D.C. And NYC: Batten Down The Hatches

INFILTRATION ALERT!

From the Associated Press, dated February 6, 2013 (hat tip to Weasel Zippers):

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — UN diplomats say that Syrian opposition’s coalition is planning to open offices soon in New York and Washington....

More at the above link.

Sue Myrick : Today, there is no doubt that radicalization is taking place inside America.

Gertz:

Al Qaida in Gulf region assessed as new top security threat to U.S.

WASHINGTON — Officials said the U.S. intelligence community has determined that Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has emerged as the greatest national security threat.

They said AQAP, which operates in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, has replaced the direct threat from Al Qaida leadership along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I actually consider Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula [to be] probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland,” National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter said.

A poster of wanted Al Qaida operatives on display in a police station in San’a, Yemen. Adam Reynolds/The Washington Times

---

In testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 9, Leiter cited repeated AQAP plots to attack U.S. passengers and cargo aircraft over the 14 months. He linked AQAP with the killing of 11 U.S. soldiers by a Muslim officer in 2009.

“They’ve been quite successful at being innovators,” Leiter said.

On Feb. 10, National Intelligence director James Clapper said Al Qaida was not believed to have recruited many Americans. But Clapper, responsible for the intelligence community, said these recruits were more dangerous than other non-Americans because of their access to and understanding of U.S. critical sites.

“We’re especially focused on Al Qaida’s resolve to target Americans for recruitment, and to spawn affiliate groups around the world,” Clapper told the House Intelligence Committee. “We also see disturbing instances of self-radicalization among our own citizens. Last year, the intelligence community helped disrupt plots and provide information that led to the arrest of homegrown violent extremists here in the United States.”

Officials said Al Qaida has increased its threat to the United States to the highest level since the suicide air attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. They said AQAP and other Al Qaida networks were recruiting Americans and other Westerners for mass-casualty suicide operations.

“This shift, as far as I’m concerned, is a game changer that presents a serious challenge to law enforcement and the intelligence community,” House Homeland Security Committee chairman Rep. Peter King said. “The committee cannot ignore the fact that Al Qaida is actively attempting to recruit individuals living within the Muslim American community to commit acts of terror.”

Congress has urged the administration of President Barack Obama to respond to the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. Leading members have called for a review of the American Muslim community, which the government had long asserted was immune to radicalization.

“We believed American Muslims were immune to radicalization because, unlike the European counterparts, they are socially and economically well-integrated into society,” Rep. Sue Myrick, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a letter to Obama. “There had been warnings that these assumptions were false but we paid them no mind. Today, there is no doubt that radicalization is taking place inside America. The strikingly accelerated rate of American Muslims arrested for involvement in terrorist activities since May 2009 makes this fact self-evident.”

POCONO MOUNTAINS: NEW HAVEN FOR TERRORISTS?

The Last Crusade

PENNSYLVANIA PERFECT STAGING AREA FOR NEXT 9/11
by
Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

The Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania has become a staging area for terrorism and the establishment of a universal caliphate.

The latest evidence supporting this claim comes from Faisal Shahzad’s trip to Matamoras, at the foothills of the Poconos, where he purchased boxes of M-88s from a fireworks store.

The high powered firecrackers, which sell for $10.00 a box, ended up as detonators for a crude bomb that Shahzad tried to set off in Times Square last weekend.

Matamoras is less than an hour’s drive from the George Washington Bridge.

Fifteen miles from Matamoras is Saylorsburg, a sleepy rural Pocono community, where powerful Turkish pasha Fethullah Gulen has established a 45 acre mountain fortress. The fortress remains protected by 100 Turkish guards and a sentry post. Local residents have complained of automatic gunfire coming from the complex and of a low flying helicopter that surveys the area for would-be intruders.

Gulen, who has been labeled “the most dangerous Islamist in the world,” has amassed a fortune in excess of $25 billion for use in the restoration of the Ottoman Empire and the established of a New Islamic World Order.

In 1998, Gulen fled to the United States from his native Turkey to avoid prosecution on charges that he was attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government in order to establish an Islamic republic.

Undercover Crusaders on the trail of Gulen in Turkey

With his vast fortune, Gulen established the Justice and Democratic Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma or AKP) which gained control of Turkey in 2002.

Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – - one for every 350- citizens – - the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – - and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.

The tentacles of Gulen’s movement now stretch throughout central Asia, including the newly formed Russian republics of Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmernistan which are becoming increasingly Islamic and radicalized.

Gulen has also established thousands of madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) throughout the world, including 85 in the United States.

The Poconos have lured other radical Muslims, including the six terrorists who sought to inflict mass casualties at Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey.

In February 2007, the would-be terrorists rented a place in Big Bass Lake, a gated community of 1,400 homes in the tiny Pocono town of Gouldsboro.

During their month-long stay at Big Bass Lake, the six radical Muslims – - all foreign-born and in their 20s, rented a public firing range to practice attacks on the military base.

Because of its close proximity to New York and other major metropolitan areas, the Poconos appears an ideal place to launch terror attacks on U.S. soil.

“We still have very remote areas. These people can come and get lost,” says Robert G. Werts, program manager for the Northeast Pennsylvania Terrorism Task Force.

John Horgan, director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State University, maintains that it’s not unusual for terrorists and radical Islamists to seek out areas that lie beneath the radar screen.

“It’s precisely because they’re overlooked that they’re attractive,” Mr. Horgan says. “In these rural areas, you’re not subject to the intense surveillance.”

Winning Hearts and Minds – NOT!!

When will Britain get it? When will the free world get it?

The attempted bombings in London and the attack on Glasgow Airport underscore the continued and long-term Islamic terror threat that Britain and the world is facing.

Far from being affronted by this incursion, young British Muslims are increasingly likely to support domestic jihad. The radicalization of British Muslim youth proceeds apace. According to a recent poll by Populus, growing numbers of Muslims aged 16-30 subscribe to extreme versions of Islam, and almost 40 percent want to live under Shariah law. Britain faces the prospect of a whole new generation of young people embracing extremism and religious fanaticism.

So far, the government has refrained from introducing more Draconian legislation. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his ministerial colleagues have promised to reinforce the government's campaign "to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim community."

That strategy didn’t work in Vietnam and it’s not going to work in the war against Islamism.

The litmus test for integration is whether Muslims are willing to be like "us." Unsurprisingly, many young Muslims are increasingly alienated by an aggressively secular culture that enforces liberal transgression of moral norms and taboos.

Crucially, current policies are not working because they fail to address the real cause of radicalization and fanaticism. Contemporary Islamic violence is religious in nature. Its origin lies in Islamic scripture and the destruction of the traditional medieval schools that dictated its interpretation.

Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street said, “It’s not enough that I should win, but that others should lose”.

He knew the meaning of winning. Not so our current crop of leftist appeasers and apologists who believe that if we could only ‘understand’ those that want to kill us, we can somehow win their hearts and minds. But, as Douglas has said so eloquently, if one side wins, the other side must lose. That means to win over their hearts and minds means they would have to believe in what we believe. We would need to replace what they hold to be true with what we hold to be true.

In other words, we need to win.

Can the appeasers and apologist show us some common ground where the Islamists and the free world can share common hearts and minds? Let’s see.

How about freedom of expression? Nope. Nada. Simple example – and I mean really simple – the Mohammed cartoon Intifada. One of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

Then how about Western art and culture? Negatory. According to a Pew survey, in predominantly Muslim countries, it's not just that they don't approve of American culture; most plain don't like it. More than two-thirds of Bangladeshis (81%), Pakistanis (80%), Turks (68%), Palestinians (68%) and Indians (68%) said they do not like American music, movies and television."

Or modern entertainment? Nope.

Women’s rights? Yeah, right. Honor killings, forced marriages, clitoris mutilation.

How about Religious freedom? Paleeze.

Democracy? Fugetaboutit. It’s the ideology.

At its core, Islam is deeply skeptical of the idea of a secular state. There is no rendering unto Caesar because state and religion are believed to be inseparable. This idea then interacts with centuries-old edicts of Islamic jurists about how the land of Islam should interact with the world of unbelievers, known as dar ul-kufr. The modern radicals then take it further, declaring that since, with the exception perhaps of Pakistan and Iran, there are no Islamic states, the whole world is effectively the land of the unbelievers. As a result, some radicals believe waging war on the whole world is justified to re-create it as an Islamic state.

They go as far as reclassifying the globe as dar ul-harb, “land of war”, apparently allowing Muslims to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In dar ul-harb, anything goes, including the killing of civilians.

It’s historical antipathy to the very possibility that reason can exist as separate from God.

The appeasers and apologists for Islam just don't get it. They are going through philosophical contortions trying to separate Islam form terror and the Islamist are laughing up their sleeves. If democratic freedoms are to survive this century, then the objective is not to win the hearts and minds of Islamists – but fight their hearts and minds.

Rick Warren To Partner With ISNA?

Is Rick Warren promoting Christo-Islam?

From this source:

The Indiana-based Islamic Society of North America will be holding its annual convention -- the largest yearly gathering of Muslims on the continent -- in Washington, D.C. over the Fourth of July weekend.

And while convention leaders are holding out hope that President Barack Obama might make the convention his latest stop in his outreach to the Muslim world, the convention has landed another pretty big fish as a featured speaker.

Purpose-Driven pastor Rick Warren has agreed to appear at the convention and be part of its main session discussing the convention's theme -- "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." Joining Warren for the session is ISNA President Ingrid Mattson and noted Muslim scholar Hamza Yusuf.

Warren's scheduled visit to the convention follows ISNA leader Sayyid Syeed's appearance last December at Warren's Saddleback Civil Forum on Public Health. Warren was unavailable this week to comment about the appearance.

His involvement with ISNA follows the Muslim organization's attempt to build partnerships with people of other faiths, including the Union of Reform Judaism and the American Baptist Churches....

Front Page Magazine's index of articles about the ISNA - What a web of Islamist connections!

Excerpt from this FPM article by Joe Kaufman:

Both the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) present themselves as mainstream Muslim organizations, yet in reality they are part of a radical Muslim movement which exists for the purpose of doing harm to America and Western interests abroad.

[...]

ISNA, said to be the largest Muslim organization in North America, has its roots in the extremist Muslim Brotherhood overseas, the same group responsible for the formation of Hamas and most other international terror entities.

[...]

Besides its connection to Hamas, ISNA is involved in the propagation of hate materials. ISNA and its sister organization, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), run an Islamic Book Service for the United States and Canada. The service consists of texts written by leaders of the Brotherhood and a version of the Quran, The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an, which has been banned by the Los Angeles school system for having numerous anti-Semitic commentaries....

Rick Warren, who has quite a following among Christians, is partnering with ISNA. What purpose is driving him?

Somebody, tell Rick Warren that when you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Hudson institute study of Muslim Brotherhood front organizations in North America

Remember, the Muslim Brotherhood's intention to destroy America, and replace it with a Sharia state was clearly revealed during the Holy Land Foundation Trial.

Here is a link to an article which details the Muslim Brotherhood Plan for the obliteration of Freedom in America.

From Vlad Tepes:

THIS IS A RATHER IMPORTANT STUDY TO SAY THE LEAST. BOOKMARK THIS OR DOWNLOAD THE PDF AND SAVE IT FOR FUTURE REFERENCE AS ITS CRITICAL TO KNOW EXACTLY WHICH ORGANIZATIONS ARE FRONTS FOR TERROR JIHAD AND ISLAMIC DOMINATION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

From the Hudson Institute:

The leadershipof the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood (MB, or Ikhwan) has said that its goal
was and is jihad aimed at destroying the U.S. from within. The Brotherhood leadership has
also said that the means of achieving this goal is to establish Islamic organizations in the
U.S. under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Since the early 1960s, the Brotherhood has
constructed an elaborate covert organizational infrastructure on which was built a set of public or
“front” organizations. The current U.S. Brotherhood leadership has attempted to deny this histo-
ry, both claiming that it is not accurate and at the same time that saying that it represents an older
form of thought inside the Brotherhood. An examination of public and private Brotherhood doc-
uments, however, indicates that this history is both accurate and that the Brotherhood has taken
no action to demonstrate change in its mode of thought and/or activity.
BACKGROUND
Goals of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood
A 1991 documentwritten by U.S. MB leader Mohammed Akram (a.k.a. Mohammed Adlouni)
explains the goal of the Brotherhood in America, which he identifies as “settlement:”
The general strategic goal of the Brotherhood in America which was approved by
the Shura [Leadership] Council and the Organizational Conference for 1987 is
“enablement of Islam in North America, meaning: establishing an effective and sta-
ble Islamic Movement led by the Muslim Brotherhood which adopts Muslims’
causes domestically and globally, and which works to expand the observant
Muslim base; aims at unifying and directing Muslims’ efforts; presents Islam as a
civilization alternative; and supports the global Islamic state, wherever it is.” …The
priority that is approved by the Shura Council for the work of the Brotherhood in
its current and former session is “Settlement.”1

Please click here for the complete report and list of front organizations for the Islamic brotherhood. This is an important document for the anti jihad.

Our Porous Southern Border

A few years ago at a lecture I attended, Mahdi Obeidi, author of The Bomb In My Garden, warned that our southern border with Mexico was the most possible avenue of bringing weapons of mass destruction into the United States.

Apparently, if this report from the Washington Times is accurate, Hezbollah is already active along our southern border:

EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah uses Mexican drug routes into U.S.

Hezbollah is using the same southern narcotics routes that Mexican drug kingpins do to smuggle drugs and people into the United States, reaping money to finance its operations and threatening U.S. national security, current and former U.S. law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism officials say.

The Iran-backed Lebanese group has long been involved in narcotics and human trafficking in South America's tri-border region of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Increasingly, however, it is relying on Mexican narcotics syndicates that control access to transit routes into the U.S.

Hezbollah relies on "the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartels," said Michael Braun, who just retired as assistant administrator and chief of operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

"They work together," said Mr. Braun. "They rely on the same shadow facilitators. One way or another, they are all connected.

"They'll leverage those relationships to their benefit, to smuggle contraband and humans into the U.S.; in fact, they already are [smuggling]."

His comments were confirmed by six U.S. officials, including law enforcement, defense and counterterrorism specialists. They spoke on the condition that they not be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.

While Hezbollah appears to view the U.S. primarily as a source of cash - and there have been no confirmed Hezbollah attacks within the U.S. - the group's growing ties with Mexican drug cartels are particularly worrisome at a time when a war against and among Mexican narco-traffickers has killed 7,000 people in the past year and is destabilizing Mexico along the U.S. border.

[...]

... To finance its operations, [Hezbollah] relies in part on funding from a large Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim diaspora that stretches from the Middle East to Africa and Latin America. Some of the funding comes from criminal enterprises.

Although there have been no confirmed cases of Hezbollah moving terrorists across the Mexico border to carry out attacks in the United States, Hezbollah members and supporters have entered the country this way.

Last year, Salim Boughader Mucharrafille was sentenced to 60 years in prison by Mexican authorities on charges of organized crime and immigrant smuggling. Mucharrafille, a Mexican of Lebanese descent, owned a cafe in the city of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego. He was arrested in 2002 for smuggling 200 people, said to include Hezbollah supporters, into the U.S.

In 2001, Mahmoud Youssef Kourani crossed the border from Mexico in a car and traveled to Dearborn, Mich. Kourani was later charged with and convicted of providing "material support and resources ... to Hezbollah," according to a 2003 indictment.

A U.S. official with knowledge of U.S. law enforcement operations in Latin America said, "we noted the same trends as Mr. Braun" and that Hezbollah has used Mexican transit routes to smuggle contraband and people into the U.S.

Two U.S. law enforcement officers, familiar with counterterrorism operations in the U.S. and Latin America, said that "it was no surprise" that Hezbollah members have entered the U.S. border through drug cartel transit routes.

[...]

A senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing operations in Latin America, warned that al Qaeda also could use trafficking routes to infiltrate operatives into the U.S.

[...]

Adm. James G. Stavridis, commander of U.S. Southern Command and the nominee to head NATO troops as Supreme Allied Commander-Europe, testified before the House Armed Services Committee last week that the nexus between illicit drug trafficking - "including routes, profits, and corruptive influence" and "Islamic radical terrorism" is a growing threat to the U.S....

Is it inevitable that our southern border will be the route by which comes into America the method for carrying out a mass attack? A lot of experts and quasi-experts believe so.

At the moment, we have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and First Alert blaming respectively United States' drug policies and Mexican President Felipe Calderon's crackdowns on the drug cartels for the present lawlessness along our southern border and in our southern-border states. We do not see much concern from them about terrorist infiltration as part of or an adjunct of the Mexican drug cartels.

Until the unthinkable happens, we "town criers" sound like paranoid nutjobs.

When the unthinkable happens, our so-called elected representatives will come up with something probably called The Domestic Contingency Plan or The Plan To Contend With The Tiny Minority Of Extremists.

At what point will our leaders recognize the Islamic threat? Are they capable of doing so?

Steven Emerson's Recent Congressional Testimony

From The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

Rep. Sherman, Emerson, Ponder State Department Reforms
IPT News
July 31, 2008

The State Department has collaborated with many radical Islamist organizations and individuals in its attempts to engage in outreach to the American Muslim community at large, Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Executive Director Steven Emerson told a congressional panel Thursday. Many of the individuals in charge of these organizations, and the organizations themselves, have been convicted, indicted, or designated as unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism cases throughout the United States.

(For detailed examples, see Emerson's complete written testimony here.)

Emerson's appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade came despite the protests of some of the same Islamist organizations. Emerson urged Congress to review the State Department's interaction with these organizations in its attempts to reach out to the Muslim community.

Emerson outlined some of the more troubling aspects of participation with these groups: namely their ties to terrorist entities and promotion of radical Islamic ideology. A number of groups that the State Department has cooperated with have links to entities such as Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hizballah - which are designated as terrorist organizations by the United States government. The groups partnering with the State Department help to support an ideology that focuses on eliminating secular Western powers and promoting their stringent ideas of Sharia law, or law as governed by Islamic text.

[...]

In response to the protests [from various Moslem groups], Congressman Sherman issued a press release in which he stated, "This hearing will go on. We need to make sure that the State Department is not giving U.S. tax dollars to those on the other side in the war on terrorism." He added "The Muslim Public Affairs Council should apologize for the statements of its executive director on September 11, 2001."

MPAC, ISNA and a constellation of other radical groups and individuals have been supported by the State Department. Perhaps Thursday's testimony will signal a turning point, seeing the State Department implement stricter guidelines to avoid past mistakes and embarrassments, which have damaged America's national security.

[...]

"I think one of the greatest fears of people in the United States is somebody may call you a racist...they may call you an Islamophobe," he said in the hearing. "And what we've seen with some of these organizations is their message is clear: ‘Give us money or we'll call you an Islamophobe'...that's what they say to the State Department. What they say to us in Congress is ‘Don't question the fact that we're getting money or we'll call you an Islamophobe.'"

Regular IBA readers might not find much new in the report, but it does serve as a good review. Whether or not Congress and the State Department will take appropriate action remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath.