New England's largest mosque supports Al Qaeda terrorists

Robert Spencer reports that

“Support For Al Qaeda Terrorists Was Preached At New England’s Largest Mosque”, by Ilya Feokistov, Daily Caller, January 16, 2017

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Islam is dangerous!

Is Islamophobia justified? Should we fear Islam? Bookworm thinks so.

the Western fear of Islam is not tantamount to the German’s ginned up fear about Jews during the 1930s. Jews were peaceably living their lives throughout Europe, just as they had done for centuries. There were no terrorist attacks; there was no fiery rhetoric of conquest. There were antisemitic conspiracy theories that used invisible lines to connect imaginary dots.

With Islam the situation is different: Since 9/11, radical Muslims have been mobilized throughout the world. The Religion of Peace, which tracks murders committed explicitly in Islam’s name, says that there have been almost 30,000 of these Islamic-inspired attacks since 9/11. Please note, that number isn’t counting “deaths;” it’s counting “attacks.” Most of these attacks are aimed at creating mass deaths, whether in churches in Egypt, market stalls in Berlin, sidewalks and nightclubs in France, or quiet streets in Tel Aviv. Moreover, that number doesn’t even address ISIS’s depredations across increasingly larger swaths of the Middle East, nor does it look at what is essentially a raging Sunni-Shia war in Syria.

That we view Islam as dangerous is not the product of a fevered “Islamophobic” imagination; it is simply a matter of reading newspapers, noting the attacks, and noting how each is preceded by “Allahu Akbar,” and each is followed by a radical Islamist group (lately, ISIS), proudly taking responsibility for the death and bloodshed.

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General Mike Flynn gives us more details of Hillary's incompetence

General Mike Flynn writes,

A failed state, a terrorist haven, four dead Americans – this is the Hillary Clinton record in Libya we know about.

...A closer examination of the run-up to the Libya debacle on September 11, 2012 leads to the irrefutable conclusion that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knowingly armed radical Islamist terrorists in Libya.

Hillary Clinton described the 2011 Arab Spring rebellion in eastern Libya as a spontaneous pro-democracy uprising, but the Libyan connection to radical Islamic extremist groups was well known long before 2011.

...The leaders of the “civilian uprising” that Hillary Clinton supported were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) who had pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda. They refused to take orders from non-Islamist commanders and assassinated the then leader of the rebel army, Abdel Fattah Younes.

Just as there was ample evidence that Hillary’s “pro-democracy protestors” were radical Islamists, there was no truth to the assertion a civilian massacre was imminent.

Libyan doctors told United Nations investigators that, of the more than 200 corpses in Tripoli’s morgues following fighting in late February 2011, only two were female. This indicates Qaddafi’s forces targeted male combatants and did not indiscriminately attack civilians. Nor had Qaddafi forces attacked civilians after retaking towns from the rebels in early February 2011.

...While Muammar Qaddafi had a 40-year record of appalling human rights violations, his abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians. We restored full diplomatic relations with Qaddafi in 2007 and he was a key partner in counter-terrorism efforts.

LIFG and affiliated jihadis received at least 18 shipments of arms from Qatar with the blessing of the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reports. The arms shipments were funneled through none other than Ali al-Sallabi, the Qatar cleric who brokered their release from prison.

The Islamists were able to pay for the weapons because Clinton had convinced Obama to grant full diplomatic recognition to the rebels, against the advice of State Department lawyers and the Secretary of Defense.

As the Washington Post reported, this move “allowed the Libyans access to billions of dollars from Qaddafi’s frozen accounts.”

These arms shipments are significant for several reasons. It led to the indictment of American arms dealer Marc Turi who was charged with selling weapons to Islamist militants in Libya through Qatar. The charges were dropped this week after Turi threatened to reveal emails showing Clinton had approved the sales.

Here’s where it gets very sticky for Secretary Clinton. The rebel leaders were on the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list. It is a direct violation of the law to provide material support for terrorist organizations under 18 U.S. Code 2339A & 2339B. Penalties for providing or attempting to provide material support to terrorism include imprisonment from 15 years to life.

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We are at war! Do you understand that?

Nazi Germany was not defeated by hashtags, flowers, candles, or Facebook Lkes.

The connection between Islamic terror and drug profits

Robert Rotberg writes at Homeland Security News Wire,

Defeating ISIS, al-Qaeda and their offshoots will, in other words, depend more on cutting off their riches than countering their appeal to wide-eyed would-be fundamentalists.

Various big-power intelligence services are looking into how the drug trade works in Africa, and the interconnections of drug routes and militancy. The most comprehensive work is being done by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which has agents in Africa and issues pointed reports about the trade.

Nevertheless, given the clandestine nature of narcotics and trafficking, conjecture and speculation abound. With big money at stake, operatives have every reason to cover their tracks.

Thanks to research done by the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College, we do know that cocaine arrives in Africa from South America on an almost daily basis.

...Stemming from growers in Peru and Colombia, some cocaine leaves Venezuela and Brazil by private jet aircraft bound for secret airfields in Guinea-Bissau. This small West African nation is widely regarded as Africa’s primary narco-state. In recent years, military coups and other forced changes in Guinea-Bissau’s weak government have directly reflected competition for control of drug-fueled profits.

Other loads of cocaine from Colombia arrive at proper international airports in Nigeria, Benin and Ghana, hidden in shipments of plantains or coffee. Corrupt airport officials and customs and police officers make sure that the valuable shipments are soon on their way by air or road to Europe.

The fact is that today about 40 percent of the cocaine that reaches Europe annually comes via Africa.

That is where al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), or several of the Islamist groups that have been active in raiding and destabilizing Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Burkina Faso, muscle into the picture. They want their cut of the profits, either from being the major transporters of cocaine across the Sahara to Europe or from facilitating that traffic for a sizable slice of the returns.

...On the other side of the continent, Asian-refined heroin derived from Afghan or Burmese poppy seeds flows by dhow sailing vessel and by air into Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. There it is redirected to Europe, and sometimes, via Nigeria, to Mexico and North America.

Al-Shabaab, the Islamist, al-Qaeda-affiliated terror movement of Somalia, derives much of its predatory income from the movement of Asian heroin and locally produced qat.

Seleka, the Muslim insurgent group that captured and fractured the Central African Republic before being ousted by French and other militias, made money from transshipping drugs from south to north. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which has always had side operations in West Africa among the Lebanese diaspora, also profits from narcotics dealings on the periphery of the Sahara.

Whether al-Shabaab, or any of the other al-Qaeda- and ISIS-associated movements in Africa, would continue to constitute serious threats to local and world order absent abundant incomes derived from smuggling drugs and other goods like charcoal and hashish is not known with any certainty. But, certainly, drug profiteering is an opportunistic pursuit that drives terror activities.

...Combating terror in Africa, at least, now depends as much on cutting off insurgents from their sources of income as it does on defeating them on the battlefield – a much longer, tougher, and more costly pursuit.

Read more here.

Mark Steyn interviews Rudy Guiliani on Islamic terror

A craven ranking of outrages

Charles C.W. Cooke writes in The Corner,

Ladies and gentleman, your Secretary of State, Mr. John Kerry:

In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate.

It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate.

When I first saw the key line here — “there was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale” — I thought that Kerry had likely been misquoted. Alas, he had not. In fact, his words are even worse in context.

There really is no way of reading these comments other than as a craven ranking of outrages. Forget Kerry’s brief flirtation with the word “legitimacy” and assume that he said “rationale” from the start. That changes precisely nothing. The top diplomat in the United States just publicly argued that because the victims at Charlie Hebdo had spoken risqué words but the victims at the Bataclan had not, the violence against the former was more comprehensible than the violence against the latter. Has he lost his mind?

Even if Kerry’s assumptions were all correct, the moral problem here would be obvious. We hear a great deal about “blaming the victim” in our domestic debates, especially as it relates to sexual assault. Does this not apply to other realms? In essence, the American Secretary of State just announced before the world that he could grasp why the woman in the short skirt was raped but that he had been left scratching his head by the attack on the woman in the pantsuit and the overcoat. “Sure,” he said, “I get why they knocked off the hate speakers, but why would they go after progressive kids at a concert? Now things are really serious.”

Read more here.


Update: Rush Limbaugh reminded his listeners today that Ted Cruz was one of three Senators who voted against Obama's nomination of Kerry to be Secretary of State.

Succinct

Bill O'Reilly asks Lt. Col. Ralph Peters what must be done to defeat Islamic terrorists:

Are people in the West indifferent to African suffering?

Matt Schiavenza asks:

How did the attacks in France so thoroughly bury the atrocities in Nigeria?

One explanation is the difficulty of covering dangerous, remote parts of the world, such as Nigeria's northeastern Borno State, where Boko Haram holds sway over much of the territory. A similar dynamic exists in Syria, where a civil war has claimed nearly 200,000 lives since erupting in 2011, and where relatively few journalists are there to witness it. In addition, it's likely that the Paris attack's focus on a publication touched a nerve with members of the media worldwide.

The main difference between France and Nigeria isn't that the public and the media care about one and not the other. It is, rather, that one country has an effective government and the other does not. The French may not be too fond of President Francois Hollande—his approval ratings last November had plunged to 12 percent—but he responded to his country's twin terror attacks with decisiveness. Not so Nigeria's Goodluck Jonathan. Since assuming the presidency in 2010, Jonathan has done little to contain Boko Haram. The group emerged in 2002 and has consolidated control over an area larger than West Virginia. And it's gaining ground. Perversely, the seemingly routine nature of Nigeria's violence may have diminished the perception of its newsworthiness.

Jonathan's failure to confront Boko Haram, of course, is nothing new. Nigeria has long been cursed with a corrupt, ineffective government, one perennially unable to translate the country's vast oil wealth into broad-based prosperity.

Read more here.