ISIS bride Shamima Begum says she’d ‘rather die’ than rejoin group
We haven’t got all day get on with it…
Islam and violence
A newly declassified pre-9/11 report exposes Al-Qaeda ‘sleeper’ cells across US, so why was the intelligence not acted on?
The release of a White House report put together the year before the 9/11 attacks reveals there was a growing fear of terrorist attack during this period. And it begs the question why more wasn’t done to prevent one.
A previously secret report authored in January 2000 by senior members of the White House’s then-national security team, which concluded that US intelligence was ill equipped and ineffective in the face of a major and ever-growing domestic terror threat, has at last been declassified.
Dubbed the ‘Millennium Alert After Action Review’, it was compiled at the behest of the National Security Council’s Counterterrorism Security Group, by representatives of each of the US government’s counterterrorism and security agencies, after a major planned terror attack was thwarted at the end of 1999.
Ayman al Zawahiri: Taliban’s return fuels questions about al Qaeda leader’s health and whereabouts
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The whereabouts of Ayman al Zawahiri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden after U.S. special forces killed the al Qaeda leader in a 2011 raid in Pakistan, remain a mystery even as the terror group could be poised to rise again.
The shadowy Zawahiri, a 70-year-old native of Egypt, is believed to be hiding out in Afghanistan or Pakistan. But he may not even be alive.
University student senator busted ‘trashing’ American flag display honoring 9/11 victims
A student senator at Washington University in St. Louis was caught on camera as he allegedly defaced a memorial of 2,977 flags commemorating the victims of the 9/11 attacks on the 20 year anniversary, throwing them in the trash.
WOW: A student senator at @WUSTL was caught on video throwing away 2,977 American flags from conservative students' 9/11: Never Forget Project memorial.
Despicable. pic.twitter.com/j6Wf1mdyLl
— YAF (@yaf) September 11, 2021
FBI releases declassified records on its investigation into possible Saudi-9/11 links
The FBI released declassified records from its secretive investigation that explored potential links between the Saudi government and 9/11, with some of the long-anticipated documents released on the 20th anniversary of the al Qaeda terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Families of the 9/11 victims have sought a host of details tied to possible Saudi government involvement in the attacks. Last week, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing the Justice Department to declassify information stemming from an FBI inquiry into possible Saudi-9/11 links.
5 in Italy slashed with knife; Somali asylum seeker arrested … today is Sunday so police are running with the “he was on drugs” excuse
ROME (AP) — Italian police on Sunday were investigating a Somali asylum-seeker for attempted murder after he allegedly slashed two ticket controllers aboard a bus in the beach resort town of Rimini, then wounded three other people, including a boy, as he fled.
Investigators are ruling out terrorism as a motive and hypothesize that the 26-year-old man was under the influence of drugs during the knife attack Saturday night, according to reports on Italy’s state broadcaster RAI.
Why Britain is uniquely vulnerable to a new wave of terrorism
Deep links with Pakistan will open the door to terrorists
The restoration of the Taliban-Qaeda regime in Afghanistan is a terrorism threat to the whole world, but Britain has some unique vulnerabilities, as MI5 Director general Ken McCallum warned today.
The jihadist army that just captured Afghanistan is part of a broad, transnational network controlled by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Britain has long been a node in this ISI network. Masood Azhar, an ISI operative and United Nations-listed terrorist, toured Britain in 1993, fundraising and recruiting for the Kashmir jihad, while laying down local networks to continue the job. Some of these networks later defected to the Islamic State.
Celebrating Our Enemies, Twenty Years after 9/11 America dives, Islam thrives.
On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.
UK foiled 31 terror plots in past 4 years, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan likely ‘emboldened’ lone-wolf extremists – MI5 chief
UK authorities foiled 31 terrorist plots in the past four years, the head of MI5 has said. He warned that the Taliban victory in Afghanistan likely served as a morale boost to domestic extremists.
“Even during the pandemic period we have all been enduring for most of the last two years, we have had to disrupt six late-stage attack plots,” Ken McCallum, the head of the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security service, told the BBC Radio 4’s Today show.
ISIS terrorist in court over 2015 Paris terror attack has his mic switched off while ranting about Syria as judge tells him: ‘You’ve had five years to comment’
An ISIS suicide bomber who survived the 2015 Paris terror attacks had his microphone switched off in court today after multiple outbursts.
A judge told Salah Abdeslam, the sole survivor of a group of assailants who killed 130 people: ‘You’ve had five years to comment,’ after the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State soldier’ disrupted proceedings with rants about Syria and claims some of the co-accused were innocent.
Abdeslam, 31, went on trial with 19 others on Wednesday over the November 13, 2015 suicide bombing and gun assaults on bars, restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and the national stadium.
Subterranean Tone-Sick Blues
A decade and a half back, the late Christopher Hitchens was talking to the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and brought up my demographic-death-spiral thesis from America Alone. Hitch wanted to know whether, when the PM got together with the Continental bigwigs, it was part of “the European conversation”.
Tone replied that it was part of “the subterranean conversation”.
By which he meant that nice house-trained EU prime ministers hadn’t figured out a way to raise such subjects in public without being damned as racists and becoming electorally unviable, at least anywhere west of the Landstraße, to modify Metternich. They still haven’t. Fifteen years on, almost every subject worth talking about remains part of “the subterranean conversation”.
Fort Hood gunman congratulates Taliban from death row in handwritten letter
The former U.S. Army major and self-described “soldier of Allah” behind the deadly 2009 massacre at Fort Hood cheered the resurgent Taliban ’s takeover of Afghanistan in a letter obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner.
Writing from death row at Fort Leavenworth , Nidal Hasan boasted “We Have Won” and congratulated the Taliban. Hasan, who gunned down 14 people and wounded 43 more, urged the nascent terrorist government to implement its brand of brutal oppression under the guise of religion.
In the Run-Up to the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, Media Pushing Stories About How Muslims Were the Real Victims
Saturday marks twenty years since Islamic jihadis attacked New York City and Washington, and the establishment media is doing all it can to ensure that Americans grasp the true significance of those attacks: not that America was hit by a global jihad that has only gained in strength since then and could hit us again, but that Muslims were and are the true victims of that fateful day. In the last few days, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press have published lengthy pieces to that effect, and more in this vein is certain to come this week.
How the November 2015 attacks marked a turning point in French terror laws
France declared a state of emergency on the evening of the November 13, 2015 after the deadliest terror attacks on French soil in modern history left 130 people dead in the Paris region. The government pushed through fresh anti-terror laws, granting police and intelligence agencies extended powers, as the country faced a wave of further attacks in French cities and towns, such as Nice, St-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Villejuif and Rambouillet.
The state of emergency expired in November 2017, when President Emmanuel Macron replaced it with a tough anti-terror law. The new law permanently legalised several aspects of the state of emergency – such as extended police powers to search homes, restrict movement or close radical religious sites.
Sweden Arrests Two Women Linked to IS
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – Swedish police said Monday they had arrested two women linked to Islamic State after they flew back from Syria, as media reported that one was being investigated for war crimes.
Stockholm police spokesman Ola Osterling said the prosecutor leading the investigation into the two women had ordered their arrest.