18-Aug-17: On vehicle rammings, Mahmoud Abbas, moderate advocate for terror, is open-minded, sees both sides

Innocent targets fleeing the murderers in Barcelona yesterday [Image Source]

President-for-life of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas - now serving the twelfth year of his four-year term of office - has just gone public with a condemnation of yesterday's appalling jihadist massacre of pedestrians in a tourist precinct of Barcelona.

Abbas condemns Barcelona attack | PA chairman sends condolences to Barcelona victims, says he condemns all forms of terror | August 18, 2017 | Israel National News | Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday condemned the terrorist attack in Barcelona, in which 13 people were murdered and 100 injured. In a message to the King of Spain Felipe VI and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Abbas sent his condolences to the victims of the attack. According to the official PA news agency Wafa, Abbas condemned the attack and stressed his rejection of all forms of terrorism as well as the need to confront all terrorist organizations around the world.

Source

Meanwhile a public figure with the exact same name and similar-looking features has been delivering the exact opposite message to Palestinian Arabs:

Abbas: Palestinian violence is “justified popular uprising” | Mohammed Daraghmeh | Associated Press | December 14, 2015
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas referred to the last three months of violence Monday as a “justified popular uprising”. Abbas’s comments came as a new poll shows widespread Palestinian support for ongoing attacks on Israelis. Later Monday, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem rammed his car into a crowded bus stop, wounding nine before bystanders shot him dead.
Israeli leaders have accused Abbas and other Palestinian leaders of inciting the violence with incendiary rhetoric. Abbas has previously refrained from either endorsing or condemning the attacks, often referring to the wave of violence as understandable but not in the best interests of the Palestinian people.
“We cannot ask the youth why they are going out (to revolt),” Abbas said in Ramallah. “They just despaired of the two-state solution.”
A poll released Monday found that two-thirds of Palestinians support the current wave of stabbings. Most Palestinians believe if the current individual attacks develop into an armed intifada, the violence might serve Palestinian national interests more than negotiations would.

We are about to contact the BBC and several of the major global news packaging/syndicators to ask when their updated, detailed take-down of the lethal hypocrisy on show in Abbas' outrageous double-talk will appear.

We're also hoping to hear from friends in Spain that the government there plans to throw Abbas' "condemnation" right back at both of his two faces.

Meanwhile in a similar vein: "23-May-17: Condemning terror is so easy to do, even Jordan can do it - and no news reports will criticize them"

19-Mar-16: An arrest in Belgium sharpens the focus on Europe-based jihad

Police raid in the Molenbeek section of Brussels, Belgium [Image Source]

Salah Abdeslam, the fugitive believed to be the only terrorist to survive after the savage Friday 13th Paris attacks last November, was captured by Belgian police on Friday.

They were tipped-off by a pizzeria owner whose suspicions were raised by an unusually large order: a "lucky break", a Politico analysis called it.

Three members of a family hiding him, named at this stage only as Abid A, Sihane A and Djemila M, have also been detained [The Independent, UK, today].

Abdeslam, it's thought, fled Paris immediately after the coordinated massacres ["14-Nov-15: The Friday 13th terror assault on Paris"] that took the lives of 130 people at the Stade de France, numerous cafés and restaurants and the Bataclan theatre in central Paris. More than 400 others were injured. He got back to Brussels, and successfully eluded a wide and urgent police search over the following months. In parts of the media, he came to be called "the most wanted man in Europe".

Today he was formally charged with "participation in terrorist murder". His lawyer says [The Guardian] he is "collaborating" with Belgian investigators and will fight extradition to France.

Abdeslam is 26, and described as a Belgian-born, French citizen of Moroccan ancestry. Associated Press calls him "a childhood friend of the suspected ringleader of the attacks... " Elsewhere, it is noted that a brother of Abdeslam's, Ibrahim, was one of the human bomb attackers at the Stade de France, and died there.

His apprehension

could give security and intelligence agencies an opportunity to interrogate Mr. Abdeslam about his ties to the Islamic State and how the attacks were planned and carried out, at a time when officials are saying that the Paris plot might have been larger and more elaborate than first thought. He was arrested three days after the police found his fingerprints in an apartment in another Brussels neighborhood. The authorities gave few details about how they had tracked him down, but the Belgian prosecutor’s office said it had also arrested three members of a family on charges of sheltering him... ["Arrested in Belgium, Suspect in Paris Attacks Plans to Fight Extradition", New York Times, March 19, 2016]

[Image Source: Bloomberg]

His arrest also gives hope to the victims of the Paris atrocities that a process focused on justice may happen. See this response from a French association of terror victims: "Communiqué du MPCT: Un espoir de justice pour les victimes du 13 novembre" (in French). The role of justice in the lives of terror victims is far too often an afterthought.

Molenbeek, the largely Muslim Brussels neighborhood mentioned in that report, and infamous for its crime and unemployment, is regarded (says AFP) as a "European hotbed of Islamist extremism" that "has long been a breeding ground for radicalism". In the week after the November massacres, Aljazeera, in an article headlined "A message from Molenbeek: 'We are not terrorists'", quoted Charles Michel, Belgium's prime minister, saying Molenbeek "was involved in almost every terrorist attack of recent years", and reporting that Jan Jambon, the Belgian interior minister, had pledged to "clean it up". In The Guardian, they called it "the Brussels borough becoming known as Europe's jihadi central".

A long and serious profile in The Atlantic during that same week described how

tiny Belgium has taken on an oversized role in the European theater of jihad. The country has provided a steady flow of fighters to ISIS in the Middle East... Belgium has just 11 million people, and Pew estimated that about 6 percent of the population was Muslim as of 2010. But Belgian and French nationals make up around a quarter of the Europeans who went to fight in Iraq in the mid-2000s... The central figure in Belgian militant Islamism is Fouad Belkacem, a 33-year-old preacher and founder of the group Sharia4Belgium. He was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, and is a disciple of the British radical Islamist Anjem Choudary... Experts also say it is comparatively easy to acquire illegal guns in Belgium, making it an attractive base for operations... In particular, Belgian jihadism is concentrated in Molenbeek. It’s a neighborhood of nearly 100,000 people in Brussels, northwest of the city center, which has had a large Muslim population for many years. There are 22 known mosques in the district. Molenbeek shares some characteristics with the banlieues in French—densely populated, large immigrant populations, very high unemployment, complaints of inadequate government services, isolation from the central city and corridors of power... Interior Minister Jan Jambon added: “We don’t have control of the situation in Molenbeek at present.” ["What’s the Matter With Belgium?", November 17, 2016]

Unsurprisingly, the BBC report on the arrest manages, in its customary manner, to not mention the word "terror" once. (The suspect, it says, is wanted in connection with the "Paris attacks".) It quotes the French president Francois Hollande, speaking at a joint press conference with Belgium's prime minister Charles Michel saying he expected Abdeslam

to be extradited to France "as rapidly as possible" [and that] Abdeslam's arrest was an "important moment" but added that it was not the "final conclusion". "We must catch all those who allowed, organised or facilitated these attacks and we realise that they are a lot more numerous than we thought earlier and had identified," he said. [BBC, today]

Abdeslam is taken into custody [Image Source]

Who were those others and what might they have in common? Other sources, but strikingly not the BBC, offer answers. In fact, Hollande spoke of

"confirmed ties between the Paris attackers and Daesh [ISIS] and stressed that the current threat level is very high." [Sputnik, today]

In Molenbeek, meanwhile. there are reports today of ongoing tensions triggered by the arrests and the police activity:

Not only was access disrupted for locals but many are angry about the neighbourhood being labelled a breeding ground for Islamist violence. “They are tarring everyone with the same brush and forgetting that the Moroccan community, that has been here for 40-50 years, works really hard,” said Yacine, a young man from just outside Molenbeek. “To say that it is a jihadist hot-spot here, no! Look for them somewhere else!” [Euronews, today]

Plenty of photos and video clips of what the Express UK calls rocks and "missiles" being hurled at police.

And this from the Wall Street Journal:

Young Muslim men living in the district since the Paris attacks have expressed concern they may have trouble finding jobs because they fear potential employers could discriminate against them based on their Arabic names and because they are registered as living in Molenbeek... ["Brussels Neighborhood of Molenbeek Returns to the Spotlight", WSJ, today"]

 We fear they are right, but also that they are somewhat missing the point.

08-Nov-15: Ten months after murderous "lone wolf" terror attack on HyperCacher Paris, turns out he wasn't alone at all

Paris, January 11, 2015 [Image Source]

Here's a report from a French news source published yesterday that provides evidence - far too late - that yet another so-called "lone wolf" jihadist was connected all along to handlers. And very likely to enablers, to inspirers and to users as well.

The source is "Emails from Paris Kosher store gunman to ‘handler’ revealed" | France24, November 7, 2015]

Amedy Coulibaly, one of the gunmen behind the January attacks on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Kosher supermarket, shared detailed information before the attacks with an unknown individual from abroad, according to French daily Le Monde.
The newspaper reported on Saturday that it was given access to emails recovered by investigators, including exchanges between Amedy Coulibaly, who held up a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris on January 9 killing four people, and his supposed “handler”. Most of these messages were encrypted according to Le Monde, but a few were written “in clear”, giving an insight into the preparations for the attack.
“I’ve got an AK47 with 275 rounds and six Tokarevs [semi-automatic handguns] with 69 rounds,” wrote Coulibaly, just hours after Said and Cherif Kouachi attacked the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo on the morning of January 7, killing 12 people. “I also have three bullet-proof vests, tactical jackets, tear gas grenades and a stun gun”.
According to Le Monde the person who received the message, whom investigators believe may have been outside of France, replied later that day in recognisably idiomatic French “SMS-speak” giving further instructions.
“OK, do what you can, go home and sleep then hide and check [email] address 1 every day,” the message reads. “Further information will come soon regarding friends who will help. Get rid of your SIM card, check address 1, address 2 is finished.”
A final email from the apparent mission controller, sent on January 8 and obtained by BFM TV on October 13, gave further instructions.
“Impossible to find friends [to help], work alone,” the message reads. “If possible track down and work with the ‘Zigots’ [the code name for the Kouachi brothers]. If possible, in your video explain that you gave them the tools in the name of D [for Daesh, the Arabic word for the Islamic State group] and say which weapons you used.”
The Kouachi brothers, in a call to BFMTV hours before they were killed by police breaking a siege at a print works near Paris, said they had acted in the name of the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabic Paninsula AQAP.
Cherif had travelled to Yemen in 2011. This claim was backed up later on January 9 in a video posted by AQAP spokesman Nasser Ben Ali Al Anassi.
In his suicide video, Coulibaly said he had acted in the name of the Islamic State (IS) group.
Le Monde reported that the latest revelations “suggest that there may have been a link between the two groups.”
Coulibaly's final message, titled “Salam”, asked his handler to take care of his wife, Hayat Boumedienne: “I want the brother to take care of her under the rules of Islam, and to make sure that she does not find herself alone or in a bad financial situation. “Above all, I want her to learn Arabic, the Koran and religious science. The most important is her religion and faith, and here she is going to need help. May Allah help you.”

Coulibaly in Le Monde, October 13, 2015 [Image Source]

The French revelations match similar reports publicized in October:

A day before Amedy Coulibaly took more than 20 hostages and killed four of them, all Jews, at the Hyper Cacher in January, he received an email from an unknown individual with instructions to contact a third party or parties with the code name “zigotos,” the BFMTV station reported yesterday (Oct. 13) based on documents it obtained. The interlocutor, described by some French media as Coulibaly’s handler, provided an email address associated with a communications firm in Pennsylvania, the French news agency AFP reported... “Work alone. Go for the easiest, the surest and most numerous. Maybe in the [city] edges in case of problems in the center. You know best,” one set of instructions transmitted to Coulibaly read... [Source]

Back in January, the idea that Coulibaly was operating as a "lone wolf", perhaps inspired by feelings of alienation or frustration, or maybe just having a really bad hair day, were everywhere in the news media. A Washington Post analysis published on January 11, 2015, referred to the absence of evidence that the killer

had been in contact with the Islamic State before his assault on the supermarket [and] may represent another example of the “lone wolf” attacks that the Islamic State has inspired, analysts said.

The then-US attorney general Eric Holder, interviewed the same day in The Guardian,

said the US was “at war” with “lone wolf” terrorists... Speaking to NBC from Paris, where he was attending a counter-terrorism summit and the march, Holder said: “That is the thing that I think keeps me up most at night, this concern about the lone wolf who goes undetected.” ["Eric Holder says US ‘at war’ with ‘lone wolf’ terrorists after Paris attacks", The Guardian UK, January 11, 2015]

And Aljazeera, not so terribly surprisingly, went to some lengths to actually refute the idea that the lone-wolf might have secretly been controlled by others:

The complete story behind Coulibaly and the Kouachis may never be known — all three are now dead — but analysts have begun to suspect the men may not have been acting under direct orders from [jihadist] groups. [Aljazeera America, January 13, 2015] 

Making all of this worse is the fact that those French murders from January 2015 continue to be invoked by jihad-minded, would-be killers as a report from just yesterday ["Madrid jihadists planned to kill Jews in Paris copycat action", Times of Israel, November 6, 2015] reminds us. Turns out three members of what's alleged to be a jihadist terror cell in Madrid, all of them Moroccans in their late twenties, all living in Spain on what are called "valid staying permits"

planned to carry out attacks similar to the ones perpetrated by Amedy Coulibaly, who in January murdered four people at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris a day after he gunned down a police officer south of the city. The report, based on information provided by unnamed officials, did not name specific targets... It said they had “planned an imminent attack on security forces or attacks against Jewish interests in the Spanish capital.”

It doesn't say here that these terrorists were "lone wolves". Only that

[T]hey considered themselves affiliated to the Islamic State terrorist organization but never traveled to the Middle East to participate in fighting there... [Times of Israel]

Coulibaly's partner/wife Hayat Boumeddiene escaped to Syria via Turkey a few days before the January massacre and is still at large. Did she manage that on her own?

04-Nov-15: Funding and defunding Islamist terror in Australia

Anti-Islamophobia protest in central Sydney, 2012 [Image Source]

In Australia, there are clear signs that the financing of terrorism is growing exponentially, with devastating results. And this is in part happening because of the humanitarian response to the devastation of Syria, and the material needs of Syrians which are in large measure being addressed via charitable giving.

A report publicized today in the Australian media ["Australian banks report huge rise in suspected terrorism transactions", Sydney Morning Herald, November 4, 2015] exposes some aspects of how this works and what it might mean - and not only for Australians:

• In the past financial year, there was a 300 per cent increase in reports to the national financial intelligence agency, AUSTRAC, of suspicious transactions relating to terrorism. This totalled $53 million that had moved through Australian financial institutions.
• Australian jihadists are increasingly taking out small bank loans with no intention of paying them back and maxing out credit cards or overdraft limits immediately before travelling to Syria and Iraq...
• In its annual report released this week, AUSTRAC attributed the 300 per cent spike in suspicious transactions – up to 367 in the past financial year – to the flow of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq, coupled with better vigilance from financial institutions. Foreign fighters are now considered one of the main forms of material support for Islamic State and they are usually self-funded, said the Financial Action Task Force in its October report on emerging risks.
• [B]anks are also grappling with an increasing number of customers who open bank accounts and provide the debit or credit card to a member of a terrorist group to allow them to make withdrawals from overseas ATMs, the task force's report said.
• Banking insiders say the cost of regulation has exploded into the hundreds of millions, as entire teams are hired to trawl for terror-related transactions.

Abdullah Elmir, raised in Bankstown, in Sydney's western
suburbs by an Australian-born mother and Lebanese-born father,
and now 18, has featured in ISIS propaganda videos
threatening Australians 

No one expects the sums of money to get smaller with time, or the complexity of tracking and stopping the financing of terror to get easier. Australia's relatively efficient and focused government is doing as much as probably any other government in the world, but reports a three-fold growth of Islamist-focused terror financing in the past year.

Things are bad, but almost certainly much worse in other places.

A Reuters report today says AUSTRAC is currently monitoring around 100 people in Australia. It adds that the country also happens to be on "high alert for attacks by radicalised Muslims or by home-grown militants returning from fighting in the Middle East, having raised its threat level to "high" and unleashed a series of high-profile raids in major cities."

Some 120 people who lived in Australia (citizens and aliens) are said to be actively aligned with the jihadists of the Islamic State and other militant groups in Iraq and Syria.

14-Apr-15: Women and what the Islamists see them as good for

Image Source

The United States is about to see a woman with a serious chance of succeeding embark on the political process of trying to get elected president. Women in the world of the terrorists play a role of a different sort.

A profile article about Gaza on the Foreign Policy website today offers an oddly-disconnected look at how women are used by the Islamist terror groups:

Throughout Gaza, armed groups have stepped up their recruitment. Now, each one — including Hamas’s Qassam Brigades and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — has a female contingent. No one knows exactly how many female fighters there are in Gaza, but the Nasser Salahuddin Brigade boasts 80 female combatants working in 25-women units. Each unit has female commanding officers, who answer to a male superior... "We fit the training around our domestic chores," said Hadifa, 26, her face obscured by a niqab, while cuddling an assault rifle during a midnight meeting at her Gaza City home. She said the women are trained to use sniper rifles, AKs, RPGs, M16s, and also how to drive cars through war zones, how to fight with a knife, and most recently how to capture an Israeli soldier in battle... It is not hard to see why they would be a military asset: Women have an easier time moving around war zones, due to the presumption that they are civilians. As a result, they can deliver weapons and food to fighters on the front lines with less risk than their male counterparts.

There's not one mention of the word "terror" in its various permutations in this article, though it's all about Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The jihadists are repeatedly called "combatants", "fighters", "military asset",  in an article replete with references to their participation in "armed resistance". In this sense, it illustrates again how a deeply cynical strategy like that of Hamas, keeping its subjects in conditions of maximum misery. depriving them of the benefits of the foreign aid inflows that make Palestinian Arabs the most-heavily-funded target group in history, pays significant dividends, particularly when there are sympathetic or dumb-as-a-boot reporters in the vicinity. This piece quotes a nameless Gazan woman, a mother, saying that:

Gaza residents see armed resistance as one of the only ways to take control of their lives. "Gaza is a tomb; we are dead anyway," she said, helping her injured son out of his wheelchair. "Either you die pointlessly and slowly, or quickly with purpose."

That sounds like it could have been lifted from an Islamist kill-the-unbelievers sermon.

Image Source

It's been a year (exactly - April 14, 2014) since hundreds of girls were seized in the name of a Nigerian Islamist terror group and have not been seen since. There will be walks in their honour and other commemorative "ceremonies" (the word used by the BBC) this week in London, Washington and other places. But it's clear the one walk that would make a real difference - one in which the girls emerge and are free of their Islamist kidnappers - is unlikely to take place, either today or anytime soon.

Another prominent female political figure, holding up a sadly pointless placard for the cameras, with a handwritten appeal to "#BringBackOurGirls", famously framed their plight in terms that seemed to many (us included) to have missed the real point completely. The tragedy of the Nigerian girls, in Michelle Obama's words, was an "unconscionable" effort by

"a terrorist group determined to keep these girls from getting an education – grown men attempting to snuff out the aspirations of young girls... In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters. We see their hopes, their dreams..."

but not a single mention of the words Boko Haram, for the terrorists who openly took credit, or Islam or Islamist, in whose name they acted (see the official text of her speech). 

Could be its a matter of semantics, and that Mrs Obama really sees the Nigerian atrocities as being about missed educational opportunities. It could also be that being unwilling or unable to face up to the ideological platform on which men who seize girls act ensures such hideous things will keep happening.

Meanwhile women and terror continue to be bracketed in new and tragic ways:

• "At least 2,000 women have been abducted by Boko Haram, detained in prisons and houses and subjected to forced marriage, stonings and sexual slavery, according to a report that berates Nigeria’s “dismal” security situation. The Amnesty International report – based on more than 150 witness accounts – charges the Islamist militants with the deaths of more than 5,500 civilians and paints the most detailed picture yet of the oppression inflicted upon young women... Soon after taking control of a town, militants implemented restrictions of movement, particularly on women, the report says. Failure to attend daily prayers was punishable by public flogging." ["Boko Haram 'has abducted, raped and enslaved 2,000 women in reign of terror'", The Independent UK, today]
• "Up to 40 Australian women have taken part in terror attacks or are supporting militant groups, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has said. She said an increasing number of women were going to Syria and Iraq to join husbands fighting with Islamic State (IS) or to marry a militant... Australian officials are worried about the effect of returnees, and on those who support them, on domestic security. Ms Bishop said that women accounted for nearly one-fifth of all foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, but that it "defied logic" that women would join groups such as IS." ["Dozens of Australian women 'supporting terrorism'", BBC, February 26, 2015]
• "From Denver to Vienna, "Caliphettes" – young girls pledging their support to Isil’s so called "Caliphate" on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr – are escaping to marry Jihadis in Syria. And most recently, Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of one of the perpetrators of the recent terrorist atrocities in Paris, is the most wanted terror suspect in the world today... the spectre of radicalised Western women streaming to the battlegrounds of Syria should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Isil’s highly sophisticated, tech savvy radicalisation and recruitment machinery. They deploy peer-to-peer, in this case girl-to-girl, marketing strategies, Twitter amplification apps, iconic memes, gaming imagery and go-pro footage from the field..." ["The female face of terror", The Telegraph UK, January 28, 2015]
• "Two women and self-declared “citizens of the Islamic State” were arrested Thursday in connection to a plot to detonate homemade bombs in the United States. Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, both of Queens, N.Y., were charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against “persons or property” in the United States..." ["2 Women Arrested in New York for ISIS-Inspired Terror Plot" [TIME Magazine, April 2, 2015]
• "Women have long been involved in terror of all stripes, from female neo-Nazis in Europe to Chechen “black widow” suicide bombers. Indeed, despite stereotypes about their domesticity and passivity... women are drawn to groups like the Islamic State by many of the same forces as men: adventure, inequality, alienation and the pull of the cause. Once there, they commit violence against other women, including as part of all-female brigades enforcing female morality codes requiring modest dress and sex segregation. They operate checkpoints and go on home raids; they are also reportedly recruiters, trainers of female suicide bombers, wives and homemakers, fund-raisers and propagandists. They also help sanitize the group’s image by posting photos of themselves drinking milkshakes on Instagram and writing chatty, lighthearted tweets... The West’s inability to appreciate the role that women play in terror should come under the highest scrutiny...  ["When Women Become Terrorists", Jayne Huckerby, NYTimes, January 21, 2015]

We said here a year ago that America's current First Lady would surely agree 

that the killing of our daughter in August 2001 at the hands of another overtly-Islamist terror group - Hamas - was unconscionable. And yes, it cheated Malki of her education. And certainly it destroyed her hopes and dreams. But it was principally about murder and especially about hatred. Did it bring anguish into our lives? Oh yes, and it's an anguish that grows as we see well-informed people who fail to comprehend the nature of attacks like the one that targeted Jewish children in a Jerusalem pizza store, and like the one that targeted Nigerian girls in their school. Excising the Islamist dimension from their understanding of what is happening dooms some of the most influential people in our societies to continue seriously misapprehending the goals of Hamas, of Boko Haram and of the rising tide of terrorism-addicted savages with Islamist passion in their hearts. Ultimately, we all pay a price for this, and it's unconscionably heavy.

Part of that price is the hypocrisy and seriously shallow thinking that tinges news reports emanating from terror-rich war zones. The problem is not so much in mis-understanding why and how women play the role they do but in comprehending how different the terrorists - female and male - are from "fighters" and "combatants". The media's confusion on this, along with the double-speak of too many politicians and other public figures, ought to be understood for what they mean strategically: an indispensable achievement for the Islamists in their march against civilized societies. 

26-Mar-15: Australia's rising pre-occupation with its death-cultists

A widely-publicized image from Sydney's 2012 Hyde
Park riots [Image Source]

Australia, host to one of the world's most congenial societies, is undergoing wrenching changes that challenge Australians' sense of who they are. Its easy-going, live-and-let-live character has been embraced and increasingly exploited by people with the darkest of motivations and religious passions. In their wake, Australia seems a nation more polarized, more dangerous and more worried than the place we used to call home.

First a statistic, via an Associated Press report today, that expresses the scale of the change.

230 jihad suspects prevented from leaving Australia | Rod McGuirk | AP | March 26, 2015 | Counterterrorism squads have prevented 230 suspected jihadis from departing Australian airports for the Middle East this month, including at least three teenage boys, officials said Wednesday... Since counterterrorism units were attached to eight Australian airports in August, 86,000 travelers have been questioned and 230 people prevented from flying on suspicion that they were headed for the battlefields of Iraq and Syria to fight with groups including Islamic State, Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Parliament. Experts disagree about why Islamic State had been so effective recruiting in Australia, which is widely regarded as a multicultural success story, with an economy in an enviable 24th straight year of continuous growth.
The London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence... center estimates that about 100 fighters came from the United States, which has more than 13 times as many people as Australia... “It is absolutely critical that the people of Australia appreciate that the death cult is reaching out to vulnerable and impressionable young people,” [Abbott] said, referring to the Islamic State group. “The death cult is reaching out, seeking effectively to brainwash people online.”

A report in today's Australian looks at a piece of the essential infrastructure that is so effectively reaping a harvest in gullible would-be Islamist foot soldiers who ache to become cannon fodder in the Arab-on-Arab slaughterhouses of the Middle East.

Online extremist propaganda is growing at an alarming rate | Sarah Martin | THE AUSTRALIAN | March 26, 2015 | A forum on extremism and social media yesterday at the Australian National University heard that Islamic State’s online promotion of its “brand and a lifestyle” was challenging the ability of authorities to respond effectively. The Australian Security Research­ Centre event heard that the growth of extremist material online was growing expon­entially faster than the ability of authorities to take it down. The government has promised a “counter-narrative” strategy and the forum was told this would include the need to undermine the intellectual arguments propagated by Islamic State, while promoting the “good story” of Australian ­society... Charles Sturt University national security lecturer Levi West, who is an expert in the use of technology in jihadist terrorism, said Islamic State had become the “market leaders” in online propaganda... The forum heard the government was taking a four-tiered approach targeting vulnerable people and community groups in an attempt to prevent high-risk individuals becoming radicalised. The strategy includes programs aimed at education, social ­inclusion and economic participation, and a focus on combating extremism online... Outlining a range of methods used to disseminate Islamic State’s message — from high production videos including militants giving “candy to kids” to how-to guides for foreign fighters — Professor West said there had been a “sudden and enormous spike” in extremist propaganda in the past year that was almost impossible to control. He said instead the government should seek to use intelligence from ­Islamic State sites, rather than shut them down.

The distribution power of the Internet and easy, anonymous access to its content, is central to the missionary strategy of the jihadists.

Islamic State launches step-by-step dossier for Aussie jihadists on how to get to frontline in Syria | Armando Cordoba | March 22, 2015 | News Corp Australia Network | The Islamic State has launched a step-by-step dossier to help would-be Australian jihadists flee the country and fight alongside the terror group. The online guide, posted to sympathisers’ social media network on March 14, includes details and advice on how to use a vast online support network on home soil and, ultimately, slip through security cracks... The new dossier, provided by an IS sympathiser, stresses the importance of contacts for foreign fighters travelling to Turkey from their country of origin. It even provides a series of ‘Useful Twitter contacts who are in IS to Private Direct message’...The dossier says that between 2012 to 2014 the most common method of crossing the border from Turkey to Syria was to enter Turkey, make contact with IS in Syria, then cross from the Bab al-Hawa and Baab al-Salaam crossing between Turkey and Syria. Now, due to heightened security in Turkey, IS fighters are directed to get a hotel room on arrival in Turkey and contact their Twitter correspondence ‘and they will together go to Sanliurfa in Turkey’...The dossier amplifies the importance IS places on the internet.

The how-to-get-to-Syria report illustrates, in passing, how those Islamism-minded would-be warriors, headed for the killing fields, become that way because of a claimed insensitivity on the part of Canberra's decision-makers:

Silma Ihram, a member of the Australian Muslim Women’s Association based in Sydney, says youths are drawn to IS because the Australian government "continues to create an us versus them" mentality... [News Corp]

Ms Ihram, born Anne Frances Beaumont, is an articulate advocate for racial tolerance and the notion that it isn't Moslems but just some angry peripheral people that give Islam a bad name. A 2006 Australian movie review called her "Erin Brockovich in a hijab". If she's right, this is all bound to end up peacefully and well, and the "them" (from that us -vs- them mentality she cites) will calm down and get on with living constructive lives. But it could all get a lot more serious if she's wrong.

19-Mar-15: Popular, polite, friendly, hard-working and desperate to play a role in the carnage

A Turkish news source carries this photo of
the arrested female today. It was taken in Turkey
while she was held there by the police [Image Source]

More developments today from the United Kingdom which, like virtually all of Europe, has been transformed into the staging ground for ongoing, religion-inspired carnage on a scale that not enough people actually comprehend:

A 21-year-old British woman was arrested today by counter-terror police at Luton Airport after landing on a flight from Istanbul, Scotland Yard said. Scotland Yard said the 21-year-old was detained at 11.15 this morning after landing on a flight from Istanbul. She was arrested on suspicion of preparation of acts of terrorism and is currently in custody at a police station in South London. [ITV News, today]

Another British source says the woman is a convert to Islam:

Jamila Henry, 21, was arrested this week in Turkey, but it is alleged she has been travelling on the passport of her identical twin sister, Jalila, who is not a Muslim... Turkish media later published images of Jamila Henry after she was arrested, wearing a black headscarf. Turkish daily Sabah reported that Jamila had admitted plans to travel to Syria to join Islamic State, because she had married a man who was fighting for the militant jihadi group. [Huffingtom Post UK, today]

At Times of London, they reported yesterday that she had been arrested earlier while on her way. That made her "the fourth Briton in less than a week... to be detained by the Turkish authorities on suspicion of trying to reach Syria and join Islamic State". As with similar cases of other men and women in their twenties (or younger), raised in democratic, open Western societies and now embracing the values of a death-and-murder cult, this woman and her sister are said to have been ‘popular and polite’ in their youth.

A fellow pupil at Sellincourt Primary School in Wandsworth, South London, said: "They were very nice, friendly, hard-working girls. I can’t imagine one of them ever wanting to join Islamic State." ...Relatives said she converted to Islam a few years ago and they have had little contact with her since... Jamila was arrested by Turkish security services as she prepared to board a bus in the capital Ankara. Agents suspect she was trying to travel to the border with Syria. Turkish officials said authorities apprehended the woman based on local intelligence and were not tipped off by British authorities. Messages and images on her mobile phone suggested she was planning to head to Islamic State territory, they alleged... At her £500,000 home in nearby Streatham, the twins’ mother, Patricia Henry, 50, said she was ‘getting together with her relatives’ to discuss how to respond to the arrest... Security services estimate 600 Britons have gone to Syria or Iraq to join militant groups. [Daily Mail UK, March 19, 2015]

By "militant", they of course mean the kind of terrorism-minded person who as a matter of religious obligation engages in bestial forms of incitement, torture, abuse, homicide and dismemberment - when the opportunity presents itself. Traveling to the killing fields of Syria is the shortest path to such opportunities. The attempt itself expresses a deeply sociopathic urge.

We can only hope the British authorities fully grasp the importance of sending an uncompromisingly discouraging message to other jihad-minded terrorism-tourists en route, already there (and perhaps thinking of coming back) or preparing to go. 

And that more Europeans manage to confront the process - going on daily under their noses - by which a teeny-tiny minuscule fraction of their neighbours' children are being converted into pathological, murder-seeking fanatics, brimful of hatred for the values and people of the societies that raised them.

04-Feb-15: The stunningly different fates of two terrorists in Jordan and what they reveal about how the war against terror is going

al-Rishawi: Confessed, then retracted, convicted. Did not actually
kill anyone. Hanged today. [Image Source]

In Jordan, the government this morning executed two "convicted jihadists". The motivation is explained by the Hashemite kingdom this way:

Jordan earlier vowed an "earth-shattering" response after IS posted a video online showing what militants say is the pilot standing in a cage engulfed in flames. Mamdouh al-Ameri, a spokesman for the Jordanian armed forces, said on Tuesday that Lt Kasasbeh had "fallen as a martyr". "His blood will not be shed in vain. Our punishment and revenge will be as huge as the loss of the Jordanians." [BBC]

Giving expression to "punishment and revenge", two imprisoned Iraqis - Sajida al-Rishawi, a would-be female suicide bomber, and a male al-Qaeda terrorist convicted in 2008 for killing a Jordanian - were sent to the gallows at daybreak today [Aljazeera].

The female had been sentenced to death for her role in a high-profile 2005 suicide bomb attack at Amman's Radisson Hotel that killed 60 people, most of them guests at a wedding. She herself actually killed no one since her bundle of explosives failed. She confessed on Jordanian television but retracted it later. According to Wikipedia, she was

sentenced to death by hanging by a Jordanian military court on September 21, 2006. She appealed against this conviction but her appeal was dismissed in January 2007. At the time of her execution, she was still engaged in the process of appeal of her sentence.

Regular readers of this blog know about another Jordanian female, an ex-prisoner, also a terrorist, with a different fate: Ahlam al-Tamimi. Unlike Mrs al-Rishawi who was hanged today, Mrs al-Tamimi is a Jordanian, born, bred, educated and (following an 11 year-period spent outside Jordan) now living with her husband/cousin, in Jordan.

Tamimi has never spent time in any Jordanian prison, and never will. Quite the opposite: she was honored with a reception in Jordan's Family Court in October 2011 when she returned home. (Perhaps because she has a family connection in the court system.) She has her own weekly television program [click for this past week's show] every edition of which is replete with advocacy and glorification of terror. They are recorded in Jordan by her friends and employers in the Hamas terror organization and beamed throughout the world on the Al-Quds TV Network. And she is free to travel throughout the Arab world which it seems she does often, giving lectures and being an honoured guest.

Oh, yes - and in December she was proclaimed the "Success Model" of the students at the Arab world's most important graduate school for journalists, an institution modeled on the Columbia School of Journalism and founded by the woman previously known as Rym Brahimi who graduated Columbia and who then spent years working as an on-camera reporter for CNN. As Princess Rym Ali, she is now the king of Jordan's sister in law.

Tamimi has over and again confessed [via this video interview, among numerous other instances] freely, proudly and happily to the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 for the engineering of which she was convicted. She was sentenced to 16 life terms in prison with a judicial recommendation that she live the rest of her life behind bars with no possibility of a commutation of sentence.

Tamimi: Confessed to 15 acts of homicide, convicted, then freed,
a happy and proud celebrity murderer and terrorist,
and icon of lethal hatred [Image Source: Screen shot
from this MEMRI video]

That is not how it worked out. She was one of 1,027 terrorists set free in the extortion-driven 2011 Gilad Shalit Israel/Hamas transaction, despite a campaign we personally waged for years. We urged our government to stand firm, to not give in, to keep this particular sociopath behind bars so that justice could be done. She is the murderer of our 15 year-old daughter Malki. And in the end, she walked free. Today she is a globally-influential instigator of jihadist terror - an icon of hatred.

What Jordan - a sovereign state at least half of whose population defines itself as Palestinian Arab, and ruled by a dynastic family from Saudi Arabia - ought to do with its terrorists is emphatically not our concern. Jordan's laws that purportedly outlaw terrorism [see this little-known aspect of the sorry mess for instance] don't get the critical attention in the West that they richly deserve. But that's a far larger problem than we can address.

However when one of that country's most celebrated education institutions is found to be incubating lethal support for jihad, terror, lethal hatred while getting lavishly backed by Western governments, NGOs and corporations, that's a real problem. Not for Jordan - for the rest of us.

By tolerating this, and giving support, comfort, guidance, funding, sponsorship, encouragement and what appears to be an absurdly naive and uncritical acceptance of a dangerous Jordanian tolerance for certain kinds of jihad directed at certain kinds of victims, the major Western NGOs and respected governments who continue to do it ought to be brought to account by their citizens and donors.

A very great deal depends, as we have said often, on being right about how to deal with terror and its promoters.

Here's the Jordan Media Institute background:

• 10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred 
• 11-Dec-14: Is it newsworthy when journalists make a terror-addicted murdering colleague their role-model?
• 11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan
• 16-Jan-15: Incubating terror-minded journalists in Jordan but they have an answer to the criticisms 
• 19-Jan-15: The dilemmas of funding and enabling terror
• 23-Jan-15: What's said in London stays in London: Jordan's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't war on terror

Postscript: If you are interested in knowing who the JMI's Donors and Partners are and what they are and are not doing about this scandal which gets their cash, sponsorship and backing, we are happy to share the pre-publication details. We are preparing to publish an expose, but for now, on request [email us by clicking here], we will share what we know. It's a revealing, and disturbing, tale.

16-Jan-15: Scenes from the warzones

Belgium [Image Source]

The past 24 hours in the ongoing war in Europe...

Verviers, Belgium last night: Two armed men, evidently Islamists with plans for launching terrorist attacks on Belgian targets, were shot dead and another wounded by security people from Belgium's federal police after opening fire with automatic weapons on Thursday evening. Belgium is now on high alert. BBC quotes officials saying the shooters were part of a group that had returned to Belgium from fighting in Syria "and planned imminent attacks on police targets". In a search of the terrorists' premises - a flat above a bakery (source) - four Kalashnikov guns, bomb-making equipment and police clothing were seized.

Brussels, Belgium last night (as well as nearby towns Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Anderlecht and Schaerbeek): Searches were carried out overnight by security personnel hunting for additional embedded Islamist terrorists.

Antwerp and Brussels, Belgium this morning: Jewish schools were closed "after they were informed that they could be potential targets" according to the BBC quoting the Belgian newspaper Joods Actueel.

Zaventem, Belgium: Two Islamists suspected of involvement in acts of terrorism or planning them were arrested Thursday (source).

Across western Europe: CNN has a breaking report today "that the ongoing terror threat appears to involve up to 20 sleeper cells of between 120 to 180 people ready to strike in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. The source said that European Union and Middle East intelligence agencies identified an "imminent threat" to Belgium, possibly also to the Netherlands."

Montrouge, France: The suburban Paris apartment, rented on a short-term basis by Amedy Coulibaly, the jihadist killer who seized a kosher grocery store in Paris last Friday and cold-bloodedly murdered four of the unarmed Jews on the premises, turns out to have been an armaments repository. French police yesterday showed what they found there: "four Tokarev pistols similar to a pair found at the store, a revolver, and sticks of dynamite... mobile telephones, tear gas grenades, a flak jacket, binoculars, a flag similar to the ones used by the Islamic State (Isil), a copy of the Koran and a car rooftop beacon similar to those used by police" (source). Many thousands of Euros were spent in accmulating what the young thug had there.

Berlin, Germany: Overnight raids on Thursday/Friday by German security personnel involving "250 officers and three Special Operations commands carried out the raids on 11 homes" resulted "in the arrest a pair of Turkish men for planning a terrorist attack on Friday", (source)

More coming.

26-Oct-14: Standing up for jihad in Minnesota

The Getty Images caption reads: "Somali Muslims pray during a Somali Week soccer tournament championship game at the Hamline University stadium on June 26, 2011, in St. Paul, Minn." [Image Source]

In Minneapolis (but it could just as easily be almost anywhere else in the world), they are agonizing over how it could possibly be that three local girls decided to get up one day and travel to the Middle East in order to hook up with the terrorists of ISIS. According to AP, they have some strong leads: (a) social media; and (b) an online predator.

The local authorities quite rightly are saying their "biggest concern is for the safety and well-being of these girls". But fewer people, it appears from this distance, are saying the next biggest concern is what to do with Islamist-terror-minded people living in their midst.

Three teenage girls being investigated for trying to join Islamic State forces in Syria were victims of an “online predator” who encouraged them, a school official said Wednesday, as U.S. officials tried to determine how they made it to Europe without anyone knowing and whether terrorists’ appeal is deepening among vulnerable youth. The southeast Aurora girls — two sisters ages 17 and 15, and their 16-year-old friend — were detained at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany, and sent home over the weekend. They were interviewed by the FBI and returned to their parents in suburban Aurora. Those in the tight-knit east African community where they live said the sisters are of Somali descent and their friend is of Sudanese descent...
“Social media has played a very significant role in the recruitment of young people,” said FBI spokesman Kyle Loven in Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali community in the U.S. Authorities there have been concerned about terror recruiting of the young for years.  “What it indicates is we have to be really careful about people in impressionable years and what they’re doing on the Internet,” said Jim Davis, former special agent in charge of the FBI in Denver.
At least one of the girls was communicating with someone online who encouraged the three to travel to Syria, said Tustin Amole, a spokeswoman for the Cherry Creek School District where the girls attend high school. Fellow high school students told school officials on Monday that the girls had been discussing travel plans over Twitter, Amole said... The girls’ parents reported them missing Friday after they skipped classes. They had taken passports and $2,000 in cash...
Amole said the school district was being “extra vigilant” in light of the FBI’s concerns that the girls’ friends or classmates might have similar intentions...
Terror recruiting has been a problem for years in Minneapolis. Since 2007, roughly 22 young Somali-Americans have traveled to Somalia to take up arms with al-Shabab, an al-Qaida linked group. Those were all men. Within the last year, a handful of people from the community left Minnesota to join militant groups in Syria, and this time, there are fears that women might have been targeted...
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Denver would not say whether prosecutors plan to charge the girls with a crime. State prosecutors said they have no imminent plans to charge the girls. Amole said they will not face discipline. “Our biggest concern is for the safety and well-being of these girls...” [AP, October 23, 2014]

Online predators and social media are frightening factors, no doubt about it. But how about these?

• "Minnesota is home to an estimated 70,000 Somalis -- the largest Somali concentration in the country. Generally speaking, Somali girls growing up in America are thriving. In the culture, parents often take a more protective attitude toward girls, believing that their reputation upholds the dignity of the family..." [Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 21, 2010]
• On the other hand: "... [T]he problems Somali girls face are a reflection of a larger issue -- a lack of programs for Somali youth, and especially for girls. "The problem is there are no activities for the girls," said Hussein, the youth and girls program coordinator for the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota. Although as many as 40 percent of the 70,000 Somalis living in Minnesota are 18 years old or younger, there are only a handful of programs for girls, she said." [Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 21, 2010]
• "The wide-reaching sex-trafficking operation, controlled by Somali gangs, preyed on girls from the Twin Cities, including some who were 13 or younger... For more perspective on Monday's indictment, MPR's Tom Crann talked with Abdirizak Bihi, the executive director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis. Bihi has worked with Somali-American girls who have been caught up in prostitution, and he said many of those girls face similar social situations..." [MPR News, four years ago]
• "The latest ISIS recruit from Minnesota is a 19-year-old woman who told her family she will be taking care of wounded fighters in Syria. Somali-American leaders say they know of at least two other young women who have also left, and they believe at least 15 Minnesotans are among at least 100 Americans who have joined ISIS from around the world. No one is quite sure when the 19-year-old woman left Minnesota for Syria..." [CBS Minnesota, September 4, 2014]
• "Reports of Americans fighting for the group [ISIS] have raised concerns about the radicalization and recruitment of young men from immigrant communities throughout the United States, and particularly those in the large Somali American community in Minnesota... " ["Somali Americans Linked to IS Shock Minnesota Immigrant Community" VOA News, September 4, 2014]
• "As Minnesota teenagers growing up in the 1990s, Troy Kastigar and Douglas McAuthur McCain shared almost everything. They played pickup basketball on neighborhood courts, wrote freewheeling raps in each other’s bedrooms and posed together for snapshots, a skinny white young man with close-cropped hair locking his arm around his African-American friend with a shadow of a mustache... They converted to Islam around the same time and exalted their new faith to family and friends, declaring that they had found truth and certainty. One after the other, both men abandoned their American lives for distant battlefields. “This is the real Disneyland,” Mr. Kastigar said with a grin in a video shot after he joined Islamist militants in Somalia in late 2008... Today, both are dead. While their lives ended five years and over 2,000 miles apart, their intertwined journeys toward militancy offer a sharp example of how the allure of Islamist extremism has evolved, enticing similar pools of troubled, pliable young Americans to conflicts in different parts of the world... “Troy and Doug fit together in some ways,” Mr. Kastigar’s mother, Julie Boada, said at her home here. “They’re both converted Muslims. They both have had struggles.” ["For Jihad Recruits, a Pipeline From Minnesota to Militancy", NY Times, September 4, 2014]
• Before all of these, a not-so-thoughtful op ed from Fox News, March 19, 2007: "Minnesota: America's First Somali-Muslim State?"
• And this from Minnesota Public Radio in June 2014: "Over the past few months, as many as 15 young Somali-American men from the Twin Cities have traveled to Syria to join radical groups trying to overthrow President Bashar Assad's regime, according to the FBI. One of the men, Abdirahmaan Muhumed, told MPR News through a series of Facebook messages that he is fighting alongside the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria... "A Muslim has to stand up for [what's] right," Muhumed, 29, wrote in a Jan. 2 post. "I give up this worldly life for Allah." Muhumed, who claims he wants to save the global Muslim community, said if that causes others to consider him a terrorist, he is "happy with it." He asked Allah to forgive him and to "make my mom strong for the decision that I made." ["Jihad in Syria lures Somalis from Minnesota", MPR, June 11, 2014]

There are some positive reports out there too, but their impact is not so obvious, and their focus is impossibly narrow. For instance

Members of Minnesota’s large Somali community gathered Sunday to condemn the recruitment of youth by terrorist groups and urge collaboration to find solutions to address the problem. About 100 people attended a town hall meeting to denounce groups such as the Islamic State and al-Shabab, which together have recruited more than two dozen fighters from Minnesota since 2007. U.S. Attorney Andy Luger told the crowd he’s working hard to bring more resources to the community to address the root causes of the problem. ["Minnesota Somalis Condemn Islamic State Recruiting", September 28, 2014] 

And then there's the role of the highest of high-profile Islamic groups in America. This report quotes Abdirizak Bihi, the executive director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis, whom we mentioned above:

"Bihi has been working to stop radicalization of Somali-Americans for years. He has testified before Congress about the dangers of radicalization in the U.S. Somali community, working alongside the FBI and the Justice Department. His involvement is personal. Bihi’s nephew was radicalized by al-Shabaab and joined the group in 2008. He was killed the following year. But he told The Daily Caller the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has blocked his efforts for years, telling law enforcement agencies by telling them that he doesn’t know the Somali community and calling him “an Islamophobe” in a recent report. “They say that I am a bad person, that I am anti-Muslim, and that I don’t represent a hundred percent the Somali community,” Bihi said. “They lie about my life most of the time and try to destroy my character, my capability, and my trust in the community.” [He] also says CAIR has tried to bring Somalis into the organization and denies the threat that terrorism poses. ["Somali-American leader: ‘I tried to warn America’ about homegrown radicalization", September 23, 2013]

Simple but effective solutions are always going to be in short supply. But ignoring the role that religious culture and identity is playing in this unfolding lethal drama, and ascribing the unchecked phenomenon of home-grown jihadists to such vague factors as "social media" and predators is a guarantee that things will get worse before they get better.

And to be as clear as possible about what we mean by "things" in that last sentence: we mean the social imperative of keeping innocent people alive and unharmed.