01-09-2023, 02:37 PM
THE PAN-ISLAMIC OPTION -
THE WEST’s PART IN THE CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF DEVELOPMENT OF “ISLAMIST TERRORISM”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pan-isl...sm/5596239
It should be clear by now to even the most disinterested global spectator to the protracted carnage of the Syrian Civil War that the governments of the Western world led by the United States of America have instigated and sustained an insurrection against a sovereign country through the use of Islamist proxies. It should also be clear to those who are adequately informed by a suitable range of media sources, that many of the terror attacks which have occurred in both American and Western European locations have been carried out by individuals who have been under the radar of Western security agencies.
Further, the Syrian and other conflicts instigated by the West have created the basis for influxes of refugees as well as new avenues of transit for economic migrants bound for Western Europe. The incessant bombing of Muslim lands for a continuous period of over a decade and a half continues to provide the basis for radicalising segments of the Muslim world. America’s role in the Syrian conflict is risking a war with Russia, a nuclear armed power, which at the invitation of the legitimate government of Syria, is part of a coalition involving both Iran and Hezbollah that is attempting to suppress the Islamist insurgents.
Yet, among the population of Western countries, there remains a perplexing mixture of ignorance and indifference about the policy of their governments calculated use of “Islamic militants” both at home and abroad. Unless a strong consensus arises in the form of dedicated mass protest movements by informed members of their populations and pressure is brought by coalitions of principled and non-partisan political actors, the West will continue to embroil itself in an enduring series of conflicts in the Muslim world.
The moral, financial and security ramifications are clear: the continuing cycle of human destruction, the ever increasing risk of terror atrocities, the burdens imposed by military expenditure as well as the threats to social cohesion caused by migration from affected countries, cumulatively represent a self-inflicted conundrum from which it will become difficult to be extricated unless there is a radical overhaul of Western foreign policy.
Much of the public debate in the United States about the rise of groups such as the so-called Islamic State often takes a partisan slant. For those to the political Right, former US President Barack Obama is the author of the Syrian crisis, while others prefer granting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the dubious accolade of being the ‘Godmother of ISIS’. On the other hand, those on the political Left blame George W. Bush for the Syrian conflict on the basis that the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent sectarian-orientated turmoil led to the development of a range of extremist Sunni Islamist militias. Many of them were linked to the al Qaeda franchise and metastasized most prominently into the Jabhat al Nusra Front and IS.
Another important part of the public discourse, inevitably heightened in the aftermath of the occurrence of each terror atrocity committed in North America or in Western Europe, relates to the issue of whether Islam can be considered to be an ethically sound religion. The consensus among many in the political classes and the media is to insist that terror attacks are perpetrated by a tiny minority of the earth’s reputed 1.6 billion Muslims, while a significantly vocal part of the public contend that the history of Islamic expansion as well as the philosophy of violence expressed by prominent Islamist groups mark it out as anything but a ‘religion of peace’.The debate on Islam is frequently concerned with whether Muslims are assimilable in Western society with the microscope firmly focused on the amount of Muslim refugees seeking or gaining entrance to North American and Western European destinations.
While each aspect of these debates are important in their own right, the compartmentalized nature of the discourse arguably serves as a useful device which distracts the public from grasping the broader picture. For one, attempting to fix the blame for the rise of certain notorious Islamist militias on particular political figures for partisan reasons only serves to obscure the very lengthy history of Western support for militant Islamic groups.
The often bitter exchanges after terror attacks are dominated by issues related to whether Muslim communities resident in the West are sufficiently loyal to their countries of residence. Getting lost in the thicket of argument and counter-argument is a disturbingly consistent feature of many perpetrators having been monitored by relevant state intelligence agencies.
In a similar vein, the worries about Western-bound Muslim refugees tend to disconnect from Western culpability in what may be termed coercive engineered migration. Thus the overall effect of these partisan accusations and disputes present a useful distraction from scrutinising the prevailing overarching policy as well as enabling politicians and security officials to escape accountability for creating the conditions which have brought Islamic fundamentalist terror to the streets of their towns and cities.
Understanding history is important. The role of the United States and its allies in facilitating the weaponising of Islam as a means of obtaining dubious geo-political advantage is a longstanding one. When Wesley Clark, a retired US four-star general admitted that ISIS had been created “with funding from our friends and allies to fight Hezbollah to the death”, on the basis that only fanatics and not idealist-minded recruits could be sufficiently motivated to do so, he was harking to a sentiment long-held by the West in its dealings with the Middle East.
The use of Islamic soldiers was one embraced by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, who in a January 1944 speech referred to Islam as a “practical and attractive religion for soldiers”. Its promise of paradise and beautiful women to the martyrs of battle was, Himmler felt, “the kind of language a soldier understands”. Three decades earlier, the use of “medieval thinking” and “superstitious” Mahometans as guerrilla proxies was an idea latched onto by Kaiser Wilhelm II during the First World War as part of the German strategy of revolutionspolitik. This was a policy aimed at encouraging subversion and revolution in the vulnerable regions within the empires against which Germany was waging Welt Kreig.
It was applied by allowing Vladimir Lenin to travel through German territory on a sealed train so that he could reach Russia where he could foment chaos through a Bolshevik uprising and give Germany an advantage on its eastern front. The Germans also scored their prisoner of war camps for Ukrainian prisoners whom they trained and indoctrinated to form an anti-Tsarist ukrainian nationalist army.
The Germans unsuccessfully attempted to apply it by inciting rebellion among the millions of Muslims living under British rule and in the areas bordering British territories. Pamphlets calling for Muslims to form cells which would kill combatant and non-combatant Christian Europeans in the name of jihad were produced.
It was a theme which was fictionalised in the John Buchan novel Greenmantle which was published in 1916. In the book, the character Sir Walter Bullivant, claims that “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other”.
But it did not end in fiction and would not be the exclusive preserve of Germany geo-strategy. British policy-makers saw jihad as means through which Britain could advance its interests against its adversaries. It would use the Ikhwan, the formidable fighting force of the second Saudi emirate to weaken the Ottoman hold on the Arabian Peninsula. The fact that Ibn Saud’s followers were, according to Winston Churchill, “bloodthirsty” and “intolerant” underscored the Ikhwan’s fitness for purpose. The intelligence services of Britain would go on to establish an enduring relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood soon after it was created in the late 1920s.
American support for militant Islamism goes back at least to the 1950s when the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the Muslim Brotherhood as a proxy force in the United States’ ideological war against Soviet communism. The Egyptian-originated organisation was utilised in an effort to undermine the secular government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser which had gravitated to the Soviet Union to acquire military arms and technical expertise for development projects.
The Soviet-Afghan war (December 24, 1979 – February 15, 1989) (Source: WideShut.co.uk)
This ploy of using Islamic combatants lay at the heart of ‘Operation Cyclone’. Among the longest and most expensive of covert operations undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency, it involved funding, arming and training Afghan Mujahideen as a means of weakening the Soviet military after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
It was the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US National Security Advisor to the administration of President Jimmy Carter, but continued by the succeeding administration of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan extended an invitation to key members of the Mujahideen to visit the Oval Office of the White House where they were given a cordial reception at which they were photographed with the president.
While on a state visit to Pakistan in October of 1981, the British Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, made her way to the Pakistani-Afghan border where she told a gathered group of Mujahideen leaders that “the hearts of the free world are with you”.
A few years after the September 11 atrocity, the Bush administration formulated a re-direction in a Middle Eastern policy geared towards aiding Sunni militants espousing the same Pan-Islamic ideology as al Qaeda as a means of undermining the secular government of Bashar al Assad of Syria.
The Obama administration followed this policy first in its support for the Nato action that led to the overthrow of the secular government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and secondly, in the decision to utilise jihadists in the attempt to overthrow the Assad government under the cover of the so-called Arab Spring. The latter enterprise was undertaken over the objections of several senior military officers at the Pentagon including the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency.
It is important to note that the French government, then led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, took the lead in instigating the Libyan uprising and that the Cameron government of Britain provided special forces soldiers to train and direct operations undertaken by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and al Qaeda-affiliated organisation.
This policy is still intact under the Trump administration. After all, any attack against the Syrian military such as was the case with the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles after a dubious allegation of a chemical attack on civilians and the recent shooting down of a Syrian Air Force jet by an American warplane, is intended to weaken it in the fight against Islamist insurgents. These actions by the United States, including the episode of the alleged mistaken killing of over 60 soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army while it was attempting to dislodge al Nusra fighters from the city of Aleppo all tend to confirm the thesis of the United States functioning as the unofficial air force of the Islamist insurgents.
It is a policy that will be sustained given the continuing priority accorded to the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia. Donald Trump’s decision to make his first foreign visit as president to the desert kingdom, the home of the Wahhabi doctrine of Islam which serves as the inspiration for Islamist death squads in Syria and Islamic terrorists striking at innocent people in the West, is rather telling.
Trump’s castigation of the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran as the “world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism” reeks of deceit and hypocrisy. It is contradicted by a 2013 report by the European Parliament which identified Sunni Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism and a leaked admission by Hillary Clinton that the Saudis “have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth”. Indeed, none of the bombs, bullets or blades used in any of the terror attacks carried out in the West since 9/11 have been done in the name of Iran or Hezbollah. They have been carried out by Sunni extremists influenced by Wahhabist teachings.
The United States has of course acted as the overseer of Saudi funding for Syrian jihadists even though Iran, together with the Syrian Arab Army and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have soldiers dying every day in the fight against extremists of the sort US Senator John McCain has cosied up to during illegally arranged visits to Syrian territory.
Abdel Hakim Belhadj (credits to the owner of the photo)
McCain, who serves as the Chair of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, was photographed handing Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the leader of the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, with an award in recognition for his part in the overthrow of the Gaddafi government. Echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words of support for the Mujahideen, McCain heaped praise on Belhadj and his group for being fighters in the cause of freedom. And just as several of the groups headed by the warlords Thatcher addressed would form the basis of al Qaeda and the Taliban, so it has been the case that Belhadj became a leading commander of ISIS in Libya.
The Saudis are not alone among America’s Middle Eastern allies in having enabled the Syrian insurrection. Other Gulf Cooperation Council states, most notably Qatar, have played a part as indeed has Turkey – all confirmed by the former US Vice President Joseph Biden. The Syrian rebels have also received support from the state of Israel through cash disbursements, arms supplies and medical assistance. The motivation for the West’s seeking to destroy secular governments such as that of Syria further than the banal rationale of overthrowing a ‘brutal dictator’ skirts over the issue of wanting to build a pipeline from the Gulf through to Turkey via Syria. The fundamental objective of the West in ensuring Israel’s continued regional hegemony is rarely mentioned even though this has been attested to by Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister, and a leaked email of Hillary Clinton’s which revealed her thinking to be that the overthrow of Assad would help the Israelis in so far as combating the perceived threat posed by Iran.
The debates which center on Muslim extremists growing into a security threat fail to maintain a decent level of scrutiny on the performance of Western intelligence services in the preventing such threats. It should be of great concern to any American citizen that a report published three years ago by Human Rights Watch and Columbia University claimed that all but four of the domestic terrorist incidents occurring in the United States in the decade after the 9/11 attacks were carried out during sting operations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In other words, most of the attacks involved people who were informers or double agents working for the FBI.
The report did not cover the dubious circumstances involving a paid informant infiltrating the group which built the bomb used for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and it excluded the case of Tamerlan Tsarmaev who had not only been on a watchlist and surveilled by the FBI, but who many suspect to have been an informer.
A similar pattern can be seen in Britain where the security services under the watch of Theresa May as both home secretary and prime minister allowed Islamists whose names were on terror watchlists, under surveillance and in some circumstances under control orders (a form of house arrest under UK anti-terror laws), to travel around the European Union and the Middle East with impunity so long as they promised to overthrow secular Arab leaders such as Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria.
This is mirrored in France where, for instance, Mohamed Merah, the man who allegedly carried out terror shootings in Toulouse and Montauban, was claimed by the former head of France’s now defunct Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) to have been a double agent and informer for Direction Centrale du Renseignement Interieur (DCRI), the state intelligence organisation tasked with counter-terrorism and counter-espionage.
It is also worth noting that the terror outrages in London in July of 2005 and in Madrid in March of 2004 involved suspected radicals belonging to al Qaeda-inspired cells who had previously been under state surveillance. While the official argument of strained resources is often brought up as a blanket excuse, the recurrence of these scenarios point to a criminally negligent pattern of handling the surveillance of potential terrorists as well as the reckless managing of informers who ‘go rogue’. And given what is known of certain ‘black operations’ conducted in Western Europe during the Cold War era which had the purpose of manipulating public feeling through acts of terror, a more sinister interpretation cannot be ruled out.
The issues of state facilitation of islamist militias as well as the mishandling of terror suspects ought to raise the concerns of politicians and citizens sufficiently enough to form the basis of hearings by state legislative bodies and pave the way for the setting up of public inquiries. Instead the discourse, with the aid of the mainstream media, is guided towards whether the aftermath of each terror attack should result in the incremental loss of the hard won rights and freedoms of the citizenry of the West.
In Britain, the recent spate of attacks have raised the ante to the extent that there have been calls to introduce internment as well as to censor the internet. France is effectively in a permanent state of emergency. All of this despite the fact that despite the blood and pain inflicted by terror, the statistics continue to show that the average person has a far higher chance of being electrocuted by a bolt of lightning or breaking their neck when getting out of bed.
The history of the West’s dalliances with terror groups is pregnant with instances of blowback. It is widely accepted that the implementation of Operation Cyclone as a means of using Islamists as a tool in weakening the Soviet enemy contributed to the formation of al Qaeda and the development of global jihadism. Those who berate others who link the outrages perpetrated by Islamist terrorists in the West to Western foreign policy are not being realistic. Indeed, there is an ineluctable logic to President Assad’s rebuke to the Turkish President Recep Erdogan for supporting the Islamist insurgents who the Turkish authorities allowed to infiltrate Syria:
It is not possible to put terrorism in your pocket and use it as a card because it is like a scorpion which won’t hesitate to sting you at the first opportunity.
The state is compromised but the continued ignorance of many and the seemingly wilful insouciance of the others mean that the people will stand compromised in the judgement of history if they refrain from pressuring their political leaders to change the state of affairs.
P
TAKFIRISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
John Andrew Morrow
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articl...lamophobia
Although some terrorists who were already prone to extremism have found a comfortable home in Takfiri-Wahhabi literalism, most of them are merely low-life criminals, drug dealers, substance abusers, pimps, pedophiles, rapists, and mentally deranged degenerates. They are the scum of the East and West. They are losers in this life and the hereafter.
Muslims and non-Muslims need to understand that takfiri terrorists have very little to do with Islam beyond a veneer of public ritualism. Although some of them have been brainwashed and indoctrinated into Ghetto or Street Salafism, others are just mercenaries out for murder and money. In most of the high-profile cases, the perpetrators were merely pawns. The real criminals were the clandestine operations experts who planned and executed the false flag operations in question.
Takfirism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin. They are both fueled by the same forces. So-called Islamic terror is orchestrated by the same people who are waging the war on Islamic terror. Takfirism and Islamophobia are employed to advance a geopolitical agenda that is both hegemonic and demonic.
In the Muslim East, North Africa, and West Africa, Muslims and non-Muslims are massacred in the name of Islam by people who are generally projected to be Muslims by a crusading mainstream media (since the vast majority of them are “dead by design” before they can be interrogated, their innate motivations are still a mystery). The region is destabilized and depopulated of Muslims and non-Muslims in proxy wars between authoritarian local powers and totalitarian world powers. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are a small price to pay for access to energy resources and reconstruction contracts.
In the Western world, non-Muslims (along with some Muslims) are massacred in the name of Islam by people who are once again projected to be Muslims. The rise of Islamophobia and attacks against thousands of Muslims is but a bonus. It helps to deflect public opinion from the crimes committed by Western powers both at home and abroad. The United States, for example, has killed more than 20 million people in 37 victim nations since World War II.
Non-Muslims denounce attacks against America attributed to Muslims while remaining completely oblivious or even justifying American attacks against Muslims. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in over one million Muslim deaths. Another half a million Muslims have lost their lives in the US-led “War on Terror” since September 11, 2001. According to the calculations of most experts, there are approximately 100,000 takfiri terrorists in the world. If the Western world has murdered 1.5 million Muslims in their self-professed attempt to eradicate 100,000 terrorists, the “War on Terror” has been a failure: it has become a “War of Terror.”
Informed and conscientious individuals are well aware that Western powers have been in bed with takfiri terrorists for the past century, from the fall of the Ottoman Sultanate to the present, supporting the very criminals they cultivated in the Saudi-financed madrasahs peppered across Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The Evil Empires of the Age are simultaneously supporting and opposing the controlled takfiris who have rained down death and destruction in both the Muslim world and the scorched remains of the Christian world.
At last count, the FBI had over 1,000 ISIS members under surveillance in the United States. The US administration, under both Obama and Trump, refuses to round them up, charge them, prosecute them, and punish them. And while official Washington has preached about a Muslim Ban, it continues to allow ISIS-affiliated criminals the liberty to plot and plan terror attacks against the homeland. Time and again, mass murder is committed on US soil by parties who were both known and surveilled by the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
As much as they may appear critical of the United States, European nations clearly share the same covert agenda. At last count, Europol reported that there were 5,000 ISIS fighters operating freely in the European Union. Repeatedly, mass murder is committed in Europe and the United Kingdom by parties who were both known and surveilled by European and British intelligence agencies.
Let’s face facts. We live in a surveillance society. Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden have made that abundantly clear. Our governments gather information on all of us. Intelligence agencies like the NSA sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all, and exploit it all. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe know who the terrorists are. In fact, they know them on a first name basis.
While it may be startling, unnerving or perplexing to most, the US State Department has the names of over 100,000 known terrorists on a secret list. And while it might be more complicated to round up criminals from abroad, it remains within the realm of possibility. What is more, nothing truly prevents the United States from detaining those 1,000 ISIS members, both citizens and residents, who are currently on our soil.
According to the framework of “Countering Violent Extremism,” arrest and prosecution are intended as a measure of last resort. For the so-called experts at the service of the US government, the final goal is helping terrorists to become law-abiding and productive members of society. Rather than show sympathy for the victims of these sub-humans and their satanic persuasion, the proponents of CVE pity the poor little terrorists, and sympathize with the fact that they are mentally traumatized, stigmatized, and ostracized for the crimes they committed or explicitly support.
Rather than focus on engagement, prevention, intervention, interdiction, rehabilitation and integration, Western authorities should reconsider their naive notions, and focus on detention, prosecution, incarceration, or execution. If, as they admit, Western intelligence agencies are tracking thousands upon thousands of bloodthirsty terrorists, why, one must reasonably ask, do they refuse to detain them for reasons of national security? For intelligence analysts, the answer is obvious: the terrorists are at their service. They are valuable assets and useful idiots.
As Phaedrus stated, “Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.” What we are witnessing in the world is all theater. Layers and layers of lies. People just see the puppet patsies. They fail to see the puppet-masters: the Hidden Hand. Unless they open their hearts and minds, the masses of Muslims and non-Muslims will never free themselves from the Matrix.
WHAT LED TO THE BIGGEST TERRORIST ATTACK ON A MOSQUE IN CANADIAN HISTORY
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articl...an-history
The outpouring of sympathy from Canadians for their Muslim neighbors following the terrorist attack on a Quebec City mosque on January 29 has been absolutely stunning. Total strangers have reached out to members of the Muslim community all across Canada to offer condolences and support. This must be unique among people of different faiths across the globe.
In the aftermath of the attack there has also been vigorous debate about the reasons behind the attack. How could this happen in Canada, supposedly this oasis of peace, tranquillity and multiculturalism, many have asked. January 29 has become a wakeup call for Canadians, especially the federal and provincial governments as well as the security agencies.
It should not have been since the far right extremists were on the radar screen and known to intelligence agencies for many years. Successive governments, however, turned a blind eye to the real threat they posed because they were all fixated on the supposed threat from Muslims. Will this tragedy change anything or after a few days of uttering meaningless platitudes, the issue will be shoved down memory’s black hole?
It is interesting to note that whenever radicalization has been mentioned in the Canadian context, it has referred only to Muslims. In fact it has become a global phenomenon. This line of thinking assumes that only Muslims are prone to radicalization. There must be something in their genes that forces them toward extremism or that there is something inherently wrong with Islam.
Unfortunately a number of so-called experts have sprung up in the West prattling on television about radicalization and the threat from terrorism. Since such talks fits into the policy perspectives of the warlords in Western capitals—the neo-cons in Washington and their fellow travelers in Nato—this narrative has been given ample airtime. And then there are the opportunist Muslims—the ‘House negroes’, in the celebrated words of the martyr, Malcolm X—that would do anything to ingratiate themselves to their white masters. These bootlickers have added their own spice to the supposed threat from ‘radicalized Muslim youth’ to the peaceful of life in the West.
Quote:It is interesting to note that whenever radicalization has been mentioned in the Canadian context, it has referred only to Muslims. In fact it has become a global phenomenon.
Several Western governments, including that of Canada, have instituted de-radicalization programs for Muslim youth. A number of Imams in Canada have jumped on the bandwagon offering their services! How many youth they have de-radicalized is not difficult to guess: zero. We say this because according to Canadian security agencies, there are very few radicalized Muslim youth. In the entire province of Quebec with a population of 10 million or more, there are no more than a handful of ‘radical Muslim youth.’ This is not the impression one would get from media accounts though.
In fact, no Muslim has killed anyone in Canada despite the media hype. The only exceptions are the two converts—Martin Couture-Rouleau and Michael Zehaf Bibeau—both from the province of Quebec that were involved in killings on October 21 and October 24, 2014 in Montreal and Ottawa respectively. Couture-Rouleau was on the RCMP radar and his passport had been seized along with some 90 other suspected extremists. He was also under surveillance yet he managed to drive his vehicle into two soldiers after waiting for them in a parking lot for two hours! He was shot and killed.
Bibeau was a drifter. He was thrown out of a mosque in Vancouver, British Columbia when he was heard uttering threats. He moved to Ottawa and was living in a shelter for homeless people in the federal capital. It has still not been explained how he obtained a high velocity rifle with which he shot and killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo standing guard, unarmed, at the Soldiers’ Memorial outside the Parliament Building in Ottawa. Bibeau then ran across the lawn outside the Parliament Building with a rifle in hand and entered the building while there were guards.
He was shot and killed only inside the building. Why he was not incapacitated and arrested to find out the truth? He was known to be mentally unstable. Had he survived, this fact would have become widely known.
But the former prime minister, Stephen Harper, a well known Islamophobe who has done great damage to the Canadian social fabric, jumped on these two killings to ram through parliament Bill C-51 whose provisions specifically target Muslims. Mercifully, Harper was booted out of office in October 2015 but in his 10 years in office, he had caused enough damage whose ramifications were felt by innocent Muslims at prayer in Quebec City Mosque on the night of January 29.
A host of politicians in Quebec also contributed to the anti-Islamic campaign. For them, Muslim women in hijab or niqab were a threat to their way of life. The Parti Quebecoise, the separatist party, as well as the Quebec liberals added their poison against Muslims seeing them as ‘enemies’ while white supremacist groups flourished right under their noses.
There are “more than 100 right-wing groups throughout Canada,” according to Caroline Biotteau of the group, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (January 31, 2017), most of them in the province of Quebec.
Unfortunately, Canadian academics have also generally ignored the rise of white supremacist groups. Among the few exceptions are James Ellis and Richard Parent, of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society. They had warned that Canada was not immune to the rise of far right extremism and it was a mistake to assume that such extremism was confined to Europe or to groups south of the border. They warned of the potential risk for far greater acts of violence from white supremacist groups whose horrific consequences were witnessed on that fateful night of January 29 in Quebec City.
A number of right wing extremist groups can be easily identified. These are the Aryan Guard, Blood and Honour and the Neo-Nazis as well as their Jewish counterpart, the Jewish Defence [Offense] League (JDL). This Zionist group that follows the racist ideology of Kahane Chai, a group banned in Israel, and the JDL that is banned in the US, continues to operate freely in Canada and is even patronized by some politicians. A member of the JDL had accompanied Harper on his trip to Israel.
Now a new group La Meute, “The Wolf Pack”, has emerged in Quebec. The group propagates such nonsense as the invasion of pro-Sharia Islamic radicals that pose an imminent threat to Quebec society. It would be wrong to assume that only this group, that attracted more than 43,000 new social media followers in just over a year, is pushing an Islamophobic agenda. Quebec politicians and French Canadians in general seem to be suffering from an inferiority complex for which they demand a price in blood from Muslims.
Even while some security agencies have pointed to the danger from these right-wing terrorist groups, politicians have turned a blind eye. In the Canadian parliament, there are many committees studying these phenomena.
In one such report in 2015, Sylvain Guertin from the Sûreté du Québec’s [Quebec Police] Division of Investigation on Extremist Threats for the Standing Senate on National Security and Defence, stated: “The majority of the service’s active files deal with the extreme right and, for 25 per cent of the files, with hate crimes”. The same report also attributed slightly less than 25 percent of the active files to Islamic radicalization (italics added).
Given such overwhelming data about white extremist groups, why some politicians and the media’s lurid fixation on Muslim extremist violence? The answer lies in the endless wars that the US and its Nato allies are waging against Muslims in other lands. Since Canada is a member of Nato, it also perpetrates these myths. If Muslims over there are ‘bad’, Muslims over here must also be ‘bad’. Without this policy of demonization, the wars of aggression cannot be successfully sold at home.
There is no better way to describe Western hypocrisy but unfortunately, innocent Muslims have had to pay a steep price!
PARIS MASSACRE : LESSONS THAT NEED TO BE LEARNED BY OUR WAR MAKING GOVERNMENTS
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/paris-mas...overnments
It is not Muslims who are the problem but the foreign policies that have helped create terrorism. That is what needs to change. No one can have anything but the profoundest condemnation for the attacks on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. It is reported that 12 people are dead, shot in a commando style attack, and that at least nine of them are journalists.
The magazine has recently published a cartoon of the Islamic state leader, and has a record of publishing anti-Islamic satire. The gunmen are assumed to be in some way connected with Islamic State (ISIS).
There can be no justification for the attack. It should be possible to satirise or to criticise ideas without this being something that can result in death or injury. There must, however, be a response to it that does not lead either to an increase in future terrorist attacks or in a rise in attacks on Muslims.
Neither outcome, unfortunately, is likely if responses so far and in the past are anything to go by.
The one effective response to such attacks would be to change foreign policy, which has helped to create precisely the terrorism that it now abhors. ISIS has grown in Iraq and Syria as a consequence of the failed wars there. The instability created in Iraq as a result of western intervention, the backing of a sectarian and oppressive government by the occupiers, and the current air strikes which are helping to win support for ISIS, have all contributed to the strengthening of this organisation. ISIS has received weapons and money from the Saudis and Qataris, has grabbed weapons provided by the west for other anti Assad groups, and has received material support from Turkey.
These are precisely the western allies -- Turkey also being a Nato member -- who sign up for the ‘war on terror’ but practice something different. The interventions they supported have greatly increased instability, for example in Libya where the British and French led bombing in 2011 continues to result in bitter civil war and conflict. The prediction made by, among others, former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller that the war on Iraq would lead to a much greater threat of terrorism has unfortunately proved to be the case.
In recent years France, under presidents Sarkozy and Hollande, has played an increasing role in these interventions. That the wars are all blamed on Muslims ignores the fact that the Libyan groups and ISIS are of course in large part fighting other Muslims. The refugees coming out of Syria, left on crewless boats to sink or swim in the Mediterranean, are also Muslims.
The consequences of the wars, with hundreds of thousands dead and many more refugees, have incensed people around the world. The large marjorities in western countries who have opposed these interventions have been ignored by their warmongering governments.
Muslims have also faced a growing level of racism and prejudice, see in the rise of far right parties, the restrictions on Muslim dress, the infringements of civil liberties, and the branding of all Muslims as somehow extremists or proto terrorists.
In France, there is a very strong far right party in the shape of the Front National, and the country has legislated some of the worst restrictions on Muslims -- for example over wearing the hijab. In Germany, the anti Islamic Pergida demonstrations have linked Muslims to crime. Levels of racism in Britain have grown, focussed both on immigrants and on Muslims.
The latest attack will lead to a greater backlash and greater levels of Islamophobia. But it is not Muslims who are the problem but the foreign policies that have helped create terrorism. That is what needs to change.
ON THE RECENT EVENTS IN PARIS
Dr.Abdul Wahid
http://www.hizb.org.uk/current-affairs/d...s-in-paris)
In the aftermath of the events in Paris, with perpetrators still on the run, the West’s press and politicians have set a narrative across the world – that the journalists at Charlie Hebdo were killed as part of a war on free speech and as such they died as martyrs.
We could go around in circles with arguments and counter arguments. ‘Had there been no provocation there would have been no backlash’ versus ‘violence is never justified when insulted’.
One thing is for sure, in my view. Had any government in the Muslim world taken a robust stand on the on-going insults to the Prophet – peace be upon him – threatening diplomatic action or to cut trade relations over the insulting depictions – I do not believe individuals would feel the frustration to retaliate. This is one of the reasons why calls for the restoration of a legitimate Islamic polity in the Muslim world continue to resonate so strongly amongst Muslims globally – to return stability and independence to the region.
But those who blame Islam for these killings say that like all religions it needs critiquing.
In that case, let me offer a critique of the modern secular ‘religion’ of liberalism – but with less crudeness and fewer insults than normally accompanies many ‘critiques’ of Islam.
France’s claim that free expression is a ‘fundamental principle’ of the Republic is a myth. For in France free expression is for some but not for others. Women are fined for wearing niqab – or banned from education for wearing hijab. Even at Charlie Hebdo, upheld as a bastion of free speech, this ‘fundamental principle’ was set aside to appease domestic political sensitivities when they sacked their own cartoonist Maurice Sinet for refusing to apologise for his biting item about Nicholas Sarkozy’s son, which appeared to denigrate him for marrying Jewish heiresses for money.
Similarly, when the French Prime Minister previously stated that the cartoons published by the magazine in 2011 were “expressed within the confines of the law and under the control of the courts”, he ought to have been reminded that the French senate passed a bill around the same time outlawing the denial of any genocide recognised by French law – restricting expression under the law and through the courts for political reasons.
”Free speech” is never absolutely “free”. No society has ever said there is an absolute right to say what you want. Laws outlawing speech are all around us. The British government is in the process of introducing legislation that will criminalise everyone from toddlers to parents for saying things that aren’t “British”. It has already criminalised people for insulting British troops. Germany criminalises holocaust denial, despite it remaining legal elsewhere. There are many examples across Europe – and usually applied selectively.
Every society has restricted speech according to their belief and value system. In secular Western society religion is largely unvalued so blasphemy is permitted. Whereas in many other parts of the world, including the Islamic world, religion is a central value and so blasphemy becomes a redline issue, including insulting any of the Prophets of God, starting from the Prophet Adam, to Prophets Moses and Jesus to the Prophet Mohammad (salallahu alaihi wasallam – and Peace be on all of them).
The existence of redlines in different societies should not imply the closure of debate. Certainly not in the case of Islam, which has a centuries-old Islamic tradition to engage in debate, tolerate criticism and hear the critiques of others. But criticism and debate is different to deliberately targeting the insult to others.
The cost to societal harmony from the ‘freedom to insult’ is rarely discussed. This freedom to mock and deride, born out of Europe’s particular dilemma of Church authority, opened the door to the growing disrespect and anti-social behaviour in society – where rudeness is celebrated as a sign of assertiveness, courtesy undervalued as weakness, and all too many people do not respect each other or the law.
Where such “freedoms” were once used to account those in power and prevent the excesses of the state, they are now directed at a community that holds no such status. The freedom to insult the sacred symbols of Islam has become a tool to bully and persecute a minority community – with a rise in the far right and anti-Muslim sentiment.
In this context an ultimatum has been served to Muslims – that it is not enough to say that the capital punishment for insulting the Prophet of Islam should be done after due judicial process by an Islamic authority – and not by ‘lone rangers’. That it is not enough to say that Muslim in a non-Muslim country under a covenant should not be a vigilante, killing people in broad daylight, some of whom had nothing to do with insulting the Prophet.
Rather, what is expected of a Muslim in Europe today is that you bow down before the god of free speech until you accept that every Prophet can be insulted – and you learn to like it or laugh it off!
That is an unacceptable expectation by those who attack Islam. Muslims living in the West have only one option when faced with insults against their beloved Prophet – and that is to speak out. Those who work to remove even that option will fail. They will find we continue to speak out loudly– despite the mockery and hatred.
Those who say we must all be allowed to insult each other freely should realise the resulting society is one where people start to hate each other, even when they tolerate each other. By contrast a society that considers deliberate insult and unnecessary provocation of others something to be avoided, is one where people will live harmoniously despite their varied differences.
The current pattern of state policies, community alienation, provocation and retaliation only fuels fear, intimidation and mistrust – for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. What is needed is more mature debate and intellectual discussion rather than insults, lies and false narratives. And despite the ultimatums put to us, Muslim remain ready for this.
PRO ZIONIST ISLAMOPHOBIC MAGAZINE , CHARLIE HEBDO IN EXPLOITATION MODE
http://www.crescent-online.net/2015/01/p...icles.html
Charlie Hebdo is cashing in on the blood of its slain journalists and cartoonists. And it continues to be as provocative as before realizing that insulting the Prophet (pbuh) sells well because most people have been turned into Islamophobes.
Within hours of hitting newstands across France on Wednesday, the pro-Zionist Islamophobic French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was sold out, all 700,000 copies of the first run of three million copies. This will be increased to five million copies.
The Islamophobic magazine plans to publish English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Turkish versions as well.
Its regular run is a mere 60,000. Great way to cash in on the blood of slain journalists and cartoonists!
And to continue the provocations, it again published a cartoon of the Prophet (pbuh) although this one was not as offensive as its previous cartoons.
The latest cartoon featured the Prophet (pbuh) with a tear in his eye, holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign under the headline “All is forgiven”.
Last Sunday a million people marched in Paris in “support” of “freedom of expression” but such freedom is only available to those that want to assault Islam and its revered personalities.
The line-up of war criminals leading the march—Benjamin Netanyahu, David Cameron and Francois Holllande etc—was a clear indication that the march had nothing to do with “freedom of expression” per se. It was to assert Western cultural imperialism and colonialism on other societies.
Amid the marchers were also a number of Middle Eastern potentates such as King Abdullah II who has clamped down on a number of websites in his country. Where is the freedom of expression there?
When Tom Willcox of the BBC reporting live from the march asked an Israeli woman about Jews killing Palestinians, there was extremely strong reaction against his question and calls for his resignation!
Willcox was forced to apologize for daring to ask a question at a rally for “freedom of expression”!
Let us repeat this: the march was for “freedom of expression” because it is supposed to be a cherished Western “value”. Let us accept it at face value.
What was so offensive about Willcox’s question that there were calls for his resignation? He merely asked a question about the Jewish oppression of Palestinians.
The argument used against Willcox was that he lampooned all Jews with the murderous Zionists.
Good point. Isn’t this what the West is doing against Muslims all the time? Why are demands being made of Muslims everywhere to condemn the Paris murderers otherwise they would be considered accomplices in their crime?
Even if we ignore the give away signs about the identity of the perpetrators—they were wearing masks to hide their identity but one of them left his ID card in the getaway car!—the claim to uphold “freedom of expression” is completely false.
When comedian Dieudonne Mbala Mbala wrote on his Facebook “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly”, the French police immediately arrested him.
No “freedom of expression” there, right? Mbala is black and he dared point to the contradiction in Western attitudes.
Amedy Coulibaly was involved in kidnapping people at the Jewish shop. He was shot dead together with some of the hostages.
Mbala was mixing the official mantra “Je Suis Charlie” with the slain supermarket gunman.
Charlie Hebdo can insult the Prophet (pbuh) but a comedian cannot even link ‘Charlie’ with the kidnapper!
The French Justice Ministry has opened more than 50 cases against people accused of “condoning terrorism”. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on January 13 that the country was now engaged in a “war on terrorism”.
In a virtual give-away, he said France would strengthen its anti-terrorism laws.
Would strengthened anti-terrorism laws have prevented the Paris attack? The alleged (now dead) gunmen were known to French intelligence. They had been questioned earlier.
The two were also on the US’ no fly watch list. How did they manage to go to Syria to join the terrorists there and then return to France?
And what role did French intelligence as well as the intelligence agencies of a number of other Western countries played—and continue to do so even today—in recruiting terrorists to fight in Syria?
The US, France, Britain, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and a host of other countries are complicit in creating these terrorists and must accept responsibility for their murderous attacks.
We must also return to the question of the perpetrators’ identity. Can one really believe that people on a suicide mission with their faces covered with masks would take there ID cards and then conveniently leave them behind in the car?
This is of the same order as Mohamed Atta’s passport recovered from the World Trade Centre rubble in September 2001.
This claim was made by New York Police Chief Norm Kelly on CNN.
Let us consider this is slow motion. The world was told that the heat from the fire that “engulfed” the building was so intense when the plane slammed into it that it melted the steel columns causing the building to collapse.
If so, how could the paper passport survive? And Atta on a suicide mission took his passport with him?
We were even told two days after 911 by Dan Rather of CBS, no less, that an “Arabic” flying manual was recovered from Mohamed Atta’s car at Logan airport parking lot.
Are there flying manuals in Arabic? Further, what good would a flying manual be to a would-be hijacker if he leaves it in his car!
Let us return to the Paris attackers. If they were so competent that they could carry out a professional operation on an office in the heart of Paris with their faces covered, how could they leave behind an ID card?
What would someone’s ID card be doing on a car seat?
Western regimes need to come clean and confess that they are the real accomplices in these criminal activities with the express aim of clamping down hard on people’s freedoms because an increasing number of citizens are waking up to the crimes and theft of people’s resources they are involved in.
THE WEST’s PART IN THE CREATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF DEVELOPMENT OF “ISLAMIST TERRORISM”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-pan-isl...sm/5596239
It should be clear by now to even the most disinterested global spectator to the protracted carnage of the Syrian Civil War that the governments of the Western world led by the United States of America have instigated and sustained an insurrection against a sovereign country through the use of Islamist proxies. It should also be clear to those who are adequately informed by a suitable range of media sources, that many of the terror attacks which have occurred in both American and Western European locations have been carried out by individuals who have been under the radar of Western security agencies.
Further, the Syrian and other conflicts instigated by the West have created the basis for influxes of refugees as well as new avenues of transit for economic migrants bound for Western Europe. The incessant bombing of Muslim lands for a continuous period of over a decade and a half continues to provide the basis for radicalising segments of the Muslim world. America’s role in the Syrian conflict is risking a war with Russia, a nuclear armed power, which at the invitation of the legitimate government of Syria, is part of a coalition involving both Iran and Hezbollah that is attempting to suppress the Islamist insurgents.
Yet, among the population of Western countries, there remains a perplexing mixture of ignorance and indifference about the policy of their governments calculated use of “Islamic militants” both at home and abroad. Unless a strong consensus arises in the form of dedicated mass protest movements by informed members of their populations and pressure is brought by coalitions of principled and non-partisan political actors, the West will continue to embroil itself in an enduring series of conflicts in the Muslim world.
The moral, financial and security ramifications are clear: the continuing cycle of human destruction, the ever increasing risk of terror atrocities, the burdens imposed by military expenditure as well as the threats to social cohesion caused by migration from affected countries, cumulatively represent a self-inflicted conundrum from which it will become difficult to be extricated unless there is a radical overhaul of Western foreign policy.
Much of the public debate in the United States about the rise of groups such as the so-called Islamic State often takes a partisan slant. For those to the political Right, former US President Barack Obama is the author of the Syrian crisis, while others prefer granting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the dubious accolade of being the ‘Godmother of ISIS’. On the other hand, those on the political Left blame George W. Bush for the Syrian conflict on the basis that the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the subsequent sectarian-orientated turmoil led to the development of a range of extremist Sunni Islamist militias. Many of them were linked to the al Qaeda franchise and metastasized most prominently into the Jabhat al Nusra Front and IS.
Another important part of the public discourse, inevitably heightened in the aftermath of the occurrence of each terror atrocity committed in North America or in Western Europe, relates to the issue of whether Islam can be considered to be an ethically sound religion. The consensus among many in the political classes and the media is to insist that terror attacks are perpetrated by a tiny minority of the earth’s reputed 1.6 billion Muslims, while a significantly vocal part of the public contend that the history of Islamic expansion as well as the philosophy of violence expressed by prominent Islamist groups mark it out as anything but a ‘religion of peace’.The debate on Islam is frequently concerned with whether Muslims are assimilable in Western society with the microscope firmly focused on the amount of Muslim refugees seeking or gaining entrance to North American and Western European destinations.
While each aspect of these debates are important in their own right, the compartmentalized nature of the discourse arguably serves as a useful device which distracts the public from grasping the broader picture. For one, attempting to fix the blame for the rise of certain notorious Islamist militias on particular political figures for partisan reasons only serves to obscure the very lengthy history of Western support for militant Islamic groups.
The often bitter exchanges after terror attacks are dominated by issues related to whether Muslim communities resident in the West are sufficiently loyal to their countries of residence. Getting lost in the thicket of argument and counter-argument is a disturbingly consistent feature of many perpetrators having been monitored by relevant state intelligence agencies.
In a similar vein, the worries about Western-bound Muslim refugees tend to disconnect from Western culpability in what may be termed coercive engineered migration. Thus the overall effect of these partisan accusations and disputes present a useful distraction from scrutinising the prevailing overarching policy as well as enabling politicians and security officials to escape accountability for creating the conditions which have brought Islamic fundamentalist terror to the streets of their towns and cities.
Understanding history is important. The role of the United States and its allies in facilitating the weaponising of Islam as a means of obtaining dubious geo-political advantage is a longstanding one. When Wesley Clark, a retired US four-star general admitted that ISIS had been created “with funding from our friends and allies to fight Hezbollah to the death”, on the basis that only fanatics and not idealist-minded recruits could be sufficiently motivated to do so, he was harking to a sentiment long-held by the West in its dealings with the Middle East.
The use of Islamic soldiers was one embraced by Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS, who in a January 1944 speech referred to Islam as a “practical and attractive religion for soldiers”. Its promise of paradise and beautiful women to the martyrs of battle was, Himmler felt, “the kind of language a soldier understands”. Three decades earlier, the use of “medieval thinking” and “superstitious” Mahometans as guerrilla proxies was an idea latched onto by Kaiser Wilhelm II during the First World War as part of the German strategy of revolutionspolitik. This was a policy aimed at encouraging subversion and revolution in the vulnerable regions within the empires against which Germany was waging Welt Kreig.
It was applied by allowing Vladimir Lenin to travel through German territory on a sealed train so that he could reach Russia where he could foment chaos through a Bolshevik uprising and give Germany an advantage on its eastern front. The Germans also scored their prisoner of war camps for Ukrainian prisoners whom they trained and indoctrinated to form an anti-Tsarist ukrainian nationalist army.
The Germans unsuccessfully attempted to apply it by inciting rebellion among the millions of Muslims living under British rule and in the areas bordering British territories. Pamphlets calling for Muslims to form cells which would kill combatant and non-combatant Christian Europeans in the name of jihad were produced.
It was a theme which was fictionalised in the John Buchan novel Greenmantle which was published in 1916. In the book, the character Sir Walter Bullivant, claims that “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other”.
But it did not end in fiction and would not be the exclusive preserve of Germany geo-strategy. British policy-makers saw jihad as means through which Britain could advance its interests against its adversaries. It would use the Ikhwan, the formidable fighting force of the second Saudi emirate to weaken the Ottoman hold on the Arabian Peninsula. The fact that Ibn Saud’s followers were, according to Winston Churchill, “bloodthirsty” and “intolerant” underscored the Ikhwan’s fitness for purpose. The intelligence services of Britain would go on to establish an enduring relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood soon after it was created in the late 1920s.
American support for militant Islamism goes back at least to the 1950s when the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the Muslim Brotherhood as a proxy force in the United States’ ideological war against Soviet communism. The Egyptian-originated organisation was utilised in an effort to undermine the secular government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser which had gravitated to the Soviet Union to acquire military arms and technical expertise for development projects.
The Soviet-Afghan war (December 24, 1979 – February 15, 1989) (Source: WideShut.co.uk)
This ploy of using Islamic combatants lay at the heart of ‘Operation Cyclone’. Among the longest and most expensive of covert operations undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency, it involved funding, arming and training Afghan Mujahideen as a means of weakening the Soviet military after the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
It was the brainchild of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the US National Security Advisor to the administration of President Jimmy Carter, but continued by the succeeding administration of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan extended an invitation to key members of the Mujahideen to visit the Oval Office of the White House where they were given a cordial reception at which they were photographed with the president.
While on a state visit to Pakistan in October of 1981, the British Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher, made her way to the Pakistani-Afghan border where she told a gathered group of Mujahideen leaders that “the hearts of the free world are with you”.
A few years after the September 11 atrocity, the Bush administration formulated a re-direction in a Middle Eastern policy geared towards aiding Sunni militants espousing the same Pan-Islamic ideology as al Qaeda as a means of undermining the secular government of Bashar al Assad of Syria.
The Obama administration followed this policy first in its support for the Nato action that led to the overthrow of the secular government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and secondly, in the decision to utilise jihadists in the attempt to overthrow the Assad government under the cover of the so-called Arab Spring. The latter enterprise was undertaken over the objections of several senior military officers at the Pentagon including the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency.
It is important to note that the French government, then led by President Nicolas Sarkozy, took the lead in instigating the Libyan uprising and that the Cameron government of Britain provided special forces soldiers to train and direct operations undertaken by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and al Qaeda-affiliated organisation.
This policy is still intact under the Trump administration. After all, any attack against the Syrian military such as was the case with the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles after a dubious allegation of a chemical attack on civilians and the recent shooting down of a Syrian Air Force jet by an American warplane, is intended to weaken it in the fight against Islamist insurgents. These actions by the United States, including the episode of the alleged mistaken killing of over 60 soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army while it was attempting to dislodge al Nusra fighters from the city of Aleppo all tend to confirm the thesis of the United States functioning as the unofficial air force of the Islamist insurgents.
It is a policy that will be sustained given the continuing priority accorded to the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia. Donald Trump’s decision to make his first foreign visit as president to the desert kingdom, the home of the Wahhabi doctrine of Islam which serves as the inspiration for Islamist death squads in Syria and Islamic terrorists striking at innocent people in the West, is rather telling.
Trump’s castigation of the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran as the “world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism” reeks of deceit and hypocrisy. It is contradicted by a 2013 report by the European Parliament which identified Sunni Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism and a leaked admission by Hillary Clinton that the Saudis “have exported more extreme ideology than any other place on earth”. Indeed, none of the bombs, bullets or blades used in any of the terror attacks carried out in the West since 9/11 have been done in the name of Iran or Hezbollah. They have been carried out by Sunni extremists influenced by Wahhabist teachings.
The United States has of course acted as the overseer of Saudi funding for Syrian jihadists even though Iran, together with the Syrian Arab Army and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have soldiers dying every day in the fight against extremists of the sort US Senator John McCain has cosied up to during illegally arranged visits to Syrian territory.
Abdel Hakim Belhadj (credits to the owner of the photo)
McCain, who serves as the Chair of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, was photographed handing Abdel Hakim Belhadj, the leader of the now defunct Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, with an award in recognition for his part in the overthrow of the Gaddafi government. Echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words of support for the Mujahideen, McCain heaped praise on Belhadj and his group for being fighters in the cause of freedom. And just as several of the groups headed by the warlords Thatcher addressed would form the basis of al Qaeda and the Taliban, so it has been the case that Belhadj became a leading commander of ISIS in Libya.
The Saudis are not alone among America’s Middle Eastern allies in having enabled the Syrian insurrection. Other Gulf Cooperation Council states, most notably Qatar, have played a part as indeed has Turkey – all confirmed by the former US Vice President Joseph Biden. The Syrian rebels have also received support from the state of Israel through cash disbursements, arms supplies and medical assistance. The motivation for the West’s seeking to destroy secular governments such as that of Syria further than the banal rationale of overthrowing a ‘brutal dictator’ skirts over the issue of wanting to build a pipeline from the Gulf through to Turkey via Syria. The fundamental objective of the West in ensuring Israel’s continued regional hegemony is rarely mentioned even though this has been attested to by Roland Dumas, a former French foreign minister, and a leaked email of Hillary Clinton’s which revealed her thinking to be that the overthrow of Assad would help the Israelis in so far as combating the perceived threat posed by Iran.
The debates which center on Muslim extremists growing into a security threat fail to maintain a decent level of scrutiny on the performance of Western intelligence services in the preventing such threats. It should be of great concern to any American citizen that a report published three years ago by Human Rights Watch and Columbia University claimed that all but four of the domestic terrorist incidents occurring in the United States in the decade after the 9/11 attacks were carried out during sting operations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In other words, most of the attacks involved people who were informers or double agents working for the FBI.
The report did not cover the dubious circumstances involving a paid informant infiltrating the group which built the bomb used for the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, and it excluded the case of Tamerlan Tsarmaev who had not only been on a watchlist and surveilled by the FBI, but who many suspect to have been an informer.
A similar pattern can be seen in Britain where the security services under the watch of Theresa May as both home secretary and prime minister allowed Islamists whose names were on terror watchlists, under surveillance and in some circumstances under control orders (a form of house arrest under UK anti-terror laws), to travel around the European Union and the Middle East with impunity so long as they promised to overthrow secular Arab leaders such as Gaddafi in Libya and Assad in Syria.
This is mirrored in France where, for instance, Mohamed Merah, the man who allegedly carried out terror shootings in Toulouse and Montauban, was claimed by the former head of France’s now defunct Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) to have been a double agent and informer for Direction Centrale du Renseignement Interieur (DCRI), the state intelligence organisation tasked with counter-terrorism and counter-espionage.
It is also worth noting that the terror outrages in London in July of 2005 and in Madrid in March of 2004 involved suspected radicals belonging to al Qaeda-inspired cells who had previously been under state surveillance. While the official argument of strained resources is often brought up as a blanket excuse, the recurrence of these scenarios point to a criminally negligent pattern of handling the surveillance of potential terrorists as well as the reckless managing of informers who ‘go rogue’. And given what is known of certain ‘black operations’ conducted in Western Europe during the Cold War era which had the purpose of manipulating public feeling through acts of terror, a more sinister interpretation cannot be ruled out.
The issues of state facilitation of islamist militias as well as the mishandling of terror suspects ought to raise the concerns of politicians and citizens sufficiently enough to form the basis of hearings by state legislative bodies and pave the way for the setting up of public inquiries. Instead the discourse, with the aid of the mainstream media, is guided towards whether the aftermath of each terror attack should result in the incremental loss of the hard won rights and freedoms of the citizenry of the West.
In Britain, the recent spate of attacks have raised the ante to the extent that there have been calls to introduce internment as well as to censor the internet. France is effectively in a permanent state of emergency. All of this despite the fact that despite the blood and pain inflicted by terror, the statistics continue to show that the average person has a far higher chance of being electrocuted by a bolt of lightning or breaking their neck when getting out of bed.
The history of the West’s dalliances with terror groups is pregnant with instances of blowback. It is widely accepted that the implementation of Operation Cyclone as a means of using Islamists as a tool in weakening the Soviet enemy contributed to the formation of al Qaeda and the development of global jihadism. Those who berate others who link the outrages perpetrated by Islamist terrorists in the West to Western foreign policy are not being realistic. Indeed, there is an ineluctable logic to President Assad’s rebuke to the Turkish President Recep Erdogan for supporting the Islamist insurgents who the Turkish authorities allowed to infiltrate Syria:
It is not possible to put terrorism in your pocket and use it as a card because it is like a scorpion which won’t hesitate to sting you at the first opportunity.
The state is compromised but the continued ignorance of many and the seemingly wilful insouciance of the others mean that the people will stand compromised in the judgement of history if they refrain from pressuring their political leaders to change the state of affairs.
P
TAKFIRISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA
John Andrew Morrow
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articl...lamophobia
Although some terrorists who were already prone to extremism have found a comfortable home in Takfiri-Wahhabi literalism, most of them are merely low-life criminals, drug dealers, substance abusers, pimps, pedophiles, rapists, and mentally deranged degenerates. They are the scum of the East and West. They are losers in this life and the hereafter.
Muslims and non-Muslims need to understand that takfiri terrorists have very little to do with Islam beyond a veneer of public ritualism. Although some of them have been brainwashed and indoctrinated into Ghetto or Street Salafism, others are just mercenaries out for murder and money. In most of the high-profile cases, the perpetrators were merely pawns. The real criminals were the clandestine operations experts who planned and executed the false flag operations in question.
Takfirism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin. They are both fueled by the same forces. So-called Islamic terror is orchestrated by the same people who are waging the war on Islamic terror. Takfirism and Islamophobia are employed to advance a geopolitical agenda that is both hegemonic and demonic.
In the Muslim East, North Africa, and West Africa, Muslims and non-Muslims are massacred in the name of Islam by people who are generally projected to be Muslims by a crusading mainstream media (since the vast majority of them are “dead by design” before they can be interrogated, their innate motivations are still a mystery). The region is destabilized and depopulated of Muslims and non-Muslims in proxy wars between authoritarian local powers and totalitarian world powers. Hundreds of thousands of deaths are a small price to pay for access to energy resources and reconstruction contracts.
In the Western world, non-Muslims (along with some Muslims) are massacred in the name of Islam by people who are once again projected to be Muslims. The rise of Islamophobia and attacks against thousands of Muslims is but a bonus. It helps to deflect public opinion from the crimes committed by Western powers both at home and abroad. The United States, for example, has killed more than 20 million people in 37 victim nations since World War II.
Non-Muslims denounce attacks against America attributed to Muslims while remaining completely oblivious or even justifying American attacks against Muslims. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted in over one million Muslim deaths. Another half a million Muslims have lost their lives in the US-led “War on Terror” since September 11, 2001. According to the calculations of most experts, there are approximately 100,000 takfiri terrorists in the world. If the Western world has murdered 1.5 million Muslims in their self-professed attempt to eradicate 100,000 terrorists, the “War on Terror” has been a failure: it has become a “War of Terror.”
Threats that are real, and substantial, do not need to be manufactured and concocted. Run-of-the-mill “lone wolf” gun violence is so much of a greater threat to Americans than “domestic terror” by every statistical metric that it is almost impossible to overstate the disparity (from 2002–2011, there were approximately 118,000 gun murders in the US as compared to less than 3,000 deaths attributable to terrorism). In that regard, it is not difficult to understand why “domestic terror” and “homegrown extremism” are things the FBI is desperately determined to create.
Informed and conscientious individuals are well aware that Western powers have been in bed with takfiri terrorists for the past century, from the fall of the Ottoman Sultanate to the present, supporting the very criminals they cultivated in the Saudi-financed madrasahs peppered across Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The Evil Empires of the Age are simultaneously supporting and opposing the controlled takfiris who have rained down death and destruction in both the Muslim world and the scorched remains of the Christian world.
At last count, the FBI had over 1,000 ISIS members under surveillance in the United States. The US administration, under both Obama and Trump, refuses to round them up, charge them, prosecute them, and punish them. And while official Washington has preached about a Muslim Ban, it continues to allow ISIS-affiliated criminals the liberty to plot and plan terror attacks against the homeland. Time and again, mass murder is committed on US soil by parties who were both known and surveilled by the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
As much as they may appear critical of the United States, European nations clearly share the same covert agenda. At last count, Europol reported that there were 5,000 ISIS fighters operating freely in the European Union. Repeatedly, mass murder is committed in Europe and the United Kingdom by parties who were both known and surveilled by European and British intelligence agencies.
Let’s face facts. We live in a surveillance society. Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden have made that abundantly clear. Our governments gather information on all of us. Intelligence agencies like the NSA sniff it all, collect it all, know it all, process it all, and exploit it all. The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe know who the terrorists are. In fact, they know them on a first name basis.
While it may be startling, unnerving or perplexing to most, the US State Department has the names of over 100,000 known terrorists on a secret list. And while it might be more complicated to round up criminals from abroad, it remains within the realm of possibility. What is more, nothing truly prevents the United States from detaining those 1,000 ISIS members, both citizens and residents, who are currently on our soil.
According to the framework of “Countering Violent Extremism,” arrest and prosecution are intended as a measure of last resort. For the so-called experts at the service of the US government, the final goal is helping terrorists to become law-abiding and productive members of society. Rather than show sympathy for the victims of these sub-humans and their satanic persuasion, the proponents of CVE pity the poor little terrorists, and sympathize with the fact that they are mentally traumatized, stigmatized, and ostracized for the crimes they committed or explicitly support.
Rather than focus on engagement, prevention, intervention, interdiction, rehabilitation and integration, Western authorities should reconsider their naive notions, and focus on detention, prosecution, incarceration, or execution. If, as they admit, Western intelligence agencies are tracking thousands upon thousands of bloodthirsty terrorists, why, one must reasonably ask, do they refuse to detain them for reasons of national security? For intelligence analysts, the answer is obvious: the terrorists are at their service. They are valuable assets and useful idiots.
As Phaedrus stated, “Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.” What we are witnessing in the world is all theater. Layers and layers of lies. People just see the puppet patsies. They fail to see the puppet-masters: the Hidden Hand. Unless they open their hearts and minds, the masses of Muslims and non-Muslims will never free themselves from the Matrix.
WHAT LED TO THE BIGGEST TERRORIST ATTACK ON A MOSQUE IN CANADIAN HISTORY
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articl...an-history
The outpouring of sympathy from Canadians for their Muslim neighbors following the terrorist attack on a Quebec City mosque on January 29 has been absolutely stunning. Total strangers have reached out to members of the Muslim community all across Canada to offer condolences and support. This must be unique among people of different faiths across the globe.
In the aftermath of the attack there has also been vigorous debate about the reasons behind the attack. How could this happen in Canada, supposedly this oasis of peace, tranquillity and multiculturalism, many have asked. January 29 has become a wakeup call for Canadians, especially the federal and provincial governments as well as the security agencies.
It should not have been since the far right extremists were on the radar screen and known to intelligence agencies for many years. Successive governments, however, turned a blind eye to the real threat they posed because they were all fixated on the supposed threat from Muslims. Will this tragedy change anything or after a few days of uttering meaningless platitudes, the issue will be shoved down memory’s black hole?
It is interesting to note that whenever radicalization has been mentioned in the Canadian context, it has referred only to Muslims. In fact it has become a global phenomenon. This line of thinking assumes that only Muslims are prone to radicalization. There must be something in their genes that forces them toward extremism or that there is something inherently wrong with Islam.
Unfortunately a number of so-called experts have sprung up in the West prattling on television about radicalization and the threat from terrorism. Since such talks fits into the policy perspectives of the warlords in Western capitals—the neo-cons in Washington and their fellow travelers in Nato—this narrative has been given ample airtime. And then there are the opportunist Muslims—the ‘House negroes’, in the celebrated words of the martyr, Malcolm X—that would do anything to ingratiate themselves to their white masters. These bootlickers have added their own spice to the supposed threat from ‘radicalized Muslim youth’ to the peaceful of life in the West.
Quote:It is interesting to note that whenever radicalization has been mentioned in the Canadian context, it has referred only to Muslims. In fact it has become a global phenomenon.
Several Western governments, including that of Canada, have instituted de-radicalization programs for Muslim youth. A number of Imams in Canada have jumped on the bandwagon offering their services! How many youth they have de-radicalized is not difficult to guess: zero. We say this because according to Canadian security agencies, there are very few radicalized Muslim youth. In the entire province of Quebec with a population of 10 million or more, there are no more than a handful of ‘radical Muslim youth.’ This is not the impression one would get from media accounts though.
In fact, no Muslim has killed anyone in Canada despite the media hype. The only exceptions are the two converts—Martin Couture-Rouleau and Michael Zehaf Bibeau—both from the province of Quebec that were involved in killings on October 21 and October 24, 2014 in Montreal and Ottawa respectively. Couture-Rouleau was on the RCMP radar and his passport had been seized along with some 90 other suspected extremists. He was also under surveillance yet he managed to drive his vehicle into two soldiers after waiting for them in a parking lot for two hours! He was shot and killed.
Bibeau was a drifter. He was thrown out of a mosque in Vancouver, British Columbia when he was heard uttering threats. He moved to Ottawa and was living in a shelter for homeless people in the federal capital. It has still not been explained how he obtained a high velocity rifle with which he shot and killed Corporal Nathan Cirillo standing guard, unarmed, at the Soldiers’ Memorial outside the Parliament Building in Ottawa. Bibeau then ran across the lawn outside the Parliament Building with a rifle in hand and entered the building while there were guards.
He was shot and killed only inside the building. Why he was not incapacitated and arrested to find out the truth? He was known to be mentally unstable. Had he survived, this fact would have become widely known.
But the former prime minister, Stephen Harper, a well known Islamophobe who has done great damage to the Canadian social fabric, jumped on these two killings to ram through parliament Bill C-51 whose provisions specifically target Muslims. Mercifully, Harper was booted out of office in October 2015 but in his 10 years in office, he had caused enough damage whose ramifications were felt by innocent Muslims at prayer in Quebec City Mosque on the night of January 29.
A host of politicians in Quebec also contributed to the anti-Islamic campaign. For them, Muslim women in hijab or niqab were a threat to their way of life. The Parti Quebecoise, the separatist party, as well as the Quebec liberals added their poison against Muslims seeing them as ‘enemies’ while white supremacist groups flourished right under their noses.
There are “more than 100 right-wing groups throughout Canada,” according to Caroline Biotteau of the group, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (January 31, 2017), most of them in the province of Quebec.
Unfortunately, Canadian academics have also generally ignored the rise of white supremacist groups. Among the few exceptions are James Ellis and Richard Parent, of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society. They had warned that Canada was not immune to the rise of far right extremism and it was a mistake to assume that such extremism was confined to Europe or to groups south of the border. They warned of the potential risk for far greater acts of violence from white supremacist groups whose horrific consequences were witnessed on that fateful night of January 29 in Quebec City.
A number of right wing extremist groups can be easily identified. These are the Aryan Guard, Blood and Honour and the Neo-Nazis as well as their Jewish counterpart, the Jewish Defence [Offense] League (JDL). This Zionist group that follows the racist ideology of Kahane Chai, a group banned in Israel, and the JDL that is banned in the US, continues to operate freely in Canada and is even patronized by some politicians. A member of the JDL had accompanied Harper on his trip to Israel.
Now a new group La Meute, “The Wolf Pack”, has emerged in Quebec. The group propagates such nonsense as the invasion of pro-Sharia Islamic radicals that pose an imminent threat to Quebec society. It would be wrong to assume that only this group, that attracted more than 43,000 new social media followers in just over a year, is pushing an Islamophobic agenda. Quebec politicians and French Canadians in general seem to be suffering from an inferiority complex for which they demand a price in blood from Muslims.
Even while some security agencies have pointed to the danger from these right-wing terrorist groups, politicians have turned a blind eye. In the Canadian parliament, there are many committees studying these phenomena.
In one such report in 2015, Sylvain Guertin from the Sûreté du Québec’s [Quebec Police] Division of Investigation on Extremist Threats for the Standing Senate on National Security and Defence, stated: “The majority of the service’s active files deal with the extreme right and, for 25 per cent of the files, with hate crimes”. The same report also attributed slightly less than 25 percent of the active files to Islamic radicalization (italics added).
Given such overwhelming data about white extremist groups, why some politicians and the media’s lurid fixation on Muslim extremist violence? The answer lies in the endless wars that the US and its Nato allies are waging against Muslims in other lands. Since Canada is a member of Nato, it also perpetrates these myths. If Muslims over there are ‘bad’, Muslims over here must also be ‘bad’. Without this policy of demonization, the wars of aggression cannot be successfully sold at home.
There is no better way to describe Western hypocrisy but unfortunately, innocent Muslims have had to pay a steep price!
PARIS MASSACRE : LESSONS THAT NEED TO BE LEARNED BY OUR WAR MAKING GOVERNMENTS
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/news/paris-mas...overnments
It is not Muslims who are the problem but the foreign policies that have helped create terrorism. That is what needs to change. No one can have anything but the profoundest condemnation for the attacks on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. It is reported that 12 people are dead, shot in a commando style attack, and that at least nine of them are journalists.
The magazine has recently published a cartoon of the Islamic state leader, and has a record of publishing anti-Islamic satire. The gunmen are assumed to be in some way connected with Islamic State (ISIS).
There can be no justification for the attack. It should be possible to satirise or to criticise ideas without this being something that can result in death or injury. There must, however, be a response to it that does not lead either to an increase in future terrorist attacks or in a rise in attacks on Muslims.
Neither outcome, unfortunately, is likely if responses so far and in the past are anything to go by.
The one effective response to such attacks would be to change foreign policy, which has helped to create precisely the terrorism that it now abhors. ISIS has grown in Iraq and Syria as a consequence of the failed wars there. The instability created in Iraq as a result of western intervention, the backing of a sectarian and oppressive government by the occupiers, and the current air strikes which are helping to win support for ISIS, have all contributed to the strengthening of this organisation. ISIS has received weapons and money from the Saudis and Qataris, has grabbed weapons provided by the west for other anti Assad groups, and has received material support from Turkey.
These are precisely the western allies -- Turkey also being a Nato member -- who sign up for the ‘war on terror’ but practice something different. The interventions they supported have greatly increased instability, for example in Libya where the British and French led bombing in 2011 continues to result in bitter civil war and conflict. The prediction made by, among others, former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller that the war on Iraq would lead to a much greater threat of terrorism has unfortunately proved to be the case.
In recent years France, under presidents Sarkozy and Hollande, has played an increasing role in these interventions. That the wars are all blamed on Muslims ignores the fact that the Libyan groups and ISIS are of course in large part fighting other Muslims. The refugees coming out of Syria, left on crewless boats to sink or swim in the Mediterranean, are also Muslims.
The consequences of the wars, with hundreds of thousands dead and many more refugees, have incensed people around the world. The large marjorities in western countries who have opposed these interventions have been ignored by their warmongering governments.
Muslims have also faced a growing level of racism and prejudice, see in the rise of far right parties, the restrictions on Muslim dress, the infringements of civil liberties, and the branding of all Muslims as somehow extremists or proto terrorists.
In France, there is a very strong far right party in the shape of the Front National, and the country has legislated some of the worst restrictions on Muslims -- for example over wearing the hijab. In Germany, the anti Islamic Pergida demonstrations have linked Muslims to crime. Levels of racism in Britain have grown, focussed both on immigrants and on Muslims.
The latest attack will lead to a greater backlash and greater levels of Islamophobia. But it is not Muslims who are the problem but the foreign policies that have helped create terrorism. That is what needs to change.
ON THE RECENT EVENTS IN PARIS
Dr.Abdul Wahid
http://www.hizb.org.uk/current-affairs/d...s-in-paris)
In the aftermath of the events in Paris, with perpetrators still on the run, the West’s press and politicians have set a narrative across the world – that the journalists at Charlie Hebdo were killed as part of a war on free speech and as such they died as martyrs.
We could go around in circles with arguments and counter arguments. ‘Had there been no provocation there would have been no backlash’ versus ‘violence is never justified when insulted’.
One thing is for sure, in my view. Had any government in the Muslim world taken a robust stand on the on-going insults to the Prophet – peace be upon him – threatening diplomatic action or to cut trade relations over the insulting depictions – I do not believe individuals would feel the frustration to retaliate. This is one of the reasons why calls for the restoration of a legitimate Islamic polity in the Muslim world continue to resonate so strongly amongst Muslims globally – to return stability and independence to the region.
But those who blame Islam for these killings say that like all religions it needs critiquing.
In that case, let me offer a critique of the modern secular ‘religion’ of liberalism – but with less crudeness and fewer insults than normally accompanies many ‘critiques’ of Islam.
France’s claim that free expression is a ‘fundamental principle’ of the Republic is a myth. For in France free expression is for some but not for others. Women are fined for wearing niqab – or banned from education for wearing hijab. Even at Charlie Hebdo, upheld as a bastion of free speech, this ‘fundamental principle’ was set aside to appease domestic political sensitivities when they sacked their own cartoonist Maurice Sinet for refusing to apologise for his biting item about Nicholas Sarkozy’s son, which appeared to denigrate him for marrying Jewish heiresses for money.
Similarly, when the French Prime Minister previously stated that the cartoons published by the magazine in 2011 were “expressed within the confines of the law and under the control of the courts”, he ought to have been reminded that the French senate passed a bill around the same time outlawing the denial of any genocide recognised by French law – restricting expression under the law and through the courts for political reasons.
”Free speech” is never absolutely “free”. No society has ever said there is an absolute right to say what you want. Laws outlawing speech are all around us. The British government is in the process of introducing legislation that will criminalise everyone from toddlers to parents for saying things that aren’t “British”. It has already criminalised people for insulting British troops. Germany criminalises holocaust denial, despite it remaining legal elsewhere. There are many examples across Europe – and usually applied selectively.
Every society has restricted speech according to their belief and value system. In secular Western society religion is largely unvalued so blasphemy is permitted. Whereas in many other parts of the world, including the Islamic world, religion is a central value and so blasphemy becomes a redline issue, including insulting any of the Prophets of God, starting from the Prophet Adam, to Prophets Moses and Jesus to the Prophet Mohammad (salallahu alaihi wasallam – and Peace be on all of them).
The existence of redlines in different societies should not imply the closure of debate. Certainly not in the case of Islam, which has a centuries-old Islamic tradition to engage in debate, tolerate criticism and hear the critiques of others. But criticism and debate is different to deliberately targeting the insult to others.
The cost to societal harmony from the ‘freedom to insult’ is rarely discussed. This freedom to mock and deride, born out of Europe’s particular dilemma of Church authority, opened the door to the growing disrespect and anti-social behaviour in society – where rudeness is celebrated as a sign of assertiveness, courtesy undervalued as weakness, and all too many people do not respect each other or the law.
Where such “freedoms” were once used to account those in power and prevent the excesses of the state, they are now directed at a community that holds no such status. The freedom to insult the sacred symbols of Islam has become a tool to bully and persecute a minority community – with a rise in the far right and anti-Muslim sentiment.
In this context an ultimatum has been served to Muslims – that it is not enough to say that the capital punishment for insulting the Prophet of Islam should be done after due judicial process by an Islamic authority – and not by ‘lone rangers’. That it is not enough to say that Muslim in a non-Muslim country under a covenant should not be a vigilante, killing people in broad daylight, some of whom had nothing to do with insulting the Prophet.
Rather, what is expected of a Muslim in Europe today is that you bow down before the god of free speech until you accept that every Prophet can be insulted – and you learn to like it or laugh it off!
That is an unacceptable expectation by those who attack Islam. Muslims living in the West have only one option when faced with insults against their beloved Prophet – and that is to speak out. Those who work to remove even that option will fail. They will find we continue to speak out loudly– despite the mockery and hatred.
Those who say we must all be allowed to insult each other freely should realise the resulting society is one where people start to hate each other, even when they tolerate each other. By contrast a society that considers deliberate insult and unnecessary provocation of others something to be avoided, is one where people will live harmoniously despite their varied differences.
The current pattern of state policies, community alienation, provocation and retaliation only fuels fear, intimidation and mistrust – for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. What is needed is more mature debate and intellectual discussion rather than insults, lies and false narratives. And despite the ultimatums put to us, Muslim remain ready for this.
PRO ZIONIST ISLAMOPHOBIC MAGAZINE , CHARLIE HEBDO IN EXPLOITATION MODE
http://www.crescent-online.net/2015/01/p...icles.html
Charlie Hebdo is cashing in on the blood of its slain journalists and cartoonists. And it continues to be as provocative as before realizing that insulting the Prophet (pbuh) sells well because most people have been turned into Islamophobes.
Within hours of hitting newstands across France on Wednesday, the pro-Zionist Islamophobic French magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was sold out, all 700,000 copies of the first run of three million copies. This will be increased to five million copies.
The Islamophobic magazine plans to publish English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Turkish versions as well.
Its regular run is a mere 60,000. Great way to cash in on the blood of slain journalists and cartoonists!
And to continue the provocations, it again published a cartoon of the Prophet (pbuh) although this one was not as offensive as its previous cartoons.
The latest cartoon featured the Prophet (pbuh) with a tear in his eye, holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign under the headline “All is forgiven”.
Last Sunday a million people marched in Paris in “support” of “freedom of expression” but such freedom is only available to those that want to assault Islam and its revered personalities.
The line-up of war criminals leading the march—Benjamin Netanyahu, David Cameron and Francois Holllande etc—was a clear indication that the march had nothing to do with “freedom of expression” per se. It was to assert Western cultural imperialism and colonialism on other societies.
Amid the marchers were also a number of Middle Eastern potentates such as King Abdullah II who has clamped down on a number of websites in his country. Where is the freedom of expression there?
When Tom Willcox of the BBC reporting live from the march asked an Israeli woman about Jews killing Palestinians, there was extremely strong reaction against his question and calls for his resignation!
Willcox was forced to apologize for daring to ask a question at a rally for “freedom of expression”!
Let us repeat this: the march was for “freedom of expression” because it is supposed to be a cherished Western “value”. Let us accept it at face value.
What was so offensive about Willcox’s question that there were calls for his resignation? He merely asked a question about the Jewish oppression of Palestinians.
The argument used against Willcox was that he lampooned all Jews with the murderous Zionists.
Good point. Isn’t this what the West is doing against Muslims all the time? Why are demands being made of Muslims everywhere to condemn the Paris murderers otherwise they would be considered accomplices in their crime?
Even if we ignore the give away signs about the identity of the perpetrators—they were wearing masks to hide their identity but one of them left his ID card in the getaway car!—the claim to uphold “freedom of expression” is completely false.
When comedian Dieudonne Mbala Mbala wrote on his Facebook “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly”, the French police immediately arrested him.
No “freedom of expression” there, right? Mbala is black and he dared point to the contradiction in Western attitudes.
Amedy Coulibaly was involved in kidnapping people at the Jewish shop. He was shot dead together with some of the hostages.
Mbala was mixing the official mantra “Je Suis Charlie” with the slain supermarket gunman.
Charlie Hebdo can insult the Prophet (pbuh) but a comedian cannot even link ‘Charlie’ with the kidnapper!
The French Justice Ministry has opened more than 50 cases against people accused of “condoning terrorism”. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on January 13 that the country was now engaged in a “war on terrorism”.
In a virtual give-away, he said France would strengthen its anti-terrorism laws.
Would strengthened anti-terrorism laws have prevented the Paris attack? The alleged (now dead) gunmen were known to French intelligence. They had been questioned earlier.
The two were also on the US’ no fly watch list. How did they manage to go to Syria to join the terrorists there and then return to France?
And what role did French intelligence as well as the intelligence agencies of a number of other Western countries played—and continue to do so even today—in recruiting terrorists to fight in Syria?
The US, France, Britain, Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan and a host of other countries are complicit in creating these terrorists and must accept responsibility for their murderous attacks.
We must also return to the question of the perpetrators’ identity. Can one really believe that people on a suicide mission with their faces covered with masks would take there ID cards and then conveniently leave them behind in the car?
This is of the same order as Mohamed Atta’s passport recovered from the World Trade Centre rubble in September 2001.
This claim was made by New York Police Chief Norm Kelly on CNN.
Let us consider this is slow motion. The world was told that the heat from the fire that “engulfed” the building was so intense when the plane slammed into it that it melted the steel columns causing the building to collapse.
If so, how could the paper passport survive? And Atta on a suicide mission took his passport with him?
We were even told two days after 911 by Dan Rather of CBS, no less, that an “Arabic” flying manual was recovered from Mohamed Atta’s car at Logan airport parking lot.
Are there flying manuals in Arabic? Further, what good would a flying manual be to a would-be hijacker if he leaves it in his car!
Let us return to the Paris attackers. If they were so competent that they could carry out a professional operation on an office in the heart of Paris with their faces covered, how could they leave behind an ID card?
What would someone’s ID card be doing on a car seat?
Western regimes need to come clean and confess that they are the real accomplices in these criminal activities with the express aim of clamping down hard on people’s freedoms because an increasing number of citizens are waking up to the crimes and theft of people’s resources they are involved in.