syria’s 23 million people in order to hold onto power over the next few years as the world turns the people of Syria its collective cold shoulder. The same Journal story quoted a law student working for Assad’s forces as stating that they “will not allow them to be nourished to kill us’ and that in the neighborhoods are either “all terrorists or those embracing them”.

 

President Putin is successfully leading the U.S. on a wild goose chase for chemical weapons giving his ally space to cleanse Syria of all opposition.”

 

About the American Islamic Forum for Democracy

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. AIFD’s mission advocates for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. For more information on AIFD, please visit our website at http://www.aifdemocracy.org/.

8/1/13 Al-Qaeda Is Back! Killing Bin Laden was never enough.

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Source: National Review Online

By all accounts, the attack was planned with care and executed with precision. At two notorious Iraqi prisons, Abu Ghraib and Taji, al-Qaeda combatants last week used mortars, small arms, suicide bombers, and assault forces to free 400 prisoners, including several who had been on death row. AQ spokesmen hailed those released as “mujahedeen,” holy warriors, who will rejoin the jihad on battlefields throughout the Middle East and beyond. Soon after, we were seeing headlines such as this: “Al Qaeda Is Back.”

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Where is the US Government in defense of Pastor Abedini and religious freedom?

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By 

Published January 27, 2013

Read this at FoxNews.com

 

Recent news of the January 21 Iranian trial of Christian Pastor Saeed Abedini before a Revolutionary Guard Court lit up social media and religious freedom activists and circles with sheer outrage over his plight and the rampant increase in Iran of persecution of religious minorities. But is religious liberty and these litmus cases a priority for the leader of the free world?

Pastor Abedini did nothing more than convert from Islam to Christianity 13 years ago and begin preaching his message in an underground network of churches in Iran. He then came to the United States and became an American citizen raising his family in Idaho. His family reported that he returned last fall to Iran to start an orphanage and was snatched from a bus by the Iranian regime on Sept. 26, 2012.  He was sent to the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. The regime’s bogus claim? He was undermining their authority and national security. Many of the claims from the Iranian State News Agency on this case and others have been proven patently false throughout. Yet there has been little public repudiation from President Obama.

The judge assigned to the case has been sanctioned many times by the European Union for his court actions and sentences. Last week it was even reported that the pastor and his attorney were not allowed to attend their own trial. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Pastor Saeed stands now convicted to eight years in prison in an Iranian gulag. This American citizen, who, like so many of our families came to the U.S. for religious freedom, went back only for charity work and is now jailed, having lost the freedom of his adopted nation.

With all the information known on this case, why the irresponsible neglect from the bully pulpit of the White House? The administration embarrassingly so far could only muster a statement from National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor saying, “We remain troubled by the case of U.S. citizen Saeed Abedini, who was arrested by Iranian officials more than three months ago on charges relating to his religious beliefs; we call upon Iranian authorities to release him immediately.” Yet, hypocritically, in June 2009, when two Current TV reporters were imprisoned in North Korea, the Obama White House and Clinton State Department made the reporter’s plight a top priority. They even dispatched former President Bill Clinton as an envoy who was then thankfully able to secure their release.

One cannot help but realize that even though our nation was founded on the “first freedom” being religious freedom, the defense of that freedom abroad is sadly no longer “first.” Secular, a-religious causes like that of so many courageous reporters seem easier for many on the left to defend and trumpet against nebulous universally decried fascists like the president of North Korea. However, when the victims are targeted for minority religious speech and liberty, their causes seem all too often to be less palatable to reflexively defend. This seems especially true for this administration when the religious repression is found to be in the hands of Islamists — a theocratic form of fascism.

As a devout Muslim, relishing my American freedoms, I know that if the freedoms of Christians, Baha’is, Jews, Hindus, other Muslim sects or atheists are trampled upon, so too soon will mine. In countries like Iran, the defense of religious freedom is the most accurate barometer upon which we can hold their nations regularly accountable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, we run from the confrontation.
Is the Obama White House fearful of confronting Iran?

History has shown that when Islamists see the defenders of freedom withdraw from conflict with their supremacist goals, they push forward even harder against religious minorities with abandon. This is not  just about one pastor, or one American citizen, it is about our credibility as a nation, which defends religious liberty domestically and abroad.

Paul Marshall recently laid out how flagrant and rampant these cases have become with now too many to count — including Pastor Yusef Nadarkani, Pastor Vruir Avanessian, Behzad Taalipasand and Mohammed-Reza Omidi to name a few of the ever growing number of Iranians and Americans persecuted in Iran for their ‘first freedom.’ Fifty members of the House of Representatives recently implored Secretary of State Clinton in a letter to leave “no stone unturned” in gaining the release of Abedini. It is time to hold up cases like Pastor Saeed’s and tirelessly demand accountability and reform inside Iran for every prisoner of conscience. Such a policy from the White House, while perhaps angering Islamists (a good thing), could ultimately also free many innocents and move to reawaken the Green Revolution that we abandoned in 2009.

This administration has proven over and over again to be unwilling to take on Islamist ideologies and defend their victims on the front lines. Whether it be the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, or the Khomeinists of Iran, the Obama White House has dodged any diplomatic engagement that pushes directly up against a confrontation between western values of freedom and liberty and Islamist values of theocracy and the empowerment of the shar’iah of the Islamic state.

The passive-aggressive nature of White House policy towards Iran has led to the outsourcing of the Syrian conflict to Bashar Assad’s allies (like Russia). It has led to a signal of our weakness in preventing their nuclear ambitions. It has led to the often overt bypassing of EU and American economic sanctions with impunity. And now it is leading more and more to the lonely abandonment of icons of religious freedom inside Iran.

M. Zuhdi Jasser is the author of the recently released book, A Battle for the Soul of Islam (Simon & Schuster) and is President and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy based in Phoenix, Arizona. He is also a Commissioner on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (the opinions here are his own).

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/27/where-is-us-government-in-defense-pastor-abedini-and-religious-freedom/#ixzz2JEhuliIM

8/21/13 Syrian nerve gas attack latest genocidal act of tyrannical Assad regime

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Statement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Syrian nerve gas attack latest genocidal act of tyrannical Assad regime

Enough is enough with Syrian death toll well over 100,000 redlines have vanished and the U.S. must provide genuine leadership

PHOENIX (August 21, 2013) – Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, a devout Muslim and author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith” released the following statement on behalf of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) following reports of a nerve gas attack near Ghouta by the Syrian Army.

 “Reports indicate that the Syrian Army has killed hundreds with a nerve gas attack in the Ghouta region.  The Syrian Army fired rockets on civilians including women and children.  Medical experts on the ground indicate that incoming patients were convulsing and foaming at the mouth demonstrating classic nerve gas symptoms with little bomb trauma.

This attack is a significant escalation of the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime and quite revealingly brazen considering the presence on the ground of apparently useless UN inspectors only a few miles away in Damascus.  The Assad regime clearly feels no restraint from attacking its own people with the most horrific weapons in its arsenal and shows no fear at all from any U.S. or western response.

Enough is enough – The Obama Administration needs to act. The current “Darwinian” Obama strategy will only allow the genocide to continue while the U.S. will be forever impotent in the future of Syria and the region. After over two years of wanton killing by Assadists, the U.S. is positioning itself squarely on the wrong side of history as over 100,000 Syrians have been killed and millions have been displaced from their homes by a genocidal tyrant. US inaction is only empowering and entrenching the evil of Assadists and their masters in Tehran while the Syrian people are left to be more and more radicalized or for dead.

Today’s use of chemical weapons flies yet again in the face of United Nations arms declarations. How much more evidence do we need in order to invoke the wrath of the world against the Assad regime? How much documentation from human rights organizations, media, and governments do we need to enforce international U.N. standards? If we have no doubt about the growing genocide in Syria and the crimes against humanity being committed, what purpose does the U.N. or NATO for that matter serve? It cannot be more clear that Assad will do anything to hold onto power.

More and more Syrian people are dying because the west is not engaged. Assad cannot be allowed to continue his barbarism. We are asking President Obama to step up and present a strategy that lays out for the leaders of the free world how they will usher the Assad regime into the dustbin of history!”

 

  

About the American Islamic Forum for Democracy

The American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. AIFD’s mission advocates for the preservation of the founding principles of the United States Constitution, liberty and freedom, through the separation of mosque and state. For more information on AIFD, please visit our website at http://www.aifdemocracy.org/.