News and Articles

Islamic Intimidation In Western Media: How extremist Muslims intimidate press, true moderates into silence
Community leaders, terrorism experts and Middle East specialists say the groups are whitewashing their radicalism to get positive press, which they later parlay into community and political power. They say the groups are holding themselves out as moderates, that they play the race card at will, and exaggerate the climate for Muslims in the U.S.

Global Islamic Media Front Instructs Islamists to Infiltrate Popular Non-Islamic Forums to Spread Pro-Islamic State Propaganda
Recently, the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) announced a new comprehensive media campaign titled "The Battar Media Raid to Defend the Islamic State [of Iraq] (ISI)," [1] whose declared purpose is to repel the intensive campaign against the ISI by Arab and Western media agencies and to stop the increasing military campaign against the ISI by Sunni organizations in Iraq.

Preventative Warfare
U.S. military servicemen are stationed at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti (capital city of the east African country, The Republic of Djibouti. The base serves as the headquarters for the CJTF-HOA (Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa), a strategic campaign to combat terrorism in a region that serves as a critical corridor between Africa and the Middle East. Working in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Seychelles, Tanzania, Uganda and even Yemen, CJTF-HOA sees itself as the future of the global war on terror. The guiding idea is straightforward. Entrenched poverty makes the region prime recruiting ground for jihadist terrorism, while the weakness of local governments makes it a potential safe-haven for Islamic radicals. Provide the native people with employment, education, and basic social services, the reasoning goes, and you counter the potential appeal of terrorism and nurture pro-American sentiment among future generations. In an age when urban, guerilla warfare has replaced traditional battlefield combat and when the loyalties of local people can decisively shift the momentum, the operations in the horn of Africa represent the U.S. military's big-theory answer to the terrorists' asymmetrical tactics. It's not so much preemptive warfare as preventive warfare.

Jihad on Western Internet Forums
An announcement by the Global Islamic Media Front, an al-Qaeda mouthpiece, was recently disseminated across several jihadist forums in which the group presents the “jihadi information and the Western peoples.” The message, written by Ahmad al-Hatheq Bi Allah, argues that the Internet serves as the best alternative to broadcast television for Muslims to execute a “kind of jihad” involving preaching and information disbursement. As the Western media allegedly obfuscates “facts,” the author believes that it is incumbent upon Muslims to join Western Internet forums, to show the truth convincingly through visual or voice arguments, especially as it concerns Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Chechnya. With successful debate, the author claims the American people will place pressure upon the U.S. government, “the guardian or terrorism and its marketing,” to reverse its foreign policy, else the people are culpable for attacks brought upon them, as Ayman al-Zawahiri exclaimed.

An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers
A 21 year-old man in North Carolina is helping militant Muslims spread their message to his fellow Americans, and so far no one has been able to stop him.

Mega Mosque in London With The Goal Of Converting All Of Britain To Islam
Tablighi Jamaat aims to build an Islamic complex near to the site of the 2012 Olympic stadium, with a mosque for 12,000 people, by far the largest religious building in Britain. The organization, which has millions of followers worldwide, insists that it is a peaceful, apolitical revivalist movement that promotes Islamic consciousness among individual Muslims. However, intelligence agencies have cautioned that the group’s ability to fire young men with a zeal for Islam acts as a staging post, for some, along a path that leads to jihadist terrorism.

An Interview With Ayaan Hirsi Ali
She is a former Muslim and a former Dutch politician who is coming up with solutions to the problem of the spread of Islamic terrorism.

Iran, Osama, and 9/11
Iran is a major fountainhead of terrorism. According to the 9/11 Commission, the Iranians and al Qaeda held discussions in the early 1990’s. During the embassy bombings trial we learned that one of these meetings involved a sit down between Imad Mugniyah, who is Iran’s master terrorist as well as Hezbollah’s chief of terrorist operations, and Osama bin Laden. As a result of these meetings, Iran and al Qaeda agreed to cooperate on attacks against America and Israel. Al Qaeda terrorists were then trained in Iranian and Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon, Sudan and Iran.

Inside Iran's Secret War For Iraq
A Time investigation, based on documents smuggled out of Iran and dozens of interviews with U.S., British and Iraqi intelligence officials, as well as an Iranian agent, armed dissidents and Iraqi militia and political allies, reveals an Iranian plan for gaining influence in Iraq that began before the U.S. invaded. In their scope and ambition, Iran's activities rival those of the U.S. and its allies, especially in the south. There is a gnawing worry within some intelligence circles that the failure to counter Iranian influence may come back to haunt the U.S. and its allies, if Shi'ite factions with heavy Iranian backing eventually come to power and provoke the Sunnis to revolt. Says a British military intelligence officer, about the relative inattention paid to Iranian meddling: "It's as though we are sleepwalking."

Homegrown Campus Jihadist
Houssein Zorkot, a third-year medical student at Wayne State University in Michigan, was arrested on September 8 at Hemlock Park in Detroit. He was wearing camouflage makeup, black clothes, and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle; he reportedly had to be tasered by police when he was arrested. His website features photographs of the Ayatollah Khomeini and a great deal of pro-Hizballah material. Most ominously, on the day he was arrested he uploaded onto his site an image that included a photo of a soldier holding a rifle, with the caption, “The Start of My Personal Jihad (in the US).” Underneath in Arabic was Qur’an 9:20: “Those who believe, and have left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight. These are they who are triumphant.” The Arabic for “striven…in Allah’s way” is jahadoo fi sabil Allah, which in Islamic theology refers in particular to jihad as warfare.

Saudis' Role In Iraq Insurgency
About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.

Defeatists (about Iraq) Are Defeated
In the real world, the news from Iraq had been (relatively) good for a couple of months. General David Petraeus's military success had been followed with striking political achievements in Anbar province. At home, a mood of annoyance at the Bush administration's conduct of the war had started to yield to a realization that we were approaching a choice of paths on Iraq, and that the consequences of embracing defeat would be severe.

Islam Gets Concessions, Infidels Get Conquered
When Islamists wage jihad — past, present and future — conquering and consolidating non-Muslim territories and centers in the name of Islam, never once considering to cede them back to their previous owners, they ultimately demonstrate that they live by the age-old adage "might makes right." That's fine; many people agree with this view. But if we live in a world where the strong rule and the weak submit, why is it that whenever Muslim regions are conquered, such as in the case of Palestine, the same Islamists who would never concede one inch of Islam's conquests resort to the United Nations and the court of public opinion, demanding justice, restitutions, rights and so forth?

The War Against Terrorists, Starting in 1776
This is an interesting look at early America and its dealings with Muslim pirates. A surprising bit of history.

Plot Against Airport Foiled
June 2007 - On June 2, the U.S. Department of Justice announced arrests in a foiled terrorist plot to attack John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport.

Debate On Al-Jazeera
This is a five and a half minute clip from Al-Jazeera of an Arab-American psychologist (Wafa Sultan) delivering a devastating critique of Muslims and defense of Jews. Sounds like partisan bickering, but try to find a single comment she makes that you can disagree with. She does this within the framework of a debate with a Muslim cleric, whose only argument is: "You're a heretic, so we don't have to listen to you."

From The Terrorists Mouth
That 5 1/2 years have passed without a similar attack on U.S. soil has made it easier for Americans to think of 9/11 as an aberration. This is a potentially dangerous belief.

How Multiculturalism Is Betraying Women
Do you believe in the rights of women, or do you believe in multiculturalism? A series of verdicts in the German courts in the past month, have shown with hot, hard logic that you can't back both. You have to choose.

Ordinary Citizen Helps Catch Terrorists
Like a hunter using a duck call, Shannen Rossmiller invites the online attentions of would-be terrorists by adorning her e-mail with video clips of Westerners getting their heads cut off.

Rage Boy In The News
Hatred of the West has been a theme of Islamists long before Iraq was invaded, and pulling our troops out of Iraq would not stop the hatred. Thinking in terms of "trying to make them not hate us" would not be good for anyone except the extremists. In fact, they do not just hate the West. They hate their fellow Muslims who wish to form democracies, not just in Iraq, but everywhere a democracy movement has been tried in a Muslim country. There has always been a small but violent minority of those Muslims who have given their all to stop democracy from taking root.

Quick-thinking pilot foils hijacker with hard landing
Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands — A cunning pilot thwarted a hijacking by discreetly warning the passengers in French — a language the gunman didn't speak — that he would knock the attacker off-balance with a rough landing, and that they should be ready to pounce.

Slow Motion Tet
All over Iraq, al Qaeda is losing support for many good reasons, but that isn't as newsworthy as a bridge blowing up, so it isn't covered much by mainstream news, so we don't hear much about it, so many of us are disheartened about Iraq. Read why news is covered the way it is.

A Summit Of Secular Muslims Rebel
This past week individuals from various professions and different ethnicities sharing a connection with Islam gathered in St. Petersburg, Fla. The meeting was billed as Secular Islam Summit. A statement -- The St. Petersburg Declaration -- was released which calls for an affirmation of individual rights and freedom of conscience for Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the Muslim world. Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi (see photo) was one of the speakers at the Summit.

Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?
Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

Islam's Other Radicals
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- At this landmark Summit on Secular Islam, there are no "moderate" Muslims. There are ex-Muslims: People like Ibn Warraq, author of "Why I Am Not a Muslim," who doesn't want an Islamic Reformation so much as he does a Muslim Enlightenment. There are ex-jihadists: people like Tawfik Hamid, who, as a young medical student in Cairo, briefly enlisted in the Gamaa Islamiya terrorist group and who remembers being preached to by a mesmerizing doctor named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Remember: for Cambodia, read Iraq
Cambodia's Pol Pot was a gigantic tragedy. What lesson can we derive from that event and apply to the current situation in Iraq?

Australia Rejects Islamist Encroachment
CANBERRA AUSTRALIA -- Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks. A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown.

Seduced by Radical Islam
Before I was an FBI informant, an apostate and a blasphemer, I was a devout believer in radical Islam. That meant I had to remember a lot of rules. I could never pet a dog or shake hands with a woman. I could eat only with my right hand, and before prayer, I had to roll my pant legs above my ankles. I accepted all this.

Historical Significance
There is a civil war raging in the Islamic world (not just in Iraq) — for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation today, but it is not yet known which will win — the Inquisition, or the Reformation.

Freelance Hackers Attack Terrorist Websites
It is illegal, but the laws may someday change. For right now, though, hackers in Britain are infiltrating and shutting down websites that recruit new suicide bombers.

How Muslims Think
A Pew Global survey yielded some dismaying results.

Freedom and Justice in Islam
What is the possibility of freedom in the Islamic world, in the Western sense of the word? If you look at the current literature, you will find two views common in the United States and Europe.

The Long War
It would be nice if we lived in a world in which we didn't have to take the enemies of liberal democracy seriously — a world without jihadists who want to kill and clerics who want to intimidate and tyrants who want to terrorize. It would be nice to wait until we were certain conditions were ripe before we had to act, a world in which the obstacles are trivial and the enemies fold up. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.

An Original Way To Fight Terrorism
Marc Sageman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a former CIA officer, notes that the nature of Islamist-jihadist sites could be turned against them. "In jihad, with so many Web sites, you have many potential messages, and you do not know what is true," he remarks. This lack of authenticity, he notes, could serve as a basis for a misinformation campaign to foil jihadists.

The Islamization of Europe?
Only a few years ago, mass-murder attacks on the West in the name of Islam, like those of September 11, would have seemed like a thriller writer’s fantasy. Nor would anyone have imagined that a bombing by Islamists could swing a general election in a European country, that a Dutch movie-maker might be shot dead on the street for a film about the abuse of women in Islam, or that one might find oneself watching, on television, the beheading of Western hostages by men crying out Allahu Akhbar! over their savage deeds. Pakistan now has a nuclear bomb, and this weapon is widely described as an Islamic bomb. To judge by their pronouncements, the Islamist leaders of Iran can hardly wait to perfect and use their derivative of it.

The Political Brain
A recent brain-imaging study shows that we lean right or left (politically) because of the way the brain has evolved. Whatever bias we have is caused by a more underlying bias for confirmation. This has important implications in the war on terror.

That Feeling Of Being Under Suspicion
Terrorism has had many effects on society, and the foremost among them are philosophical, or spiritual. We are now called upon to adjust the way we live and think, and to do so we must also adjust the bandwidth of our tolerance. By this I don't mean that we must be less tolerant of others but that some among us must learn to tolerate--or put up with--hardships, inconvenience or a new set of presumptions, given the all-consuming nature of the threat we face, in which "the profiled" and "the profilers" alike are targets.

The Muslim Mind is on Fire
Youssef M. Ibrahim writes in the Middle East Times: "The world of Islam is on fire. Indeed, the Muslim mind is on fire. Above all, the West is now ready to take both of them on. The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down."

Europe's Native-Born Enemy
This is an article about the London bombing, but the author says something that clarifies the whole terrorism situation. He wrote, "[The constant violence in the Muslim world] is essentially a civil war within a rival civilization in which the most primitive elements are seeking to gain the upper hand. Sept. 11 forced us to intervene massively in this civil war, which is why we are in Iraq. There, as in Afghanistan, we have enlisted millions of Muslims on the anti-Islamist side."

Freedom is Winning
Democratic governments now outnumber nondemocratic governments worldwide, and the trend is all good.

Protection Against Terrorist Nukes
Scientists have found a way to detect concealed nuclear weapons-grade materials at border crossings around the world.

Don't Be Passive
It is important for you to remain active and purposeful rather than passive and feeling helpless. Punctuating this understanding is a new study by Ohio State University.