The Guardian identifies the terrorists:

The lynchpin of the group was Mohammed Chowdhury, a 21-year-old from east London, who pleaded guilty at Woolwich crown court on Wednesday to preparing to commit an act of terrorism.

He and eight other young men from London, Cardiff and Stoke on Trent were due to face trial this week, but in a last-minute change of plea they admitted the terror plot, but denied the intention was to cause death or injury.

Undercover detectives had followed Chowdhury and his right-hand man, Shah Rahman, observing Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament on 28 November 2010, during a massive surveillance operation which eventually led to the arrest of the terror gang.

There should be no ambiguity about their intentions and how they have been radicalised. Anwar al-Awlaki and Inspire magazine are all namechecked:

The group – who will be sentenced next week – were inspired by Anwar al- Awlaki, the US-born Islamist cleric who was al-Qaida’s leader in the Arab peninsula until he was killed in a drone attack last September.

Chowdhury and his followers collected messages sent out by Awlaki, who had masterminded a plot to send bombs disguised as printer cartridges to US synagogues on cargo planes. His plan failed when the packages were intercepted.

The men are understood to have followed instructions to copy Awlaki’s mail bombs in an al-Qaida magazine published five days before their first meeting in November 2010.

The publication, Inspire 3, detailed Awlaki’s attempt to post the bombs to synagoges in October 2010.

Chowdhury and his co-defendants, Gurukanth Desai, 30, his brother, Abdul Miah, 25, Shah Rahman and Mohibur Rahman, were found with copies of the magazine as well as an earlier edition Inspire 2.

CST cites the Al-Muhajiroun link:

CST was informed by the police of the potential threat to the rabbis when the group was arrested in December 2010, and together with the police we briefed the rabbis and the security officers at their synagogues. This plot is a reminder of the enduring terrorist threat that is faced by the UK Jewish community.

The “radical groups” that the men were associated with were al-Muhajiroun and its various successor groups, including Islam4UK and Muslims Against Crusades, which have been proscribed (pdf) by the government. This is no surprise: one researchreport (pdf) found that 15% of UK nationals convicted of Islamist terrorist offences had links to al-Muhajiroun or its successor organisations. Some details of the defendants’ connections to these groups appeared in the media at the time of their arrests, and it is likely that more will emerge in the coming days.

And here’s the proof. A photo of the leader of the terrorist plot, holding an Islam4UK placard.

Lynchpin Mohammed Chowdhury

And here Mohammed Chowdhury again, standing respectfully next to Anjem Chaudri, his “emir”.

Mohammed Choudhury, second from right

Isn’t it high time to acknowledge that the Al-Muhajiroun pose a greater danger than simply a group of hyper-aggravated Muslim radicals who look good on Newsnight provoking Jeremy Paxman?

In a U.S. Department of Defense memorandum released by WikiLeaks, I have uncovered another, especially devastating source who spoke out against Mr. Aamer in Guantanamo. “UK558″ described Mr. Aamer as a “recruiter” for al Qaeda. He outlined how Mr. Aamer and he traveled to meet members of a European al Qaeda cell in 2000, and how Mr. Aamer fought in Bosnia under the leadership of Abu Zubayr al-Haili, a senior al-Qaeda figure. “UK558″ talked of the training in AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades Mr. Aamer received.

“UK558″ is the Defense Department memorandum’s code-name for none other than Moazzam Begg. Back in the U.K., Mr. Begg consistently calls for Mr. Aamer’s release. He has said that it is Mr. Aamer’s “personal character and charisma” that keeps him in Guantanamo, “as opposed to anything he has been accused of.” He also suggested that he is only being detained because he could expose British complicity in torture. Yet while in Guantanamo himself, Mr. Begg was telling the U.S. that his “lifelong friend” was an al Qaeda recruiter and mujahideen fighter. (It is worth repeating that four separate U.S. inquiries have dismissed Mr. Begg’s accusations that this information was obtained under coercion.)

This old-school hip hop track is dedicated to Mr Begg

The Pakistani ISI and its parliamentary lapdogs are responsible for tens of thousands of Afghan and ISAF/NATO deaths over the past decade. Everybody knows now. But the depths of duplicity, mendacity and barbarism to which the Pakistani elites have stooped, and the enthusiasm with which they have devoted themselves to the care and feeding of some of the world’s most savage and lumpen jihadi gangsters, are not so well known.

As of last Wednesday, the BBC World News has been blocked by Pakistan’s cable channels as a “protest” against this two-part BBC documentary, Secret Pakistan. Watch this, and you will see what the Pakistani establishment does not want the people of Pakistan to know. The people of the “west” need to know these things, too, no less.

Part One: Double Cross.

Part Two: Backlash.

In the years to come, the history of the so-called “war in Afghanistan” will be little more than a footnote in a chapter about the lies successive American governments told themselves and the world about Pakistan – that American-subsidized, nuclear-armed, military-industrial crime syndicate with a bribe market for a parliament that masquerades as a UN member state. All we can hope is that chapter won’t be in a book about a nuclear holocaust that ended a sickening, paranoid hoax of a country that had held most of its 170 million “citizens” hostage and barely alive on less than $2 a day in the final years before it all went up in flames.

Here’s a rare and horrifying glimpse of the reality behind the lies: The Ally From Hell. Excellent journalism from Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder.

And here’s a typically revolting recrudescence of Yank excuse-making from Thomas Friedman, under the headline A Long List Of Suckers, who provides Answer # 1953 to the mewling “Why do they hate us?” question: “America today needs much more cost-efficient ways to influence geopolitics in Asia than keeping troops there indefinitely. We need to better leverage the natural competitions in this region to our ends.”

Thanks for that, Amreeka.

Regular readers of HJS will know it’s not often I find myself in agreement with either the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), the umbrella group for Islamic societies that in the words of the Prevent strategy, “has not always fully challenged terrorist and extremist ideology within the higher and further education sectors”; or even CagePrisoners, former Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg’s advocacy group with a history of supporting radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki killed in a US-drone strike in September.

But this morning I found myself becoming the 120,748th person to sign an e-petition calling for Babar Ahmad, currently fighting extradition to the US on terrorism offences, to be tried in the UK, a campaign which both groups strenuously support. Ahmad, who’s been held in maximum security prisons for seven years without trial, is waiting for a final ruling on his case from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

His family want him to be tried in the UK, where his alleged offences occurred. They point out that the US is seeking to extradite him under “the controversial no-evidence-required Extradition Act 2003”. The legislation, referred to by the campaign group Liberty as “undermin[ing]  longstanding safeguards against unfair removal,” allows for the extradition of British citizens to many jurisdictions, including the US, without the need for a court to hear that there is any evidence against them.

In June this year, the Houses of Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights urged the government to amend the law, to allow a British judge “to refuse extradition where the alleged offence took place wholly or largely in the UK,” and called on the requesting country to “show a prima facie case”.

The charges against Ahmad, however, are serious: conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists; providing material to support terrorists; and conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country. Were he found guilty in a US court he would face life imprisonment.

The US District Court for the District of Connecticut indictment alleges that Ahmad and his co-accused, Syed Talha Ahsan, provided, and conspired to provide material support and resources to terrorists in Afghanistan and Chechnya, through Azzam Publications, an internet based platform with multiple websites, and through email communications.

Ahmad is accused of using the websites to fundraise and recruit individuals for the Taliban and Chechen mujahideen; and to provide justification for violent jihad and advertise videotapes for sale depicting fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. The US further alleges that the websites revealed links to Shamil Basayev – the leader of the Chechen terrorist group Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, who claimed to be behind the Beslan school massacre in 2004.

Ahmad and Ahsan are also suspected of communicating by email with members of both the Taliban and Chechen mujahideen and conspiracy to provide support to terrorists seeking temporary residence in London. In November 2000, Ahsan and Ahmad are alleged to have assisted in coordinating the shipment of gas masks to the Taliban. They are also accused of attempting to recruit Pakistani nationals in November 2001 to travel to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against the US, and instructing Pakistani nationals in how to submit false and fraudulent visa applications for those travelling to Pakistan. In April 2001, they are suspected of gaining possession of a then classified document, which discussed the vulnerabilities to a terrorist attack of the US Navy operating in the Straits of Hormuz.

Putting these charges aside for one moment, Ahmad has also been treated atrociously by the British justice system: arrested in the middle of the night in December 2003, Ahmad was hauled into Paddington Green police station with 73 injuries to his body before being released a week later without charge. The Metropolitan Police then offered Ahmad £60,000 by way of an apology for what they called a “serious, gratuitous and prolonged attack”.

By signing the e-petition I am not making comment on Ahmad’s innocence, nor am I seeking to downplay the severity of the allegations or abuse listed above or turn him into another cause célèbre of the “War on Terror”. Being the victim of gratuitous human rights abuses – by the very people charged with protecting you – will no doubt affect one’s belief in their country and its institutions. I would not blame Ahmad for never trusting the authorities again.

But, it does not make him innocent – that’s not for me to judge. All I believe is that no one should be forcibly removed from the own country without their courts first hearing the evidence against them. To that end, Ahmad should be tried in the UK.

The petition is available here

Glenn Greenwald:

What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.

Greg Scoblete:

The counter-argument here is that Awlaki effectively lost whatever constitutional protections citizenship affords when he took up arms against his country and was found on a battlefield. … in this specific case, it looks like Awlaki was a traitor to his country and had given aid and comfort to its enemies. But is executive decree of guilt enough to have Americans – even loathesome ones – killed?

And on this side of the pond, we have

Maajid Nawaz:

However, the Awlaki case adds another wound to the body of human-rights protections that had hitherto been sacred. This action carves out the legal pathway for a state to silence not only external but internal dissent, by defining the citizen as an “enemy of the state”. Legally it matters little that in this case Awlaki was indeed an enemy of the state. With the evidence being kept secret, the precedent has been set.

However, legal experts argue, more pertinently than any of the above, the extenuating circumstances for killing al-Awlaki.

Robert Chesney on bypassing the Fifth Amendment:

A corollary to Bobby’s second point in this post is that it is not enough to say the words “due process” by way of denouncing the Al Aulaqi strike, as though those words represent a discussion-ending argument. One has to specify what process is due to someone being targeted in a particular circumstance before one concludes that the targeting violates due process. If targeting Al Aulaqi were really an assertion of the power to kill any U.S. citizen anywhere based on his speech, I would find it alarming indeed. But I am, in fact, quite certain that Bobby is correct that it is no such thing.

Benjamin Wittes on the question of Due Process:

does the attack show that the U.S. government believes that al-Awlaki had no Fifth Amendment right to due process in this situation, such that deadly force could be used against him anywhere? I don’t know what government lawyers may have thought about this, but I’m very doubtful this is the case. Rather, I suspect that their view was that deadly force was only compatible with the 5th Amendment in this setting because al-Awlaki was located, purposefully, in a place where neither the host-state government nor the United States had a plausible opportunity to capture him (combined with his asserted operational role and the resultant premise that he posed an imminent threat to life).

Here is al-Awlaki making a call for Jihad:

What are the equivalents of the First and Fifth Amendments in Jihadi ideology that protects an individual’s right to due process and a trial before they are inadvertently killed in a suicide mission by one of Awlaki’s duped disciples?

KABUL – President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who for years pushed for reconciliation with the Taliban, now says attempts to negotiate with the insurgent movement are futile and efforts at dialogue should focus instead on neighboring Pakistan.

Karzai explained in a videotaped speech released by his office yesterday that he changed his views about trying to talk to the Taliban after a suicide bomber, claiming to be a peace emissary sent by the insurgents, killed a former Afghan president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, at his home on Sept. 20. Rabbani was leading Karzai’s effort to broker peace with the Taliban.

“Their messengers are coming and killing. . . . So with whom should we make peace?” Karzai said Friday to a gathering of the nation’s top religious leaders that was videotaped.

“I cannot find Mullah Mohammad Omar,’’ Karzai said, referring to the Taliban’s one-eyed leader. “Where is he? I cannot find the Taliban council. Where is it?”

“I don’t have any other answer except to say that the other side for this negotiation is Pakistan,” Karzai said.

The last point is noteworthy.

Most of the Taliban leadership is thought to be living in Pakistan and its governing council – known as the Quetta Shura – is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta. In addition, the Pakistan-based Haqqani network maintains safe-havens in the country’s tribal areas along the Afghan border, particularly in North Waziristan, and has deep ties to the Pakistani secret service, the ISI.

It’s obvious that President Karzai’s about-turn comes after the news that the “Turban bomber” who killed Afghanistan former president, Burhanuddin Rabbani last month, was from Pakistan.

Hence the epiphany:

An Afghan government statement issued earlier in the past week said Pakistan had failed to take steps to eliminate terrorist sanctuaries. It added that if Pakistan’s intelligence service is using the Taliban against Afghanistan, then the Afghan government needs to have negotiations with Pakistan, “not the Taliban.”

When he was imam of a San Diego mosque in the 1990s, his sermons were attended by two future 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

In a video posted in November last year he called for the killing of Americans, saying they were from the “party of devils”.

Kool and the Gang are overjoyed:

Ordinary people (and potential victims of al-Qaeda terrorism) express their relief all over the world:

“The victory belongs to those peasants. Not to us.”

Or does real news imitate The Onion?

Al-Qaida has sent a message to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asking him to stop spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks.

Iranian media on Wednesday reported quotes from what appears to be an article published in the latest issue of the al-Qaida English language magazine, Inspire, which described Ahmadinejad’s remarks over the 11 September attacks as “ridiculous”.

In his UN general assembly speech last week, Ahmadinejad cast doubt over the official version of the 2001 attacks.

“The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al-Qaida was behind 9/11 but rather, the US government,” the article said, according to Iranian media. “So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?”

Michael Weiss adds on Ahmadinejad:

A’jad’s got a well-known tendency toward pseudo-history, and it can’t help his grasp of reality that he’s surrounded by witches. But this Inspire polemic won’t end the bizarre and shameless nonsense espoused by everyone else in the Truther firmament, from Gore Vidal to Charlie Sheen to 25 per cent of Britons and 33 per cent of Americans, about the most re-broadcast event in human history.  Why won’t they give al-Qaeda the credit it desperately seeks?

It wasn’t Pakistan but the CIA that created the savage Haqqani Taliban network that U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen has been belatedly fingering as the chief culprit in Afghanistan’s agonies, Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Minister, declared on Sunday. It is an outrageous lie, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the terrorist savageries visited upon the people of South Asia over the past three decades will know. But I don’t expect that this will matter in the least to fashionable “left-wing” opinion among the world’s rich white people, where the consensus has for some long while served with remarkable precision as an echo of the lumpen view incited by right-wing Pakistani chauvinists.

Terry Glavin offers an insight into the history of the Haqqani Network, that Taliban stronghold in Pakistan, nurtured and funded by Pakistan’s secret police, the ISI.

Careful readers will note that the chronology of events Glavin covers shows that the Taliban, the Haqqani network and al-Qaeda were all fully formed and operational well before the USA got into the picture. Glavin is refreshingly disparaging of the world’s “rich white pseuds” far-lefties, Ken Livingstone and his Jamaat-e-Islami friends in Whitechapel, Michael Moore and a coterie of Guardian editors who will have us believe that the CIA and USA foreign policy created these Frankensteinian terrorist networks. They’re lying and not for the first time either.

The shorthand use of the term “Haqqani network” is instructive in the way the words we use oftentimes allow lies to creep into our conversations unnoticed. The term “Haqqani” comes not from a family name, like Gambino or Soprano, although to be fair to headline writers it is useful to employ it that way. In fact, the name comes from a madrassa in Akora Khattak, Pakistan, known as Darul uloom Haqqania. Its headmaster and chancellor, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, is not without reason known as the godfather of the Taliban.

Over the years, the Darul uloom Haqqania has dispatched thousands of zombies to post-grad throat-slitting and suicide-bombing assignments in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Punjab, Balochistan, and other such locales. Just one famous alumnus is Mullah Omar, “commander of the faithful” and supremo of the Quetta Shura Taliban, the genocidal cult funded and armed by Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Agency (with no help from the CIA, incidentally) to seize and run Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, and which has been the scourge of the Afghan republic ever since. Another alumnus is the mass-murderer who calls himself Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose son Sirajuddin now more or less runs the network from its Binladenist bases in Waziristan and across the Afghan border in Paktia, Khost and other such mountainous wastelands. Sirajuddin is a senior member of Omar’s Quetta Shura.

To go along with the lie that the Haqqani network was created by the CIA, one will have to first open the lid of the memory-hole and chuck in the fact that Jalaluddin had already declared a global jihad against the entire civilized world, not least the Afghan republic of Mohammed Daoud Khan, by the mid-1970s. This is long before Jimmy Carter got the bright idea of upsetting the Cold War applecart by funding Afghan jihadists, a decision he made long before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and a long, long time before the CIA decided to subcontract and outsource its entire foreign policy in Afghanistan to the ISI”s torturers and death squads.

On those who advocate engagement with these jihadists, Glavin has this to say:

If you really think “peace talks” are the way forward in any of this, you will want to try imagining peace talks with this elaborate complex of barbarism. If you really think that Joint Chiefs boss Mike Mullen is merely taking the opportunity of his pending retirement to say mean things about the thugs that run the military-industrial complex we lazily call “Pakistan,” a quick read of the West Point study will do you good (.pdfhere). To cite:

“The scholarly and policy communities have misapprehended the precise local context for the development of global jihadism,” is the way the authors delicately and diplomatically describe the fashionable delusions the Obama White House hopes to provide “war weary” Americans as an excuse to abandon Afghanistan and put a stake in the heart of a sovereign and democratic Afghan republic. “It is vital that the policy community correct the course that has taken this erroneous assessment for granted and recognize the Haqqani network’s region of refuge for what it has always been – the fountainhead of jihad.”

There is more and it is brilliant. Do yourself a favour and read it in full.

The Haqqani Network is a Taliban wing  based in Pakistan. Last week it was responsible for the terrorist attack on an NATO installation in Kabul. Sixteen people were killed – no Americans.

Now irrefutable mobile intercept evidence has been traced which shows the direct link between Haqqani network and the ISI.

According to U.S. officials, the Haqqani network consists of several thousand fighters and operates with impunity from safe havens inside Pakistan, conducting cross-border raids into Afghanistan and up into Kabul.

The Pakistani spy agency uses the Haqqanis to sow violence so Afghanistan cannot emerge as a strong and stable country allied with Pakistan’s arch enemy India.

Two days before the attack on the U.S. Embassy, a large truck bomb went off at an American combat outpost, wounding 77 U.S. soldiers.

Two days before that, U.S. intelligence intercepted communications that the Haqqani network was sending a large truck filled with explosives into Afghanistan. Gen. John Allen, the commander in Afghanistan, called Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the commander of Pakistan’s army and former head of Pakistani intelligence, and asked Kiyani to head off the attack. According to U.S. officials, Kayani promised to “make a call,” but the truck continued into Afghanistan and exploded on the anniversary of 9/11.

These are only the latest in a long stream of high-profile attacks by the Haqqani network which U.S. officials say is protected and financed by Pakistani intelligence.

This latest evidence is bound to make things more difficult, if not completely farcicalm for the US to continue funding Pakistan for its role as a partner in the fight against terrorism, for which it is the recipient of nearly $2 billlion from the USA.

2,975 reasons to hate Al Qaeda. There are millions more.

To start, there are 2,975 reasons from 90 countries. An unforgettable patchwork quilt of humanity that was disappeared on a Tuesday morning ten years ago. (credit for photo above depicting many victims of 9/11) But that is only the beginning.

I hate Al Qaeda for all the human beings they have killed – the Africans, Americans, Arabs, Asians, Europeans, agnostics, atheists, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims.

I hate Al Qaeda because they have murdered thousands of Muslims even while claiming to represent them, a claim they make even while bombing mosques during Ramadan. Because they reduce a rich religious heritage to a series of absurd prohibitions. They make the most sacred pronouncements, like Allahu Akbar – God is Great – into threats, into epithets.

I hate Al Qaeda because of the Caliphate of Doom they want to build.

I hate Al Qaeda because in these ten years they have facilitated the brutality of some on the right who built “enhanced interrogation” chambers for celebrations of simulated drowning. Because now almost everyone accepts a little torture.
But I also hate Al Qaeda because they have inspired some on the left to say the stupidest things. Proclaiming that Osama bin Laden was in the end simply an “unarmed victim” about whom there was no evidence of wrongdoing. That Anwar al-Awlaki is just a “Muslim cleric.” The people in the towers on 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fates. Inane.

I hate Al Qaeda because they hate women, gays, Jews, Christians, Muslims not like them, which is most Muslims. Because they only hate. And they make me hate too.

I hate Al Qaeda because they wanted a clash of civilizations. And we gave it to them in Qur’an burnings, in marches against Mosques, in Iraq.

I hate Al Qaeda because they support every one of the worst Muslim movements – Al Shabab (“the youth”), the Taliban (“the students”), Boko Haram (“Western education is a sin”) – the same movements we must defeat for the real youth, the actual students, to get a decent education, to have a future. Because we have to waste time talking about them when we should be talking about building that future for generations coming of age in an economic and environmental meltdown.

I hate Al Qaeda because the way forward should be the Democratic Spring, because jihadism should be the past.

I hate Al Qaeda for the young Algerian fiancé who bled to death in his mother’s arms in Cherchell after a suicide bomber broke his fast this August; for Mustapha Akkad and his daughter Rima; for Danny Pearl,Amenia Rasool, and Father Mychal Judge, all of whom are no more because Al Qaeda is.

I hate Al Qaeda for the bombs ofBaghdad, of Algiers, of Amman, ofDar es Salaam, of all the cities they have blighted like New York. (credit for photo at left of firefighter standing amid smoldering ruins at World Trade Center days after the 9/11 attacks) Because a myriad of conspiracy theorists absolve them of their crimes even when they say they have committed them.

I hate Al Qaeda because there is no excuse for what they do, yet people make excuses for them.

I hate Al Qaeda because not enough of us will openly say we hate them, but those who do, no matter the risk, are made invisible. Because a Muslim bomber always makes headlines while a peace activist of Muslim heritage warrants virtually none.

I hate Al Qaeda because they make it harder for people who look like my father to board an airplane. Because they confirmed every racist’s view of Muslims. And provoked responses from the Bush Administration that confirmed every anti-American cliché.

And I hate Al Qaeda because on one breathtaking September day they changed the world in an explosion of cruelty.
Ten years on, I am ready to stop hating Al Qaeda. I am ready to stop Al Qaeda.

The remarks appeared in an article written by SIAN ‘leader’ Arne Tumyr which was published on the group’s website on Sunday night. The site had released a shorter statement eight hours earlier condemning Breivik as ‘an enemy of Norway’. Both pieces remain on the SIAN site, which currently bares the following passage on its homepage: ‘Islam is the backdrop for this tragedy – this incredible and horrific mass murder that Sian takes the stand from. Also we feel with the relatives. The political correct Norway, however, has its share of the blame – the politicians have put a lid on Islamic debate – despite the fact that most of the Norwegian people is opposed to Islam.’(sic)

Tumyr’s article also denied the presence of xenophobia in Norway, explaining that in contrast to “Islamic states”, “in Norway there is no hatred of ‘strangers’ – only resistance to foreigners who want to take from us our values and subjugate the Norwegian culture”. It further rejects any calls for “dialogue”, since “a good Muslim has nothing – absolutely nothing to dialogue with. They have only Islam, ‘the prophet’ and Sharia – and it is this that in time will govern Norway.” Tumyr also wrote of “the political authorities who said on Sunday, stated that they would work for the multi-cultural society” that “in plain words” this meant “they will work for continued Islamization of society”.

SIAN is the Norwegian branch of ‘Stop Islamisation of Europe’, an umbrella group which entrusted its American branch, Stop Islamization of America, to writers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in January 2010. On Sunday, SIOE co-founder Stephen Gash agreed with a commenter on the group’s Facebook page that Breivik had been ‘Islamised’, replying that the killer had ‘behaved like a Muslim’.

Since SIOE and SIOA have issued statements condemning Anders Breivik, it will be interesting to see whether they will now disown their Norwegian branch or take action against its leadership. It would also be worth knowing whether they agree with SIOE’s co-founder that this sociopathic murderer ‘behaved like a Muslim’.

Adam Barnett is Research Co-ordinator for the One Law for All campaign and author of the forthcoming report ‘Enemies Not Allies’ (released next week), which investigates the EDL and SIOE. He can be reached via The Spittoon.

I’m pretty sure I will pray to God as I’m rushing through my city, guns blazing, with 100 armed system protectors pursuing me with the intention to stop and/or kill. I know there is a 80%+ chance I am going to die during the operation as I have no intention to surrender to them until I have completed all three primary objectives AND the bonus mission. When I initiate (providing I haven’t been apprehended before then), there is a 70% chance that I will complete the first objective, 40% for the second, 20% for the third and less than 5% chance that I will be able to complete the bonus mission. It is likely that I will pray to God for strength at one point during that operation, as I think most people in that situation would….If praying will act as an additional mental boost/soothing it is the pragmatical thing to do. I guess I will find out… If there is a God I will be allowed to enter heaven as all other martyrs for the Church in the past.

Andrew Sullivan identifies this as articulation of what he calls Christianism and, not surprisingly, it reads like the text of a suicide video lovingly prepared by a jihadi terrorist.

Notice the absence of real faith, which would recoil even at the very thought of killing innocents, but the pragmatic, cold-blooded use of faith as a psychological mechanism to enable mass murder. Bin Laden, we should recall, had been a very Westernized rich kid before he became a “believer.” Breivik – who killed a greater proportion of Norwegians than bin Laden did of Americans on 9/11 – has the same internal conflict. It is his fear of his lack of real faith that propels him to pragmatically embrace the psychological structure of religion to murder his cultural enemies, to reify “Europe” or “Christendom” or “the Church” in order to defend them and give some meaning to his life. He also needs to reify Islam into a purely political and cultural entity that exists solely as an existential threat to Western freedom and in which every Muslim is therefore suspect.

My point is this: this was about as far from an act of meaningless violence as you can get. It is an explicitly articulated, carefully argued conclusion from a mishmash of every current far right platitude out there. Breivik does not merely claim influence by someone like Robert Spencer, he quotes him and so many others at great length as part of his manifesto! It’s a pastiche of vast tracts of the far right blogosphere. None of this delegitimizes sane, vital critiques of Islamist intolerance, violence and ideology; none of it makes these cited ideologues and fanatics guilty of murder or in any way being accomplices to murder, or in any way connected to his crime. But it does seem to me to prove beyond any doubt that Christianism is indeed a phenomenon in its own right, and that its evolution into neo-fascist violence, like Islamism’s embrace of neo-fascist violence, is now something that cannot be denied.

And then are Breivik’s links to key members of the EDL:

Scotland Yard was investigating Breivik’s claims that he began his deadly “crusade” after being recruited to a secret society in London, and that he was guided by an English “mentor”. David Cameron, who was being kept updated on developments, said Breivik’s claims were being taken “extremely seriously”.

Breivik wrote of having strong links with the EDL, saying he had met its leaders and had 600 EDL members as Facebook friends.

Mr Hobson said in an online posting that: “He had about 150 EDL on his list … bar one or two doubt the rest of us ever met him, altho [sic] he did come over for one of our demo [sic] in 2010 … but what he did was wrong. RIP to all who died as a result of his actions.”

Whether Breivik acted as a “lone wolf” or as part of an organised group is yet to be uncovered. But more to  the point, Breivik certainly ingested and regurgitated large amounts of writings of right-wing ideologues: Theodore Dalrymple, Robert D. Kaplan, Lee Harris, Ibn Warraq, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Walid Shoebat, Bat Ye’or, Mark Steyn, Melanie Philips, Pamela Geller et al are all quoted and get a name check. Their ideas were the intellectual padding employed to justify his narcissistic journey to Christianist nationalism. His manifeso makes much reference to the “Vienna School of Thought” promulgated online by the ‘Gates of Vienna’ blog and the far-right Norwegian blogger, Fjordman.

This mind-boggling act of mass murder is the ultimate and logical conclusion to the “Eurabia” conspiracy thesis which has been developed into a keystone of European far-right ideology. Sane people of the political centre must debunk this idiotic conspiracy theory once and for all if they are to oppose the rise of the European Far-Right. Opposing far-right fascism can only be achieved with the same principled and well-informed rigour that has been applied to tackling Islamist extremism – by identifying key individuals and groups rather than employing spurious generalisations.

Breivik has been universally condemned, of course, and although it is encouraging to see proponents of the far-left commentators condemn this act it is difficult to ignore the glaring note of hypocrisy. Although the far-left blogs have been robust in their criticism of  the horror in Norway, Islamophobia-Watch used the opportunity to score cheap tribalist points by attacking, once again, moderate Muslims and organisations opposed to Islamic terrorism. There is an irony at play here: the great pity is seeing so many people who are now (correctly) condemning the terrorist atrocity in Norway but who have previously never been able to bring themselves to condemn Islamic terrorism in, say, Pakistan or Afghanistan with the same moral outrage.

Robert Lambert yesterday mistakenly criticized the government for its position on excluding and subsequently arresting the hate preacher Raed Salah, as reported on Newsnight , not for his political views, but for violating his notice of exclusion under UK immigration law. Lambert refers to Saleh as “Sheikh” and  presents him as merely a persecuted Palestinian activist.

  In his piece, Lambert tries to say that the controversy is about Israel and nothing to do anti-semitism, extremism, support for Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, or in fact any connections with officially-designated extreme or terrorist groups.

Lambert is either ignorant of the facts, incompetent or simply not concerned with them at all.

  He states that “anger and frustration with Israeli oppression is hardly the same as unwarranted hatred of a minority or majority community of any kind.”  

But Salah has said:

“We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children’s blood,” he said. “Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread.”

Clearly for Lambert this was nothing to do with hatred of Jews!

Salah also wrote:

“Jews knew about the attack on the twin towers, left the building and did not inform anyone. 9/11…A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.”

There is no mention at all by Lambert of support for extremists such as al-Qaeda, in fact he claims that Salah is like “Nelson Mandela”.  Well, here is the website of the movement which Salah heads, describing Bin Laden as the “the sheikh, the martyr, bin Laden” and the US forces who killed him as the forces of “Satan”!…”We in the Islamic Movement condemn the assassination operation against the sheikh, the martyr Osama Bin Laden, if [reports are] true, at the hands of the American security arms. The assassination, if true, proves collusion of mercenaries who have sold their consciences to cursed Satan.”

Lambert goes on to say: “It is difficult to find anything in Sheikh Salah’s so-called hate speech that would not have occasioned an entirely opposite response from the British Home Secretary had the words been uttered by a non-Muslim visiting Britain.” 

Again, let’s examine the evidence and see if Lambert is correct.

• Michael Savage (real name Michael Weiner) was banned from entering the country for his views on Islam, immigration, rape and autism.

• Fred Waldren Phelps, the Christian Baptist, (when last I checked he was not a Muslim), was prevented form entering the country for his anti-gay views. (He celebrated the deaths of US soldiers and picketed funerals of AIDS victims).

• For a list of some other racists and extremists that have been excluded for spreading obnoxious views, have a look at this list in the Guardian.

The Salah decision is self-evidently nothing to do with Israel, but is about extremism, support and praise for the al-Qaeda terrorist leader, anti-semitism of the most vile kind, and a rabble-rousing hate preacher. It is incidental that this hate preacher happens to a Muslim. 

Lambert insinuates that this is not about terrorism but Saleh was arrested, sentenced and served time though subsequently released after plea bargaining for funding Hamas.  Hamas is a terrorist organization which targets and attacks civilians and is listed so by the EU.  


One would have assumed that a former police officer, specializing in counter-terrorism, would be aware of this.

However, if Lambert is unaware why doesn’t he ask a few questions of his funders?  Among them is an organisation named and shamed by David Cameron as a Muslim Brotherhood front – the Cordoba Foundation. 

Is it be a coincidence that Lambert also praises another sheikh – the Muslim Brotherhood- groomed “cleric”, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a man who is reported to believe that terrorism is a religious duty, including killing American civilians working in Iraq“.

These beliefs are not just immoral and illegal, but also in direct contravention of the UK Government’s policy and stopping terrorism: you would think that an expert, former police officer would know this, wouldn’t you? 

Entering our country is not a right for all people: it is a privilege, and one which should not be extended for people who support terrorism. A view which I would have thought did not require justifying – and hence the exclusion of Salah is nothing to do with free speech.

I would hasten to add that I am sure that our courts will uphold justice.  Lambert threatens the coalition government with UK justice, but neglects to mention that another person whose entry to Britain he supported, Zakir Naik, also tried to challenge his exclusion but the decision to exclude him was upheld by a UK High Court. Oh and guess what – Naik is another one of Lambert’s “Cause Celebs”.  I have confidence in our judicial system, and believe that it will reject the claims of Lambert’s current “Celeb”, Salah, as well.

  A question remains: will our civil service still take what Lambert says with any seriousness, when the facts are diametrically opposed to his “analysis”?

The last part of the interview is on the distribution of US aid to Pakistan (1.5 billion USD per year) and how it is spent in Pakistan very interesting and it goes like this:

Shehrbano: If you look at American aid, it’s all going towards the military. There are billions of dollars which are going towards planes and teaching soldiers how to fight and arms and bombs and guns and things but there’s no humanitarian aid. So there’s no aid going towards infrastructure or education or sanitation or electricity and these are the main things that Pakistan needs. These are the everyday problems and its when you begin to address these problems that you begin to address the root causes of extremism.
Interviewer: Isn’t it true that the military and intelligence services are so dominant that they essentially make sure that all the money gets diverted to themselves no matter who it’s earmarked for?
Shehrbano: Yes, they very much call the shots.
Interviewer: Yeah, well how do you get around that?
Shehrbano: That’s the million dollar question!
Interviewer: Yeah, well its actually a 15 billion dollar question if you do the math.

To which the obvious question is Should the US cut Aid to Pakistan without making things worse for the abject poor who genuinely need it?

The problem with the name al-Qaida, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America.

Maybe something like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group, would do the trick, he wrote. Or Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, meaning Restoration of the Caliphate Group.

As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group’s full name, al-Qaida al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as simply al-Qaida. Lopping off the word “jihad,” bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.” Maybe it was time for al-Qaida to bring back its original name.

A repackaging of an established brand is a difficult PR task at the best of times and bin Laden must have known he had his work cut out for him. But no fear, Spencer Ackerman’s readers are already on the case. You can post more or you can vote for the best from amongst these helpful suggestions for the Beards of Terror at al Qaeda HQ.

• Goat Busters
• Westboro Baptist Church
• League of Extraordinary Beards
• Angry Beards
• Kandahar Ardent Brotherhood Of Orthodox Muslims (KABOOM)
• iQaeda
• Explodia
• Terrorists Without Borders
• Microsoft Customer Service Call Center
• Bad News Beards
• The Whole In’shallah’da
• Yes We Quran!
• Cave Smurfs
• Quran Quran
• The Artist Formerly Known as Al-Qaida
• People for Extreme Terrorist Adventures (PETA)
• Sunni and Shiar
• SEAL bait
• Snuggle Bunnies
• Beard On The Run
• 72 Virgin Airways
• International House of Terror
• The Turbanators
• Dirka Dirka Mohammed Jihad
• Club der Deppen vom Dienst (DVD`s)

We thought “72 Virgins Airways,” the “League of Extraordinary Beards,” and “Terrorists Without Borders” were the funniest but the most well observed of the lot: “Why hide it any more? Inter-Services Intelligence.”

Download FATWA on Terrorism and Suicide Bombings (pdf)

Update: FATWA-on-Terrorism-and-Suicide-Bombings_NoRestriction (can copy and paste from the document now) – Thanks AF!

An eight-year-old Pakistani girl was kidnapped by militants who forced her to wear a suicide vest to attack security forces, police said on Monday.

Police produced the girl, identified as Sohana Javaid, before a news conference broadcast on Pakistani television channels.

The girl recalled how she was kidnapped in her hometown of Peshawar by two women and a man who pulled up in a car.

“They put a handkerchief on my mouth and I fell unconscious. They took me to some place. They gave me some biscuits to eat and I again fell unconscious,” Sohana said in a video, according to a voice over translation on the tape.

Forced to wear a suicide vest, she was transported to a security check post in a small town in the Lower Dir district in the northwest.

“I moved towards the check post but I started shouting and was taken into custody,” said Sohana.

Munir Ashi is the chairman of the Dar ul-Isra mosque in Cardiff. He has had keen supporters in government there:

The [reconstruction] work at Dar ul-Isra has been made possible by a grant of £120,000 from CFAP – the Welsh Assembly Government’s Community Facilities and Activities Programme.

“That has been a huge help,” Dr Ashi admitted. “Although we have raised funds ourselves and some of the work is being completed by members of the Muslim community, the cash from the Welsh Assembly Government has made all the difference.”

Ashi is one of the scheduled speakers at the Cageprisoners fundraising event scheduled for this Saturday at Cardiff City Hall.

This makes sense. Ashi is a good fit with the Taliban supporters and jihad lovers of Cageprisoners. Have a look at him here, wishing Israel’s destruction in a sermon at the mosque in March this year:

If Egypt comes out of the hands of the Americans and the Israelis, it means it is liberated. It means Israel very soon will disappear,inshallah (God willing).

You see, he wants the Egyptian army to invade Israel. Later on in the same sermon he mocks that army for tending to its commercial interests rather than doing what he wants:

From here we call upon Muslim armies, especially in Egypt now, you have to move! Why you are negative? What you doing? The whole Muslim ummah (community of believers) is humiliated!
…
Are those [Egyptian soldiers] the people who we are waiting for them to liberate Palestine and liberate the ummah?

Here is another video where Ashi looks forward to Israel’s destruction, with some Israelis-are-Nazis abuse thrown in. It was recorded at a demonstration in Cardiff in 2009 during the Gaza war.

No one can describe what is happening in Gaza in any word other than Holocaust. It is a Holocaust in Gaza!
…
You cannot find more dirty business than what is happening in Palestine. They kicked us out of our whole land. They came from all over the world to establish Israel. Where they have no right to have a piece of land in Israel. Palestine is our homeland, whether today, or tomorrow, or next year, or next century, we’ll be taking it back, inshallah.
…
Dear brothers, this is the way. Demonstrate, donate, pray for them, keep supporting them. Then they will be the victorious one day. No problem of the power of Israel, no problem. They will be finished. Palestine will be back, inshallah.

People who want to “donate” in support of Mr Ashi’s cause need look no further than a charity where he is the chairman, Education Aid for Palestinians (EAP). It helps Hamas. Here is a picture of him (third from right) visiting the Islamic University of Gaza, a Hamas bastion, in March 2009.

Money was handed over:

The delegation presented a donation to the Islamic University of Gaza by way of a cheque for £120,000 in order to rebuild with IT and Science laboratories. Dr Kamaleen Shaath, the president of IUG thanks the donors from the United Kingdom for all their generous contributions and ask to continue their support towards to this well worthy cause.

Ashi’s fellow trustee at EAP is Zaher Birawi. He’s the man third from left in the picture above.

Birawi will be well-known to this blog’s readers. He is a key operative in Viva Palestina, George Galloway’s Hamas support operation. In the picture below he is to the right of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in a ceremony in Gaza honouring Viva Palestina.

You can read more about Mr Birawi and his services for Hamas here.

Until last year Muin Shabib was also a trustee at EAP. He too is a man who has worked for the Hamas financial network. Here is just some of the evidence. Like his fellows, Shabib is a “no peace” man, as the FBI learnedin its investigation of the American network:

We don’t want children of our community, in Islamic and non-Islamic schools, one day surrendering to the issue of peace with Jews.

Ashi’s fellow speakers at the Cardiff City Hall Cageprisoners event are also Hamasniks and Israel haters. Here’s Lauren Booth, defender of antisemitesGilad Atzmon and Mahathir Mohamad, beaming with Haniyeh:

And here is Yvonne “Zionist Tentacles” Ridley with Viva Palestina in Gaza, boasting about breaking sanctions law by funding Hamas:

I brought cash and I am happy to say I have given that cash to George Galloway and we have both given that money to the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, which has broken UN sanctions. If they want to charge us, if they want to arrest us, bring it on.

Actually, for Ashi, it seems that Hamas is family. Literally. I understand that he is the brother-in-law of Mousa Abu Marzook, a leader of Hamas in Syria. His daughter Isra married Marzook’s son Omar in Syria in 2004. And his cousins in America, the Elashis, were leading figures in two Hamas fronts, Infocom and the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). HLF was a multi-million dollar Hamas funding network. Marzook was one of its architects.

In the end the FBI shut HLF down. Ghassan Elashi, HLF’s founder and chairman, was found guilty of funding Hamas in 2008 and sentenced to 65 years in prison.