Friday, May 01, 2009 
By Eric Shawn

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518611,00.html

The cover of “Jihad Recollections,” a magazine about Al Qaeda that impels Americans to join in jihad.

It’s been likened to Al Qaeda’s “Vanity Fair,” a new English-language Internet magazine called “Jihad Recollections” that focuses on the terrorist group, its founder, Usama Bin Laden, and how to commit jihad. It also predicts the demise of the United States.

“This is designed for Americans,” says noted terrorism expert Steven Emerson, founder of the Investigative Project on Terrorism in Washington, D.C., and author of the book “American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.”…

It is not clear what connection, if any, the magazine has to Al Qaeda or its followers. It is published by the “Al Fursan Media Foundation,” but FOX News could not find such an organization or a way to contact them for comment.

Yet “Jihad Recollections” certainly highlights the terrorist group and the goals of Islamic jihad in a sophisticated and graphically slick presentation similar to any high quality Web site.

The magazine includes the speeches and writings of Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Articles range from “Four Practical Steps to Expand the Global Jihad,” to “The Science Behind Night Vision Technology” and “Principles of Guerrilla Warfare.”

“The magazine is quite startling,” said Emerson. It is “a veritable manual on how to carry out terrorism. It’s quite shocking, and the question is whether it violates the law or not.”

The first issue says of the 9/11 attacks, that “the strategy was genius.” It calls America “one of the most atrocious and egotistical regimes to date,” and it accuses the United States of spreading corruption in Islamic countries through its embassies. “How can we expect from America any good?” it asks. “We only expect from it every evil and corruption.”

“Jihad Recollections” appears to prepare followers to engage in jihad…

In fact, “Jihad Recollections” proclaims: “It is the first of its kind as it is geared towards the English speaking Muslims who are interested in gaining heights in their religious, political, economical, social, technological, strategic, historical, biographical and health awareness.”

The writing may be a bit flamboyant, and while it boasts that “The U.S. grows weaker every day,” there is no explicit call for violence against the country or against Americans. Emerson thinks the publication is “pushing the envelope of the First Amendment” by reporting on jihad issues, and he says it indicates that the Internet is being used as “one of the major sources for radicalization.” …

More than 5,000 people have viewed “Jihad Recollections” and 11 people list it as one of their “favorites.” Who are its readers? And do they adhere to the jihad philosophy?

Whoever is behind “Jihad Recollections” has a strange mix of opinion with one focus: seemingly to spread the message of Islamic jihad at the expense of Americans. That such a publication is accessible at all speaks to the freedoms we enjoy in our country while, experts say, also serving as a warning of the danger that Islamic militants and radicals pose to our nation.

[NOTE re the reference to the ‘Conquering of Rome’ in the picture of the magazine’s cover: the Arabic word Rom – literally ‘Rome’ – means the Christian world. – JB]

 Al-Qaeda is roaring back into Iraq. 

Pakistan is disintegrating, and the Taliban is likely to take control of its nuclear arsenal.  

Iran and North Korea are producing nuclear weapons. 

Israel has called up its airforce reservists.

What is the Obama administration doing about these developments?

What is it likely to do?

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child will apparently have full legal force in the US.

This means that American moms may not smack their kids or – O boy, will they be in for it!  

But  – liberals be assured – it does not forbid you to kill them if they’re born alive when you try to abort them.   

And it will not stop little boys in Africa being armed with Kalashnikovs and sent into battles to kill and be killed. It will not stop the seizure or purchase of children by African and Arab slave dealers. It will not stop children being held and exploited as slaves for labour and sex. It will not save little Muslim girls from having their genitals sawn off. It will not stop the ritual killing of children as human sacrifices by certain African and Far Eastern religious cults. It will not stop Hamas from using children as human shields. And it will not stop Islamic moms and dads having their children blow up in suicide bombings. 

There isn’t really a choice. Iran, with the active help of the UN and the passive help of the decaying West, will win. Lebanon will be a bunker. 

 From the Investor’s Business Daily:

The Feb. 14, 2005, assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in a car bombing also killed 22 others and sparked a nationwide protest that became known as the Cedar Revolution.

It soon forced the withdrawal of Syria’s army after decades of de facto occupation of a neighbor it had refused to formally recognize, a sovereign nation it viewed as a lost province of a Greater Syria.

In the aftermath of the assassination, a U.N. commission was formed to determine who killed Hariri and to bring them to justice. Most fingers pointed at Lebanon’s former occupier, Syria, which not surprisingly failed to cooperate in the investigation.

The initial report by Detlev Mehlis, the chief U.N. investigator into Hariri’s assassination, said the decision to kill Hariri, who Damascus feared would rally Lebanese opposition to Syrian influence, "could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials" and their Lebanese operatives.

On Wednesday, it became clear that Hariri’s assassins might never be brought to justice and that the U.N. isn’t serious about dealing with that assault on Lebanese democracy — part of a long series of assassinations of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians and journalists.

Judge Daniel Franzen ordered four Lebanese generals suspected of involvement in Hariri’s murder freed on the grounds there was insufficient evidence for keeping them jailed. In fact, it was not so much a lack of evidence as it was a lack of will by the international community, which refused to press Syria on the issue.

After Hariri’s assassination, the formation of the international tribunal into his death and the withdrawal of Syrian forces gave a boost to those hoping Syrian influence and control were at an end and Lebanese democracy was safe. But much has changed in the last four years.

In 2006, the terrorist group Hezbollah, heavily armed and financed by Damascus and Tehran, provoked a war with Israel using Lebanon and its people as a human shield.

Despite U.N. Resolution 1559, which demanded all militia groups disarm, Hezbollah kept its weapons and added more while it began a two-year campaign marked by additional violence and assassinations to destabilize the government of Lebanon.

The campaign culminated in early 2008 with Hezbollah laying siege to government buildings and storming pro-government militia headquarters in West Beirut. The violence subsided after talks in Doha, Qatar, gave Hezbollah (the Party of Allah) its long sought veto power over government decisions in a new Cabinet of national unity. But Hezbollah wants more and in the upcoming June 7 parliamentary elections, may win it all.

Sources in Lebanon say that in recent months Iran has smuggled upward of a billion dollars into Lebanon to help its puppet creation, Hezbollah, buy the election. "Hezbollah intends to win these elections at all costs," says Toni Nissi, secretary-general of the National Council for the Cedar Revolution. "This election victory will allow them to transform their illegal institutions into legal ones." …

Many fear this election could be as disastrous for Middle East peace as the 2006 election that brought Hamas to power in Gaza.

"The choice is between Lebanon as a beach and Lebanon as a bunker," Middle East expert Amir Taheri recently quoted a Lebanese businessman as saying. "Lebanon could either become an extension of Europe in the Middle East or a bridgehead for Iran in the Mediterranean."

All that will be needed for Iran to triumph will be for the West to continue to do virtually nothing.

This delightful display of obfuscation, incoherence, and characteristic slippery-slitheriness on the part of the pythoness, Nancy Pelosi, comes from a report by Politico:

Nancy Pelosi sat down with CNN’s Candy Crowley tonight and gave her most detailed – and passionate – explanation of her muted behavior during an initial classified briefing on enhanced interrogation procedures in 2002.

Crowley kicked it off by asking the Speaker about about a column by former CIA director and ex-House intel chairman Porter Goss accusing Democrats of collective "amnesia" for urging investigations of waterboarding after remaining relatively mute during those first classified briefings.

PELOSI: Well, first of all, let me say that perhaps we do live in an alternate universe, Porter and I.

Porter’s orientation is that he was a member of the CIA before he came to Congress and he speaks now as a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

CROWLEY: Is he wrong?

PELOSI: Perhaps he is seeing it from his perspective. If they say we have a legal opinion, it means we’re going to use it. That’s not how I heard it. They said they had a legal opinion. They said they weren’t going to use and when they did they would come back to Congress to report to us on that. But that’s how I heard that.

Let me say what’s important about how we go forward. Because for some reason the Republicans, while I am barred from talking about what goes on in meetings and I could be charged for revealing classified information, they seem to feel at liberty to talk about everything that went on at every meeting as they saw it.

She went on to make the argument, refuted by the current ranking Republican on the intelligence committee Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), that she didn’t raise objections because they would have served no practical purpose.

So as we go from here, he said-she said, it can go on forever. What we should do is to say more members should have access to this so that there can be accountability and you can talk about it.

You’re really a hostage if you’re notified that something has happened. They’re not asking for your thoughts. They are notifying you that this is their opinion. They later may have notified, I don’t know, because I wasn’t part of any of those briefings, of what they were doing, but they notify you that they have an opinion.

If you want to take it to another place, who do you call, the chief justice of the Supreme Court? The president of the United States whose policies these are? You have no recourse or else you are breaking the law. 

Crowley then asked why she didn’t raise objections to the briefers, which riled up the Speaker.

PELOSI: To what end? To what end? No, we’re not – they didn’t say they were doing it. But you know what, I’m not getting into that. The fact is, is that I know what they told us and I know that they did not share our values.

So any briefing that you would get from the Bush administration on the subject is one that is probably something you’re not going to agree with, and two, maybe not the whole truth anyway.

When will they ever learn? A Jewish member of the British Labour Party is turned down for a candidacy in the Birmingham local elections.

The left is not your political side, ma’am! Will it take more than this to convince you? What world have you been living in? Have you been asleep? Wake up and smell the jihad!   

From the MailOnline:

The Labour Party has become embroiled in a race row after a prospective female councillor was allegedly told she was ‘too white and Jewish’ to be selected. 

Elaina Cohen claims that Labour councillor Mahmood Hussain said he would not support her application for an inner-city ward because ‘my Muslim members don’t want you because you are Jewish’. 

Mrs Cohen, 50, has made an official complaint about the alleged remarks made by Mr Hussain, a Muslim and former lord mayor of Birmingham. 

She said: ‘I am shocked and upset that a member of the Labour Party in this day and age could even think something like that, let alone say it. 

‘People should not be allowed to make racist comments like that. If someone in the party feels I cannot represent them because of my colour or religion, that’s ridiculous. 

‘I felt particularly aggrieved because I have worked across all sections of the community, particularly with the Muslim section, and have been on official visits to Pakistan.’ 

Mrs Cohen had applied to stand as a Labour councillor for the Birmingham ward of East Handsworth and Lozells, which has a high Asian and Afro-Caribbean population. 

As one of Labour’s safest seats on Tory-led Birmingham city council, the final candidate would be almost certain of victory at the June 4 by-election. 

But when Mrs Cohen telephoned 57-year-old Mr Hussain for his support, she was astonished to be told that she was too ‘white and Jewish’ to be considered. 

Lorraine Briscoe, who runs a local community association, was sitting next to Mrs Cohen when the conversation took place on speakerphone last Tuesday. 

‘I was disgusted that a councillor could make comments like that in 2009,’ she said. 

‘He told her, "They will not vote for someone who is white and Jewish. My Muslim members don’t want you because you are Jewish". 

‘Elaina then asked him if he had talked to his Muslim members about it and he said, "I don’t want to talk about it with you" and hung up. 

‘Elaina does a lot of good work in this community and she does not see race or religion, she just sees people.’ 

Two days after the alleged conversation, Mrs Cohen and another candidate were rejected by a pre-selection panel after failing to gain the support of the local party. 

Instead, members were presented with one candidate, black South African Hendrina Quinnen, who was selected by an almost unanimous vote. 

Mrs Cohen has now sent an official complaint to Labour Party general secretary Ray Collins and Birmingham city council accusing Mr Hussain of improper conduct. 

Mr Hussain said yesterday: ‘I would not make those sort of comments. The allegations are not true.’

If the US does not soon find a way to confiscate or neutralize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal – and is there the least glimmer of a chance that Obama and Hillary (‘smart-power’) Clinton will even try? –  the Taliban will almost certainly take control of it.

Can we doubt that they will use it?   

Walid Phares writes (read the whole article here): 

Over the past few months, Pakistan’s government authorized governors in the Northwest part of the country to sign agreements with the leaders of the “Sharia Movement” in the Swat valley, a Jihadi front, to apply their interpretation of religious laws. The founder of the movement, Sufi Mohammad accepted the terms of the settlement with Islamabad. But his son in law Maulana Qazi Fazlullah the chief of the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi organization (TNSM), who since 2007 has deployed his 5,000 militiamen in 60 villages forming a “parallel emirate,” is now on the march to expand Taliban influence beyond the “authorized” district. In short, the cohort of jihadists is not stopping, not reconciling, not de-radicalizing but seeking to eventually reach the capital.

First in Waziristan, then as of last year in Swat, and now seizing the district of Buner, the Taliban are conquering Pakistani land. Their technique is simple: Give us Sharia implementation or endure terror. Authorities have been choosing the morphine option: let them apply Sharia if they cease fire. But as soon as an area is “granted” to the jihadists, a new “jihad” begins towards the adjacent district. The “forced Sharia” gives the Taliban more than just catechism: full control, broadcast, courts, training facilities, and money. It just cedes territory and people to a highly ideological force. Their Sharia-based “Talibanization” grants them harsh show of severity and intimidation: girls and women punished, opponents eliminated, civil society repressed, a copycat of pre-2001 Afghanistan.

But the strategic consequences of the last “offensives” inside Pakistan are boundless. By reaching a distance of 70 miles or so of the capital the Taliban are putting the government under their direct menace. Pushes elsewhere are expected southbound and northeast bound. The army is deploying around public buildings; that is a bad sign. I’d also project a Jihadi push along the Kashmir borders with India. The hydra is expanding gradually, preparing for a massive squeeze.

 Walid Phares writes:

The so-called Somali pirates are strategically different from their historical predecessors in the Caribbean or from their contemporary colleagues in archipelagoes around the world. They aren’t a vast collection of individual thugs, acting as bands replicating what successful sea gangs have accomplished for centuries before them. There are too many of them, operating from extremely long shores, all using similar methods, and are backed from hinterland forces.

 

They may seem like pirates as they seize ships and negotiate for the ransom. But these water thugs actually belong to a wider chess game. The grand ensemble of the army of little boats is in fact part of a regional Jihadi apparatus being deployed in the horn of Africa and beyond. The Jihadi grand circle building in the region is not limited to the pirates but involves hostile forces from the mid Red Sea to East Africa. The Somali pirates are merely one facet of this grand circle…

 

The end aim is to create a vast zone of insecurity stretching from East Africa to the Red Sea. A closer look allows strategists to easily realize that these are the maritime passages from the Oil rich Gulf to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and also parts of the East African alternative routes the most economic via Cape Town… This operation is of regional-international dimensions. It is about holding these passages hostage… It is a maritime Jihad striking at the Western/international lifeline on high seas to bring about a change in balance of power…

 

The so-called pirates are being used by land-based forces to drag the enemy [the non-Muslim world] into a wider war in the region …

 

Two months ago, Eritrea and the Iranian regime signed an agreement granting naval facilities to the Khomeinist military ships to use the country’s ports and eventually build a base on the Red Sea. Last month, reports signaled an alignment of military intelligence between the Sudanese and Iranian regimes and Hezbollah’s networks in the region…

 

 Robert Spencer writes:

An Iranian newspaper has reported that four American banks have issued formal requests to the Central Bank of Iran to open branches in Iran. Citibank, Goldman Sachs and two others left unnamed plan, according to the report, to establish temporary branches in an Iranian free trade zone if their requests are approved. The newspaper Jaam-e-Jam quoted an unnamed source explaining: “If they can work according to Iran’s banking law, they will be allowed to open branches in Tehran and other cities.”

Is this where the bailout money is going? 

It is curious that American banks – which probably wouldn’t still be in business but for the taxpayers’ largesse – would want to do business in a country where the government holds military parades featuring banners proclaiming “Death to America” and whose President has declared: “I say accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible.” 

It is just as ominous in the long term that the banks would apparently be willing to “work according to Iran’s banking law.” So in other words, Western banks operating in Islamic countries have to abide by Sharia Finance restrictions. And meanwhile, Western banks operating in Western countries likewise are increasingly accommodating Sharia Finance restrictions.

This is yet another manifestation of a stealth jihad phenomenon that is manifesting itself today in many areas besides finance: in Muslim countries, Muslims demand that Westerners conform to Islamic sensibilities, and likewise in Western countries, Muslims demand that Westerners conform to Islamic sensibilities…  

The most notorious example of accommodation to Islam is the increasing popularity of Sharia Finance, which Western banking institutions are rushing to offer to Muslims in the West even more quickly than they are rushing to open branches in the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

There is, after all, so very much money to be made. Najib Fayyad of Unicorn Capital Turkey explains: “There are Islamic finance institutions operating in over 75 countries and with assets estimated at around US$700 billion, a figure which is growing at a rate of about 15% a year.” Some of the West’s leading financial institutions, including (besides Citibank and Goldman Sachs) Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Dow Jones, HSBC Bank, Lloyd’s, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Standard & Poors, have created “Sharia Advisory Boards,” staffed with Islamic clerics and scholars, in order to help them bring their financial practices into line with Islamic norms.

A benign exercise in multiculturalism? Not quite. Christopher Holton, Vice President of the Center for Security Policy, states that “America is losing the financial war on terror because Wall Street is embracing a subversive enemy ideology on one hand and providing corporate life support to state sponsors of terrorism on the other hand.” …

What’s more, Sharia Finance is another tool of Islamic separatism: instead of assimilating into American society, Muslims are demanding, and receiving, parallel financial institutions that reinforce the idea that they are unique, not subject to the laws and norms to which the rest of us are subject – a privileged class. At the same time, Sharia Finance initiatives are giving Islamic interests increasing control over Western economic life… 

The multiculturalist anxiety to accommodate Muslim principles and practices only makes Westerners even more vulnerable. Yet instead of engaging in careful strategic planning of both domestic and international initiatives, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and two other American financial institutions are working on opening branches in a country that has considered itself at war with the United States for thirty years. 

It is a test of Congressional resolve to regulate financial institutions. Will they allow the banks which American money has just saved to establish branches in a state sponsor of terrorism? 

 Dr Laurie Roth found out what really happened when Captain Richard Phillips was finally rescued. She writes with some anger in Canada Free Press:

First of all, President Obama wouldn’t authorize the DEVGRU/NSWC SEAL teams to even go to the scene for 36 hours.  This by the way was going against the scene commander’s recommendation.  Of course, Obama, with his vast military experience knew much more!

The first time Capt. Phillips jumped in the water the SEALS had the pirate thugs all sited in but could not fire due to ROE restriction.

Just when your stomach starts turning green it gets worse!

When the navy Rubber boat was fired upon as it approached with supplies, they were not allowed to return fire due to the ROE restrictions.  Can we say mentally ill yet?

President Obama in his vast brilliance with Pirate and military situations denied two rescue plans developed by the Bainbridge CPN and SEAL teams.

Finally, days into this the Bainbridge CPN and SEAL team CDR finally had had enough and decided they had the authority to determine risk to hostage and fire if need be.  4 hours later it was done.  3 Muslim Somali Pirates were dead and 1 pirate,Wali-I-Musi was captured.  Miraculously and 5 days later Capt. Phillips was rescued. 

What is the bottom line?

If Obama had kept his nose out of this and let the SEALS do what they wanted to and could do, this would have been handled and concluded well in a few hours not 5 days!

Notice the media barely mentions that the Somali pirates were young, fundamentalist Muslims on a Jihad mission.  They were all 16-19 years old.  I can just see the media and some in this administration getting their knickers in a twist calling out such rash, violent responses to such young impressionable people. 

The only part in this drama that should have changed, now that we know the Pirates were such young men, was that Obama should have stayed out of this and the Pirate, Islamic thugs should have been killed within the first few hour by the SEALS.

You couldn’t help but notice the huge celebratory response of success from Obama and his administration, marking it as a huge success and victory.  That would be fine if it was true.  There was a great and miraculous victory all right…….in spite of Obama and his politically correct delays.

A final thought to the politically correct morons who apparently want people to die on the high seas…..why can’t all cargo ships, cruise ships and business ships of all sizes be heavily armed if Muslim terrorists are on a roll attacking ships, stealing and killing around the Horn of Africa?