18-Sep-15: Someone stabbed a policewoman in Europe: Anything here to learn?

The now-deceased assailant had been living in Germany for 14 years when
he was convicted in 2008. How well had he absorbed the culture, values
and language of his asylum? The earphones in front of him
could be a clue [Image Source]

Police in the Spandau district of Berlin were alerted yesterday (Thursday) morning to the presence of what people were reporting as a “madman with a knife” threatening people in the area. Officers were dispatched and, according to Telegraph UK, the suspect

attacked a woman police officer as she got out of her patrol car, stabbing her in the neck just above the top of her protective vest... For several hours after the incident, police were treating it as a random act of violence by a mentally disturbed man.

The woman officer’s partner drew his weapon and shot the assailant four times. Four additional patrol cars arrived at the scene and additional gunfire ensued. A "stray bullet" hit the injured police woman, who was rushed to emergency surgery and was out of danger by Thursday evening.

Then the authorities started acknowledging that this might not have been random violence.

Turns out the man with the knife has a back-story. Associated Press says he is "a known Islamic extremist", as does Washington Free Beacon. The BBC, surprisingly forthright this time, says he was "an Islamist who stabbed and seriously injured a policewoman". But Daily Express UK isn't too sure of his faith or outlook and contents itself with "a member of a terror group linked to al-Qaeda" (delicately refraining from any mention of Islam, Moslem or Muslim except as part of the name of a violent group).

At the bashful Voice of America, they say

German police have shot dead an Iraqi man who had wounded a policewoman with a knife, with prosecutors saying he was a suspected "Islamist." [Voice of America, September 17, 2015]

with quote marks suggesting audiences should figure it out for themselves.

Germany's state broadcaster seems a little surer (though not much) that faith-related issues fit into this somewhere:

A 41-year-old man of Iraqi origin has been shot dead in Berlin after he stabbed a policewoman. State prosecutors say the man was an "Islamist." [DeutscheWelle]

In Morocco, the story's headline conveys some facts without much insight: "German Police Shoot Knife-Wielding Iraqi Man After he Stabbed a Policewoman".

And CNN, which to remind us all is working from the same set of facts as everyone else and has updated the story at least once since yesterday afternoon, seems to have a case of journalistic paralysis. Quoting the official police spokesperson, it says he

told CNN it's too early to say what might have motivated the suspect, who was released from jail in 2013. The unidentified man was convicted of attempting an attack on Iraqi's prime minister during a visit to Berlin in 2004... "He was under supervision and wears an electronic tag. But he was not under any surveillance," said Berlin prosecutor Michael von Hagen, describing the suspect as someone "belonging to the Islamic scene." ["Police kill Iraqi man in Berlin after knife attack on street", CNN]

AP provides a few notable details

Security officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the attacker was Rafik Mohamad Yousef, who was convicted seven years ago of belonging to an al-Qaida-linked terror group... Frank Henkel, the interior minister for the state of Berlin, said the reasons for the attack were still unclear. "There are indications that this wasn't a planned act," Henkel said in a statement, but added that due to the man's history "a religious motif can't be excluded."
Yousef, an Iraqi national, was arrested in December 2004 after German officials suspected him and two others of being part of a plot by the Ansar al-Islam group to attack former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi during a visit to Berlin.
German authorities wanted to deport him to Iraq after his release in 2013 but were unable to do so because he could have faced the death penalty in connection with the attempted assassination, Henkel said.
Yousef was ordered to wear an electronic tag, which he removed on Thursday morning.

The AFP caption reads: "Men, women and children break a police cordon rushing towards waiting buses at the train station in the city of Tovarnik, close to the Croatian-Serbian border, Sept. 17, 2015." [Image Source]

Given the openly-admitted impotence of the German security people, it would not surprise to know that anxieties are on the rise throughout Europe over how well things are going to work out. The 2015 tsunami of in-bound undocumented Arab migrants has brought Germany some 800,000 asylum-seekers this year alone. That's four times last year’s non-trivial total, and there's little sign of these numbers getting smaller. We think there's good reason to expect them to grow.

Can the system cope? Germany's Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF in German)

is said to have more than 250,000 unprocessed asylum applications with the average turnaround time averaging more than five months... [DeutscheWelle, yesterday]

Telegraph UK says that the knife-man had been

sentenced to eight years [and] released early in 2013 but electronically tagged and allowed to remain in Germany.

The people in charge of security knew this was a dangerous person but according to BBC (drawing different inferences from those of AP)

the German authorities were unable to deport him as he had refugee status and was at risk of being killed in his native Iraq. ["Germany police shoot Berlin Islamist after knife attack", BBC, September 17, 2015]

We imagine some Europeans, observing with horror the lengths to which their authorities go to guard the welfare of "asylum"-seeking migrants convicted of plotting murder and then left to walk their streets with removable tags on their limbs, must be wondering how well they and their loved ones are protected from repetitions of this lethal act and worse.

But not all Europeans. According to Wall Street Journal yesterday, nearly two-thirds of Germans say, according to a poll taken this past weekend "they don’t fear that too many refugees were coming to their country." Which leaves us wondering how to interpret yesterday's report that Germany's

Interior Ministry announced in a statement on Thursday that it had accepted the resignation of Manfred Schmidt, head of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF). The ministry cited "personal reasons" for Schmidt's departure from Germany's top migration authority.

12-Sep-14: In Australia, the focus on home-grown terrorists gets sharper

Islamist "Black Standard" flag, symbol of Jihad and end-of-days philosophy, borne by
anti-Israel philosophers in a "rally" outside Sydney Town Hall,
July 20, 2014 [Image Source]

Follow up to our post ["09-Sep-14: In Australia, terrorism no longer as far away as it once seemed"] from Wednesday:

The Australian government on Friday elevated its terrorism threat level to the second-highest warning in response to the domestic threat posed by Islamic State movement supporters. Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced the increase from “medium” to “high” on a four-tier scale on the advice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. The domestic spy agency’s Director-General David Irvine warned this week that the terrorist threat level had been rising in Australia over the past year, due in part to Australians joining Islamic State to fight in Syria and Iraq. “I want to stress that this does not mean that a terror attack is imminent,” Abbott told reporters. “We have no specific intelligence of particular plots.” “What we do have is intelligence that there are people with the intent and the capability to mount attacks.” It is the first time that the threat level has been elevated above medium since the scale was introduced in 2003. [Source]

In The Age (Melbourne) today, they add some more detail:

• Prime minister Abbott is confident that the authorities are "smarter than terrorists and would-be terrorists" and will remain "one step ahead"...
• The new terrorism threat level will "not make any difference to daily life" for the vast majority of Australians but will mean "more security" at airports, ports, military bases, public buildings and large public events, including the upcoming AFL Grand Finals. But "football fans should not be deterred from attending the games..." Acting Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin: "You may expect to see heightened police presence but it won't be intrusive, I'm sure..." 
• Irvine of ASIO: "The rhetoric that is now coming out of the Middle East which is encouraging Australians to take violent action … increases the possibility of attacks here, and so we see an increase particularly in intent.. It could manifest itself in a Bali-type attack or it could manifest itself in the various other sorts of attacks from loners through to small groups to large activities..."
• 60 to 70 Australians are among the 10,000 foreign fighters fighting alongside the terrorists in Iraq and Syria and some had already returned home. 

A report in Wednesday's The Australian says Australian security authorities are "concerned about a handful of Muslim extremists, operating in groups of three or four, who have broken away from mainstream mosques and the broader Islamic community."

That same Wednesday, two days ago, some 180 officers from the AFP and Queensland Police swooped on nine properties across Brisbane in the northern Australian state of Queensland, among them an Islamic bookshop - the Iqraa Islamic Centre - in Brisbane, arresting two men. Both were charged with terrorism-related offences. A television news reporter [here] says one of the two is the brother of Australia's first Islamist human bomb (though he used the inaccurate and unfortunate term "suicide bomber"). He was referring to Omar Succarieh, the brother of Ahmed Succarieh who in September 2013 drove a truck laden with several tonnes of explosives into an army installation at the Deir al-Zour military airport in in northeast Syria. The bomber was named on social media sites at the time as "Abu Asma al-Australi", an alias that the media speculated "could refer to a Brisbane man named Ahmed" [video here]. All that was said at the time was that he "is understood to have a wife, at least one brother, and possibly a child."

Brisbane, Wednesday: The bookstore is on the very far right in both senses; getting distracted
by puppies and golf would be a mistake

Australians' natural but misplaced sense of distance and relative security will likely have been reinforced by the video images of the raided premises given the prominent signs on the facade of the two shopping-strip neighbours [screen shot above; source]. This is a pity because - as the references to Bali and other unmentioned terror attacks indicate - Australia has paid heavily in this ongoing war already.

Australian concern with the scale of the issue can be sensed from an analysis of population growth trends:

The number of Muslims in Australia will grow four times more quickly than non-Muslims over the next 20 years [calculated using fertility, mortality and migration rates]
as the continued instability in developing Islamic countries in Southeast Asia drives migrants and refugees to these shores. A major new [2011] study by the US-based [Pew Research Centre's Forum on Religion and Public Life] has forecast a global surge in the Muslim population, with Australia and New Zealand among the nations expected to see the biggest rises. In Australia, the Muslim community will grow from about 399,000 to 714,000 by 2030, an increase of 80 per cent. In that time the non-Muslim population will increase by about 18 per cent. [Source: The Australian, January 29, 2011]

14-Sep-06: Manipulating the Media: Frank Exposure, Courtesy of Reuters

How honest, accurate and untainted by ignorance, malice or influence are the news media that tell us what's happening in the world?

Imagine a headline that said: "Zionists Urged to Buy Influence in World Media". Think that might get some attention?

Would a report that quoted a major Jewish leader saying "Jewish tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-semitic attitudes around the world" get reported? Would it be discussed on talk-radio, the Guardian's op-ed page, Malaysia's cartoon pages? Would it be a major story on ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, Al-Jazeerah?

Now let's stop the speculating. Here's a true story -- only it's about Moslems, about Islamic power and about an authentic, formal, organized bloc of 57 nations that act in unison to control nearly one-third of the votes in the United Nations General Assembly.

Below is the actual, unedited form of yesterday's story as published by Reuters. After you've read through the text, please also read the comments we've added at the end.

Muslims urged to buy influence in world mediaWed Sep 13, 2006 2:12 PM BST

RIYADH (Reuters) - Muslim tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-Muslim attitudes around the world, ministers from Islamic countries heard at a conference in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Information ministers and officials meeting under the auspices of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Islamic body, said Islam faced vilification after the September 11 attacks, when 19 Arabs killed nearly 3,000 people in U.S. cities in 2001.

"Muslim investors must invest in the large media institutions of the world, which generally make considerable profits, so that they have the ability to affect their policies via their administrative boards," OIC chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told the gathering in the Saudi city of Jeddah.

"This would benefit in terms of correcting the image of Islam worldwide," he said, calling on Muslim countries to set up more channels in widely-spoken foreign languages.

Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-run group behind the Fox News Channel. The U.S. channel is generally seen as right-wing and no friend of Arab or Muslim interests.

Washington's response to September 11, invading Afghanistan and Iraq and tightening civil freedoms at home as part of a wider "war on terror", has created a widespread feeling among Muslims worldwide that their religion is under attack.

A row earlier this year over Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed deepened the sense of a divide between Islamic culture and the West.

"The fierce attack on Islam in the five years since the September 11 attacks has forced us into a defensive position on our faith and understanding of our tolerant religion," Egyptian Information Minister Anas el-Feki said in a speech.

"Now more than ever we need a new Islamic media message that reaches all parts of the world," Feki said, citing Israel's recent 34-day war in Lebanon as one issue where Muslims needed to make their views and influence felt.

To this, we'd like to add several comments.

1. About the OIC's Role

We've spoken publicly in the recent past about the Organization of the Islamic Conference (also referred to as the Organization of Islamic Countries.) Apart from hosting the conference described above, the OIC's actions are the main reason why the United Nations has failed, after years of inside efforts, to adopt a convention against terrorism. You can see the background to this in Arnold Roth's speech to the 3rd International Congress of Victims of Terror, reprinted here. The OIC's ability to frustrate all attempts to comprehensively outlaw terrorism constitute a remarkably under-reported, largely-unknown and shameful story.

2. About the Influencers

The way Reuters chooses to describe the influence of Alwaleed bin Talal is odd, to say the least. It says:

"Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp..."

And that's it. No other investments, no other investors. So how minimal is minimal?

Alwaleed bin Talal is surely worthy of a touch more attention than Reuters gives him. In addition to being a member of the Saudi royal family, a nephew of King Abdullah and the the richest Arab in the world with estimated net worth of US $20 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the world's eighth richest person. Wikipedia says: "He has been nicknamed by Time magazine as the Arabian Warren Buffett."

This comment itself is an interesting observation since Alwaleed also holds a vast stake in that same Time magazine, a holding worth a billion dollars or more. This gives him a voice in the affairs of CNN, Time and a long list of other media properties.

His 5% holding in News Corp gives him a stake in the world's largest publisher of news in the English language: 175 papers, plus TV stations, magazines, radio, book publishers and film production studios. He's also invested in the dominant Italian media conglomerate Mediaset, in the Asia-and-Europe-wide TV network SKY and in many other media properties. In addition, a $9 billion stake in Citicorp gives Alwaleed some modest degree of influence in other parts of the global business landscape.

A man who understands what money can buy, Alwaleed donated $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard Universities in 2005. This was the second largest donation that Georgetown has ever received. Its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU) is now renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

3. How Effective is This Sort of Investment?

Middle East Online quotes Prince Alwaleed himself boasting of its effect:

During last month's street protests in France, the US television network Fox... ran a banner saying Muslim riots. [Alwaleed says:] "I picked up the phone and called Murdoch . . . (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."

The Prince is quoted in a Washington Times column explaining that his largesse as aimed at "bridging the understanding between East and West... for peace and tolerance." The columnist, Diana West, observes:

Funny how that bridge goes only one way. We won't ever, for example, see a Saudi prince (or anyone else) plunk down cold cash to expand -- or even establish -- Christian studies in Saudi Arabia, where exercising freedom of a non-Islamic religion is a crime.

We should point out, that in some circles, Alwaleed's holdings are themselves shrouded with question marks. As The Economist said in a penetrating and very readable analysis from 1999: "Anyone who seeks to present Prince Alwaleed as the face of the new Saudi Arabia needs to explain the mystery that lies at the heart of his empire."

Perhaps it's this shroud of uncertainty that renders Reuters so modest in its claims about his influence and that of other Arab and Moslem potentates.

4. About a "New Islamic Media Message That Reaches All Parts of the World"

This isn't the place to repeat what antisemites have said all the way down history: that the Jews control the banks, the media, the movies, the water supply and the rest. The haters will keep saying what haters say, and the rest of us will try to avoid being drawn into an ignorance-laden, prejudiced and pointless debate.

People who want to have influence and advance their private agendas have always had the means available to do this by wealth, by economic power, by war. Alwaleed is no exception and he's not alone in his ambitions, though perhaps exceptionally well-placed to achieve it. But we're dealing here with a different, threatening and more dangerous situation - one that's characterized by a barely-disguised degree of collaboration, co-operation and lofty self-justification.

Alwaleed is not the only player in the creation of a "new Islamic message". The conference that sparked this report is, after all, a global international conference of governments and their ministers. Not just some governments, but governments that have nearly a third of the United Nations in their control. And as we observed above, control is the right word since the fact is they do act in a united, co-ordinated way.

That's one of the reasons the OIC exists.

Ignoring the slightly tortured English of their website, the OIC's secretary-general Ihsanoglu says their efforts are about international co-ordination. He "expressed certainty of the possibility of achieving success and professionalism in joint Islamic information action based on human capabilities and high-level professional capacities of the Islamic world which have proved their merit and competence in the various Islamic media such as TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and websites."

Meanwhile the Saudi Undersecretary for Culture and Information, Dr. Abdullah Al-Jasser, this week "drew attention to the fact that the Islamic world faces today formidable challenges and biased world media actions that have enormously prejudiced Islam and Muslims through news, information and programme manipulations. This urgently necessitates the quick access of Islamic States to the global information society, not only by possessing and utilizing technologies, but also by upgrading content."

The word jihad doesn't appear in the press releases but its spirit seems to be there. As a group speaking with a single voice, the Islamic nations say they're grievously provoked and they absolutely have to fight back. And they see the media as a critical battlefield.

If you're searching for signs of critical self-examination by these states and their reps, don't be too hopeful. When it comes to the overwhelmingly Islamic character of global terrorism, something that troubles most of the world, don't waste your time searching for analysis on the OIC website. It's evidently not a problem of theirs. On the contrary, their pre-occupation as a global group is with rebuffing suggestions of an Islamic connection to terror (the link is to an OIC speech by Malaysia's former prime minister who addressed this theme repeatedly). The terrorism problem is mainly a problem of perceptions in the West, they say, with Islamic states and Moslems among its principal victims. The solution therefore is in changing those Western perceptions.

Are there Arab and Moslem victims of Moslem terror? Of course - vast numbers of them; we know some personally. Does this mean that Islam is unrelated to global terror and its cancerous spread in the past decade? Of course not. Islam is at the very heart of the cancer. It's impossible to comprehend terror without looking closely at the role Moslems play in its growth.

The organized Islamic governments, all 56 of them, are hardly hiding their intentions, leaving the rest of us to wonder how much of an impact their Islamic war against Western perceptions is now, and will be, reflected in the news reporting, analysis and pictures that get to our pages and screens.