Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has blamed Britain’s foreign policy in Syria and Iraq for radicalising David Amess’ killer.
Ali Harbi Ali, 26, was handed a rare whole life tariff after being convicted of murder and preparing terrorist acts on Monday by jurors who spent just 18 minutes deliberating.
The Islamic State fanatic carried out his attack at the backbench Conservative MP’s constituency surgery in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, on October 15 last year.
“If you are supporting our prisoners, you are supporting some of the best people on the planet,” stated Coalition for Civil Freedoms (CCF) prisoner and family support coordinator Nada Dibas during a recent webinar on “Ramadan Behind Bars.”
These “best people” — CCF’s clients — include terrorists in American prisons. Yet to Dibas and panelists like the Islamist, slavery-defending Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown, they’re victims of America’s Islamophobia.
Unrest broke out in southern Sweden late on Saturday despite police moving a rally by an anti-Islam far-right group, which was planning to burn a Qur’an among other things, to a new location as a preventive measure.
Scuffles and unrest were reported in the southern town of Landskrona after a demonstration scheduled there by the Danish right-wing party Stram Kurs party was moved to the nearby city of Malmo, 27 miles south.
Opponents of Stram Kurs numbering up to 100 mostly young people threw stones, set cars, tires and dustbins on fire, and put up a barrier fence that obstructed traffic, Swedish police said. The situation had calmed down in Landskrona by late Saturday but remains tense, police said, adding no injuries were reported.
Die Aufstände der erzürnten Allahu-Akbar-Kämpfer in #Schweden weiten sich aus:
Nach #Linköping brennen jetzt weitere Städte!#Landskrona #Norrköping #Örebro pic.twitter.com/zB44u2O5g4— Hartes Geld (@Hartes_Geld) April 17, 2022
Des émeut*s ont éclaté pour la troisième soirée consécutive en Suède à Malmö et Landskrona contre le rassemblement du parti d'extrême droite anti-islam "Ligne Dure", qui organise actuellement une tournée dans le pays en brûlant le Coran lors de ses rassemblements. #Suede pic.twitter.com/6SVPZgz5OS
— Anonyme Citoyen (@AnonymeCitoyen) April 17, 2022
Muslim headscarves took centre stage in France’s presidential campaign on Friday as both finalists in a tightly contested April 24 run-off were confronted by women in headscarves who asked why their clothing choices should be caught up in politics.
France is home to western Europe’s largest Muslim population and many Muslims feel the presidential campaign has unfairly stigmatized their faith.
Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who trails the incumbent in the polls, has said she will ban headscarves in public and fine women who flout the ban.
PARIS (AP) — The only surviving member of the Islamic State attack team that terrorized Paris in 2015 asked Friday for forgiveness and expressed condolences for the victims, wiping away tears during court testimony as he pleaded with survivors to “detest me with moderation.”
For years, Salah Abdeslam stayed silent about what happened Nov. 13, 2015 in the Bataclan theater, Paris cafes and the national stadium, and the 130 people who were killed. After his trial opened last year, he had a few outbursts of extremist bravado, but for months he refused to answer most questions.
Then this week, his words started flowing, in lengthy testimony that at times contradicted earlier statements. His words at times prompted angry outbursts from the public.
Riots erupt in Sweden before far-right rally
Four Swedish police officers and a member of the public were injured by counter-protesters demonstrating against a far-right group’s intention to burn a Quran in Orebro city in central Sweden on Friday.
Riots erupt in Sweden’s Orebro ahead of right-wing extremist demonstration
STOCKHOLM, April 15 (Reuters) – Violent riots erupted in the central Swedish city of Orebro on Friday as counter-protesters attacked police ahead of a planned right-wing extremist demonstration.
Police said on its website that four police cars had been set on fire and at least four police officers and one private individual had been injured as protesters threw stones and large groups attacked police cordons and tore down riot fences.
This is what a lost country looks like.
Here we see that immigrants burned a country which has offered them what they had not dreamed of from the countries from which they come.
They destroy public property and they do not care about it!#Sweden #orebro pic.twitter.com/C8uRufA1en— Info Warrior – 1821 (@InfoWarriorNews) April 16, 2022
The main defendant in the trial over the 2015 Paris attacks has apologised to victims at the end of his testimony.
Prosecutors say Salah Abdeslam, 32, is the only surviving member of the so-called Islamic State cell that targeted Paris that night, killing 130 people.
“I wish to express my condolences and offer an apology to all the victims,” he told the court.
Prosecutors say his suicide belt malfunctioned, but Salah Abdeslam said he had changed his mind.
“You are going to go through an ordeal,” a lawyer for British Islamic State Beatle El Shafee Elsheikh warned the jury at the start of his terrorism trial in Virginia last month.
What followed was a fortnight of some of the most harrowing testimony imaginable.
The 12 jurors at the Alexandria federal court were made to listen to audio recordings of the so-called Beatles’ victims pleading for their lives. They watched their subsequent execution videos, and looked at photographs of decapitated heads triumphantly displayed on spikes.
Islamization becomes irreversible when the Muslim population reaches 20%. French election results can speed the process or slow it.
“The British will be a minority by 2066”. The banner with those words flew over the heads of the spectators at the football match between Manchester City and Liverpool. A light plane with a banner attached passed over the Etihad Stadium, causing a wave of outrage on social media. “Who pays to fly these racist Etihad banners?”
Unfortunately, the phrase (“the British will be a minority by 2066”) does not come from an old English fascist like Mosley, but from David Coleman, the most important demographer in England, a professor at Oxford. “By 2066, whites born in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be outnumbered,” writes Coleman in the left-wing Prospect magazine. “The 50 percent threshold has no special demographic meanings, but it will have a considerable psychological and political impact and the transition from majority to minority will represent a huge change in cultural, political and religious identity.”
The main suspect on trial for the 2015 Paris attacks says he was in ‘shock’ when told he had to blow himself up in Paris.
The main suspect on trial for the 2015 Paris terror attacks, Salah Abdeslam, on Wednesday told a court that he decided against blowing himself up as planned on the evening of November 13, 2015.
“I’m walking into this bar in the 18th [arrondissement], I’m ordering a drink, I’m looking at people around me, and I’m like, ‘no, I’m not going to do it.’ I gave up, I left, I took the car,” he said during the final hearing of his trial.
Abdeslam had refused to speak to the court during his hearing two weeks ago but broke his silence on Wednesday. “I’m going to explain myself because this is the last time I can do it. I’m going to do the best I can, I’m going to do my best,” he said after complaining about his portrayal in the media.
When two unarmed officers arrested the murderer of Sir David Amess MP, they did society an enormous favour. The assailant, Ali Harbi Ali, now a convicted Islamist terrorist due to be sentenced today, wanted to be martyred. Denying him that narcissistic prize, and putting him on trial, has helped us know more about what needs to be done to stop violent extremists. I hope that gift wakes him up every morning for the decades he will spend behind bars.
We can’t talk to dead terrorists, however much some deserve that fate. So it’s people like Harbi Ali who hold a mirror up to the systems and doctrines we use to try to interrupt the journey from thought and lethal action. It’s not a pretty sight.
Update: El Shafee Elsheikh: Guilty verdict for Islamic State ‘Beatle’ jihadist
A US federal jury in Virginia has convicted an ex-British jihadist over his involvement with a notorious Islamic State terror cell.
El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, was linked to the abduction, torture and beheading of several IS hostages in Syria, including journalists and aid workers.
On Thursday, after a three-week trial, he was found guilty of lethal hostage taking and conspiracy to commit murder.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Federal prosecutors concluded their conspiracy and terrorism case against a British member of the Islamic State on Wednesday with a wrenching account of how an aid worker had been brutalized and sexually assaulted during a year and a half in captivity.
For much of her ordeal, the aid worker, Kayla Mueller, 24, was held by a notorious cell of four Islamic State members known for their viciousness and nicknamed “the Beatles” for their British accents, muffled behind black balaclavas.
Prosecutors say the defendant, El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is “Ringo.” For nearly two weeks, they have argued that the polite, bespectacled defendant was a central figure in the Beatles, responsible for drafting ransom emails and mistreating prisoners. Among those captives, they say, were Ms. Mueller and three American men — James Foley, Steven J. Sotloff, and Peter Kassig — who were later beheaded by one of Mr. Elsheikh’s close associates.
Isn’t “death for the sake of Allah the highest calling” anymore?
An odd story appeared in the Boston Globe on Thursday: it seems that “Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is asking the First Circuit Court of Appeals to stay his execution and consider four constitutional claims in his case that were not presented to the US Supreme Court, which last month reinstated the death penalty for Tsarnaev, ruling that he had received a fair trial for his role in the 2013 terrorist attacks that killed three and injured more than 260.” But doesn’t Tsarnaev believe anymore that “death for the sake of Allah is the highest calling”? Doesn’t he want to enjoy the virgins of paradise? Could it even be that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after committing murder for Allah, has left Islam?
Syria’s civil war was raging in March 2013 when black vehicles cut off an Italian aid worker’s car in the north of the country. Masked gunmen forced Federico Motka and a colleague into the trunk of a car and sped off.
“Welcome to Syria, you mutt,” Motka recalled one of the captors ominously telling the aid workers in British-accented English, before they were driven to a camp of Islamist militants who were battling the Syrian regime.
This was the beginning of 14 months of torment for Motka and other foreigners held by a group that would soon be known worldwide as the Islamic State. In Alexandria federal court, Motka testified that he grew to fear the British-accented man and two others from England the most. Captives dubbed them “the Beatles.”
Go incognito
A national charity that describes itself as Canada’s largest grassroots Muslim organization is launching a Charter of Rights challenge against the Canada Revenue Agency, claiming that a years-long audit of the charity has been tainted by bias and Islamophobia.
The Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) plans to serve the government with its formal legal challenge today.
MAC said the audit, which began in 2015, poses an “existential threat” to the organization because it threatens to revoke its charitable status and raises the possibility of damaging sanctions.
“An unfair decision by the CRA will affect the lives of thousands of Canadians overnight,” MAC chairperson Nabil Sultan told CBC News.
MAC is the Muslim Brotherhood.
