Charitable Hamas Enterprise
IDF: Flotilla, Hamas Have Similar Funding by David Lev 
While organizers of the Gaza flotilla have claimed that they have no connection to terror and that their only objective in sponsoring the flotilla is to break Israel's naval blockade of Gaza, IDF military intelligence has uncovered evidence that shows that flotilla organizers have received significant amounts of funding from groups that support Hamas and other terrorist groups.
The flotilla is being funded in large part by three Islamic charity funds from the Hamas-affiliated Charity Coalition, which directly fund Hamas and other terror groups.
Among the funds is the European Campaign to End the Siege (ECESG), a UK-based umbrella organization of more than thirty Europe-based organizations; it openly supports Hamas. Most of its organizations ― founded as Muslim Brotherhood branches in Europe ― are participating in the 2011 Gaza flotilla. Israeli military sources found that some of these umbrella organizations are sponsors of Hamas terror activity in Gaza.
ECESG Chairman Dr. Arafat Madi Mahmoud Shukri also serves as chairman of the Palestinian Return Center (PRC), which advocates the mass settling of descendants of Arabs who fled Israeli in 1948 in all parts of Israel as a means of destroying the country's Jewish majority, in addition to supporting terror campaigns to frighten Jews into leaving the land. Due to PRC’s flagrant links to Hamas, it was declared illegal in Israel.
In addition to ECESG, the Switzerland-based Droit Pour Tous (“Rjghts for All”) organization and the Italy-based group ABSPP are openly and intimately involved in Hamas charity efforts as well as efforts to illegally break the lawfully enforced naval blockade on Gaza. Droit Pour Tous has, among other things filed a case for the arrest of President Shimon Peres when he visited Switzerland in March on the grounds that he is accused of committing "war crimes and crimes against humanity,” and has sponsored several Swiss members of parliament who are sailing on one of the flotilla ships.
An IDF raid several years ago on Hamas offices in PA controlled cities yielded letters, memos, bank records, receipts, and other materials showing ABSPP financial support to Hamas front organizations in Italy. The funds ended up being distributed in monthly payments to families of suicide bombers, prisoners and Hamas terrorists as a means of rewarding them for their terrorist efforts and as a "social security" program to the families.As published online at ArutzSheva, 3 July 2011Labels: Israel, Terrorism Islam Middle East
Effectively Sinister Lobbying
When we think of the Muslim Brotherhood, we think of Egypt's long resistance against permitting the fundamentalist
Islamist movement to freely espouse its values and gain membership. An offshoot of the MB was responsible for assassinating former Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat for daring to make peace with Israel; it is heartily and vigilantly anti-Semitic.
Hamas, ruling Gaza, is a creature of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The motto of the Muslim Brotherhood is succinct and without ornamentation:
"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur`an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar!" Resolutely determined to wage battle, but to do it in a covert manner by first misleading people to believe that their mission is a peaceful one without violent intentions, to infiltrate and to quietly gain influence.
And this is precisely what the Muslim Brotherhood has done, spread out its tentacles from Egypt to the surrounding Middle East states, working diligently to broaden their membership and the enthusiasm of their membership to access avenues to power. The Muslim Brotherhood, well organized and extremely patient, is growing ever more influential in turning around Muslim countries' values to reflect their own.
And they do not stop their activities at the borders of Islam. They are well ensconced with active memberships working quietly and determinedly to make the impressions they desire, within liberal democracies, with working units in the United States and in Canada as well. These are affiliates, careful to disguise their close working relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are there, and they represent the aspirations of the Muslim Brotherhood, speaking in their favour and defence.
Now comes news that the Obama administration is seriously engaging in outreach with the Muslim Brotherhood, which has finally achieved official status in Egypt. And U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton loftily declares that there's nothing new there, the State Department has been in "limited contacts" with the Muslim Brotherhood previously. The MB spokesmen themselves clarify the truth, that no such contacts have ever previously existed.
"The Obama administration is continuing the approach of limited contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood that have existed on and off for about five or six years. We believe that given the change of the political landscape in Egypt, it is in the interest of the United States to engage with all parties that are peaceful and committed to non-violence". Hillary Clinton
With that description, of 'peaceful' and 'committed to non-violence', she cannot honestly be referring to the Muslim Brotherhood. But yet she is, so she and the administration are both deviously dishonest. This is the very same Ms. Clinton who stated months earlier that the U.S. was not in contact with the MB, and who referenced the group as an ideology hijacking the democratic transition in Egypt.
But of course there's an answer of sorts to this seeming confusion. That being that the Muslim Brotherhood has some members in the Egyptian parliament. They simply called themselves something else, knowing the regime of previous President
Hosni Mubarak considered them dangerous and violent. And so, U.S. representatives meeting with some Egyptian
MPs, included Muslim Brotherhood members.
They have now gained the legitimacy they have long sought, recognized by the United States as partners in negotiations. The Freedom and Justice Party will yet rule Egypt, and it will eventually manage to rise to power elsewhere in the Middle East from all portends. It is as its 1928 founder claimed:
"It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet." Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna
Labels: Terrorism Islam Middle East, United States
Mourning Neda Soltan
During Iran's failed "green revolution" when hundreds of thousands of Iranians swept into the streets in Tehran and other cities of the Islamic Republic of Iran after the presidential vote that was so obviously corrupted and which returned Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad to power, one particularly vile incident seemed to stand out, arresting the attention of the world.
A young university student, curious about what was occurring on the streets, decided to go out for herself, with a few friends, to witness her country's latest upheaval. She hadn't been a part of the protest group. She was, in effect, a bystander. Her name was Neda
Soltan, and her dying agony on the street, shot by a motorcycle
basiji at random, was indelibly captured for posterity.
The Republican Guard and their helpers, the black-clad, motorcycle-driving, gun-wielding
basiji eventually wore down the protesters. Thousands of protesters proudly wearing symbolic green signifying their determination to effect a social-political revolution, led by two main political figures, were arrested, placed in detention, many tortured, and some murdered.
Grand Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei was forcefully blunt and decisive; the protest was not to succeed and the people would simply have to accept that he decreed the vote was perfectly above board and Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad's presidency was to continue. Battered and downcast, the revolutionaries withdrew their protests into simmering resentment that still resonates.
On the anniversary of their daughter's murder, her parents, Ali
Agha Soltan and his wife
Hajer, visited the cemetery where their daughter is buried. The cemetery was accessible only to the relatives; the public not permitted entry, and police were present to ensure that nothing untoward occurred that might disturb the peace.
When Neda
Soltan's mother became anguished at the site in expressing her inconsolable grief, laying flowers at their child's
gravesite, police intervened. Ali
Agha Soltan was angered at the orders of the security forces for their hostile show of disrespect, and as he protested, he was shoved to the ground and placed in a headlock.
They lost their daughter and gained the enmity of the government. They are not to express grief in public; to do so is to risk being assaulted.
Labels: Conflict, Iran, Terrorism Islam Middle East
Hard To Believe...?
Say it isn't so. The Islamic Republic of Iran is actively conspiring with the Government of Syria to brutalize Syrians who protest against their tyrannical government. That seems so out of character for Iran, doesn't it? It doesn't? Well, perhaps not. Shia Iran and Alawite Shia Syria do, after all, have much in common. Majority Sunni Syrians and Syrian Kurds are somewhat less than impressed with the government of Bashar al-Assad whose brother's militias are breaking their heads.
Since Iran has had ample opportunity to develop a functioning response to their own Iranian protesters who themselves have aspirations for a different kind of government, in employing the hard, brutal reactions of the Revolutionary Guard to quell the revolt of the reformers, both following the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and again in the wake of the Egyptian protests, it makes eminently good sense they would wish to share their response-effectiveness with their ally.
AP A garbage can is set on fire as protesters march in Tehran, Iran, on Monday. Eyewitnesses reported that sporadic clashes erupted in central Tehran's Enghelab, or Revolution, Square between security forces and protesters.
To which end a stream of aid from Tehran has entered Syria in the form of trainers and advisers so that the anti-government demonstrations can be handily crushed. Computer surveillance developed by Iran has enabled Syria to arrest hundreds of its citizens. and Iranian military trainers are instructing their Syrian counterparts in their successful restraining techniques used against the "Green Movement" in 2009.
It is doubtful whether Syria requires any further lessons in incarceration techniques and the effectiveness of torture, rape and beatings, along with 'disappearing' those whose insufferable complaints against the administration cannot be tolerated. On its own, Syria has developed some truly impressive protocols for exacting discipline and punishment upon protesters.
The ritual of Friday prayers resulting in following protests are being answered by a full-blown crack-down of the Syrian military. The promise of reforms does not appear to have made those invested in the possibility of a different kind of country for their future and that of their children confident. Nor do they feel that their government feels their pain and their demands have been heard and understood.
And the United Nations, the EU, the US, and the G-8 have had their opportunities to express disaffection with the violence meted out by Syria toward its civilian population.
Labels: Iran, Terrorism Islam Middle East
All Bets Off!
There continue to be reverberations of blame-and-shame directed toward the United States, its executive and the orders given to the Navy
SEALs to conduct an operation with the distinct purpose of eliminating the world's foremost terrorist. ...This is not the manner in which a civilized country prosecutes its agenda of forestalling terrorism. There are laws to be observed, international standards of niceties to be acknowledged.
And what the United States ordered be done was to conduct an official assassination. Yes, they did. They did what the Israeli Mossad has long considered to be effective and needfully useful.
Onlookers and bystanders are offended. Of course those who considered
Osama bin Laden to be an honoured
mujahedeen, a man of principle, a pious man of God, actually following orders from on high to defend Islam from the infidels and Crusaders are beside themselves with rage. Citing their determination to carry on without him, that his precious blood would not be spilled for no cause; he will be avenged.
Even his estranged sons whose own sensibilities were offended by their father's insistence on slaughtering innocent civilians; those of the West and Muslims as well, were dreadfully upset that their father was not politely arrested and placed on trial. Exception is also taken to the fact that his body was buried at sea; had film been taken of a Muslim scholar offering last rites in a land burial many claim they would have found that acceptable.
The burning question is why does it matter what his end was like considering the violence he espoused and demanded in the mass slaughter of innocent people? He was guilty of mass murder, and he continued to agitate for further slaughter in the name of Islam. He posed as a dire threat to the well-being of a good portion of the Globe, given the off-shoots of
al-
Qaeda posed and determined to terrorize their targets.
The niceties of the law become forfeit when facing up to a resourceful, indomitable, resistant-to-reason adversary who will grasp at any measures, however vile and destructive to wound an enemy mortally.
Osama bin Laden was simply treated to his own brand of action in an act of official retribution for the thousands of lives he was responsible for terminating.
The United States is again being treated in some quarters - say for example, Britain, where the infiltration into society at many levels, including politics and academia of tolerance for
Islamist rhetoric and claims for justice have been astoundingly successful, as an intolerant brute of a nation. An undercurrent of sympathy for bin Laden and recrimination toward the U.S. for killing the al-Qaeda leader runs through that society.
Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had a sympathetic take on the situation: "I think the killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn't look as if justice is seen to be done." Justice? Why justice was indeed done, and seen to be done. It is the interpretation of justice that is at question here. Kill unmercifully and be yourself treated to no mercy.
Osama bin Laden whose sole raison d'etre is the destruction of Western society and the elevation of Islamism
had no compassion whatever for those whom he delivered to death. He felt that anyone associated with the West was tainted and had no right to live. He engineered death traps, inspired followers to think of more inventive and useful ways to slaughter people.
Was he really owed the dignity of being handled with respect? His life was to be given the respect and the dignity and the honour that was denied by him to countless others? He used every and any means at his disposal to destroy life, why was his life worthy of special consideration? Those who express reservations about the manner in which his life was taken are clearly confused.
It's the same old story about reservations taken by those who are uninvolved; those who are not threatened, demanding of those who must defend themselves that they do so fully observing the fine points of the law. When you're dead because of a lack of attention to the big picture and too much attention to the fine details, the finality of it all cannot be reversed.
When faced with a deadly venom-spewing architect of death it is best removed expeditiously. Those who speak derisively of the U.S. action in removing any further options from bin Laden, whose voices caress the words "moral obligations", are sadly delusional.
Labels: Justice, Terrorism Islam Middle East, United States
Captivity and Forgiveness
When the news media were full of the kidnapping details in 2005 in Iraq of four men representing a Christian peace group, it seemed a lunatic enterprise on the part of those held hostage to enter the country for the purpose of attempting to turn Iraqis toward peace and away from violence. The Iraqis themselves were fully invested in their tribal and sectarian hatred toward one another. Their focus was on the capture, torture and murder of
Shia or Sunni by Sunni or
Shia.
But the Christian Peacemaker Team sent a delegation of four committed members to preach sweetness and light, courtesy fundamentalist Christians who believe in forgiveness and redemption to fundamentalist Muslims who practise violent jihad and martyrdom. One of the
abductees who had been held for 118 days as hostages before a joint commando raid freed them, has written a memoir of the experience.
Long before James
Loney wrote his memoir he had issued a public expression of forgiveness toward his captors. Recalling his statements at that time he seemed like a delusional and fearfully stupid man, determined to support his faith by declarations of unflagging hope in the decency and goodness of humankind. Failing to make a distinction between social environments and hereditary antipathies.
"I know I'm speaking out of school here, but I'm going to say it anyway. You have no idea how many people were involved, how many people risked their lives to get you out. I want you to tell your people that. Just tell them to think about that before they decide to send someone else here. I'm not saying anything else. Just tell them. Tell them to think about all the people that risked their lives to get you out."
This was spoken to James
Loney in an icily chiding lecture by one of the soldiers who had been tasked to rescue him and the three other
abductees. It was a joint British-U.S. task force, whose formation had the purpose of hunting for
al-
Qaeda operatives and rescuing foreign hostages. Everything comes at a price. The men who rescued
Loney and the two others risked their lives.
The fourth man was beyond rescue. An American, Tom Fox, had earlier been removed from the squalid site where he had been kept along with James
Loney, Norman
Kember and
Harmeet Singh. He was murdered, his body found on a street in Baghdad. And the following is what illuminates the peculiar mind-set of a man like James
Loney.
Determined to forgive, he will not permit himself to feel any kind of rancour or blame against his abductors. He lived for all the time he was in captivity in the fear of their discovering that he is gay knowing that they would make an attempt to cure his homosexuality; the cure for which in many Muslim societies is death.
Like the
jihadis that captured him and his three colleagues determined to turn the face of peace toward their captors, he believes in self-discipline and self-sacrifice; where they believe in the sacrifice of martyrdom with its great reward of attentive virgins in Paradise, he believes in the martyrdom of self to a greater ideal of Godly virtue.
Neither he nor the two others who were rescued from their miserable captivity and possible even future torture and death, would agree to testify against their captors in the prosecution of the death of the American Tom Fox, by trial in Iraq by its Central Criminal Court.
"They took Tom away from us, but they did not take away our ability to forgive."We did not lose ourselves. We were not infected with the poison of hate. They may have changed our lives, but they did not change us." This is how James
Loney celebrates his victory over the events that occurred to him as a tormented prisoner of the Swords of Righteousness Brigade who held them for ransom.
In pledging forgiveness and refusing to testify against their captors they effectively denied justice to the man whom their captors murdered. This kind of moralistic hubris does not reflect a humble mind but a sadly delusional one. Obtusely, deliberately delusional.
Labels: Justice, Terrorism Islam Middle East
Islam At War - With Itself
This is Islam gone amok with its war against itself. The viciously violent faction of Hate Central using defence of Islam as its inspiration for unbridled slaughter. Its enemies the disrespectful-to-Islam West, the Crusading infidels, the Jews who would not accept Mohammed's courteous invitation to forsake Judaism for Islam. And for the
historied arrogance of their refusal, they have paid handsomely in wars of attrition through the ages.
Those Muslims who wish to live their lives as worshippers of Islam without the baggage of violent jihad are less Muslims in the jaundiced eyes of the
Islamists than betrayers of Islam. This is an end-game that the
Salafists and the
Wahhabists and the Muslim Brotherhood with its offshoots of
Hamas and Hezbollah play with the world at large, to counter the influence and the civil advances of the West for the goal of a global caliphate.
The charismatic figurehead of global jihad who courteously demonstrated what bold determination and casual consideration of the meaning of life brought together in a tandem of bold purpose could accomplish is no more, but his legacy lives on. Now that he is dead, now that he has ascended to Paradise to be served and serviced by virgins aplenty as reward for his selfless sacrifice, his sacred blood is to be avenged.
Just another reason for the
mujaheddin to hone their terror skills in seeking new and more powerful images to leave the world with, corresponding with their volatile belligerence, their fascination with dealing death wholesale. And the latest carnage 80 dead in northern Pakistan in a paramilitary training centre. Young men who were being trained by the military to defend their country's interests preparing to go home on leave.
The many wounded may never be able, due to their injuries, to pick up where they left off. They will always remember hearing the triumphant "
Allahu Akbar!" and the two terrifying blasts that took the lives of their comrades, and made martyrs of those who acted as human bombs. Trauma, both physical and psychological, condemns them to live the event in perpetuity, while the 80 whose lives were taken were at least spared that.
This is Islam at its most incendiary, the kind of human relations that detest those among their own communities who cannot grasp the dire need to slavishly engage in jihad as commanded by the Koranic precepts that neatly fit the agenda of the
jihadists.
Labels: Terrorism Islam Middle East
