World Threats

The Syrian rebels are loudly airing their frustrations with the U.S. as they ask for outside help, even going so far as to ask Israel for humanitarian assistance. Opposition leaders are particularly enraged after being informed that they shouldn’t expect American assistance until after the presidential election. There are valid reasons to worry about support the rebels because there are Islamists, including Al-Qaeda elements, among them but the secularists’ need for outside support and disillusionment with the U.S. are also things to be concerned about.

The Syrian Support Group, a political arm of the Free Syria Army in Washington D.C., sent a request to the U.S. for 1,000 RPG-29 anti-tank missiles, 720 23mm machine guns, 500 SAM-7 rockets, body armor, secure satellites and $6 million to pay soldiers. Every item was turned down and the reason given has sparked vocal expressions of disgust with the U.S.

A Free Syria Army logistics coordinator named Louay Mokdad said that requests for satellite images, an operations room and information that can be useful in tracking Assad’s chemical weapons were turned down as well. He slammed the U.S. for providing “weak and inadequate” support.

A representative of the group said, “Basically the message is very clear; nothing is going to happen until after the election, in fact nothing will happen until after the inauguration. And that is the same message coming from everyone, including the Turks and Qataris.”

Abdulbasit Sieda, the Kurdish president of the Syrian National Council, an umbrella group based in Turkey, said ”We would like to say to President Obama that waiting for Election Day to make the right decision on Syria is unacceptable for Syrians. We cannot understand that a superpower ignores the killing of tens of thousands of Syrian civilians because of an election campaign that a president may win or lose.
Click here to read the rest of my FSM/IRD article.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie hasn’t commented on the case of Imam Mohammed Qatanani since the issue started getting attention, leaving open the question of whether he still stands by the radical imam that the Department of Homeland Security wants to deport. We now know the answer. On July 24, Christie invited Qatanani to a Ramadan dinner at the Governor’s Mansion and he reaffirmed his support for the cleric, calling him a “friend.”

“In all my interactions with the imam, he has attempted to be a force for good in his community, in our state with law enforcement, with those of us who have gotten to know him for the years,” Christie said at the event in Princeton.  He continued:

“I hope that what you see is a constant strain of conduct for me. I will judge people based upon their relationships with me and the way I observe them conduct themselves, and while there may be other issues at play and I will certainly consider those if other facts come in, I will tell you the folks who are my friends will continue to be my friends as long as they continue to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty and faith in common value and the things that make our state a better place.”

This development isn’t terribly surprising, especially since RadicalIslam.org reported that when Christie’s Attorney General met with Qatanani, Mohamed el-Filali, the executive director of Qatanani’s mosque and an official from the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ N.J. chapter.

Qatanani’s next hearing is scheduled for November 26.

For more background information on Imam Qatanani and his relationship with Governor Christie, read RadicalIslam.org’s previous reports by clicking here, here and here.

Click here for the original article at RadicalIslam.org.

A source operating in the Middle East has informed RadicalIslam.org that prominent Saudi princes and sheikhs are trying to purchase anti-aircraft missiles for the Syrian rebels and unsuccessfully tried to convince the U.S. to provide them.

According to this source, Saudi security officials have expressed concern that jihadists fighting in Syria will attack the Royal Family after Assad falls.

The Saudi princes are reportedly seeking SA-7 and SA-24 missile systems and may be looking to acquire them from Libyan stockpiles. After Muammar Qaddafi was overthrown in Libya, there were reports of large amounts of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles going missing. Qaddafi’s older SA-7s can be shoulder-fired but the newer SA-24s must be launched from a vehicle.

Sheikhs in the Najd region are preaching that Muslims are required to wage jihad against Assad, either by personally fighting or financially contributing to Sunni Muslims in Syria and Iraq. The source attributes the rise in violence in Iraq to this Saudi recruitment drive.

Wealthy princes are financing their travel, paying Syrian military personnel to defect and are attempting to recruit former members of the Saudi National Guard with large financial packages. On July 29, Al-Jazeera reported that the Saudi Crown Prince announced that over $72.33 million was raised for the Syrian people over five days, with $5.3 million coming directly from King Abdullah and $2.6 million from the Crown Prince. Food, blankets, medical equipment and even jewelry were donated separately.

On June 19, we reported that a source estimated the number of Saudi Wahhabists fighting in Syria to be between 150 and 200. The source said that about 450 were in transit to Syria and another 450-500 were still in Saudi Arabia making travel arrangements. This source says that the number of Saudi jihadists estimated to be in Syria now is between 1,800 and 2,500.

Click here to read the rest of my RadicalIslam.org article.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is on his way out and the best he can hope for is to create an Allawite mini-state for his loyalists. Al-Qaeda smells blood in the water and wants a piece of the pie once Assad falls. The Muslim Brotherhood, like Al-Qaeda, envisions an Islamic State of Syria. Some of the secular rebels determined to overthrow Assad are worried, warning that the Islamists are pulling the rug from under their feet.

The Assad regime began directly supporting Al-Qaeda as the U.S. invasion of Iraq neared, though the Hezbollah networks supported by Assad worked with Al-Qaeda before that. Now, Al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned its sights on its former sponsor, just as General David Petraeus predicted. One low-level Al-Qaeda operative in Iraq says, “Our big hope is to form a Syrian-Iraqi Islamic State for all Muslims, and then announce our war against Iran and Israel, and free Palestine.”

Saudi Wahhabists are recruiting and dispatching fighters to Syria and the regime is worried enough about Hamas to apparently assassinate one of its leaders. A Libyan Islamist militia leader with Al-Qaeda ties met with the Free Syria Army in November and is almost certainly responsible for the arrival of Libyan fighters afterwards. The Free Syria Army, consisting largely of army defectors, is generally regarded as a secular force but jihadists sometimes operate under its banner. For example, a video has surfaced of fighters claiming to belong to the Free Syria Army with the flag of Al-Qaeda in the background. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, says there are about 300 different rebel groups in Syria and as many as one-fourth may be Al-Qaeda supporters.

Click here to read the rest of my FrontPage Magazine article.

On July 13, a group of over 100 opponents of the Iranian regime crammed into a small conference room in McLean, V.A. to honor a Kurdish leader assassinated by the regime. The audience, mostly Kurds, was also there to explore a question that has been on their minds for years, even decades: Why won’t the U.S. help us overthrow a terror-sponsoring regime that supports its enemies?

The event honored Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, an Iranian-Kurdish leader murdered by the regime’s agents in Vienna in 1989. It was put together by United Kurdish Youth for Human Rights, KurdCenter, the Leadership Council for Human Rights and Sara Akrami, founder and President of the Human Rights Association at York University. Akrami, a half-Kurdish Iranian, views the Kurds as an essential part of any organized opposition to the regime. Her activism, such as showing the film Iranium on campus, has earned her death threats. Thanks to the Institute on Religion and Democracy, I was able to speak at the event.

The argument most commonly used by opponents of backing the opposition is that outside help is unwanted and counter-productive. President Obama explained his silence during the 2009 Green Revolution with, “It is not productive, given the history of U.S. and Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections.” The Iranians I spoke to couldn’t disagree more and many nodded in agreement when Kathryn Cameron Porter said she is “ashamed” of voting for President Obama because of his stance on this issue.

Dr. Ivan Sascha Sheehan of Baltimore University fired up the audience with his denunciations of how the U.S. has handled the Iranian opposition. They especially sympathized with his statement that the West has used them as bargaining chips at the negotiating table, using them to influence the regime instead of replacing it.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The fighting in Damascus and now Aleppo means Syrian dictator Bashar Assad can no longer hope to reclaim his country. The best he can hope for is to barricade himself inside a stronghold in the mountainous areas of the northwest and along the Mediterranean Coast.

An army defector says that 60% of the country is now under the control of the rebels called the Free Syria Army. They have captured all four border crossings on the Iraqi border and one on the Turkish border. The fighting in the capital of Damascus is nearing the Presidential Palace and it is escalating in Aleppo, the upscale city that has been one of the few areas relatively stable since the revolution began.

“Aleppo is to Syria what New York City is to the U.S.—a key financial hub, and a key crossroads for international trade,” writes James Miller. His assessment is that, “If Aleppo falls, this war is over,” because the rebels will then control Idlib Province and then take Hama and Homs.

Assad’s forces are over-stretched and over-used. Their offensives are able to defeat the rebels in battles–Damascus’ Midan District has been recaptured by the regime—but then the fight moves elsewhere. The regime simply doesn’t have the means to squash the revolution.

Click here to read the entire article at RadicalIslam.org.

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Huma Abedin’s late father, Dr. Syed Abedin, was also intimately involved with Islamists. He led the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs based in Saudi Arabia. It is backed by the Muslim World League and is an entity of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a very extreme Islamist group. The Institute also published Mrs. Abedin’s book. Huma herself was an associate editor of the Institute’s journal as far back as 1996 and as recently as 2008, which means she was there when it published her mother’s extremist book. This screenshot from September 2008 shows that Huma, her mother and brother were all simultaneously editors of the journal.

Click here for the entire article at RadicalIslam.org.

One of the most acclaimed documentaries about Muslims in a post-9/11 America is New Muslim Cool, a 2009 film about a Puerto Rican-American named Hamza Perez that is part of an Islamic hip-hop duo named “Mujahideen Team.” The film focuses on an FBI raid on his mosque and his dismissal as an Islamic teacher at a jail, using them as examples of the discrimination Muslims now face. But is the FBI really prejudiced against Muslims or acting to protect Americans against threats by radical Muslims?

Perez, the hero of the film, was part of a group who moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to “create a Muslim community.” He’s made extremist statements in the past, including one directed towards the U.S. government in 2003 that he attributes to immaturity. He’s held up as a moderate eager for interfaith dialogue who believes that jihad is a struggle against sin, not the waging of war. His past remarks resulted in the revoking of his security clearance, temporarily barring him from teaching at the jail.

Click here to read the rest of my RadicalIslam.org article.

On June 1, 2009, William “Andy” Long was murdered at an Army recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas by an Islamist terrorist named Carlos Bledsoe. In a new, heart-wrenching and jaw-dropping film titled Losing Our Sons by Americans for Peace and Tolerance, you see the real story of how this happened. The bottom line is this: The Islamists are operating in our midst, we’re refusing to recognize it, radicalization is no accident and any family can be victimized by it.

The process of Islamist radicalization unfolds before the viewer as the story is told through the eyes of Melvin Beldsoe and Daris Long, the father of the Islamist terrorist and the father of his victim, making the film a powerful emotional journey. Both of them lost their sons at the exact same moment, they explain. The attack wasn’t the result of statistics. Beldsoe wasn’t the inevitable “bad apple” in a large group. This was the fruition of a jihadist process that continues in Nashville and around the world today.

Beldsoe was exposed to radical Islam at Tennessee State University. The school allowed an organization called the Olive Tree Education to host lectures about Islam on campus. The organization’s website promoted sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki and its leader teaches that Muslims must oppose “progressive Islam” that believes Islam isn’t a “state matter.” Muslims are not allowed to have opinions and must form a “reaction to Westernization” that involves implementing Sharia Law. In one clip, the leader is asked whether homosexuality is punishable by death under Islam. He replies in the affirmative.

Click here to read the rest of my FSM/IRD article.

The United Nations Security Council latest proposal for ousting Assad’s government: international sanctions, was defeated this morning by the veto power of China and Russia, while two other nations (Pakistan and South Africa) abstained and eleven voted to take the hardest non-military line against the brutal regime.

This represents yet another display of the international community’s paralysis to do anything useful to settle the ongoing conflict in Syria, as the embattled regime’s few remaining allies refuse to join the west in ousting Assad and the west refuses to seriously consider non-U.N. military actions, such as deploying NATO…

With the regime launching an counter-offensive against the rebels in Damascus, killing scores of innocents at a funeral procession with helicopter gunships, and the rebels putting every ounce of resources into this fight – western action could tip the scales and end this conflict sooner then later with a new government in place and Assad on his way to the Hague.

With the events of earlier today still in mind, my angst towards the United Nations has never been greater. I really just cannot understand the abject stupidity of the international body tasked with preventing conflict…..

As I’m sure everyone heard, Syria is in a state of total civil war: Damascus saw the strongest engagements in city limits since the uprising started last year; potentially thousands of Syrian soldiers defected; Assad might be wounded and there are rumors that loyalist forces are distributing gas masks to their troops.

Or, in other words – the shit hit the fan. Literally.

So what was the U.N.’s response?

Postpone the latest useless U.N. Security Council resolution that threatens… and I’m not kidding… sanctions if Assad doesn’t cease and desist from his brutal crackdown until tomorrow to allow more time for the west, which has about as much backbone as a in-vertebrae right now, to sway Russia to our side on… sanctions in wake of what occurred today.

Oh, gee wiz, lets shoot for sanctions when Damascus is fricking burning!

This is the time where western forces could aid the Free Syrian Army, overwhelming Assad’s dwindling loyal forces, and put this tyrant down once and for all. We did the right thing in Libya when the rebels were almost at the point of destruction; why not learn from our involvement last year, and this time help when the loyalists are the ones with their capital under siege?

Then again, that would be common sense, something the U.N. hasn’t displayed since their creation almost 70 years ago…

Perhaps this is Assad’s retaliation:

“An explosion occurred in a passenger’s bus with Israeli citizens at the Burgas Airport,” Mayor of Burgas Dimitar Nikoliv announced for Radio FOCUS.
According to unofficial data there are casualties.

Update:

Unfortunately, there are casualties. 3 dead, 20 wounded.