Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of Texas CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to almost seven years imprisonment. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was given 20 years for federal weapons and explosives convictions in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and shipped back to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 for overstaying his visa. Authorities found a firearm and considerable ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was then deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for directing at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. (See Foundation Watch, December 2015.)“
Contending that American Muslims are the victims of wholesale repression, CAIR has provided sensitivity training to police departments across the United States, instructing law officers in the art of dealing with Muslims respectfully,” according to DiscoverTheNetworks. The estate of 9/11 victim John O’Neill Sr., a senior FBI counter-terrorism agent, filed a lawsuit claiming that CAIR’s goal “is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police department and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities.”
He has previously served Jewish communities in France and Israel, and, according to the report, has been instrumental in aiding Jews of the former Soviet Union. He is believed to have been in Haditch at the gravesite over Rosh Hashanah.
The motive for the attack remains unknown. According to the report, violent antisemitic attacks in Ukraine are rare, and there is no indication at this time that the assault was antisemitic in nature.
BackChannels wishes not to become “Yellow Press”, but given the mysterious elements in the crime described in The Algemeiner, both Ukrainian detectives and global public now need to be aware of the possibility of being fooled by old KGB method in placing a cooked-up image before “the masses”.
Let the detectives do their work, and may they do it with exemplary conscience and integrity.
After the Gaza war in 2014, the Jewish community all around the world especially in the UK was targeted by extremists. Some cases were highlighted in the media and many disappeared as usual but the Police tried hard to bring the offenders to justice. One of the cases was about 52 year old Mr. Yisro’el Shalom, who brought his case to me. Mr. Shalom had been living in the Borough of Newham in East London for nearly 22 years and in the last three years, he was attacked 340 times and verbally abused nearly 60 times. He was physically tortured, kicked and punched in his face by a gang of Asians (most probably Pakistanis) because he was a Jew living within the Muslim community.
Those hunting for war porn may find it on Live Leak.
The variety of insults to humanity evident in the Syrian theater have horrified and numbed this observer, albeit not in the action immediately — although throwing civilians into baking ovens would seem as bad as it gets: from there, the numbers subject to similarly depraved behavior may climb, God rest their souls, but the character of the crime could not be worse, well, perhaps with the exception of being boiled in exploding nuclear plasma — but in the consideration that this dive down into the criminal depths has been going on, and one may say this today with a straight face, for years.
While Putin and Obama may try to keep at their own arms length the depravity exhibited by the Assad regime (from the outset) and the Al Qaeda affiliates that have carried into the fray their own intellectual poisons as well as a demonstrated lack of self-restraint, the two remain visible at the outer boundary of the melee, would that either could untie themselves from what keeps them in an opposition fast losing its equilibrium.
The Syrian Civil War as a furnace, in the larger sense, continues drawing fuel from Islamist ranks worldwide. In fact, as we head into the New Year, Syria would seem the go-to place for fighting to establish the global caliphate, to chat freely about offing the Jews, once and for all, and for throwing innocents into baking ovens.
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Syria today is a country of blurred facts and wild rumors, but the abduction and in some cases murder of Christian clerics is real enough.
It is believed that more than 30 journalists are currently being detained in Syria.
Many kidnappings have been downplayed in the hope of aiding negotiations.
On Tuesday the Spanish newspaper El Mundo decided to publicise the abduction of two journalists in Syria in September after indirect communications with their captors led to “no result”.
L., in our so-far cooperative, democratic, open society (let’s all memorize the phrase), Americans may purchase just about any firearm they wish — and then some.
Note that I said “just about” because efforts by gun-control advocates may (or have) imposed some limits on high-magazine automatic firearms, a move that immediately spurred sales of the AR-15 class of weapons and related munitions.
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Peterson inquired about the tank on the lawn. “It’s an M1A1, from World War II,” Clancy said, gazing over at it. “My wife gave it to me for Christmas.”
“Geez,” Peterson said, “how much does a tank cost?”
“I don’t know,” Clancy replied with a slight smile. “Do you ask your wife what your Christmas presents cost?”
The American landscape is dotted with militia and sporting gun clubs and their ranges, and that includes private Muslim compounds as well as the enclaves of good ol’ Christian boys. In principle, what is legal and allowed for one group must apply equally to all, and that’s what we do. It takes the commission of a crime for the government, any level, to get into the business of a person or organization, gun owner or gun club.
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Where there are brakes involving the private ownership of firearms, the laws focus on behavior (required registration, training certification, etc.) rather than ownership.
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Finally, for the Facebook short-form of writing, lol, small home defense to corporate security involves a lot more than the mere possession of a weapon. As we have a reliable police force, outbound emergency communications count a great deal in any incident; as most American violence of interest involves domestic and personal issues (and alcohol), the paths to battery and murder may get far along and out of reach of both a weapon or telephone device; as regards break-ins, the fearful-with-guns often make mistakes involving their perception of intrusion and fatal accidents involving loved ones take place.
Perhaps the underlying threats in a peaceful land are largely psychological — and so are the comforts of owning some hardware.
In Pakistan, you are perhaps out on the edge of a wild frontier, but even so, what are the crimes that would be forestalled by the robed man of the house descending a staircase with a revolver? Would it not be better to call the police and retire to a safe room?
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It may be a fair test of American democracy and the values of the people that, overall, we are armed to the teeth and haven’t even one mainline domestic issue sufficient to launch even one general internecine low-intensity conflict. Instead, from time to time, organizations on the political fringe arm up, go “off the hook”, commit a crime or several — assassinations, bank robberies, bombings, etc. — bringing on a thorough reaming by the FBI and the invitation to sit in an electric chair or look forward to “three hots and a cot” for life.
I have been assured by my contact in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that fighting reported in the Miami Herald last Thursday is still ongoing but with one changed note: the hint that Hezbollah has banded with the FARC “to move their operations to neighboring countries, Peru, Venezuela and Ecuador, seeking new territory to plant opium . . . .”
That coca and poppy cultivation have taken place, or takes place, in certain areas isn’t news, but whether or not Hezbollah’s is in on that enterprise — or a part of this most recent fighting — that might be something worth the watching.
Excerpts From an Exchange
Sunday, August 11, 2013:
“We are worried about a war against Israel from many terrorist groups, we have information that Mexico and Peru are increased production of cocaine and opium are sowing now, it is likely that drug traffickers with this money can finance violent groups worldwide, in exchange for weapons and as part of the drug trade, then they can make terrorist attacks with Opium money.”
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“This is a battle with two front of war to Ecuador, because the drug traffickers control the jungle between Colombia and Peru, where the government of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador have no presence, the state have no presence with roads, village, school, hospitals in remote places of the country, far away from the Andes mountains all this place remain alone.”
Dark Space
From back rooms to board rooms to “secure compartmented information facilities”, any space may be made and kept “dark” in terms related to privacy and the keeping of secrets, but remote rural space affords another dimension in dark space: the opportunity to develop criminal and, in essence, criminal political enterprise with impunity.
Expect Edward Snowden’s breach of his NSA nondisclosure agreement to burn its way around the world.
What is freedom if it is not the ownership of one’s communications with assumed privacy?
What is security if it is not the state’s ability to operate “listening posts” to detect malice against those it has been charged to defend?
I have said of the Islamic Small Wars, and as much may be said of all organized crime and political terror, that they are wars for poets and detectives, the former because 1) what takes place in the mind takes place in language, and 2) what takes place in real space involves the most private forms of collusion and operational communication.
The recapitulation of international web traffic that starts at the Internet’s trunk lines, the robotic sifting for strings and patterns or known quantities, one might call them . . . I’m not sure that bothers me so much.
I am more concerned when the FBI ignores or overrides a valid and reliable Russian intelligence tip-off and Boston marathoners and their families and friends lose their lives or legs: what motivated that negligence before the fact?
I’m also annoyed a little bit about the web bots watching my online shopping and pressing me to buy whatever I’ve browsed on every other Facebook or online news page.
In the end, if we don’t like so much electronic snooping, we can, I suppose, resume living locally and hope the bar, the coffee shop, the barber’s chair, and the local park are not infested with bugs that never bite but only listen.
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