How Twitter Is Messing With Al-Qaeda’s Careful PR Machine

A burnt vehicle is removed from the site of an Al Qaeda in Iraq bomb attack in Baghdad on March 29, 2013. The group's activities have proven problematic for Al Qaeda's larger messaging. (Reuters)

A burnt vehicle is removed from the site of an Al Qaeda in Iraq bomb attack in Baghdad on March 29, 2013. The group’s activities have proven problematic for Al Qaeda’s larger messaging. (Reuters)

By :

The idea that the Internet facilitates Al-Qaeda’s recruitment and messaging campaigns is not new. However, more than ever, the changing landscape of the online environment is allowing for dissent from within the ranks of Al-Qaeda’s supporters. Gone are the days when Al-Qaeda’s senior online ideologues could control the flow of information by operating their own bulletin board-style forums. While Al-Qaeda and its supporters still facilitate discussion through their own web communities, the nature of jihadi discourse today is much more democratic, with jihadi personalities claiming inside knowledge dispersed across the online environment. The evolution toward platforms such as Twitter that empower the individual are allowing Al-Qaeda’s supporters to avoid forum censors and promote their own personal narratives, which are not necessarily in agreement with that of Al-Qaeda’s messaging strategy writ-large.

This phenomenon was at center stage in early April when Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq (AQI) committed an unthinkably reckless strategic messaging error. On April 9, AQI announced the incorporation of Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria into an AQI-administered Islamic state aspiring to govern Iraq and Syria. Effectively, AQI attempted to define Al-Nusra as no more than a subordinate to AQI. Al-Nusra, one of the Syrian opposition’s most effective fighting groups and indisputably Al-Qaeda’s most popular affiliate, was quick to respond. Just one day later,they denied knowledge of the merger and professed a direct pledge of loyalty to Al-Qaeda senior leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Despite the State Department placing Al-Nusra on it list of foreign terrorist organizations in December 2012, this was the first time that Al-Nusra’s leadership had publically acknowledged their link to Al-Qaeda.

These events led to a flurry of debate on jihadi web forums that support Al-Qaeda. Many jihadists were quick to criticize AQI and began openly wondering how an affiliate of Al-Qaeda, a group that is notoriously careful in crafting its messages, could commit such a blunder. However, jihadi forum moderators suppressed commentary that criticized AQI, and the lack of free speech within Al-Qaeda’s movement was unmistakable. Just several years ago it might have ended there without any serious repercussions, but today’s is a different Internet environment. The rise of social media platforms championing the power of the individual has changed the online jihadi landscape. While the new model works to the benefit of Al-Qaeda so long as its proponents promote a unified message, the new reality also magnifies dissent.

Read more at The Atlantic

Pack of ‘Lone Wolves’ in thwarted Canadian terror plot just grew by one

936967_10201010191639987_621509775_nShoebat Foundation:

Last month, Canadian authorities prevented Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser from committing an Islamic terror attack that involved derailing a VIA passenger train.There is no telling how high the death toll would have been had they been successful. Thankfully, they were not.

The left-wing media would have you believe that Islam is not what motivated these two ‘lone wolves’. That westerners don’t seem all that interested in finding out – largely because failed terror attacks rarely get people to look up from their smart phones – is part of the problem.

In addition to Esseghaier’s facebook page revealing an Al-Qaeda flowchart and a photo of Bin Laden, his favorites included the likes of Abu Mus’ab Zarkawi, the guy many believe personally beheaded Nicholas Berg in Iraq.

Now it’s being reported that a third ‘lone wolf’ may have been part of the Esseghaier / Jaser pack. Ahmed Abassi was arrested in New York and apparently had plans to perpetrate a separate attack, designed to kill 100,000 people.

Read more at Shoebat Foundation

 

Acting like a weapon of mass destruction, a Tunisian Jihadist is accused by US authorities of planning to poinson thousands of Americans. As usual, the debate about lone wolf or not, and who radicalized him and so on, surges. By now, precedents and global analysis shows that every Jihadist is indoctrinated by someone. There are no exceptions. Every Jihadist is either recruited or recruits itself to some group. That is not what worries me in my analysis, it is the type of attacks the latest Jihadists are selecting. Most of the targets are mass casulaties types and frequency of attemps is higher.

Since my book ‘Future Jihad’ of 2005, I have challenged the ‘Lone Wolf’ assertion raised by many in the mainstream academia, media and among ‘consultants’ to Government. There is no full Jihadi lone wolf when he makes phone calls to other Jihadists. I published dozens of pieces and was interviewed several times over the past few years trying to explain that in the making of a Jihadist, there must be other Jihadists. The Bush bureaucracy, not policy makers, dodged this reality and the Obama Administration and bureaucracy pushed back against it. But Ft Hood, Arkansas and Boston reconfirmed it, sadly and deeply. Walid Phares 

 

How Obama Betrayed America

betrayed_lgBelow is David Horowitz’s new pamphlet, How Obama Betrayed America…And No One is Holding Him Accountable. To order it, click here.

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall.  We see farther into the future.” – Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton

It is a judgment on Barack Obama’s timorous, apologetic, irresponsible and ultimately anti-American conduct of foreign affairs that Madeleine Albright’s words, spoken little more than 15 years ago, now sound as antique as a pronouncement by Harry Truman at the onset of the Cold War, the great challenge America confronted bravely and without equivocation a generation ago.  While Obama has quoted this statement repeatedly to hide his real disdain for his country, he has set in motion policies meant to make America far from indispensable — a diminished nation that “leads from behind” if at all; a nation with a downsized military that is chronically uncertain about its meaning and its mission as it skulks in the wings of the world stage.

Albright’s statement was made about Iraq when Democrats were still supporting their country’s confrontation with its sadistic dictator Saddam Hussein, and before they defected from the war shortly after its battles were under way.  As a senator, in step with his Democratic colleagues, Obama opposed America’s war with Iraq while American troops were still in harms’ way, and then opposed the military surge that finally won the victory; as president he presided over the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq,  against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted a continuing military presence, paid for with the blood of thousands of American men and women in arms. Obama thus turned that benighted nation over to the malign influences of America’s chief enemy in the Middle East, Iran, while betraying every American who gave his or her life for its freedom.

Far from shouldering his responsibility as the commander-in-chief of America’s global War on Terror and embracing it as this generation’s equivalent of the Cold War, Obama showed his distaste for the entire enterprise by dropping the term “War on Terror” and replacing it with an Orwellian phrase — “overseas contingency operations.” Minimizing the Islamist threat to the United States is not an oversight of the Obama administration; it is its policy.

It should not have been difficult for Obama to make the nation’s defense a priority when he became America’s commander-in-chief in January 2009.  The American homeland had already experienced a devastating attack, which terrorists have been constantly trying to repeat. The number of foreign states openly supporting terror has steadily increased (and grown even more during Obama’s tenure); and the most dangerous Islamist regime – Iran – is being allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, while Washington dithers over pointless negotiations. With secular governments giving way to Islamist regimes in Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, with the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan and an American withdrawal imminent, the global situation today has eerie parallels to the early Cold War, with implications equally dire.  Yet instead of policies that put U.S. national security first and are pursued without hesitation or apology, Obama’s time in office has been marked by retreat and accommodation and even support of Islamist foes – most ominously of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which swept aside an American ally, with Obama’s personal intervention, and is busily creating a totalitarian state.

  Obama’s Foreign Policy Disasters

In the four years since Obama’s first inauguration, almost three times as many Americans have been killed in Afghanistan as in the eight years of the Bush administration. Withdrawal, not victory, has been Obama’s goal from the outset, and now it is the only outcome possible.  During the Obama years, there have been more than 8,000 Islamic terrorist attacks on “infidels” across the globe, a twenty-five percent rise over the years in which the fighting in Iraq was at its height. Yet, in the face of this bloody and intensifying Islamist offensive, Obama has tried to convince the American people that the war against al-Qaeda has been essentially “won” — by him — and the terrorist threat is subsiding.[1]  Denial of the war Islamists have declared on us and denial of the threat it represents is the heart of the Obama doctrine that has guided this nation’s policies for more than four years.

Obama’s desire for rapprochement with Iran’s Islamist regime has prompted the administration to drag its feet on the sanctions designed to halt Iran’s nuclear program. For the same reason, the president and his administration were silent when hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets of Teheran to call for an end to the dictatorship and were met by an orgy of violence from the mullahs’ thugs.  Because of the White House’s moral and political timidity, borne out of its denial of the Islamist threat and the guilty conviction that America (presumably an even greater predator) has no right to condemn another nation, this tipping point in Iran tipped the wrong way.

The administration’s denial was also egregiously manifest in its response to the massacre of 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood by an Islamic fanatic, who three and a half years later still has not been brought to trial. The Fort Hood terrorist successfully infiltrated the American military and despite open expressions of hatred against the West was promoted to U.S. Army Major. The Obama administration’s Kafkaesque response to an obvious case of Islamist violence against the U.S. was to classify the terrorist attack as an incident of “workplace violence,” and thus to hide the fact that Hasan was a Muslim soldier in a war against the infidels of the West.

This inability to name our enemies was on display again on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 when  jihadists staged demonstrations and launched attacks against the American embassies in Egypt and other Islamic countries. In Libya, al-Qaeda terrorists overran an American consular compound and murdered the American ambassador and three brave staffers. The attack took place in a country that had recently been destabilized by Obama’s own intervention to oust its dictator. As senator, Obama had denounced a military intervention in Iraq, which, unlike his Libyan adventure, had been authorized by both houses of Congress and a unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution. As president, he had invoked the principle of non-intervention to justify his passivity in the face of governmental atrocities in Syria and Iran. But in Libya he conducted an unauthorized invasion of a country that posed no threat to the United States and was not, as Syria is, in alliance with the mullahs of Iran and the terrorists of Hizbollah. The chaos that followed Obama’s Libyan intervention led directly to the rise of the local al-Qaeda, which planted its flag atop the same American outpost in Benghazi it later destroyed, and the U.S. ambassador along with it.

The events in Benghazi were a stark revelation of the consequences of a foreign policy without a moral compass.  The battle over the embassy lasted seven hours. Although the President learned about the attack shortly after it began and although the embattled Americans inside the compound begged the White House for help, and although U.S. fighter jets were stationed in Italy only an hour away, the president, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of that office, denied help by leaving his post, so that only silence answered their desperate calls. The president and his administration then went into cover-up mode lying to Congress and the American people, pretending for weeks afterwards that the attack was the result of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Mohammed internet video, whose director they then threw in jail.

Before his overthrow, the dictator, Moammar Gaddafi, warned that his demise would unleash the forces of the Islamic jihad not only in his own country but throughout North Africa. This was a prophecy quickly realized. In the aftermath of Obama’s intervention, al-Qaeda was able to take control in Mali of an area twice the size of Germany. In Tunisia and Egypt, jihadists emerged as the ruling parties, with the acquiescence and even assistance of the Obama administration. In Syria, a savage civil war metastasized unimpeded, killing tens of thousands and eventually pitting a fascist regime allied to Iran against rebel forces largely aligned with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As these disasters unfolded, the White House not only did not oppose the Islamists but armed and enabled them. Obama had previously intervened in Egypt, the largest and most important country in the Middle East, to force the removal of its pro-American leader, Hosni Mubarak. He then promoted the Brotherhood’s ascension to power by portraying it as a “moderate” actor in the democratic process. As the Middle East situation deteriorated, the Muslim Brotherhood became the chief beneficiary of America’s financial, diplomatic and military support. This same Brotherhood was the driving force behind the Islamist surge, the mentor of Osama bin Laden and the leaders of al-Qaeda, and the creator of Hamas. Rather than being quarantined, the Brotherhood-dominated government in Cairo now received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and F-16 bomber jets from the Obama administration that had facilitated its rise to power.

Appeasement of Islamist Enemies

To allay concerns about the emergence of the Brotherhood, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued the following justification for its acceptance by the White House: “We believe that it is in the interests of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful, and committed to non-violence, that intend to compete for the parliament and the presidency.”[2] In these words, Clinton was referring to an organization whose spiritual leader, Yusef al-Qaradawi, had recently called for a second Holocaust of the Jews, “Allah willing, at the hands of the believers,” and a party that was calling for the establishment of a Muslim caliphate in Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish state.[3] Soon after Clinton’s endorsement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate, Mohamed Morsi, was elected Egypt’s new leader and was referring to Jews as apes and pigs. Secure in the American administration’s support, he wasted no time in abolishing the constitution and instituting a dictatorship with no serious protest from the United States. Only months before this destruction of Egypt’s civic space by his Islamist party, the new dictator was visited by then Senator John Kerry, shortly to be Hillary Clinton’s successor as Secretary of State. Kerry assured the world that the new Muslim Brotherhood regime was “committed to protecting fundamental freedoms.”[4]

Read the rest at Front Page

The Mass Exodus of Christians from the Muslim World

images (34)By Raymond Ibrahim:

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway.  Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.

We are reliving the true history of how the Islamic world—much of which prior to the Islamic conquests was almost entirely Christian—came into being.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently said: “The flight of Christians out of the region is unprecedented and it’s increasing year by year.”  In our lifetime alone “Christians might disappear altogether from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt.”

Ongoing reports from the Islamic world certainly support this conclusion.  Iraq was the earliest indicator of the fate awaiting Christians once Islamic forces are liberated from the grip of dictators.

In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million.  Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

Now as the U.S. supports the jihad on secular president Assad, the same pattern has come to Syria: entire regions and towns where Christians lived centuries before Islam came into being have now been emptied, as the opposition targets Christians for kidnapping, plundering, and beheadings, all in compliance with mosque calls that it’s a “sacred duty” to drive Christians away.

In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered.  One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians….  Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.”  In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by al-Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported.

But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat. Displacements began in Ameriya [62 Christian families evicted], then they stretched to Dahshur [120 Christian families evicted], and today terror and threats have reached the hearts and souls of our Coptic children in Sinai.”

Iraq, Syria, and Egypt are the Arab world.  But even in “black” African and “white” European nations with Muslim majorities, Christians are fleeing.

In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled.  According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, church and Christian property has been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.”  Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.  Problems cited are typical:  “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions were given for Christian churches.”

“Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”

And so history repeats itself.

One can go on and on:

  • In Ethiopia, after a Christian was accused of desecrating a Koran, thousands of Christians were forced to flee their homes when “Muslim extremists set fire to roughly 50 churches and dozens of Christian homes.”
  • In the Ivory Coast—where Christians have been crucified—Islamic rebels “massacred hundreds and displaced tens of thousands” of Christians.
  • In Libya, Islamic rebels forced several Christian nun orders serving the sick and needy since 1921 to flee.
  • In Muslim-majority northern Nigeria, where nary a Sunday passes without a church bombing, Christians are fleeing by the thousands; one region has been emptied of 95% of its Christian population.
  • In Pakistan, after a Christian child was falsely accused of desecrating a Koran and Muslims went on an anti-Christian rampage, an entire Christian village—men, women, and children—was forced to flee into the nearby woods, where they built a church, permanently resided there.
  • In Somali, where Christianity is completely outlawed, Muslim converts to Christianity are fleeing to neighboring nations, including Kenya and Ethiopia, sometimes to be tracked down and executed.
  • In Sudan, over half a million people, mostly Christian, have been stripped of citizenship in response to the South’s secession, and forced to relocate.

To anyone following the plight of Christians under Islam, none of this is surprising.  As I document in my new book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, all around the Islamic world—in nations that do not share the same race, language, culture, or economics, in nations that share only Islam—Christians are being persecuted into extinction.   Such is the true face of the global Islamic resurgence.

Often forgotten is that, in the 7th century, half of the world’s entire Christian population was spread across what is now nonchalantly called the “Muslim world.”  Then, Islam, born in the deserts of Arabia, burst out in a series of world-altering jihads, conquering and slowly transforming these once Christian nations into Islamic nations.

In order to evade sporadic persecution and constant discrimination, over the centuries most Christians converted, while others fled.  A few opted to remain Christian and live as barely tolerated third-class subjects, or dhimmis, according to Sharia law.

They eventually experienced something of a renaissance during the colonial and post-colonial era, when many Muslims were Westward-looking.

But today, with the international resurgence of Muhammad’s religion, these remaining Christians are reaching extinction, as Islam’s 1400 year mission of supremacy and global hegemony continues unabated—even as the West looks the other way, that is, when it’s not actually supporting it in the context of the so-called “Arab Spring.”

RAYMOND IBRAHIM, a Middle East and Islam specialist, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum. A widely published author, best known for The Al Qaeda Reader (Doubleday, 2007), he guest lectures at universities, including the National Defense Intelligence College, briefs governmental agencies, such as U.S. Strategic Command and the Defense Intelligence Agency, provides expert testimony for Islam-related lawsuits, and has testified before Congress regarding the conceptual failures that dominate American discourse concerning Islam and the worsening plight of Egypt’s Christian Copts. Among other media, he has appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, PBS, Reuters, Al-Jazeera, CBN, and NPR.

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ARE OUR MILITARY TRAINING ISLAMIC SLEEPER CELLS IN AMERICA?

sleeper-cells-630x286by Dr. Richard Swier:

Paul David Gaubatz, a U.S. State Department-trained Arabic linguist and former U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent believes so. Gaubatz, and investigative journalist and Hoover Institute fellow Paul Sperry co-authored the book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America. Gaubatz was the first federal agent to serve in Iraq.

According to Gaubatz, “In the U.S. our military bases have programs to bring citizens/scientists from Islamic based countries to the U.S. to train them on many of our weapons systems and some of our most highly guarded technology systems.  The U.S. military also bring foreign military personnel from Islamic controlled countries to train on our aircraft, to include how to fly the various U.S. military aircraft. Many of these foreigners disappear into the underground ‘Islamic Sleeper Cells’ throughout America. This must stop.  Kirkland AFB, NM, Wright Patterson AFB, OH. and Lackland AFB, TX. are three of the top offenders.”

“Intelligence that would not be provided to the American public is freely provided to foreign nationals from Islamic based countries that support terrorism against us.,” states Gaubatz.

Gaubatz reports, “In addition thousands of foreigners from Islamic based countries are trained at our military bases about aircraft systems and how to fly them.  Lackland AFB, Texas is one of our prime offenders in this category.  When I was a Special Agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations we continuously had open cases on foreign citizens who suddenly left our installations and disappeared into unknown areas of America. I have written previously about ‘sleeper cells’. These are some of the people who go underground into sleeper cells. They are trained military personnel who have a working knowledge of English and have been trained on our weapons systems.  Immediately after the attack on 9-11, other Agents and myself were given orders to attempt to track these ‘lost’ foreigners down.  It was an impossible hunt. There was a major concern some of the 9-11 Islamic hijackers had even trained in our military flight schools.

Read more at Watch Dog Wire

 

Egyptian Salafi Cleric Murgan Salem: Boston Bombing Was Meant To Deliver A Message; Similar Attacks Expected In France

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MEMRI:

Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian Salafi cleric Sheikh Murgan Salem, which aired on Tahrir TV on April 16, 2013:

Interviewer: “Today, we will be talking about the Boston bombings, which took place yesterday, during the marathon. There were casualties. People were wounded and killed. What is your analysis of what happened?”

Murgan Salem: “In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Obviously, I do not know who carried out that operation, but if it was done by the mujahideen, it serves as a message to America and the West: We are still alive. Contrary to what you say, we have not died. The [Americans] wanted to send a message to the entire world that they had finished off the mujahideen – not just the mujahideen of Al-Qaeda, but the mujahideen all over the world. I do not know who carried out this attack, but if it was indeed the mujahideen, it was meant as a clear message to America and to the West.”

Interviewer: “But do you think that this could have been an Al-Qaeda operation?”

Murgan Salem: “No. this was not up to the standards of Al-Qeda. It was extremely amateurish. The standards of Al-Qaeda are much higher. By the way, I was not a member of the Al-Qaeda organization. But I knew all the people who belonged to it.”

Interviewer: “You were close to Sheik Osama and Dr. Ayman…”

Murgan Salem: “We were like one family. I am happy and proud to have been a friend of these brothers, but I cannot claim to have had the honor of being an Al-Qaeda member. The standards and techniques of Al-Qaeda are much higher. From what I saw on the news, this was the work of amateurs. I do not know who did it, but they have managed to get the message across: We can reach you whenever and wherever we want.

[…]

“Over the past 30 years, there has been a qualitative leap in the war with America. American is waging a war in our countries, and we are the ones who reap its fruits. Those courageous heroes have shifted the battle over to America’s own turf.

“I do not rule out the possibility that this was carried out by people born in the U.S. I do exclude the possibility that it was done by the Al-Qaeda organization. This is not the work of Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al-Zawahiri. I think it was done by people resentful of the policy and arrogance of America and Europe. It is not just America.

“The Americans have passed their arrogance over to France. France, which led the first Crusade, is now leading the war against Islam and the Muslims. They must taste the bitter retribution for their deeds. This is not a threat, but a warning of what might happen to them.”

Interviewer: “To America and the West?”

Murgan Salem: “To France in particular, and to America and the entire West.”

Interviewer: “Why?”

Murgan Salem: “Because the [French] are leading the war against us. What brought France to Mali? Or America to Afghanistan and Iraq? Why don’t they let our nation be? Have we ever interfered in their affairs?

[…]

“France has accepted the banner of arrogance and enmity to Islam, so it will taste what it deserves. I cannot be held responsible for over one million [Muslims] in the West, who were harmed by French and American policy. More than one million [Muslims] were born in the West. I cannot be held responsible for them. I do not know what they may do. The [Westerners] are facing a deluge, and they will be destroyed.”

Interviewer: “Destroyed?”

Murgan Salem: “There is no doubt about it. The U.S. has completely collapsed, even if they are not hurrying to admit it. The American debt has reached how many trillions of dollars? They have a huge debt. Now poverty is spreading throughout America.

[…]

“We say to the Western peoples: Force your stupid governments to refrain from supporting the tyrants. France’s intervention in Mali will not go unanswered. I don’t think it will. I do not have any specific information, but I am sure it will not go unanswered – just like their intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan did not go unanswered. They will suffer catastrophes for this.

[…]

“With the utmost stupidity, France has accepted the banner of enmity [to Islam] – from the days of Sarkozy to Hollande. This stupidity will bring catastrophes upon them, just like it did upon America. Although I am not from Al-Qaeda, I can say, as someone who has known these people, that the path of Al-Qaeda is the path of the Koran, which calls upon [Muslims] to wage Jihad against infidels who attack them and intervene in their affairs. This is the path of Islam and the Koran, and not something invented by Osama Bin Laden.

“No, it was not invented by Osama or Ayman. It was sent down by Allah, and anyone who thinks he can defeat this path is delusional.”

[…]

Interviewer: “Who do you consider to be an infidel?”

Murgan Salem: “Anyone who does not accept Islam. They are either original infidels, like the Jews and Christians, or apostates, like the secularists, liberals, Communists, or socialists. Whoever does not accept Islam is an infidel. Allah said so, not me.”

Also see:

Al Qaeda Leader Urges Unity for Sake of Islamic State

imagesAl-Qaeda’s leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has posted a 103-minute message on militant websites calling on Muslims to unite to create an Islamic state.. The audio was produced by al-Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahab, and was presented alongside video footage showing Iranian Revolutionary Guards captured in Syria.

Zawahiri urged Muslims to use the “Arab Spring” to come together and wage jihad. He specifically praised the mujahideen in Syria, exhorting them to step up their fight against the “criminal secular” regime of President Bashar Assad. He also issued a warning to France that its military intervention in Mali will be bogged down.

“I warn France that it will meet in Mali, with God’s permission, the same fate America met in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Al-Zawahiri said.

Al-Qaeda is unhappy that France launched a military operation in Mali last January after being asked to intervene by the country’s interim president. Since then, French and Malian troops have liberated main towns in the north, but remnants of al-Qaeda-linked cells remain active there in some of the vast rural areas.

Read more at The Clarion Project

Also see:

 

Christians Face Persecution, Extinction in Islamic Lands

COPTIC CHRISTIANS PRAY INSIDE CHURCH IN CAIRO

During this Christian holiday season, the message from the world — and even from the top ranks of Christendom — to Christians facing Islamic jihad and the imposition of sharia would seem to be: “You’re on your own.”

by Clare M. Lopez
Radicalislam.org
March 27, 2013

Across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Islam is on the march again and Christians are marked for annihilation. In lands once known as the heartland of Christianity, where the Apostles and early missionaries spread their faith, Christianity is a faith under fire and Christians themselves are a dwindling presence.

Nowhere is the Islamic assault against Christians more intense than the killing fields of Syria, where rebel advances by both the al-Qa’eda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated militias of the Syrian Free Army (SFA), inevitably result in pogroms against Christian populations in every town they capture from the Bashar al-Assad regime that previously had protected Syria’s minority Christians.

As Nina Shea wrote recently at National Review Online, the 2,000-year-old Christian Assyrian community in embattled Syria literally faces extinction, as an Islamic “ethno-religious cleansing” targets its defenseless members with kidnappings, murder, rape and threats.

Like Iraq’s Assyrian and Chaldean communities before it (some of whose members had fled to Syria for safety), the Christians of Syria are now fleeing in droves, many to Lebanon, and some even back to Iraq. The Chaldean Catholic bishop of Aleppo, Antoine Audo, reports that as many as 30,000 Christians have fled that devastated city alone.

Juliana Taimoorazy, the founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council, has highlighted the desperate plight of Iraq’s original people, the Assyrians and Chaldeans, descendants of mighty civilizations and Christian since the first century. Since the Council’s founding in 2008, Taimoorazy has made it her mission to document and speak about the devastation wreaked against Iraqi Christian businesses, churches and homes in the years since 2003, when the ouster of Saddam Hussein brought to power the jihadist forces of Shi’ite Islam.

Waves of violence, killing and forced displacement have slashed the pre-2003 number of churches in Iraq from 300 to just 57, and the number of beleaguered Christians from some 1.4 million to perhaps only half a million in 2013.

Read more

 

Investigate Benghazigate

1451690329By Frank Gaffney:

After Iraq was liberated from Saddam Hussein’s despotic misrule, critics denounced the then-incumbent president with the charge that “Bush lied, people died.”  It never ceases to amaze that among the most prominent of those making this slanderous accusation were past and present Democratic legislators who had publicly pronounced exactly what George W. Bush did:  Saddam possessed – and used – weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  And they, like Mr. Bush, had every reason to believe and did believe that such weapons, or worse, might be used again unless his regime were overthrown.

Put simply, there never had been any conscious or deliberate effort to deceive the American people.  Neither did the President seek to deflect responsibility for his actions.  To the contrary, his top political advisor, Karl Rove, subsequently acknowledged that his greatest mistake – at least until he made a centi-million-dollar hash-up of Campaign 2012 – was preventing any official effort from being mounted to counter the calumny about Mr. Bush lying about Iraqi WMD, with the predictable effect of allowing the credibility of the Bush 43 presidency to be destroyed.

By contrast, people did die in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 due to Barack Obama’s policies and he lied about it, repeatedly and knowingly.  This scandalous reality has come to be popularly known as “Benghazigate.”

If we don’t find out what led up to, occurred during and happened afterwards –and the role played by the President and his senior subordinates throughout – there will certainly be more lies and may be more American deaths.

Read more at Center For Security Policy

 

The New ‘Silk Route;’ Weapons to Gaza and Beyond

by Paul Alster: