The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI agree that the homemade explosive devices that have wreaked havoc in Iraq pose a rising threat to the United States. But lawmakers and first responders say the Bush administration has been slow to devise a strategy for countering the weapons and has not provided adequate money and training for a concerted national effort.
First off, more money for first responders will not prevent bombs from going off in the first place. Not having people around living in your society who try to plant bombs along streets and roads is the only way to prevent IEDs from going off in your society. Yet the reporter thinks it important to report how Washington DC's bomb squad uses trailers as offices whereas LA's bomb squad has a new $8 million building. News flash: The people in LA aren't any safer as a result. Hello Mr. Reporter. You should look a little more critically at self-serving sources of information.
We invaded Iraq. Our troops stayed for years. The locals and their Jihadist allies therefore got lots of opportunities for training and practice on what works. Now the Bush Administration fears they'll put all that practical training to effective use back in America.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who told the Senate last month that such bombs are terrorists' "weapon of choice," said yesterday at a local meeting that President Bush will soon issue a blueprint for countering the threat of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Chertoff's department said in a draft report on IEDs earlier this year that national efforts "lack strategic guidance, are sometimes insufficiently coordinated . . . and lack essential resources."
What does Mr. Chertoff think "strategic guidance" would look like? I'm sure he's not on the clue train for what we most obviously ought to do if we really think Muslim terrorists might start blowing up lots of bombs along busy streets in America. Does anyone have an idea what we ought to do about it? Show of hands? Anyone?
At the risk of stating the obvious: Keep Muslims out of America. If they aren't here they can't blow up bombs here.
Such a diabolical, fiendish plan is beyond the pale back in the halls of the US Department of Homeland Security and way beyond the pale in the White House. My guess is the Democratic National Committee would be horrified (at least publically) at the suggestion. But we already have 300 million people. We don't need any more. Most of the world is not Muslim in any case and therefore a visitor and immigrant ban specifically aimed at Muslims would not put a big crimp on commerce. Plus, a disproportionate amount of economic activity is concentrated among peoples who are not Muslims.
Here is what Mr. Chertoff imagines as elements of a strategy against IEDs:
He said his department has provided $1.7 billion in grants related to the IED threat, trained workers at 16 ports and deployed thousands of new explosives detectors at airports, and plans to increase the screening of small boats and private aircraft that might carry bombers or bombs.
Think about how huge American is. sensors at a handful of locations would provide little protection. Sensor systems do far more to assure the public than they do to provide protection.
Bomb makers who are in America don't need to smuggle bombs in. They can make bombs here. If IED makers make it into the United States with enough funding to go to work they won't need to target airplanes and ports. They'll be able to blow up bombs on very busy packed freeways and tunnels under rivers. The main problem occurs once we get bomb makers inside our borders. Techno-gadgetry in select locations will do little to protect us once that happens.
I think America exists primarily for the people who are already American citizens. I do not think we have a moral obligation to let in anyone who wants to come here. There is nothing morally wrong with trying to protect our way of life from people who believe in very different values and ways of living. I want to live in a relaxed society where security concerns do not require us to look around paranoically at people in airplanes or at boxes that fall off of trucks and lay on the sides of roads. I'm not willing to give that up just so we can pretend that all the peoples of the world share enough common values to all live together in Mayberry RFD.
There's a really really simple way to greatly reduce the Muslim terrorist threat in the West: Keep out Muslims. Instead, Britain lets in Muslims in sufficient number that asylum seekers alone make up a quarter of all suspected terrorists in Britain.
THE government faces new embarrassment over Britain’s porous borders with the revelation that one in four terrorist suspects arrested in Britain is an asylum seeker.
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, there have been more than 1,100 arrests under antiterrorism legislation. While some of the most serious threats come from Al-Qaeda supporters born in the UK, there is new evidence of many suspects exploiting loopholes in the country’s immigration laws.
It was confirmed last week that Muktar Said Ibrahim, one of the bombers involved in the failed suicide attacks of July 21, 2005, was given a passport even though he had convictions for indecent assault and robbery. Gordon Brown has said an applicant in similar circumstances would not now be granted citizenship.
A Home Office analysis of those arrested under antiterrorism laws from 2001 to 2005 found that almost a quarter – 24%, or 232 out of 963 – had previously applied for asylum.
This is what Monty Python called "Getting Hit On The Head Lessons".
Even if Muslim immigration was restricted to educated Muslims that would not eliminate the threat as demonstrated by the recent attempt by Muslim doctors to blow up cars in London and Glasgow.
All eight of the suspects arrested following car bombing attempts in London and Glasgow reportedly were employed or previously employed by Britain's National Health Service.
The suspects, whose names have not been confirmed by police, include one doctor from Iraq and two from India. There are also a physician from Lebanon and a Jordanian doctor and his medical assistant wife. Another doctor and a medical student are thought to be from the Middle East.
These are signs that reality is trying to tell us something. But our elites don't want to hear it.
More generally, the Western countries have plenty of people already. Britain is very densely populated and does not need a larger population. Population increases do not improve the quality of life for the people who are already there. The opposite is the case. So why let in floods of people?
Both doctors were working at UK hospitals and were apparently here legally.
The revelation raises the horrifying prospect that Al Qaeda propaganda is reaching beyond disaffected young Muslims.
"These are highly-educated, articulate and intelligent people," one security source said.
Ignorance, unemployment, and poverty were not needed to drive these Muslim men to terrorism. What our elites do not want to admit: Islam is the root problem.
One of the doctors has a wife and baby.
One of the doctors, the man arrested on the M6, was said to be a Jordanian-born doctor at the North Staffordshire Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent.
He lived with his wife and baby in a rented house in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, where forensic officers were carrying out a detailed search last night.
If Muslims were kept out of the West then the Western countries would have much less risk of terrorism and Western women would be at less risk of oppression and rape.
The British knew some attack was coming up but have far too many Jihadists to watch.
Recently intercepted conversations, known as "chatter", had already alerted them that jihadists were hoping to attack Britain, most probably in a place where many people congregate.
But against a backdrop of 30 current plots, 200 suspected terrorist cells and close to 2,000 known suspects to keep under surveillance, the police and intelligence agencies were unable to pinpoint the exact timing or the targets.
That's the problem with having a large Muslim subpopulation living in your society: Too many wannabe terrorists to watch. Who knows when some group will get up the nerve and get together the supplies they need to carry out an attack? Plus, with so many groups to watch some will not get noticed at all. Attacks are inevitable.
Islamic terrorist groups are targeting university students for recruitment. This latest plot involved two doctors. Well, eventually the terrorists will manage to recruit some engineers or chemists or physicists to build them effective bombs. Or they'll just manage to get an electronic "bomb making instructions for dummies" book off the internet. The bombers in Iraq have gotten much better. The same will happen with the Muslim bombers in Britain.
The British ought to deport the illegal alien Muslims and stop Muslim immigration. The Brits also ought to revoke permanent residency for the non-citizen resident Muslims and deport them as well. Also, do citizenship buy-outs and pay citizen Muslims to leave.
In recent years, Britain has become a hornet's nest of Islamic extremism. The domestic intelligence service MI5 is currently investigating 30 major terror plots in the U.K. and has under surveillance more than 1,600 individuals, who are operating as part of 200 British-based terror networks.[1]In April, British courts convicted an Islamic terror cell of attempting to kill thousands of shoppers at the U.K.'s largest shopping mall, in Bluewater, Kent. Between September 2001 and December 2006, there were 1,166 terrorism-related arrests in the U.K., with more than 400 people charged.[2]
The scale of the problem involving young Islamic extremists in Britain was highlighted in a major 2005 British Foreign Office/Home Office study, "Young Muslims and Extremism." Terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda have found a fertile hunting ground in the U.K., where half of Muslims are under the age of 25, and where there is widespread opposition to the U.S.–British-led war on terror. The report revealed that extremist groups are secretly recruiting well-educated, affluent Muslims from British universities, in addition to impoverished, underachieving Muslims through mosques and prisons. Former MI5 Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller estimates that more than 100,000 British citizens consider the July 2005 London attacks "justified."
Highly educated terrorists. Education is not a panacea that makes everyone into a secular liberal.
LONDON, June 30 — One day after the British police discovered what they called a double car-bombing plot in London, two men slammed a Jeep S.U.V. that caught fire into the departure doors at Glasgow Airport as thousands of people awaited flights on the first day of school summer vacations.
Watching the vehicle burn on TV it looks like it has a large quantity of flammable materials. But the materials were not packaged in a way that could cause explosive burning that would kill lots of people. The Muslims in Britain do not yet have the level of skills that the Muslims in Iraq have for causing mayhem. That is likely a learning curve that they'll be going up.
One of the attackers was engulfed in flames.
Police subdued the driver and a passenger, both described by witnesses as South Asian—a term used to refer to people from Pakistan, Afghanistan and other countries in the region—arresting them and taking one to the hospital. Witnesses said one of the men was engulfed in flames and spoke "gibberish" as an official used a fire extinguisher to douse the fire.
William Rae of Strathclyde Police said in a news conference that the police had no indication that Glasgow was targeted. With a large Muslim subpopulation how can the British police watch them all or even a substantial minority of them? Police surveillance is very labor intensive.
The string of attempted and successful attacks continues. In this latest round so far 2 vehicles were found near a London night club before they were detonated and this third vehicle went off at Glasgow airport but not very effectively. They do not yet have the technical ability characteristic of, say, Jihadists in Iraq. But we should expect them to learn from their mistakes and develop better bombing methods.
Another thought: The danger in Britain isn't limited to Londonistan. The whole country can get ruined by Muslim immigration.
Police have confirmed they are now investigating the discovery of two car bombs in the West End of London.
Police said the second device had been found in a Mercedes hours after the car was given a parking ticket in Cockspur Street and towed to Park Lane.
Another Mercedes, with a bomb made up of 60 litres of petrol, gas cylinders and nails, had been found outside a nightclub in Haymarket at 0130 BST.
As demonstrated recently with their horrible proposal on immigration reform, America's Imperial Senate does not place much importance on border security or on controlling who gets to live in America. But if we do not want to live in Jihadist front line battle cities like London has become we need to force the Imperial Senators to stop pretending that all the peoples of the world would make good American citizens.
The discovery of two bombs, doubling the available forensic evidence available to the police, strengthened speculation among counterterrorism experts that the devices — based on a simple technology but capable of causing great harm — were the work of a cell with links to jihadist groups keen to signal their continued commitment to extremism.
Separationism is the answer. France shows on a smaller scale what we could do: Pay Muslims to go back where they came from. Go home. Yes, pay Muslims to leave.. Of course, the illegal immigrants ought to get rounded up and booted out with no pay. But legal resident and citizen Muslims could be offered buy-outs like corporations do when downsizing.
None of the terrorists recently arrested for a plot to kill people at Fort Dix in New Jersey is from Iraq. The war in Iraq did not deter these Muslim immigrants from plotting to attack a US military facility. All the plotters were foreign-born and hence would not be in the United States if we didn't let them enter the United States in the first place.
The narrative of a foiled terror plot spelled out in the federal complaint issued yesterday by officials in New Jersey is full of tiny moments that are clearly chilling yet undeniably strange. Certainly, the 27-page document describing a plot to kill soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey stands out as one of the more detailed descriptions to emerge so early in a terrorism case during the last few years.
While the document paints a picture of a bloody-minded, though occasionally unsophisticated, plot, it is worth recalling that acts of terror — even deadly ones — have often included glaring strategic flaws in the past. One of the terrorists in the 1993 scheme to destroy the World Trade Center, in fact, returned to a rental office to claim his deposit for the truck that carried explosives into the complex’s garage.
The current case came to light in early 2006 when the suspects — four ethnic Albanians, three of them brothers; a Jordanian; and a Turk — asked their local video store to transfer their own improvised jihadist videotape to DVD and a representative of the store called the authorities. Within weeks, federal agents managed to infiltrate the group with an informer who recorded them with apparent ease — at home, in their cars and on the phone for more than a year.
If we didn't let them come here they wouldn't be here to shoot people or explode bombs.
Half of the suspects are illegal aliens and they are all foreign born.
Q: Who are the suspects?
A: They are men in their 20s. All are Muslims born outside the United States and four are ethnic Albanian. Five live in New Jersey and one in Philadelphia. One is a U.S. citizen, two are legal residents and three are in the country illegally. They have had jobs installing roofs, working as clerks at stores and driving taxis. Some of the men have wives and children.
Why weren't they satisfied to live in the land of opportunity and work at jobs?
The neoconservatives and assorted deluded liberals in the Clinton Administration believed that if we sided with the Muslim Albanians and against the Orthodox Christian Serbs over Kosovo that our doing so would make Muslims all over the world more favorably disposed toward the United States. So the US came down on the side of the Albanians and painted the Serbs as vicious killers. But pro-Muslim US policy in the Balkans did not sway these Albanian Muslims to love America.
Serdar Tatar got the idea of attacking Fort Dix by delivering pizza there.
Q: Why did they target Fort Dix?
A: One of the suspects, Serdar Tatar, had delivered pizza on the base and said he knew it like the back of his hand, Christie said.
The liberal universalists still think their Muslim appeasement strategy can work. The Democratic Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wants to make Kosovo into a state in order to make the Jihadists like the West.
At the hearing, titled The Outlook for the Independence of Kosova (the Islamic and dhimmi spelling of the province), Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee said the following:
"Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led government[s] in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe. This should be noted by both responsible leaders of Islamic governments, such as Indonesia, and also for jihadists of all color and hue. The United States principles are universal, and in this instance, the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe."
Liberal universalism leads liberals to support the creation of Muslim countries in Europe. That's universalism? I want no part of it.
Lawrence Auster responds to Lantos and the Fort Dix plotters.
Well, gosh all mighty, the jihadists of the world, especially the Albanian jihadists, sure are taking note of the great favor we've been doing for Albanian Muslims these last few years as we've pushed for the creation of an Albanian Muslim state in Kosovo. Of the six Muslim men arrested in the plot to attack the Fort Dix, New Jersey U.S. Army base and mass murder U.S. servicemen, four are ethnic Albanians.
Yep. Telling Muslims that we just love the spread of Muslim power and the establishment of Islamic states in the West sure is a smart way to make jihadists feel all warm and cuddly toward us and stop wanting to spread Muslim power and create Muslim states in the West!
Larry points to a post by Carol Iannone where Carol explains why liberal universalism and diversity are the enemy of our national identity and of respect for our history.
Believe it or not, it's really not surprising that a professor has got himself into trouble by emailing George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation to his college community. Many, perhaps most, Americans do not realize how thoroughly our national identity has been reconstituted as DIVERSITY. I don't mean that we are more diverse as a people, which is obvious, but that our very essence, our very raison d'etre, our very identity as a nation has become diversity. This has arisen from the multiculturalism of the Left which seeks to destroy any idea of a common culture and favors our dissolution into subcultures, but also, ironically, gains support from the universalism of the Right.
If as the Right holds, our American ideals are universal and require no cultural underpinnings or even any historical basis, but are applicable to all humanity everywhere right now, and it is racist and condescending even to think otherwise, it can be perceived as something of an insult to act or speak in any manner whatsover as if we might actually have a specific historic culture, or even that our ideals might have had some specific historical embodiment. Such a position can imply that other histories and cultural formations might not as readily support the ideals of liberal self-government and this must be utterly forbidden. Yes, those from militaristic, authoritarian, oligarchic, hierarchic, mandarin, feudal, and tribal cultures are entitled by our current fictions to believe that their historical backgrounds are equally conducive to the realization of democratic idealism, because of its absolute, apodictical universality. Likewise, since the ideals are universal, no special homage is due to America or to our American heroes for realizing them in fact.
Liberal universalism holds that Iraqis love freedom as much as we do. Liberal universalism holds that Muslims in the Balkans have a culture that is just as supportive of freedom of speech and religion as we do. This is madness.
More Muslims in Europe are turning toward the path of jihad and terrorism against non-Muslims.
ZUTPHEN, Netherlands -- On the surface, the young Dutch Moroccan mother looked like an immigrant success story: She studied business in college, hung out at the pub with her friends and was known for her fashionable taste in clothes.
So residents of this 900-year-old river town were thrown for a loop last year when Bouchra El-Hor, now 24, appeared in a British courtroom wearing handcuffs under an all-encompassing black veil. Prosecutors said she had covered up plans for a terrorist attack and wrote a letter offering to sacrifice herself and her infant son as martyrs.
The Washington Post article uses this Dutch Moroccan (i.e. Muslim) as an example of an improbable terrorist. Well, granted men are more likely to embrace jihad than women. But some women do it. Muslim women aren't automatically safe to be around just because they are women.
People in Zutphen may have been surprised, but terrorism suspects from atypical backgrounds are becoming increasingly common in Western Europe. With new plots surfacing every month, police across Europe are arresting significant numbers of women, teenagers, white-skinned suspects and people baptized as Christians -- groups that in the past were considered among the least likely to embrace Islamic radicalism.
Teenagers are unlikely to embrace Islamic radicalism? If they are Muslim teenagers it goes with the territory. If someone is baptized as Christian that does not make them immune to conversion to other religions. Once they become Muslims their embrace of jihad is a pretty small intellectual step.
Islam is not a religion of peace. The Western peoples should separate their societies from Muslims. Europeans could pay Muslims with residency rights to leave Europe. Illegal alien Muslims should just get deported.
A former sailor in the US Navy has been charged with activities in support of terrorism.
HARTFORD, March 8 — When Hassan Abujihaad was a sailor on a United States Navy destroyer in 2001, federal prosecutors said, he began exchanging e-mail messages with a man who ran an Internet site seeking to raise money for terrorist causes.
I found a web site that claims "Abu" means holy man or saint but that it is common practice to use "Abu" to refer to fathers. So this guy's name, Abu (father) Jihaad (holy war) is father of holy war. That is probably the chosen name of a convert since he's also referred to in news stories as Paul R Hall.
Mr. Abujihaad initially contacted the administrators of the Web site to buy DVDs that promoted Muslim separatist fighting in Chechnya and elsewhere, the authorities said. But in 2001, he shared information about his ship’s whereabouts and vulnerabilities, according to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice.
The US government claims he was telling a British Muslim web site operator when his destroyer passed through the Straits of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. That web site operator, Babar Ahmad, is a British Pakistani who the United States government wants to extradite from Britain to put on trial in the US for raising funds for terrorism.
The investigation into Babar Ahmad turned up emails from Abujihaad.
In July of 2001, referring to the attack on the USS Cole, Abujihaad writes in an e-mail: "I am a Muslim station on board a U.S. warship currently operating deployed to the Arabian Gulf. It shall be noted before Osama's latest video was viewed by massive people all over the world. That psychological anxiety had already set in on the America's forces everywhere. All this is due to the martyrdom operation against the USS Cole."
The Western countries should stop letting Muslims immigrate and should deport the vast majority of non-citizen Muslims already here. Also, citizen Muslims should be offered money to give up their citizenship and to move to Muslim majority nations. Oherwise we are going to witness the continued development of Muslim parallel societies in the West.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, chief of Britain's internal security agency MI5, gave a speech at Queen Mary College, London, where she said large numbers of Muslims in Britain are plotting terrorist attacks in Britain and 30 plots are underway.
What I can say is that today, my officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don't know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas. The extremists are motivated by a sense of grievance and injustice driven by their interpretation of the history between the West and the Muslim world. This view is shared, in some degree, by a far wider constituency. If the opinion polls conducted in the UK since July 2005 are only broadly accurate, over 100,000 of our citizens consider that the July 2005 attacks in London were justified.
She says more Muslims in Britain are becoming radicalized.
What we see at the extreme end of the spectrum are resilient networks, some directed from Al-Qaida in Pakistan, some more loosely inspired by it, planning attacks including mass casualty suicide attacks in the UK. Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow's threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the Internet.
Many of the plots link back to Al Qaeda in Pakistan. Pakistan really seems like it has become terror central now that most Al Qaeda people have fled Afghanistan.
We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy. What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer thirty - that we know of. These plots often have links back to Al-Qaida in Pakistan and through those links Al-Qaida gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale. And it is not just the UK of course. Other countries also face a new terrorist threat: from Spain to France to Canada and Germany.
A word on proportionality. My Service and the police have occasionally been accused of hype and lack of perspective or worse, of deliberately stirring up fear. It is difficult to argue that there are not worse problems facing us, for example climate change... and of course far more people are killed each year on the roads than die through terrorism. It is understandable that people are reluctant to accept assertions that do not always appear to be substantiated. It is right to be sceptical about intelligence. I shall say more about that later.
But just consider this. A terrorist spectacular would cost potentially thousands of lives and do major damage to the world economy. Imagine if a plot to bring down several passenger aircraft succeeded. Thousands dead, major economic damage, disruption across the globe. And Al-Qaida is an organisation without restraint.
Muslims aren't being persecuted in Britain. Many of them live off of the welfare state while marrying their cousins. They are moving away from assimilation. They've achieved such concentrations in cities that they can and do construct parallel societies. Even though they are not personally persecuted they dream up delusions that the West is in a war to wipe out Islam and away they go with plans to blow up trains, planes, and buses. Sometimes they succeed. As more convert to the Jihad path more will succeed.
Domestic Muslim terrorism in Western countries is nature's way of telling us that Muslim immigration is a really bad idea. The solution? Steve Sailer says pay Muslims to give up their citizenship in Western countries and go back to their ancestral countries. Sounds like a good idea to me. The West and Islam are not compatible. We should separate the West and Islam from each other.
Britain is harvesting the bitter fruits of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.
LONDON, Sept. 2 -- Authorities arrested 16 people early Saturday in two unrelated anti-terrorism operations in London and Manchester, reflecting growing concern over the threat of homegrown Islamic extremism in Britain.
The larger operation, in London, resulted in the arrests of 14 suspects, including some who were seized when police raided a Chinese restaurant south of the Thames River. Scores of police officers backed by helicopters also searched the 54-acre grounds of an Islamic school in a village southeast of London.
The authroies say the groups in London and Manchester are unrelated to each other and unrelated to the group arrested for plotting to blow up passenger airplanes with liquid explosives.
The guy in charge of Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch in London, Peter Clarke, told a BBC interviewer that British authorities are watching thousands of Muslims as potential supporters of terrorism.
Asked roughly how many people in the UK police were looking at in the belief that they may be involved directly or indirectly in terrorism, Mr Clarke said: "I don't want to go down the numbers game, I don't think it's helpful.
"All I can say is that our knowledge is increasing and certainly in terms of broad description, the numbers of people who we have to be interested in are into the thousands."
When pressed further on the figure, he added: "As I say, that includes a whole range of people, not just terrorists, not just attackers, but the people who might be tempted to support or encourage or to assist."
The United Kingdom is looking more like the Divided Kingdom.
Mr Clarke, interviewed for BBC Two’s Al-Qaeda: Time to Talk?, added: “What we’ve learnt since 9/11 is that the threat is not something that’s simply coming from overseas. What we’ve seen all too graphically and all too murderously is that we have a threat which is being generated here within the United Kingdom.”
The figures provided by Mr Clarke are the highest that any investigator has been prepared to reveal in public, and indicate the pressure faced by police and MI5.
His estimates of possible suspects include not only activists prepared to carry out attacks but the extremist recruiters who find and encourage them and the supporters who house them, raise cash and help them.
Watching that many people has got to be fairly expensive.
The 54 acre grounds of the Jameah Islameah Islamic school at Mark Cross, near Crowborough is suspected as the training site used by terrorist recruiters to radicalize potential recruits.
It used the school grounds, which include a lake and an area of woodland, for survivalist exercises. Young recruits had to listen to extremist lectures on religion and politics.
Police are believed to have intervened after intelligence reports indicated a discernible change in the nature of the rhetoric and language of the alleged recruiters.
Detectives believe that while the group was still being radicalised, no targets had been identified and any possible terrorist attack was a long way off.
An Imam from London bought the school and 54 acres of grounds to enroll all of 9 children.
According to its Ofsted report last year, the school in Mark Cross had only nine boys on its roll, aged from 12 to 15, and inspectors found it failed to provide a satisfactory education.
George W. Bush would have us believe that faith-based educational institutions are automatically institutions for good because they are, well, faith-based. He would also have us believe that Islam is a religion of peace. Never mind that Islam's founder was a military leader and dictator who expanded his religion by conquest and mass murder. Never mind that Muslims are taught all should submit to Islam.
The root problem is Islam and isolation of Muslims from the West is the best defense. No, we can not reform the Muslim religion. No, we can not change its base texts. It is what it is. We should accept it and be honest about its nature when we talk about it. Pretending or hoping that it is something that it is not will not help us any.
Multiculturalism means having to worry about people who buy large numbers of cell phones.
The three men are described as being of Palestinian descent but live in Texas. Police say the three, ages 19, 22, and 23 appear to be naturalized citizens.
One man was driving while the other two were in the back opening the phone packages with box cutters throwing the phones in one box, batteries in another and the packaging and phone charger in another container. The suspects had 1000 other cell phones in the van. There was also a bag of receipts showing that someone was in Wisconsin the day before.
The phones were Nokia TracFones selling for $20 at Wal-Mart.
These young Texas Palestinians were arrested in Caro Michigan on suspicions of terrorist activity.
Concerned that the Mackinac Bridge may have been a target, prosecutors arraigned three Texas men Saturday in Caro on felony terrorism charges after police found about 1,000 cell phones in their van in the Thumb.
Maruan Muhareb, 18, Adham Othman, 21, and Louai Othman, 23, were charged by Tuscola County prosecutors with providing material support for terrorist acts and terrorism surveillance of a vulnerable target, said Sgt. Curtis Chambers of the Tuscola County Sheriff's Department. They were each being held on $750,000 bond Saturday night.
Apparently they were not intending to use the bulk of these phones in the United States.
Police also noted that the men had thrown away many of the phone chargers, indicating that they may have intended to send the phones out of the country because different outlets are used overseas.
How many US soldiers have died in Iraq as a result of Muslims in the United States sending the supplies needed do make bombs?
In Marietta Ohio 20 year olds Ali Houssaiky and Osama Abulhassan were arrested as a result of their TracFone buys and are suspected of taking the microchips out of the phones to be sent abroad.
Assistant Washington County Prosecutor Susan Vessels said Abulhassan and Houssaiky knew the phones were being used for illegal activity. She said the men were found in possession of a list detailing the specific types of phones to buy, based on the kind of microchips they use.
“Mr. Abulhassan made a statement to officers that he knew what they were doing was wrong and that he knew no one would ever use over 600 phones for legal purposes,” Vessels said. “(He also stated) he did not know for sure, but that he believed the phones and chips were being shipped overseas.”
Terrorists aren't the only people who want untraceable communications. Conventional criminals also buy TracFones for anonymity.
Big TracFone purchases are being investigated across the nation.
In an earlier incident, at a Wal-Mart store in Midland, Texas, on Dec. 18, six individuals attempted to buy about 60 of the phones until store clerks became suspicious and notified the police. A Wal-Mart spokesperson confirmed the incident.
The Midland police report, dated Dec. 18 and obtained by ABC News, states: "Information obtained by MPD [Midland Police Department] dispatch personnel indicated that approximately six individuals of Middle-Eastern origin were attempting to purchase an unusually large quantity of tracfones (disposable cell phones with prepaid minutes attached)." At least one of the suspects was identified as being from Iraq and another from Pakistan, officials said.
...
In addition, special agents reported that similar incidents centering on the large-scale purchases of tracfones had been reported throughout the nation — identifying individuals of Middle-Eastern descent as the purchasers."
If we did not accept Muslims as immigrants we would not face this problem.
Export of cell phones can be quite profitable.
But the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are as concerned about phones being resold to finance criminal or terrorist operations, said Kirk Whitworth, Homeland Security spokesman.
Cell phones that can be bought for $20 in the U.S. can bring $200 to $300 in China and Iraq, said Rich Rawlins, deputy director of the Ohio Division of Homeland Security.
The phones also can be reconfigured, by those with the know-how, to make an unlimited amount of free calls from a phone that is difficult to trace, Rawlins said.
I'm surprised by the profit margins. Why can't they buy cell phones more cheaply from Taiwan or Hong Kong?
Sometimes I think the Open Borders advocates defend the transformation of our society because they just want to relieve their boredom. America is full of small towns where nothing much ever happens. Letting in Muslim immigrants allows boring towns like Caro Michigan to become exciting national news stories.
CARO - Taking a break between customers at her family's ice cream parlor on S. State Street, Andrea Downing tried to make sense of news that terrorism suspects were operating in Caro.
"It's just so weird," said Downing, 17. "Nothing ever, ever happens in Caro."
Why live safely when you can create challenges by importing people who hate you? Some members of our society just can't stand to look around and see millions of people living in relative safety and freedom. They want to upset our society and force us to experience scares, ordeals, and injustice.
The British authorities just broke up a big airplane bombing plot.
British authorities said Thursday they had thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up several aircraft heading to the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage, averting what police described as "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
The Muslim terrorists planned to use liquid explosives that wouldn't have been detected in x-rays.
One report had 20 airplanes targetted but other reports put the number at 6 to 10 airplanes.
Unconfirmed media reports said anywhere from six to 10 US commercial airliners had been targeted in the plot.
21 people of mostly Pakistani origin were arrested.
British police hinted that more arrests were likely after 21 people, most of them of Pakistani origin, were detained over an alleged plot to simultaneously blow up US-bound aircraft.
Pre-dawn raids were carried out in London, the west central English city of Birmingham and the Thames Valley area of southeast England after intelligence of what one officer described as a bid to cause 'untold death and destruction
News reports indicate that some were born in Britain to parents of Pakistani descent. Obviously they were able to maintain their Pakistani and Muslim identities to create a more multicultural Britain. Leftist multiculturalists should be pleased.
UK government home secretary John Reid complains British law makes it too hard to stop terrorists.
Mr Reid said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
He complained that as home secretary he was "in a very difficult position", unable to always prosecute individuals due to the difficulty of obtaining "sufficiently cogent admissible evidence for a criminal trial", while facing legal bars against deporting or detaining them.
Reid sees mass migrations of humans as highly problematic.
As leaked to the weekend papers, Mr Reid also said that mass migration in a globalised world was the "greatest challenge facing European governments".
While the mass movement of people provided the potential for greater wealth and opportunity, it also brought insecurity into the heart of communities, he claimed.
The home secretary said that the cold war "froze" the world into a static state in which migration was minimal, ethnic and religious tensions suppressed and national borders inviolable.
Twenty years after its end, Britons were now faced with a world in which insecurity had become "one of the highest concerns of daily living".
"That momentous scale of transition from static to mobile populations makes mass migration and the management of immigration the greatest challenge facing European governments, in my view," he said.
America' elites reject the challenge posed by immigration. They see no evil, hear no evil. It all looks like roses to them.
MARIETTA, Ohio — Investigators in southeast Ohio said they were working to unravel how two Michigan men charged with supporting terrorism came to have airplane passenger lists and airport security information.
Osama Sabhi Abulhassan, 20, and Ali Houssaiky, 20, both of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, were being held at the Washington County jail on $200,000 bond each, which could be raised at an afternoon court hearing. Each was charged Wednesday with money laundering in support of terrorism.
They also admitted to buying 600 phones and selling the phones to someone in Dearborn. They bought pre-paid phones which are favored by cirminals and terrorists since they are less traceable to their owners.
Muslim terrorists are nature's way of telling us that not all cultures and religions are the same, not all are compatible, and not all belong within our borders.
Helping police to infiltrate a terrorist ring can get you labelled a bad Muslim in Canada.
TORONTO – The surprise announcement by a prominent Muslim leader here that he was an informant who helped authorities arrest 17 Muslims on terrorism charges has raised questions in the Muslim community over the ethics of informing versus a responsibility to stop violence.
Since outing himself as an informant who infiltrated and trained with the suspects, Mubin Shaikh has come under harsh criticism by some Toronto Muslims and sparked a debate about how far citizens should go in aiding police investigations, even as he has been hailed as a hero in the mainstream media.
Notice the difference in reactions. The Canadian mainstream sees a hero. Muslims see something else. Multiculturalism is a great way to increase distrust and make consensus impossible.
Is he a moderate Muslim perhaps? Depends on what one means by "moderate". He wants Islamic law in Canada.
Before this, Shaikh was a well-known conservative leader in the Muslim community. He runs a shariah arbitration center and is a fierce advocate for Islamic law, in Canada.
Muslims are nature's way of telling us that multiculturalism is a really bad idea.
Some Muslims figure Shaikh must have manipulated the arrested Muslims to take a path toward terrrorism.
Some wonder whether Shaikh couldn't have dissuaded the terrorism suspects, most of whom are younger than he, from violence. Some accuse him of entrapping the suspects. Some question his motivation - Shaikh claims he was paid C$77,000 (US$68,000) for his work and is owed another C$300,000. Others simply scorn him as a betrayer.
"He was not just an informer in terms of ratting out certain people, he was actually fishing," says Aly Hindy, imam of the Salaheddin Islamic Centre, a mosque several of the suspects attended in Scarborough, an eastern suburb of Toronto. Mr. Hindy said Shaikh's deep knowledge of Islam - he studied for two years in Syria - helped him gain sway over the youngsters.
I can imagine the logic: Better a single Muslim who cooperates with the non-Muslim authorities be considered bad than the larger group of Muslims who saw their primary allegiance for Islam against the non-Muslims.
Remember the Pepsi Generation? In Western countries young radical Muslims are embracing a different way to be hip. The police in Canada have a special term for these politically active and energetic young Muslims. Meet the Jihad Generation.
Such home-grown terrorism is a growing concern, says security analyst John Thompson.
"The cops have a nickname for it - the jihad generation," says Mr. Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto think tank.
So what is this exciting and hip Jihad Generation up to? In Canada the Jihad Generation want to make a big bang.
Jack Hooper, deputy director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said the greatest security threat our country now faces comes from within — from homegrown, made-in-Canada terrorists. Now we know why.
On Friday, following the largest Canadian anti-terrorism investigation since 9/11, police arrested 12 adults (aged 19 to 43) and five minors, charging them with “terrorism-related offences” they said were “inspired by al-Qaida.” Chillingly, all are residents of Canada and most are Canadian citizens. Of the 12 men accused, six are from Mississauga, four Toronto and two from Kingston.
Authorities said they recovered three tonnes of ammonium nitrate — triple the amount used by a homegrown American terrorist in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168. The intended targets? Police wouldn’t say. Speculation includes Parliament Hill, other government offices and the CN Tower.
These are not boring youth. They are ambitious. They aim to make names for themselves.
Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star delivers very bad news to Canadians: Cowering while letting in large numbers of Muslims is not a successful formula for avoiding attacks by evil men. Who'da thunk it?
For everyone who thought Canada could cower in a corner of the planet, unnoticed and unthreatened by evil men — even when the most menacing of a very bad lot has twice referenced this country as a target for attack — take a good, hard look at what's been presented and what's being alleged.
Three tonnes of ammonium nitrate, thrice the amount used by Timothy McVeigh to demolish a government building in Oklahoma City. Cellphone detonators. Switches. Computer hard drive. A 9-mm pistol. Soldering gun. Camouflage gear.
And 17 males — born here or reared here, certainly settled here, some of them little more than children — formally remanded yesterday on terrorism-related charges.
This is all just the beauty of cultures mixing and intermingling But you'll always find those nay sayers who think that letting in large numbers of people from incompatible cultures is going to cause trouble.
Canada's shrinking native population has prompted the country to encourage robust immigration. Canada touts the relative harmony within its society, sometimes in contrast to tensions over immigration in the United States.
Public figures treat references to distinct ethnicities or religions as anathema; police statements on the arrests Friday did not use the word Muslim. But while Canada trumpets this diversity, the arrests supported the warnings of some that the growing ethnic communities can be a source of hidden passions and underground politics.
Canadian multicultural leftistists will surely be happy to learn that the Jihad Generation bombers are very multicultural, hailing from several diverse Muslim countries.
Information that has emerged about the men portrays them as typical of the Toronto metropolitan area, where more than 40 percent of the population is foreign-born, and many born here of immigrant parents. Those charged came from a variety of Muslim countries, including Somalia, Egypt and Pakistan.
The Jihad Generation obviously embraces globalism and multicultural theocracy.
Little except that most of them appeared to be typical Canadian residents from a variety of Middle Eastern backgrounds, with loving families, who kept very much to themselves.
"Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed," RCMP Assistant Commissioner Mike McDonell said Saturday. "They're all residents of Canada and for the most part, they're all citizens," he said.
"They represent the broad strata of our community."
The Jihad Generation of Canada represent a "broad strata" of Canadians. I think I'm out of date with my images of Canada. It doesn't appear to be like the MacKenzie brothers any more. Eh? Check out what the family members of the "broad strata" look like.
We haven't heard the last from the Canadian Jihad Generation. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is watching hundreds of hostile Muslims.
CSIS admitted this week it couldn't track down many domestic terror suspects and warned the country faced an increasing threat from "home-grown terrorists" who had been assimilated into society.
Jack Hooper, deputy director of operations at the CSIS, said the service was trying to keep track of "350 high-level targets" as well as 50 to 60 organizations thought to be linked to groups such as al-Qaeda.
Canada isn't all alone with the Jihad hipness thing going on. Great Britain also has a Jihad Generation.
The terrorist threat facing Britain has developed into a "covert conspiracy" involving hundreds of men and women living ordinary lives in the nation's suburbs, security sources have revealed.
Unbeknown to their families and friends, they form a silent 1,200-strong "army" of terrorists. They are believed to be involved in at least 20 major plots that they hope will bring death and destruction to Britain
Disaffected by Western ways of living and inspired by Bin Laden's 9/11 attack young Muslims are becoming more devout. But we are not supposed to feel suspicious about it.
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, and Abul Koyair, 20, the two brothers arrested after the dawn raid may, according to MI5, be typical of other young Asian men who have become disaffected with the Western way of life and have been radicalised by militant Islamists who support a global Jihad.
According to neighbours, the brothers underwent a transformation after the September 11 attacks on America in 2001, adopting beards and more traditional Muslim dress. "Lots of young Muslims these days are getting more religious, especially after 9/11," said one neighbour. "It's nothing to be suspicious about."
In response to a massive Muslim terrorist attack on non-Muslims lots of Muslims become more religious and we are not supposed to get suspicious about this reaction! A religion whose terrorists inspire greater faith isn't something we are supposed to react to?
Deportation is the solution. Lawrence Auster says the problem isn't so much the Muslims as it is our foolish willingness to let them into Western nations. Our first hurdle? We need to call Muslim terrorists Muslims.
A conversation between Melbourne Australia residents 46 year old Abdul Nacer Benbrika (who labels hiimself a Muslim cleric) and 20 year old Abdullah Merhi recorded by police in September 2004 and just introduced in a criminal trial against them has them discussing their intent to carry out an attack on a scale similar to the Muslim terrorist attack at the Madrid train station.
Prosecutor Nicholas Robinson read out portions of a transcript of a conversation in which Merhi allegedly discussed martyrdom with Benbrika.
Mr Robinson also claimed the two men had been recorded discussing plans to do something "big" and made reference to a terrorist attack in Madrid.
"To do a big thing," Merhi said.
"Like Spain," Benbrika replied.
"If I'm sincere, Allah will open a path for me," Merhi said. ". . . if I'm sincere and I go there now, will He open the door there tonight? If I'm sincere now, will He open the door in a month?"
They discussed the idea of killing Australian Prime Minister John Howard at a football game.
They are part of a larger group on trial.
As well as Benbrika, Merhi and Taha, the Melbourne men alleged to belong to a terror group are: Ezzit Raad, 23, of Preston; Aiman Joud, 21, of Hoppers Crossing; Fadal Sayadi, 25, of Coburg; Amer Haddara, 26, of Yarraville; Ahmed Raad, 22, of Fawkner; Izzydeen Atik, 25, of Williamstown North; and Shane Kent, 28, of Meadow Heights.
All except Haddara and Kent are also charged with making funds available to a terrorist group.
Mehri did not want to wait long to carry out an attack.
Mr Merhi said on the tape that his eyes had recently been opened and a message had to be sent. "I have made my point. If it comes up, I will go but I am not waiting 20 years or two years," he said.
Mr Benbrika said innocent ones could be the victims: "Because he kills our innocent ones . . . that is it. An eye for an eye." He also encouraged the younger man to do a "big thing" close to train stations, the prosecution told the court.
They had another conversation about slaughtering police.
Another of the accused terror suspects, 31-year-old Hany Taha, who was also refused bail yesterday, was said to be present during a conversation about "slaughtering police".
The court also heard Mr Benbrika had become infuriated by a rival Melbourne cleric preaching that al-Qa'ida leader Osama bin Laden was "on the wrong path".
These guys do not sound impressive. But people as unimpressive-sounding as these are probably just the sorts who go and blow up people.
The leader of a minor New Zealand political party that has been polling about 10% of the vote warns against Muslim immigration to New Zealand.
Moderate Muslim groups are sheltering fundamentalists who may be plotting terror attacks on New Zealand soil, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters claimed yesterday.
In a speech directly linking "open- door immigration policies" to radical Islam, Mr Peters said the country's history of religious tolerance and free speech was threatened by Muslim migrants who "do not share our traditions".
"We cannot take our tradition of toleration for granted when we are importing fanatics for whom that tradition is alien," he said.
"In New Zealand the Muslim community has been quick to show us their more moderate face, but there is a militant underbelly here as well.
"These two groups, the moderate and militant, fit hand and glove.
"Underneath it all the agenda is to promote fundamentalist Islam - indeed these groups are like the mythical Hydra, a serpent underbelly with multiple heads, capable of striking at any time and in any direction," Mr Peters said.
I do not see why Western nations should let in Muslim immigrants at all. The idea of letting them in always strikes me as "It's being-hit-on-the-head lessons in here." We have no shortage of people. We have huge selection of people who want to come to Western countries for the most part because we have higher living standards. So why not be incredibly choosy and let in only those who will provide a large net benefit?
Peters is a member of the New Zealand parliament and former deputy prime minister. If you are curious about Peters then click on the two Wikipedia links I embedded in the first paragraph of the article.
A nationalistic speech that does not hesitate to represent the people of one's nation as somehow better or deserving of preservation against the influx of others is a rare thing to hear these days and sounds shocking to anyone conditioned to today's leftish political mores. This guy sounds like the late British parliamentarian Enoch Powell. Check out John Derbyshire's aricle on the London bombings entitled "Thinking About 7/7: Enoch Powell’s Revenge?" for an essay on how far nationalism has eroded in Britain and in much of the Western countries.
Nick Hume of the London Times has joined the list of British commentators who think that British self-hatred has helped to create the intellectual environment that terrorists living in Britain use to justify their attacks.
Perhaps it might have something to do with the way that, from the moment they arrive here, asylum-seekers are told that Britain is a racist hellhole that deserves what it gets. And they first receive that message not from some fringe Islamic preacher, but from the heart of our self-flagellatory culture. Those bombing suspects came to a society that seems intent on denying that there is anything good about living here. Britain gave them schooling. But what exactly would they would have been taught?
Think of the miserabilist images of society that we are all subjected to these days. Britain is portrayed as institutionally racist and increasingly Islamophobic at home and abroad, a darkly degenerate place full of violent drunks and drug addicts, disrespectful “hoodies” and child abusers, pregnant teenagers and sexually transmitted diseases, whose people believe in nothing except football and getting fat in front of the television.
If the British were told they had many things to be proud about they'd act in ways more consistent with that pride and the place would be better for it.
Hume's essay is similar in tone to Anothony Browne's longer and excellent article from The Spectator entitled The Left’s war on Britishness (requires free registration which is worth your time).
No, the real answer to why Britain spawned people fuelled with maniacal hate for their country is that Britain hates itself. In hating Britain, these British suicide bombers were as British as a police warning for flying the union flag.
Britain’s self-loathing is deep, pervasive and lethally dangerous. We get bombed, and we say it’s all our own fault. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. The government and the BBC gush over ‘the other’, but recoil at the merest hint of British culture. The only thing we are licensed to be proud of is London’s internationalism — in other words, that there is little British left about it.
The The US Public Broadcasting System Frontline TV show had an excellent segment last week entitled "Al Qaeda's New Front" (and if you get a chance to watch a rerun it would be worth your while). The episode's web site pages have a lot of additional information and I suggest going to that previous link and clicking through and reading some of the articles. One of the people interviewed for the show was psychiatrist and researcher on terrorists Marc Sageman. Among Sageman's points: Terrorists do not need elaborate training.
The violent videos unearthed and broadcast after 9/11 featuring multinationals in fatigues honing their skills in remote training camps may largely be a thing of the past. "While the movement was under the control of Al Qaeda, they could go to Afghanistan to train, but now they don't have that luxury," Sageman says. "Training is no longer necessary. The guys in Casablanca and Istanbul were not trained. There is no evidence the guys from Madrid ever went to a training camp. But yet they are still able to conduct operations."
It turns out making "sophisticated" cell phone detonators is not that sophisticated, Sageman says. "Anyone who knows anything about a cell phone can hook it up to a detonator." He argues that the over 1,000 Web sites coming out of Iraq showing beheadings via video files are actually "far more sophisticated than rigging a bomb up."
Sageman says the devices used by many terrorists are remarkably primitive. "It's pretty amateurish. The real threat today are attacks like Madrid, Casablanca, Istanbul -- it's not [sophisticated attacks like] 9/11 because these guys can't coordinate."
I've previously posted excerpts summarizing some of Marc Sageman's statistical analyses on terrorists in my previous post "Former CIA Case Officer Provides Terrorist Profiles". The Frontline episode includes more details from from Sageman's work. For example, Muslims are more likely to become jihadists if they move to live in a society which has what is to them a foreign culture.
At the time they joined jihad, the terrorists were not very religious. They only became religious once they joined the jihad. 70 percent of his sample joined the jihad while they were living in another country from where they grew up: someone from country A is living in country B and going after country C. This is very different from the usual terrorist of the past, someone from country A, living in country A, going after country A's government.
For an example of the A to B to C pattern look at Mohammed Atta from Egypt who moved to Germany and then decided to attack the United States. If Germany had not allowed Atta and his Middle Eastern co-conspirators to immgrate to Germany then the 9/11 attack probably would have happened. Muslim immigration to Europe (and to Canada for that matter) therefore heightens the risk of terrorist attacks in the Unietd States.
A more general statement perhaps is that people who join the jihad tend to feel like outsiders. The native born British Muslims who join the jihad do not see themselves as British. They see themselves as Muslims living in Britain. There's an obvious lesson here for Western societies: Don't let in people whose religion gives them a belief system which is incompatible with Western cultures. Do not let in people who will see themselves as outsiders. Only let in people who have cultural and religious beliefs that are fully compatible with the existing culture.
Of course, to recognize that some cultures are incompatible with each other requires a rejection of muliticulturalist ideology. One must see differences between peoples. One must give up the illusion that the majority of people in every country of the world are, deep down, secular liberal democrats. To reject myths which are part of one's secular or religious faith in humanity is more than many people can manage. But unless Western intellectuals adopt a more realistic and empirical view of human nature Western democracies are going to become less free and less safe.
The potential for terrorism and conflict is heightened when the immigrants are from a sufficiently different ethnic or racial group that they see themselves an the larger society also see them as foreign. Human beings identify more closely with those who look more like them, act more like them, think more like them. This tendency toward seeing people as belonging to in-groups and out-groups is part of human nature. Policies based a rejection of deep human tendencies lead to foolish immigration policies and foolish foreign adventures such as the debacle in Iraq.
If Western countries will stop allowing Muslim immigration and if Western countries will deport all the Muslim illegal aliens then the future growth of the threat of terrorist attacks can be decreased. Why not make these changes to immigration law and immigration law enforcement? Yes, to make the change requires adoption of a less idealistic view of human nature and a less utopian expectation for the future of humanity. But the result will be more freedom in Western societies and less risk of terrorist attacks or of political fights centered around ethnic conflicts.
The attack by the Pakistani British citizens who apparently engaged in suicide bombing on the trains and the bus works against the argument that better integration will eliminate or greatly reduce the Western Muslim terrorist threat. The Frontline "Al Qaeda's New Front" has a Frequently Asked Questions" (FAQ) list which includes the observation that Britain has been an especially friendly place for Muslims. Yet 4
Are some European countries faring better than others in integrating their Muslim communities?
Florida State University Professor Alec Hargreaves, author of numerous books on the North African immigrant community in France and currently a visiting professor of immigration and integration at the Sorbonne in Paris, gives high marks to the U.K. "British policy has generally been more accommodating than that of France or Germany," he says. "Given the large geographical distances separating the U.K. from Pakistan and Bangladesh (the two main Muslim states among the countries supplying Britain with migrant labor), it was unrealistic to think of those migrants as temporary residents. Instead, family settlement was more obviously the norm." Britain also led the way among Western European states in the 1960s and 1970s in developing anti-discrimination policies, which other European Union countries, such as France, are only just beginning to catch up with, he says.
The British home secretary's professed shock that the London bombers were born in Britain demonstrates the folly of embracing a mythical view of human nature in place of a more realistic and biological view.
Charles Clarke, the British home secretary, is 'shocked'. According to the latest police updates, the London bombers were not some Johnny Foreigner threat to our 'way of life': they were four young Britons brought up in our way of life; four men aged between 19 and 30 who were born in Britain to normal, and by all accounts perfectly respectable, Pakistani families.
But why is Clarke shocked? The harsh reality is that these young Brits would appear to be pretty typical al-Qaeda types. For al-Qaeda is not, as many have claimed since 9/11, a bunch of foreigners brought up on the dusty backstreets of Cairo or Ramallah and hell-bent on launching war against a faraway West; they tend to be young, respectable, often middle-class and sometimes naive men, many of whom were born or educated - and even radicalised - in the West. For all the talk of a 'clash of civilisations', al-Qaeda is a largely Western phenomenon.
There was absolutely no reason to be shocked that Pakistani Muslims born in Britain chose to kill dozens of people as suicide bombers.
None of the bombers had criminal records or were known to the police in advance.
Shehzad Tanweer, 22, Mohammed Sadique Khan, 30, and a 19-year-old, Hasib Mir Hussain, have been named as the suspected suicide bombers. The fourth bomber has yet to be named.
All three came from respectable Pakistani families and were born in Britain, and lived in Leeds. None of them had previous criminal records.
Police officials said privately that the suspects were not known to police as Islamic extremists, fitting the profile of 'sleepers' who were chosen for the mission because they had not previously attracted police attention.
This is nature's way of telling Westerners that our immigration policy is the height of folly.
One of the London bombers had a father who owns several businesses.
The second alleged terrorist, Shehzad Tanweer, 20, came from Colwyn Road, Leeds, and is believed to have been responsible for the Aldgate bomb. Shehzad came from a close-knit Muslim family, with four British-born children. His father owned several businesses in the Leeds area. The family lived in a large detached house in the Beeston area in Leeds, with two Mercedes parked outside their home. Shehzad attended Leeds University, were he studied Sport Science. He sometimes helped at his father fish and chip restaurant, South Leeds Fisheries. He was a regular at the Bangali Mosque at Dewsbury Road.
The man responsible for the No. 30 Bus bombing at Tavistock Place was 19-year-old Hasib Hussain, from Colenso Mount, Leeds. Hasib, who knew Shehzad, had been wild until eighteen months ago when he became increasingly religious after visiting relatives in Pakistan. The fourth bomber, believed to be from Luton has yet to be identified, and his remains are still in the Piccadilly line train.
Sports science is not a major for the most brilliant. My suspicion is that while a lot of the terrorists have technical and scientific degrees their minds are marginal for the kind of work they set out to do. Plenty of second rate and third rate universities grant degrees in a variety of scientific and technical subjects. Are these the sorts of universities that the educated terrorists have been earning their degrees? If so then it is plausible that they end up feeling intellectually inferior and resentful of the more successful members of the majority population. I'd love to see IQ tests administered to captured terrorists who have college degrees. I'd also like to see the academic standings for the universities where they earned their degrees and their grade point averages at those universities. Anyone out there reading this a terrorism researcher? This cries out for study.
Think about this. Someone living in one country has a hard time comparing himself to someone else doing a superficially similar job in another country. But put them close together in the same office and suddenly their relative abilities become apparent. Differences in raises and promotions drive home the point that some guy has been judged less capable than some other guys in his same office. If a guy refuses to accept the idea that other people in his environment really are more capable and more productive then he's going to blame his superiors for his own inadequacy. If he happens to believe in a religion that tells him he can get a huge reward in heaven by killing these other people then for some small but significant portion of those boiling with resentment suddenly that resentment and that blame gets channelled toward flying a jumbo jet into a skyscraper or blowing up a bomb on a subway.
Also see my previous post Islamic Terrorists Recruiting At British Universities and Razib's corresponding post and the GNXP discussion of Razib's post.
The Sunday Times of London has gotten ahold of a British government dossier on terrorist recruiting activities in Britain.
The Whitehall dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following last year’s train bombings in Madrid, says: “Extremists are known to target schools and colleges where young people may be very inquisitive but less challenging and more susceptible to extremist reasoning/ arguments.”
Even if only a half of a percent of British Muslims join up with radical organizations that number still is in thousands.
The dossier also estimates that 10,000 have attended extremist conferences. The security services believe that the number who are prepared to commit terrorist attacks may run into hundreds.
Most of the Al-Qaeda recruits tend to be loners “attracted to university clubs based on ethnicity or religion” because of “disillusionment with their current existence”. British-based terrorists are made up of different ethnic groups, according to the documents.
“They range from foreign nationals now naturalised and resident in the UK, arriving mainly from north Africa and the Middle East, to second and third generation British citizens whose forebears mainly originate from Pakistan or Kashmir.
“In addition . . . a significant number come from liberal, non-religious Muslim backgrounds or (are) only converted to Islam in adulthood. These converts include white British nationals and those of West Indian extraction.”
How well are the loners doing in their classes when they are recruited? Are they above or below average? Do they feel inferior to other students? Do they feel inadequate? Do attractive women treat them as undesirable? Are they introverts? Depressed? Anxious?
The report describes terrorist recruiters who use British universities as their recruiting grounds. If those recruiters are not locked up or deported then the rate of attempt at terrorist attacks will almost certainly go up with time.
The Iraq war is creating terrorists, not stopping them.
The Iraq war is identified by the dossier as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism. The analysis says: “It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US.
In the long run the Iraq war might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. If a significant portion of the Muslims in Western countries are going to go all alienated and become terrorists the sooner the larger public learns this the sooner pressures will build to stop letting them into Western countries. Even the ones who do not become terrorists do more poorly on average than native Europeans. So there is a big economic downside to letting them in as well. Plus, many of them do not have Western values. The larger argument against Muslim immigrants contains most of the arguments against Hispanic immigration plus additional arguments due to larger conflicts in beliefs and values. The demographic trends in Western countries might shift in a less unfavorable direction (still bad, just not as bad) due to the continued terrorist attacks in Europe.
I've made this argument in the past. Basically, more terrorist attacks against Europe and America in the short term will help to evoke an immune response in Europe before the demographic conditions become much worse. So the stupid US foreign policy of the Bush Administration toward the Middle East and Muslims in general might, by intensifying the clash of civilizations, wake up the West to the obvious fact that some belief systems are incompatible and irreconcilable. But a lot of believers in secular ideologies, like their supernatural religion believing counterparts, are pretty resistant to abandoning elements of their faith. Reality is going to have to pound on them pretty hard for the truth to sink in.
You can read the full text of the leaked British cabinet documents in a 4 part series here and here and here and here (all are PDF format).
The former London Metropolitan police chief, Lord Stevens, who retired early in 2005 says the London bombers are almost certainly British citizens and have some higher education.
“They will be apparently ordinary British citizens; young men conservatively and cleanly dressed and probably with some higher education. Highly computer literate, they will have used the internet to research explosives. They are painstaking, cautious, clever and very sophisticated.”
Stevens said intelligence officers believed that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps, some of whom returned home to become potential Islamic terrorists.
He said at least eight other separate terrorist attacks had been foiled in the past five years. At times up to 1,000 undercover officers had been working on one anti-terrorist operation.
The time to stop Islamic terrorists in the West is before either they or their parents immigrate to Western countries in the first place. While foolish and irresponsible elites of some Western countries have already stuck their populaces with substantial Muslim subpopulations which will commit terrorist attacks for decades to come Western governments could at least stop making the problem worse. Put an end to all Muslim immigration. If only one half of 1% of the children of Muslim immigrants become terrorists that is still far too many.
The Brits let "Londonistan" flourish for decades.
Yesterday, commentators in Europe claimed Britain had paid the price for allowing Islamic extremists to flourish unopposed in “Londonistan”.
The stinging rebuke came as an apparent backlash against Britain’s Muslim community began to emerge with a petrol-bomb attack on a mosque in Merseyside.
"Londonistan" is a sore point especially with the French. The police and intelligence agencies in France have complained for years that the British attitude was that the Islamic radicals could do anything they wanted as long as the radicals didn't carry out attacks on British soil. The Brits weren't worried about fund-raising and organizational activities that the radicals conducted in Britain because the radicals were seen as aiming to attack governments in the Middle East. The British welfare state paid the radicals monthly checks essentially to make babies and to build up organizations. Idle hands are the devil's workshop as grandma used to say. The British government granted asylum to radicals who claimed they were in danger of religious persecution in their home countries. Of course in some of those cases those radicals were advocating or even organizing terrorist attacks against Middle Eastern governments. So one could make an argument for Britain as paralleling (albeit to a much lesser extent) Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by providing a safe haven for Islamic radicals. Well, now those birds have come home to roost.
I see home grown terrorism as a challenge to the assumptions underlying the concept of citizenship. How can one claim the status of citizen when one rejects the legitimacy of the society that the overwhelming majority of its members accept and support? Why should the majority recognize the right of membership in a group for people who reject and who wish to kill large numbers of members of that group?
But even if revocation of citizenship followed by banishment was brought back into vogue as a respectable option one problem the British face is that many of the radicals can no be identified in advance of an attack. Still, some are well known. Be gone with them.
Peter Bergen, author of Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, has an op/ed piece in the New York Times on the threat which British Muslim terrorists pose to the United States.
Why have so many of these terrorists come from Britain? Many British Muslims are young and poorly integrated into society and therefore vulnerable to extremism. In fact, Muslims have the youngest age profile of any religious group in Britain; around a third are under the age of 16. The unemployment rate among British Muslims runs almost 10 percentage points above the national average of about 5 percent. In the case of 16- to 24-year-old Muslim men, the unemployment rate is 22 percent. Not surprisingly, polls of British Muslims show a considerable sense of anger. Eight out of 10 believe that the war on terrorism is a war on Islam, while a poll conducted last year, under the auspices of the Guardian newspaper, found a surprising 13 percent who said that further attacks by Al Qaeda or a similar organization on the United States would be justified. One rap video that surfaced in Britain last year called "Dirty Kuffar" had lyrics that included the following verse: "O.B.L. [bin Laden] pulled me like a shining star! Like the way we destroyed them two towers, ha-ha!"
Last year a British government report estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 British Muslims are supporters of Al Qaeda or related groups.
Bergen notes that the Visa Waiver Program (see below) allows increasingly angry and numerous European Muslims to freely enter the United States without any need for visa application and approval. The Muslim terrorist groups can get around the tougher screening of Middle Eastern visa applications by recruiting European citizen Muslims to terrorism.
Of course, however bad the British and European Muslim terrorist threat to the United States the threat is even worse for the British. Worse yet, while the British could negotiate political deals with the Irish Catholic terrorists there is no obvious and acceptable political deal that the Brits could negotiate with the Muslim radicals.
The argument that the British Muslims are "poorly integrated into society" suggests that, well, the Brits have not done a good job of integrating them. But the Brits haven't done any worse a job integrating Hindus and other groups which do not become terrorists. Also, Britain does not strike me as a particularly hostile place for non-natives. If some group feels so far out of place in Britain to engage in terrorist attacks then they obviously shouldn't be allowed to live there in the first place. The British people do not have any sort of moral obligation to totally rearrange their society and change their culture to satisfy any group angry enough to blow up busses and trains.
22 European countries are members of the Visa Waiver Program.
Two Western but non-European countries are members of the Visa Waiver Program.
Australia has some problems with Islamic terrorists.
A few non-Western countries are part of the Visa Waver Program as well.
Japan doesn't pose much of a threat but Muslim Brunei and partially Muslim Singapore do.
Our biggest terrorist threat from Visa Waiver countries emanates from Britain followed by France and Germany. Most of the British Muslims have the advantage of English language skills. They also have plenty of mosques which teach them to hate us non-believers.
While much is made of the threat of terrorists I still think that most Americans face a greater threat from immigrant groups that commit crimes at higher rates than from terrorists. Garden variety murders occur every day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. At some point terrorists may find ways to pose an even greater threat than immigrant groups which have high crime rates (e.g. Hispanics and Africans).
The problem with the terrorist threat is that if only a very small fraction of society decides to become terrorists the cost to the rest of us would be enormous. One one hundredth of one percent of America is about 30,000 people. That many people operating as terrorists could kill more people than the US lost in the last 100 years as soldiers fiighting in wars. Therefore any group which has even a small fraction of its members leaning toward terrorism should be kept out. We already have enough people and so does Europe. Immigration should be done only when the benefits per person coming in clearly outweigh all the costs immediately and in the long term. In my opinion the United States could reduce the rate of immigration by a couple of orders of magnitude by putting a high IQ minimum on immigrants and eliminate huge costs and growing risks while retaining the bulk of the benefits of immigration.
In the longer run if technological advances reduce the obstacles to carrying out large and very lethal terrorist attacks then I predict some countries will enact legislation that allows them to revoke citizenship even of the native born. Banishment is the most obvious way to respond to a group that rejects the legitimacy of a society and which seeks to kill many of its members.