*** You cannot fight ideology exclusively through force; it tends to exacerbate the problem. MS ***
FROM: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5js8Rp36GIbKbq2igevloWpOolIiQD9G5QKE80
NEWARK, N.J. — Authorities say two New Jersey men who intended to kill American troops were arrested at a New York City airport before boarding flights on their way to join a jihadist group in Somalia.
Federal authorities say 20-year-old Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and 24-year-old Carlos Eduardo Almonte were arrested Saturday at John F. Kennedy Airport before they could board separate flights to Egypt and then continue on to Somalia.
Alessa, of North Bergen, and Almonte, of Elmwood Park, were charged with conspiring to commit an act of international terrorism.
Teams of state and federal law enforcement agents who have been investigating Alessa and Almonte since 2006 took them into custody. They are scheduled to appear Monday in federal court in Newark.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Two New Jersey men who allegedly intended to kill American troops were arrested Saturday at a New York City airport before boarding flights on their way to join a jihadist group in Somalia, a newspaper reported.
Mohamed Hamoud Alessa, 20, and Carlos Eduardo Almonte, 26, were arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport before they could board separate flights to Egypt and then continue on to Somalia, The Star-Ledger of Newark reported. The newspaper cited officials familiar with the details of the arrests who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
Alessa, of North Bergen, and Almonte, of Elmwood Park, were charged with conspiring to commit an act of international terrorism through al-Shabaab, a violent extremist group based in Somalia and connected to al-Qaida, the officials told the newspaper. Al-Shabaab was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group in 2008.
The FBI and the New York Police Department confirmed to The Associated Press that two men were arrested at the airport, but did not identify them or provide further details. FBI spokesman Richard Kolko in Washington said no threat was made at the airport; New York police spokesmen were not immediately available for comment.
Teams of state and federal law-enforcement agents who have been investigating Alessa and Almonte since 2006 took them into custody, the officials said. They are scheduled to appear Monday in federal court in Newark.
The arrests were made as part of an investigation known as Operation Arabian Knight. Authorities said an undercover NYPD officer had infiltrated the suspects' group of friends and was able to monitor their consumption of jihadist videos and literature, overseas travel preparations, and purchase of airline tickets.
The two men had planned their trip Somalia for several months, saving thousands of dollars, undergoing tactical training and test runs at paintball fields to condition themselves physically, and acquiring equipment and clothing they could use when they joined al-Shabaab in Somalia, the officials said. Both had bragged about wanting to wage holy war against the United States both at home and internationally, investigators said.
Officials said the two men were not planning an imminent attack in the New York-New Jersey area. Both are American citizens, the officials said.
Also Saturday, FBI agents sealed off Alessa's street in his neighborhood at around 10:30 p.m., and FBI agents, local police and the NYPD descended on his home, the newspaper reported. North Bergen police would say only that an investigation was in progress.
Twenty cars with agents and police came to Almonte's home at around 11 p.m., with agents searching the outside of his house and a detached garage, the newspaper reported.
Somalia, an impoverished East African nation of about 10 million people, has not had a functioning government for more than a decade, although the U.S. is backing a transitional government there. The Pentagon's top commander in the region has included Somalia on a list of countries where clandestine American military operations designed to disrupt militant groups would be targeted.
The arrests follow two failed terrorist attacks in the U.S. in recent months: an alleged attempted car bombing in Times Square by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad last month, and the alleged attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Showing posts with label somali muslim radical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label somali muslim radical. Show all posts
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
THE LIES OF AYAAN HIRSI ALI
*** I invite Ayaan Hirsi Ali and/or Irshad Manji to a civilized and reasoned debate on the merits of their positions. The story below explains to you why intelligent people should not fall for these imposters. If you want real critique, let it come from within - believe me, we can do a MUCH better job of exposing the wrong as well as championing the right in a way that is truthful and makes sense. MS ***
FROM: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/21/jasonburke.theobserver
Late afternoon and the grubby 1950s glass and concrete alleyways of Rotterdam's centre are full of teenagers. Black, white, dreadlocked, shaved, speaking Dutch, Chinese, or a French-Arabic-Dutch mixture, all of them wear jeans, T-shirts, and cheap leather bomber jackets for boys, sequined belts for the girls. One or two wear headscarves with their make-up and bangles. On a bench is a stack of newspapers, the front page recounting the latest twist in the saga of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 'The rise, the fall and then the rise again,' comments the seller sourly. 'I hope this time she goes for good.'
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, raised in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, in Holland since 1992, is to move on, once more a refugee of a sort.
Her spokesman, Ingrid Pouw, yesterday finally put an end to a week of rabid speculation, telling The Observer that the 36-year-old MP will leave her adopted country at the end of August to take up a position at a conservative think-tank in Washington DC. After announcing her retirement from Dutch political life at a press conference last week, Hirsi Ali went straight to a meeting with the US ambassador to arrange for fast-track visas or even US residency documents, Pouw said.
Yesterday the dust was far from settling on the Hirsi Ali affair. A TV programme highlighting lies Hirsi Ali told on her asylum application and the subsequent decision by hardline immigration minister Rita Verdonk to strip her of her Dutch citizenship, has triggered a political crisis in Holland. Elsewhere in Europe, the shockwaves created by the controversy are spreading too, with some claiming that another voice against repression had been silenced by force and others welcoming the end of a campaign seen as provocative and negative.
Once more, Hirsi Ali had succeeded in forcing the most difficult, uncomfortable issues of immigration, integration, religion and culture to the forefront of debate in a fiercely uncompromising way.
Hirsi Ali fled Somalia with her family to Saudi Arabia when her father's political activities brought him into conflict with the Somali government, and then on to Kenya.
In 1992, fleeing an arranged marriage, she arrived in Holland where she worked first as a cleaner and then as a translator at a refugee centre in Rotterdam - an experience that marked her deeply, according to one friend interviewed by The Observer. A victim herself of female circumcision, Hirsi Ali was shocked by the male repression of immigrant women living in one of the most developed and tolerant societies in the world.
She studied political science at Leiden University and found a position in a leftwing think-tank. With such credentials, as well as her striking looks, she was well placed when the attacks of 11 September 2001 focused global attention on Islamic radicalism. Her self-appointed mission was to make the Dutch and Europeans aware of 'the repressive nature of Islam' and of the dangers of mass immigration, which led to an invitation from the Dutch Liberal party to join them and, very rapidly, to a seat in parliament.
Despite the Liberals' right-wing economics and uncompromising anti-immigration stance, Hirsi Ali pronounced the party her political home.
Yet, though increasingly known in Holland, it was only in 2004 that she became an international figure when film-maker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a radical Islamist after he made a film with Hirsi Ali called Submission, using quotes from the Koran projected over a semi-naked woman to highlight domestic violence in Muslim societies. After the murder, Hirsi Ali went into hiding, surrounded by bodyguards.
But though she continued with her public, parliamentary and international engagements, the stress of constant death-threats and increasing criticism of her trenchant statements, began to tell. When, earlier this year, a court decided that she would have to leave her home in The Hague because she was endangering her neighbours, Hirsi Ali, friends said, started thinking about moving overseas. And then a new documentary was broadcast on Dutch TV. It was made by Gus van Dongen, an experienced TV journalist. He travelled to Somalia and Kenya to interview members of Hirsi Ali's family.
'There was no agenda,' van Dongen said last week. 'She is a politician who had made much of her background, telling one story. We set out to check those facts. That is all.'
The TV programme, broadcast 10 days ago, highlighted the fact that Hirsi Ali had falsified her original asylum application in Holland, saying that she had not come from war-torn Somalia as she claimed, but from Kenya, where she had lived peacefully for 10 years. The fact that she had lied was well-known, retorted Hirsi Ali, making the point that was she was fleeing a forced marriage. Not so, said van Dongen, using testimony from her brother and husband to allege that the marriage was not made under compulsion. Nor van Dongen said, was Hirsi Ali raised in a strict Muslim family.
An old story, said Hirsi Ali.
But not as far as Rita Verdonk, the Dutch 'iron lady' and minister of immigration, was concerned. Though a member of the Liberal party too, she launched an investigation and within days decided that Hirsi Ali should be stripped of her passport. The result was a huge row in parliament, splitting the Liberal party and the rest of the ruling right-wing coalition. This weekend Verdonk has promised to reconsider. But few think she will change her stance.
The affair has attracted international attention - most of it misinformed according to Bas Heijne, a newspaper columnist. 'This is being completely misjudged overseas,' said Heijne. 'It's all about domestic politics. The neo-conservative wave that swept Holland in recent years is running out of steam and turning in on itself. One of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's problems is that she had no real political base, either in immigrant communities or in the native Dutch population.'
But others, in Holland and overseas, see the battle as representative of far deeper issues. Robert Zoellick, number two at the US State Department, welcomed her decision last week - in part a tacit condemnation of 'wishy washy' Europeans who refuse to take a firm stance against radical islam.
Such transatlantic criticism appears increasingly inappropriate. On Thursday last week, the French national assembly passed a hardline package of immigration measures which will have a major impact in coming years. In Holland, stricter laws have resulted in a drop from 43, 500 asylum applications in 2000 to 12,300 last year. 'It's getting much harder for refugees to get into Europe. All the ministers are watching and copying each other,' said Annemiek Bots, of the Dutch Refugee Council.
But the real issue raised by Hirsi Ali is not so much immigration as integration - and free speech. For Gijs van Westelaken, who made Submission with Van Gogh and Ali, the activist has challenged 'the complacency' of a society that would 'do anything' not to address the difficult issue of how to integrate nearly 1.7 million immigrants, one in 10 of the population, of whom around two-thirds are Muslim. 'Theo van Gogh was silenced. Now Hirsi Ali has been silenced too,' he said. Yet there is little chance that she will abandon her campaigning, he said. 'It's a mission, it's what makes her tick.'
In Rotterdam the jury is still out on Hirsi Ali. The port city is one of Holland's most cosmopolitan with more than 30 per cent of electors of foreign origin. Recent elections saw a 25 per cent cut in seats on the city council for the right-wing party linked to the Liberals. In the Rotterdam Immigrants' Association offices, Mohammed Bibi, the director, praised the fact that Hirsi Ali had 'started a discussion'. 'But she did it in a very rude way and she related everything - violence, female circumcision, repression - to religion where actually it is cultural,' he said.
Burak, 25, a taxi driver from Turkey, said the only good Hirsi Ali had done was to stimulate debate. 'Islam is a religion of peace ... People are terrorists not because of their religion but because of their hate,' he said. Burak was unsure, however, if he would stay in the Netherlands. 'It is OK in Holland but is getting bad to be a Muslim now.'
In her own words ...
On immigration: 'I am not against migration. It is pragmatic to restrict migration, while encouraging integration and fighting discrimination.'
On religion: 'I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.'
On 9/11: Referring to hijacker Mohammed Atta's letter to his accomplices telling them to pray for martyrdom, she said: 'If I were a male under the same circumstances, I could have been there. It was exactly what I used to believe.'
On Islam: 'When a Life of Brian comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of van Gogh, it will be a huge step.'
On the lessons she learned from an Iranian-trained Shia fundamentalist: 'I had never seen an Israeli, but we hated them because it was "Muslim" to hate them.'
On herself: 'I have no real social life. It's like having a body with no bottom [a Somali expression]... who on earth can I saddle with a relationship? It's not off limits, and technically it can all happen. But is it, as we say in Dutch, verstandig? Sensible? It doesn't seem sensible now.'
FROM: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/21/jasonburke.theobserver
Late afternoon and the grubby 1950s glass and concrete alleyways of Rotterdam's centre are full of teenagers. Black, white, dreadlocked, shaved, speaking Dutch, Chinese, or a French-Arabic-Dutch mixture, all of them wear jeans, T-shirts, and cheap leather bomber jackets for boys, sequined belts for the girls. One or two wear headscarves with their make-up and bangles. On a bench is a stack of newspapers, the front page recounting the latest twist in the saga of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 'The rise, the fall and then the rise again,' comments the seller sourly. 'I hope this time she goes for good.'
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, raised in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, in Holland since 1992, is to move on, once more a refugee of a sort.
Her spokesman, Ingrid Pouw, yesterday finally put an end to a week of rabid speculation, telling The Observer that the 36-year-old MP will leave her adopted country at the end of August to take up a position at a conservative think-tank in Washington DC. After announcing her retirement from Dutch political life at a press conference last week, Hirsi Ali went straight to a meeting with the US ambassador to arrange for fast-track visas or even US residency documents, Pouw said.
Yesterday the dust was far from settling on the Hirsi Ali affair. A TV programme highlighting lies Hirsi Ali told on her asylum application and the subsequent decision by hardline immigration minister Rita Verdonk to strip her of her Dutch citizenship, has triggered a political crisis in Holland. Elsewhere in Europe, the shockwaves created by the controversy are spreading too, with some claiming that another voice against repression had been silenced by force and others welcoming the end of a campaign seen as provocative and negative.
Once more, Hirsi Ali had succeeded in forcing the most difficult, uncomfortable issues of immigration, integration, religion and culture to the forefront of debate in a fiercely uncompromising way.
Hirsi Ali fled Somalia with her family to Saudi Arabia when her father's political activities brought him into conflict with the Somali government, and then on to Kenya.
In 1992, fleeing an arranged marriage, she arrived in Holland where she worked first as a cleaner and then as a translator at a refugee centre in Rotterdam - an experience that marked her deeply, according to one friend interviewed by The Observer. A victim herself of female circumcision, Hirsi Ali was shocked by the male repression of immigrant women living in one of the most developed and tolerant societies in the world.
She studied political science at Leiden University and found a position in a leftwing think-tank. With such credentials, as well as her striking looks, she was well placed when the attacks of 11 September 2001 focused global attention on Islamic radicalism. Her self-appointed mission was to make the Dutch and Europeans aware of 'the repressive nature of Islam' and of the dangers of mass immigration, which led to an invitation from the Dutch Liberal party to join them and, very rapidly, to a seat in parliament.
Despite the Liberals' right-wing economics and uncompromising anti-immigration stance, Hirsi Ali pronounced the party her political home.
Yet, though increasingly known in Holland, it was only in 2004 that she became an international figure when film-maker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a radical Islamist after he made a film with Hirsi Ali called Submission, using quotes from the Koran projected over a semi-naked woman to highlight domestic violence in Muslim societies. After the murder, Hirsi Ali went into hiding, surrounded by bodyguards.
But though she continued with her public, parliamentary and international engagements, the stress of constant death-threats and increasing criticism of her trenchant statements, began to tell. When, earlier this year, a court decided that she would have to leave her home in The Hague because she was endangering her neighbours, Hirsi Ali, friends said, started thinking about moving overseas. And then a new documentary was broadcast on Dutch TV. It was made by Gus van Dongen, an experienced TV journalist. He travelled to Somalia and Kenya to interview members of Hirsi Ali's family.
'There was no agenda,' van Dongen said last week. 'She is a politician who had made much of her background, telling one story. We set out to check those facts. That is all.'
The TV programme, broadcast 10 days ago, highlighted the fact that Hirsi Ali had falsified her original asylum application in Holland, saying that she had not come from war-torn Somalia as she claimed, but from Kenya, where she had lived peacefully for 10 years. The fact that she had lied was well-known, retorted Hirsi Ali, making the point that was she was fleeing a forced marriage. Not so, said van Dongen, using testimony from her brother and husband to allege that the marriage was not made under compulsion. Nor van Dongen said, was Hirsi Ali raised in a strict Muslim family.
An old story, said Hirsi Ali.
But not as far as Rita Verdonk, the Dutch 'iron lady' and minister of immigration, was concerned. Though a member of the Liberal party too, she launched an investigation and within days decided that Hirsi Ali should be stripped of her passport. The result was a huge row in parliament, splitting the Liberal party and the rest of the ruling right-wing coalition. This weekend Verdonk has promised to reconsider. But few think she will change her stance.
The affair has attracted international attention - most of it misinformed according to Bas Heijne, a newspaper columnist. 'This is being completely misjudged overseas,' said Heijne. 'It's all about domestic politics. The neo-conservative wave that swept Holland in recent years is running out of steam and turning in on itself. One of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's problems is that she had no real political base, either in immigrant communities or in the native Dutch population.'
But others, in Holland and overseas, see the battle as representative of far deeper issues. Robert Zoellick, number two at the US State Department, welcomed her decision last week - in part a tacit condemnation of 'wishy washy' Europeans who refuse to take a firm stance against radical islam.
Such transatlantic criticism appears increasingly inappropriate. On Thursday last week, the French national assembly passed a hardline package of immigration measures which will have a major impact in coming years. In Holland, stricter laws have resulted in a drop from 43, 500 asylum applications in 2000 to 12,300 last year. 'It's getting much harder for refugees to get into Europe. All the ministers are watching and copying each other,' said Annemiek Bots, of the Dutch Refugee Council.
But the real issue raised by Hirsi Ali is not so much immigration as integration - and free speech. For Gijs van Westelaken, who made Submission with Van Gogh and Ali, the activist has challenged 'the complacency' of a society that would 'do anything' not to address the difficult issue of how to integrate nearly 1.7 million immigrants, one in 10 of the population, of whom around two-thirds are Muslim. 'Theo van Gogh was silenced. Now Hirsi Ali has been silenced too,' he said. Yet there is little chance that she will abandon her campaigning, he said. 'It's a mission, it's what makes her tick.'
In Rotterdam the jury is still out on Hirsi Ali. The port city is one of Holland's most cosmopolitan with more than 30 per cent of electors of foreign origin. Recent elections saw a 25 per cent cut in seats on the city council for the right-wing party linked to the Liberals. In the Rotterdam Immigrants' Association offices, Mohammed Bibi, the director, praised the fact that Hirsi Ali had 'started a discussion'. 'But she did it in a very rude way and she related everything - violence, female circumcision, repression - to religion where actually it is cultural,' he said.
Burak, 25, a taxi driver from Turkey, said the only good Hirsi Ali had done was to stimulate debate. 'Islam is a religion of peace ... People are terrorists not because of their religion but because of their hate,' he said. Burak was unsure, however, if he would stay in the Netherlands. 'It is OK in Holland but is getting bad to be a Muslim now.'
In her own words ...
On immigration: 'I am not against migration. It is pragmatic to restrict migration, while encouraging integration and fighting discrimination.'
On religion: 'I do not believe in God, angels and the hereafter.'
On 9/11: Referring to hijacker Mohammed Atta's letter to his accomplices telling them to pray for martyrdom, she said: 'If I were a male under the same circumstances, I could have been there. It was exactly what I used to believe.'
On Islam: 'When a Life of Brian comes out with Muhammad in the lead role, directed by an Arab equivalent of van Gogh, it will be a huge step.'
On the lessons she learned from an Iranian-trained Shia fundamentalist: 'I had never seen an Israeli, but we hated them because it was "Muslim" to hate them.'
On herself: 'I have no real social life. It's like having a body with no bottom [a Somali expression]... who on earth can I saddle with a relationship? It's not off limits, and technically it can all happen. But is it, as we say in Dutch, verstandig? Sensible? It doesn't seem sensible now.'
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