Tag Archives: Faisal Shahzad

Keeping Our Heads in the Sand After Boston

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IPT News
May 14, 2013

 

The Obama administration’s policy banning references to “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” in discussions about terrorism drew criticism during last Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings.

The bombings “should again teach us that the enemy we face is violent Islamist extremism, not just al Qaida,” said former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. “Osama bin Laden is dead. And the remaining leadership of al Qaida is on the run, but the ideology of violent Islamist extremism is rapidly spreading.”

The Boston investigation already has shown that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev “adopted the outrageously false narrative of violent Islamist extremism, that Islam and America are involved in a struggle to the death with each other,” Lieberman said.

It has been more than five years since the Department of Homeland Security, under the Bush administration, issued a directive about “the difficult terrain of terminology” as recommended by unidentified academics and Muslim American activists. “Jihadist” and “Islamist terrorist” were identified as terms to be avoided. Jihad “glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have, and damages relations with Muslims around the globe,” the memo said.

By identifying them as mere extremists or criminals, they lose some of the luster that attracts recruits, the argument goes.

Is it working? How can you tell?

Anecdotally, this strategy did nothing to dissuade the Tsarnaevs, or any of the otherhomegrown terrorist plotters in recent years. The policy’s effectiveness is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. But skeptics, such as Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program Director Jeffrey M. Bale, say the language policy is illogical.

“Why, after all, would Muslims look to non-Muslims to interpret their religion for them, or for guidance about how to identify and label Islamists?” Bale said in response to an email from the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “Indeed, if we call jihadists ‘criminals,’ it may actually have the counterproductive effect of garnering more sympathy for them given the levels of anti-U.S. and anti-Western hostility throughout the Muslim world.”

Jihadists routinely make it plain that – while religion may not be the sole factor driving them to violence – their Islamic beliefs and identities dominate their thinking. “We in the West just don’t seem to want to believe what they constantly say,” Bale wrote. (Read his full response here.)

Read more at IPT

Boston Bomber Exposes Islamist Secret

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596_largeIPT News:

Now he’s in trouble.

It is one thing for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be seen on security camera videos placing one of the bombs that killed three people at last week’s Boston Marathon.

But now he’s really crossed a line.

Tsarnaev is telling investigators he and his brother were motivated by religion to plot their carnage, media reports citing anonymous federal sources say.

Radical Islam. It’s a label banned by the Obama administration. National Islamist groups say it doesn’t belong in conversations about terrorism. Tsarnaev didn’t get the memo.

Recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, Dzhokhar told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev were driven by religious fervor and took their instructions from al-Qaida’s Inspire magazine, NBC News reports. Anger at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled their rage, the Washington Post reports.

That motivation echoes justifications offered by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan for the Fort Hood shooting spree that killed 13 people and Faisal Shahzad’s sentencing rant about his attempt to bomb Times Square in 2010. “The crusading U.S. and NATO forces who have occupied the Muslim lands under the pretext of democracy and freedom for the last nine years and are saying with their mouths that they are fighting terrorism, I say to them, we don’t accept your democracy nor your freedom, because we already have Sharia law and freedom,” Shahzad told the court. “Furthermore, brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”

Despite this candor from terrorists, the Obama administration and Islamist groups have argued that referring to terrorists’ religious motivations somehow grants them religious legitimacy. “Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists,” CIA Director John Brennan said in 2009 when he was White House terrorism adviser. “Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term ‘jihad,’ which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve.”

Similarly, Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Paul Stockton squirmed and obfuscated when asked about the role radical Islam played in past terror plots.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) tried to stem the tide about radical Islam that Tsarnaev unleashed by issuing a news release Tuesday. It decries the focus on a radical Islamic motive for the Boston Marathon bombings as inherently bigoted. The “wave of inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric” is solely due to the Tsarnaev’s Muslim faith, the statement said.

CAIR co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad “said the recent spike in hate rhetoric comes in the wake of a coordinated long-term effort by Islamophobic activists and groups to demonize Islam and marginalize American Muslims.”

One imagines they’ll give Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a good talking-to for demonizing Islam in his statements to investigators.

The Tsarnaev case threatens the Islamist narrative that radical Islamic ideology in terror attacks should be ignored or minimized.

Read more at IPT

The Boston Bombing and the Case for FBI Stings

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IPT News:

With a few lucky breaks, last week’sBoston Marathon bombing could have had a dramatically different outcome. Had Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sought help building their bombs on jihadist web forums, FBI agents likely would have detected it.

They would have sent in an undercover operative or an informant. And the Tsarnaevs would have been arrested as they tried to detonate their bombs, which had been rendered inert by the FBI.

And it would have elicited howls of protest from Islamists and their supporters.

Instead, four people are dead, including the MIT police officer killed in Friday’s shootout, and more than 150 people are injured. Many have lost limbs. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was charged Monday with using a weapon of mass destruction.

It is easy to imagine the reaction had investigators discovered him and his brother sooner.

“Entrapment!” defense attorneys would argue. “The FBI is fabricating terror threats, using hapless stooges incapable of harming anyone,” Islamist advocacy groups would say.

We know this because this is how the scenario has played out dozens of times in recent years. But last week’s bombing shows you don’t need to be a master criminal to murder and maim innocent people. The ingredients to build the pressure-cooker bombs came straight out of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine. The brainchild of American-born operative Samir Khan – killed in a 2011 drone strike along with fellow American Anwar al-Awlaki – Inspire offered suggestions for small-scale, homegrown jihadi attacks in each issue.

Instructions for the pressure-cooker bomb came from an article headlined “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom.” A subsequent article referred to that recipe and advised that pressure cooker bombs should be “placed in crowded areas and left to blow up. More than one of these could be planted to explode at the same time. However, keep in mind that the range of the shrapnel in this operation is short range so the pressurized cooker or pipe should be placed close to the intended targets and should not be concealed from them by barriers such as walls.”

The Boston Marathon bombs blew up within 12 seconds of each other, about a block apart.

The Tsarnaevs succeeded in carrying out an attack where others have come close, but failed. At least two other would-be terrorists came chillingly close to attacks that likely would have triggered more casualties than were suffered in Boston. Faisal Shahzad parked an explosive-laden car in Times Square. But he made mistakes in the chemical composition and it failed to detonate.

In Texas, Naser Jason Abdo had copies of Inspire magazine in his hotel room, and ingredients for pressure-cooker bombs, when police swooped in. Abdo was nabbed thanks to an alert gun store owner who took notice and called authorities after Abdo arrived by taxi cab to a fairly remote outlet and acted suspiciously.

His plan was to detonate the bombs at a restaurant popular with Fort Hood personnel and then shoot survivors as they scrambled out of the debris. He did it out of a sense of religious duty.

But, as we have repeatedly chronicled, FBI sting operations meant to interdict terrorists before they strike, are condemned routinely as misguided and unnecessary. Islamist advocacy groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) say the FBI is creating terrorists who otherwise would not turn violent.

The FBI, “by using informants acting as agent provocateurs, has recruited more so called extremist Muslims than al-Qaida themselves,” CAIR-Michigan Director Dawud Walid said in 2010. The use of informants are among “self-deluding initiatives that seem to seek terror-case quotas,” CAIR Chicago’s Ahmed Rehab wrote in 2009.

“What the FBI came and did was enable them to become actual terrorists, and then came and saved the day,” CAIR-San Francisco’s Zahra Billoo said in 2010. The FBI “is creating these huge terror plots where they don’t exist.”

But Ali Soufan, a former FBI supervisory special agent and a veteran of some sting operations, defended the practice as vital for national security.

“As you can’t prosecute someone just for professing a desire to kill Americans, and you can’t read minds to determine if they really intend to carry out their threats, either you wait to see if the real al Qaeda gets in contact—and hope you can track them—or you intercede,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal book review. “Most Americans would no doubt prefer the latter option to taking a serious gamble with civilian lives.”

How many Boston Marathon attacks does it take to emphasize that point? How many dead 8 year olds, exchange students or innocent young women are enough to make interdiction acceptable?

Read more at IPT

 

Jihad in Boston

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 jihad

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It has now been revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia near Chechnya: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with Massachusetts police early this morning, and his brother Dzhokhar, who as of this writing is still at large.

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev

Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev

As more and more material comes to light about the pair, their motivations become clear. On a Russian-language social media page, Dzhokhar features a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page features two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”

Tamerlan also says, “I’m very religious.” He notes that he does not drink alcohol because Allah forbids it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend has converted to Islam. Even his name indicates the world from which he comes: Tamerlan Tsarnaev is apparently named for the Muslim warrior Tamerlane. Andrew Bostom wrote in 2005 that “Osama bin Laden was far from the first jihadist to kill infidels as an expression of religious piety….Osama lacks both Tamerlane’s sophisticated (for his time) military forces and his brilliance as a strategist. But both are or were pious Muslims who paid homage to religious leaders, and both had the goal of making jihad a global force.”

Combine all that with the fact that the bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis use in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square jihad car bomber, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb have been published in al-Qaeda’sInspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers are abundantly clear. It is increasingly likely also that they were tied in somehow to the international jihad network, as is indicated by how they fought off Boston police early on Friday with military-grade explosives – where did they get those? And where did they get the military training that they reportedly have, and displayed in several ways during the fight Friday morning?

Yet despite all this, the mainstream media continues to obfuscate the truth. NBC doesn’t see fit to mention any of the brothers’ connections to Islam in their profile of them. CNN warns that “it should not be assumed that either brother was radicalized because of their Chechen origins.” And this, of course, follows days of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. According to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.” Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”

Read more at Front Page

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San Francisco leaders condemn AFDI jihad truth ads, refuse to condemn words of jihadists themselves

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Geller-Ads-620x365-thumb-500x294-2083March 11, 2013 Robert Spencer:

San Francisco officials held a press conference today to condemn our jihad truth ads as “Islamophobic” and “racist” — what race is jihad terror again? I keep forgetting. And why is it “Islamophobic” to report on what Islamic jihadists and supremacists have actually said about jihad, so as to alert Americans to the nature of the jihad threat? Unexplained, unexamined. The San Francisco officials and the mainstream media are not engaging in any real analysis, but just in propagandistic sloganeering and grandstanding, the end result of which is to deny and minimize the reality of the jihad threat.

Do you think that conclusion is overstated? Consider this: Pete DaTech guy contacted Stephanie Ong Stillman, the Director of Communications the Office of District Attorney George Gascón, and asked her if San Francisco officials planned to condemn the ads alone, or also the jihadis’ statements on the ads. It would have been easy to throw in a line about deploring the “twisted version of Islam” enunciated by the jihadis depicted in the ads, but no such luck: Stephanie Ong Stillmen repeatedly told Pete that they were only condemning the ads, not the jihadis. Read all about it here, and Pamela Geller has more here.

Politely and courteously register your indignation at the hypocrisy and moral myopia of San Francisco officials:

Stephanie Ong Stillman, Director of Communications Office of District Attorney George Gascón
415-553-1167 phone
415-740-5134 cell
415-553-1737 fax
stephanie.ong.stillman@sfgov.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SFDistrictAttorney
Twitter: @SFDAoffice

AFDI denounces San Francisco leaders’ condemnation of jihad truth ads Yahoo News, March 11:

NEW YORK, March 11, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – A prominent national human rights organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), has denounced San Francisco city leaders’ condemnation of their ads telling the truth about the jihad threat that Americans face.

The AFDI ads feature actual quotes from Osama bin Laden, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a witness to the jihad of Fort Hood mass murderer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Hamas TV and Times Square jihad car bomber Faisal Shahzad. They depict Osama bin Laden’s actual explanation of why he took down the Twin Towers: “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” They note that Hasan was shouting “Allahu akbar” as he murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood. They recount a Hamas TV music video that included the lyric, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah,” and report Shahzad’s words on how jihad involving “weaponry” is “an obligation and duty in Islam on every Muslim.”

“Americans need to understand the threat they’re facing,” said AFDI Executive Director Pamela Geller. “That is the point of our ads. The slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Algeria et al — that doesn’t warrant a statement, let alone a press conference from San Francisco authorities, but my ads do. Think about that. Hundreds of thousands dead, but it would be blasphemy to talk about. The slaughter in the cause of jihad is OK, but my talking about it is the problem.”

Geller continued: “It is significant that they did not condemn the cynical and deceptive Hamas-linked CAIR ads that ran on buses earlier, and to which my ads are replying. Their inconsistency and politically motivated selective outrage are manifest.”

“Hamas-CAIR,” she said, “an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest Hamas funding trial in our nation’s history, has created out of whole cloth a propaganda campaign that dissembles, deceives, and deliberately lies about the definition of jihad. Our ads reply to that campaign with the truth about the jihad threat in the words of the jihadis themselves.”

Read more at Jihad Watch

Fight jihad: Contribute here.

 

What a brilliant way to shine a light on the truth! Here are some more of the adds:

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Three Convicted in Massive British Terror Plot

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Irfan Khalid, Ashik Ali and Irfan Naseer

Irfan Khalid, Ashik Ali and Irfan Naseer

IPT - by John Rossomando:

A court in Birmingham, England has convicted three men of plotting to carry out a suicide bombing campaign inspired by the late terrorist mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki.

Irfan Khalid, Ashik Ali and Irfan Naseer were radicalized by Awlaki’s lectures and by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine, which regularly featured the terrorist mastermind’s articles prior to his death in a September 2011 drone strike.

Police found lectures by al-Awlaki on Khalid’s cell phone, including “The Book of Jihad,” “It’s a War against Islam,” “Brutality towards Muslims” and “Stop Police Terror.”

According to the Telegraph, Khalid encouraged his fellow plotters to listen to al-Awlaki’s lectures.

Additional CD-ROMs containing talks by al-Awlaki were found in Khalid’s grandparents’ home. The terrorist leader’s messages were also found stored in Ali’s laptop and cell phone.

The trio experimented with making bombs using ammonium nitrate they removed from sports injury cold packs. Experts told the court they could have developed a viable improvised explosive device (IED) using their bomb-making recipe.

Such tactics resemble the sort of “Open Source Jihad” tactics advocated in Inspire that call for small groups or individual jihadists to make bombs and other weapons using readily available ingredients.

“They wanted to commit their own 9/11. They were critical of the July 7 [2005] bombers because they didn’t kill enough people,” said Marcus Beale, assistant commissioner of the West Midlands Police, the Guardian reported. “From evidence we presented to the court there were 8-10 bombs that they wanted to deploy, a mixture of suicide bombs and IEDs. So in terms of their capability, if they delivered on the plans that they had they would have committed mass murder on a horrendous scale.”

A coordinated series of bombings in London in 2005 killed 52 people in what is known as the 7/7 attacks.

Another of the plans the trio discussed involving the attaching of blades to the wheels of cars to mow down pedestrians came directly from an Inspire article titled, “The Ultimate Mowing Machine.”

Al-Awlaki has been tied to numerous other terror plots, including: Maj. Nidal Hasanand the Fort Hood shooting, Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab‘s plot to blow up an airliner with a bomb in his underwear and Faisal Shahzad‘s plot to blow up a truck in Times Square. The 9/11 Commission Report also stated he was tied to two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Although al-Awlaki might be gone his message lingers in his videos that are still for sale in Islamic bookstores and in more than 2,000 YouTube videos.

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Obama’s Counterterror Strategy: Lie And Deny

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Investors Business Daily:

National Security: Turns out al-Qaida hit not just one, but four U.S.  embassies last month. These coordinated acts of terror are not the first that  the president, who blamed the violence on a video, has downplayed.

The Weekly Standard reports that in addition to the deadly attack on the  American Consulate in Libya, al-Qaida terrorists were behind the U.S. Embassy  sieges in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. All were timed around the 11th anniversary  of 9/11 and carried out by terrorists tied to the same group that attacked our  homeland on 9/11.

A congressional probe reveals President Obama knew on Day One that al-Qaida  terrorists were behind the murder of the U.S. ambassador and three of his aides  in Benghazi. But he spun it as a “spontaneous” outbreak of violence, claiming  local Muslims were reacting to a “hateful” American-made movie on the Muslim  prophet Muhammad.

The initial knee-jerk denial of Islamic terrorism fits a pattern with this  presidency. Since 2009, Obama has insisted acts of terror are not terror, or  terrorists have acted alone when in fact they’ve acted in concert with al-Qaida  or the Taliban. Here’s a rundown of the other cases:

•  Fort Hood massacre: Despite reports Maj. Nidal Hasan screamed “Allahu  Akbar!” before opening fire on a roomful of fellow Army soldiers in Texas on  Nov. 5, 2009, Obama dismissed an otherwise obvious act of terrorism as the  random act of “one individual.”

Even after evidence showed Hasan was in contact with al-Qaida leader Anwar  Awlaki and had religiously justified his attack in an elaborate PowerPoint  presentation, the administration still classified his jihadi rampage as  “workplace violence.”

•  Christmas Day bomber: Within days of the Dec. 25, 2009, attack on a U.S.  airliner, Obama assured the nation that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was “an  isolated extremist.”

In fact, the so-called underwear bomber had been trained by al-Qaida in  Yemen. Obama and his national security team knew this within the first hours of  the investigation because Abdulmutallab had told the FBI as much during his  interrogation.

•  Times Square bomber: Two days after Faisal Shahzad tried on May 1, 2010,  to detonate his explosives-packed SUV in downtown New York, the White House  misled the public into thinking there was no larger terrorist conspiracy behind  the attempt.

It described it as as a “one-off” incident — a British term meaning it wasn’t  part of a series. In fact, intelligence clearly showed that the Pakistani  Taliban were behind the attack. Shahzad had been trained at a Taliban terror  camp inside Pakistan and had been funded by the terrorist group.

The president covered up what really happened in all these terror cases,  because they were embarrassing failures of security and intelligence.

Al-Qaida’s coordinated and heavily armed strike in Libya — the worst on U.S.  soil since 9/11 — also jeopardizes Obama’s carefully crafted narrative that he’s  decapitated al-Qaida and is generally tough on terrorists. Neither is true. And  judging from recent polls, voters are starting to see through the smoke  screen.

Mitt Romney now commands a 48%-42% advantage over Obama on the question of  which candidate would be tougher on terrorism, a new Bloomberg National Poll  finds. We suspect this gap will grow as more details leak out about al-Qaida’s  unfortunate — and unnecessary — resurgence on Obama’s watch.