Today in history, on October 21, 1094, a small force of Christian knights destroyed a massive Muslim horde in Spain, where the Jihad and Reconquista had been raging for years.
Around 1085, the Almoravids, a North African group committed to jihadist teaching and led by the Emir Yusuf bin Tashfin, began pouring into Spain to aid their Islamic counterparts, the Moors, who had suffered several significant defeats to the Christians in recent years.
Russia is exploiting and fomenting a wave of Islamist propaganda against Sweden, the head of Sweden’s counter-disinformation agency has told The Times.
Sweden has been confronted with a storm of anger across large parts of the Islamic world, driven by a series of Quran burnings and conspiracy theories claiming that the Swedish authorities are forcibly removing children from Muslim families.
The values that built la République are crumbling
It is characteristic of France’s self-absorption that what started as a national sense of outrage at the latest Islamist killing on our soil soon evolved into a bitter scuffle between present and past tough-talking Home Secretaries. Last Friday, Dominique Bernard, a 57-year-old French literature teacher at a state Lycée in Arras, was stabbed to death by a 20-year-old Chechen former pupil, Mohammed Mogouchkov, shouting “Allahu Akbar” as Bernard tried to prevent him from entering the school’s main building. Three years almost to the day, it felt like a terrible repetition of the killing and beheading of another teacher, Samuel Paty, in a west Paris suburb.
The heinous Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel left many Canadians, particularly in the Jewish community, deeply shocked and concerned about the questionable tone coming from our government.
This week, a number of world leaders have visited Israel to show their solidarity with the Jewish state. However, Canada’s response has been marked by efforts to evacuate its citizens from the region and a pledge of $10 million in aid to both sides, reflecting a faulty and shameful desire for neutrality.
When ISIS bride Dure Ahmed left Toronto for the caliphate in Syria, she insists she had no clue what her notorious husband was up to, including the kidnapping and savage beheading of American journalist James Foley.
According to a recent interview she gave to the CBC and BBC, Ahmed claims she was “oblivious to what was going on” while her then-British husband El Shafee Elsheikh was committing atrocities as part of the British-accented ISIS terror cell known as “the Beatles.”
Four convicted terrorists have been returned to prison after failing lie detector tests since they were introduced following the 2019 London Bridge terror attack.
A review into the use of the polygraph tests, published on Thursday revealed that new information came to light in almost three quarters of the tests carried out since they were introduced in June 2021.
Police believe a Moroccan asylum seeker charged with murdering a pensioner in Hartlepool was motivated by terrorism, a court has heard.
Ahmed Ali Alid, 44, is accused of stabbing to death Terence Carney, 70, in the early hours of Sunday morning and also attempting to murder fellow asylum seeker, Javed Nouri, at the hostel where he was living.
Britain is not immune from the Islamist threat
William Shawcross’s review of Prevent — the prevention strand of the Government counter-terrorism strategy — was considered highly controversial when it was published earlier this year. This was not least due to its insistence that Islamist terror remains the most significant threat to Britain, and that neither resources nor attention were being allocated proportionately.
The service in Arras cathedral for 57-year-old Dominique Bernard was broadcast on a large screen in the city’s Heroes’ Square, where hundreds watched in the rain.
Bernard, married to another teacher and father of three adult children, was posthumously awarded the Legion of Honour by Macron.
The award is France’s highest civilian decoration.
Sweden has demanded tougher EU border controls after a failed asylum seeker suspected of terrorist sympathies shot dead two Swedish football fans in Brussels.
Abdesalem Lassoued, 45, a Tunisian man, was shot and killed outside a café in the Schaerbeek district of the Belgian capital yesterday morning as local children travelled to school.
OTTAWA — Some Liberal MPs are now suggesting they want an end to the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, with at least three calling for a ceasefire between the Jewish state and Hamas and another making an emotional plea to stop what he called the “butchery” in the Gaza Strip.
How much longer can we offer candles and prayers?
On Monday evening a service of remembrance was held in Arras cathedral in northern France. The congregation was there to pay its respects to Dominique Bernard, the teacher who was murdered by an Islamist at his school last Friday, not far from the cathedral. The service was led by Bishop Olivier Leborgne. ‘We don’t have all the answers, but we believe that peace is our future,’ he told the congregation. As worshippers lit candles, the choir sang ‘Jesus, the Christ, the inner light, don’t let the darkness speak to me’.
Berlin’s Jewish community has been shaken by two petrol bombs thrown at a synagogue amid a spike in antisemitic incidents in some European countries.
Police said two people threw “burning bottles filled with liquid” in what was described as attempted arson.
“We could feel the tensions more and more,” said director Anna Segal. She said the community had felt very threatened in recent days.
For months now, authorities charged with keeping Europe safe from Islamist extremist violence have been sounding the alarm. In May, Dutch security services warned that the terrorist threat from Islamic State to Europe had increased. The same month, the French interior minister said the risk of Islamist terrorism was rising again and that his own country was being targeted, as well as its neighbours.
In recent days, these pessimistic forecasts appear to have been vindicated. France is deploying 7,000 extra troops on to its streets after a teacher was fatally stabbed on Friday in an attack that Emmanuel Macron condemned as “barbaric Islamic terrorism”. The suspected attacker swore an oath of allegiance to IS in an audio recording on his phone shortly before the killing, prosecutors have said.
The Conservatives say it’s “unacceptable” that the federal government allowed a Canadian woman with ties to ISIS to re-enter the country.
CBC News reported Tuesday new details about the identity of a 33-year-old woman the government repatriated with her children in April from a detention camp in northeastern Syria.
Dure Ahmed, who is now living in the Toronto area under conditions, was married to El Shafee Elsheikh. He’s a high-profile ISIS militant who was part of a cell known as “the Beatles” because of their British accents.
Elsheikh is the highest ranking ISIS member to be tried in the U.S. He’s serving multiple life sentences in a supermax prison for his role in the deaths of eight American, British and Japanese hostages.
