Author Archives: Grace

Al-Shabaab arms, trains pirates for spoils of terror

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From The National Post

Somali militants training pirates

‘Relationship of convenience’: Canadian report

Stewart Bell, National Post Published: Thursday, December 03, 2009

Members of the hardline Al-Shabaab Islamist rebel group sit on a pick-up during a demonstration in Mogadishu, Oct. 30, 2009. Omar Faruk/Reuters Members of the hardline Al-Shabaab Islamist rebel group sit on a pick-up during a demonstration in Mogadishu, Oct. 30, 2009.

The Somali militant group Al-Shabab has been arming and training pirates in exchange for a share of their spoils, says a newly released Canadian intelligence document.

Al-Shabab has formed a “relationship of convenience” with one of the two main pirate networks operating off the Horn of Africa, the “Top Secret” intelligence assessment says.

The report describes an “Islamist extremism-piracy nexus” that involves Al-Shabab providing “weapons, combat training and local protection” to the Mudug pirates of southern Somalia.

In return, “elements of Al-Shabab continue to receive portions of the spoils from successful hijackings either in cash or seized weapons and materiel,” it says.

Pirate attacks in the region have soared over the past two years but in addition to threatening international shipping, they are also apparently financing the Somali extremist group at the centre of several major North American counter-terrorism investigations.

The FBI is probing at least 20 Somali-Americans who have left Minneapolis to join Al-Shabab, and the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service are investigating whether up to six Somali-Canadians who left Toronto in recent weeks were also recruited by Al-Shabab.

The report was written by Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, which is made up of representatives of Canada’s national security agencies. A copy of was obtained under the Access to Information Act.

It says 13% of the cargo that passes through Canadian ports transits the pirate-infested waters around the Horn of Africa. Last year, a shipment of Canadian iron ore was commandeered by Somalia pirates and released after the owner of the vessel, the Yasa Neslihan, paid a ransom, the report says.

Somali pirate attacks more than doubled last year to 115, 46 of which were successful. Given the millions worth of ransom payments involved, the “operation ties” between the pirates and Al-Shabab could earn significant sums for the militants.

Al-Shabab is an armed group that is fighting what it calls a jihad to impose Islamic law in Somalia and beyond.

The group adheres to al-Qaeda’s anti-Western ideology, and the report says that, “some Al-Shabab fighters and leaders have also received guidance from al-Qaeda and have attended foreign training camps.”

As part of a recruiting effort aimed at Western youths, Al-Shabab has been distributing Internet propaganda videos in English that feature rap music and show foreign fighters engaged in attacks.

The Somali-Canadians under investigation are in their early- to mid-twenties. Most left Toronto together in early November without informing their families or friends. Investigators believe they are already in Somalia.

The Abu Huraira mosque, where some of them worshipped, has urged anyone with information to come forward.

National Post

Tots transformed into jihadists, courtesy Islamic Jihad Union, al-Qaeda

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When I was a child I asked my mother if there was indeed a place called Hell and a Satan who lived there. She told me that they both did in fact exist, but not in the pictorial, fiery underbelly sense. Instead she said, Hell was a place on earth and the work of Satan was commissioned through humans void of any compassion, reason, empathy, tolerance or love.

Mighty big words for a youngster, but for any loving parent, human values to be taught to tots long before they are capable of fully understanding their broader context or good worth. Of all the stories that I have researched and covered on Islamist extremism, this one has brought me closest to those who would inhabit the pit of Hell and exist as Satan’s proxy. I now understand fully my mother’s words and as a mother myself, deplore anyone who would commit their children to dance for the Devil.

The following story comes from this Hell.

Grace for Vlad.

From The Sun U.K., courtesy TROP

Al-Qaeda tot stunt

By SIMON HUGHES
Chief Investigative Reporter

Gun girl … child forced to pose with AK-47 rifle

A TINY girl aged barely two sucks her fingers in childish innocence – while grasping an AK-47 assault rifle almost as big as her.

The tot, in full Muslim dress, was made to pose with the weapon dubbed the “Widowmaker” as part of a sickening propaganda stunt staged by extremists of the Islamic Jihad Union, linked to al-Qaeda.

Harrowing ... youngsters wield terrorist rifles

Harrowing … youngsters wield terrorist rifles

The group – who target British and US troops from lairs on the Afghan border with Pakistan – also pictured the girl and five other toddlers with heavy weapons in front of a black Islamic flag.

Three boys aged five or six wield rifles in another chilling image posted online.

Link: Child Of Terror

Hate in the classroom: anti-Semitism in Canada’s high schools

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“I don’t have to listen to you; you are not a person, you are nothing, you do not exist as a person.” “Don’t speak to me, don’t look at me, you are not human, you are a Jew.”(taunts by a student attending an Ontario high school aimed at his Jewish teacher).

From The National Post

Toxic classrooms

Confronting anti-Semitism in our high schools

Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Monday, November 30, 2009

What follows is an edited excerpt from testimony delivered at a hearing of the Canadian Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism this month.

My attention has been drawn to the disturbing phenomenon of overt Jew hatred in high schools, especially those with high populations of students from countries where Jew hatred is officially sanctioned in the law of their countries of origin.

As a case in point I offer one particularly disturbing story, because I believe it points to wider issues of concern for the educational system and for our society. It involves a Jewish teacher in an Ontario French high school whose name I cannot reveal because she fears physical retaliation.

“Miriam” had taught in French language schools in the 1970s and 1980s in schools with large Lebanese Christian populations without incurring any anti-Semitism. In her current career she works amicably with Muslims. A child of Holocaust survivors, Miriam is demonstrably neither racist nor anti-Muslim.

In 2001 Miriam started teaching at a school largely populated by children of refugees, mainly from Djibouti and Eritrea, countries where there are no Jews but where hatred of Jews is deeply entrenched in the culture.

During the academic year of 2002-2003 Miriam started to encounter anti-Semitic taunts from students, such as “Does someone see a Jew here, someone smell a Jew? It stinks here.” When she reported this and similar insults to the principal, the principal did not follow up. Indeed, the principal seemed more concerned about the students’ sensibilities than hers.

The principal instructed teachers not to offend their Muslim students; they were not to look students in the eye, they were not to gesture with the forefinger to bid them approach and they were not to interfere with male students who were physically aggressive to male teachers.

During the invasion of Iraq, moments of silence were held in the classroom. Cultural presentations involved only Muslim culture and no Canadian content. Students were allowed to leave assembly during the playing of the national anthem.

The crisis of this story occurred when Miriam admonished a student for wearing a Walkman in class. The student screamed at her: “I don’t have to listen to you; you are not a person, you are nothing, you do not exist as a person.” When Miriam demanded he accompany her to the principal’s office, the student followed her down the hall yelling, “Don’t speak to me, don’t look at me, you are not human, you are a Jew.”

Although the student was ultimately suspended for 10 days, his parents expressed puzzlement about the punishment since, they patiently explained, the teacher was after all Jewish. They complained about the severity of the punishment to the school board. Continue Reading →

Burqa Barbie: you’ve gone the wrong way baby.

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I have to admit, at first thought I felt this story of no great shakes and decided not to report on it. Barbie’s makeover seemed a bit pithy compared to the stack of Islamist horror stories that circulated through the media at the time (and continue to do so).  But  it is in fact important to weigh in on Barbie’s new wardrobe malfunction and those who would advertise her latest armoire addition as progressive, sensitive, inclusive and culturally relative. The only comment worthy of any real note, is the refusal by many including Mattel, to acknowledge the mockery of freedom that Barbie is now bestowed. Here is the initial story as reported by the Daily Mail U.K. Phyllis Chesler urges us to boycott Burqa Barbie and below, Barbara Kay of Canada’s National Post delivers an honest assessment of Islamist misogyny in full swing.

Burka Barbie

Why is the world’s favourite fashion doll wearing a symbol of oppression?

Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Wednesday, December 02, 2009

One of the world's most famous children's toys Barbie has been given a fundemental make over -- wearing a Burka. Handout/CATERSNEWS/IBERPRESS

One of the world’s most famous children’s toys Barbie has been given a fundemental make over — wearing a Burka.

In the process of conveying a general idea or a cue to an emotional response, we often seek instinctive recourse in a linguistic device called antonomasia. We’ll substitute an antonomastic placeholder like “Solomon” for a wise person or “Hitler” for an evil one, “Pearl Harbor” for an ineluctable casus belli, and so forth.

The words “Barbie doll” used to elicit the image of a ditzy blonde bimbo. No longer. Since Nov. 20, the 50th anniversary of this iconic doll and beloved plaything of little girls everywhere, 500 Barbies –including various Barbies wearing chadors and full burkas — have been on show at the Salone del Cinquecento in Florence, Italy.

The exhibition is sponsored by toy company Mattel, Barbie’s owner. Dolls wearing “traditional Islamic dress” — the burkas and chadors — were chosen to be auctioned off by Sotheby’s as a fundraiser for the Italian branch of Save the Children.

A Barbie collector attending the exhibition from England opined: “Bring it on, Burka Barbie … I think this is really important for girls. Wherever they are from, they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.”

I have seen some pretty tawdry advertising campaigns in my time, but I must say this one takes the cake for insensitivity. What’s next in dolls that are “important for girls” to play with? “Illiterate Barbie”? “Forced-Marriage Barbie”?

One has to wonder what was going through the heads of these people. Mattel is a gigantic company with, one would presume, the cream of the advertising world’s crop at its beck and call. Save the Children has for many decades been in the business of rescuing children from poverty, despair and injustice. And yet neither the world’s biggest advertising brains nor the world’s most child-sensitive hearts saw the impropriety of “clothing” the world’s most instantly recognizable toy in the world’s most instantly recognizable symbol of oppression.

The dolls make a mockery of disempowered women who have been stripped of all human dignity, women with no means of challenging their forced depersonalization. There can be no parallel between these travesties of multiculturalism and other “diversity” Barbies — brown Barbies, native-dress Barbies, pilot Barbies — avatars that reflect the natural appearance and truly traditional garb and career choices of free women.

For starters, burkas are not “traditional Islamic dress,” because they are not “dress” at all. Burkas are not a sartorial multicultural counterpoint to Dallas Cheerleader Barbie. Thrown over clothes, they are, in the words of an Afghanistan woman to a visiting Canadian journalist, “walking coffins.”

The teeth of burka clad women fall out because their faces never get any Vitamin-D-rich sunlight. Is this a suitable object of play?

Neither are burkas “traditional.” They were invented quite recently by fanatically misogynistic fundamentalists who make a habit of beating or killing or disfiguring any woman insufficiently self-extinguished by this suffocating tent. These women and girls are wearing chadors and niqabs and in many circumstances hijabs for reasons that have nothing to do with their own wishes or choices. Some even die for a failure to meet the draconian standards of the “modesty” police, as 15 Saudi girls did when forced back into a burning school because their hair was uncovered in flight. Having fun yet?

Many moms won’t let their little girls play with any dolls. Many won’t let their little boys play with guns. Their stance represents an extreme, but not illogical, extension of Western cultural ideals. In the eyes of the majority who do consider both dolls and guns natural objects of play, however, there should be no moral distinction between Burka Barbie and a putative G.I. Joe figure in a suicide vest for essentially they both represent a medieval Islamist worldview that flies in the face of the West’s most cherished values: equality of men and women and respect for human life, including one’s own.

Antonomastically speaking, there’s a loss in this story. As a symbol of obliterated femalehood, Barbie has shed her cultural innocence.

bk**@*******on.ca

Men of hate.

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From The Daily Mail U.K.

Face to face with the men of hate: The Muslim fanatics who attacked Baroness Warsi

By Sue Reid
Last updated at 9:19 AM on 02nd December 2009

With egg yolk dripping through her hair after being attacked by demonstrators, Britain’s most prominent Muslim woman politician took refuge in the sweetly named Memsaab Boutique in Luton. Baroness Warsi could have been forgiven for saying she would never put her well-heeled foot in the Bedfordshire town again.

Minutes earlier, as darkness fell on Monday evening, the Tory peer had been cornered by a group of finger-jabbing young Islamists who had pelted her with eggs, accusing her of causing Muslim deaths in Afghanistan.

The mob chanted: ‘Shame on you!’ and one protester yelled loudly: ‘This woman doesn’t represent us’.

Switzerland: majority voters back nationwide ban on minarets

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From The Telegraph U.K.

Switzerland appears to have backed minaret ban

Voters in Switzerland appeared to have backed a call to ban minarets from mosques, according to early exit poll results.

By Alexandra Williams in Geneva and Bruno Waterfield
Published: 10:16AM GMT 29 Nov 2009

A pedestrian walks past a display advertising the initiative against the construction of new minarets in Switzerland, in Geneva A pedestrian walks past a display advertising the initiative

Thirty minutes after the referendum finished at midday, Swiss television reported: “The initiative would appear to be accepted. There is a positive trend. It’s a huge surprise.”

According to the respected gfs.bern polling institute an estimated 59 per cent of voters backed the ban. A majority of cantons were also in support of the initiative.

“A majority have voted for a nationwide ban on the construction of minarets,” said the institute’s director Claude Longchamp, speaking on Swiss Radio DRS.

For the Swiss constitution to be changed, the majority of the electorate and a majority of the cantons are required to vote ‘yes’.

A survey two weeks ago showed 53 per cent said they would reject it. Both the government and parliament had rejected the initiative.

Commentators had said the country risked international pariah status and a backlash across the Muslim world if a ’yes’ vote was achieved.

If the exit polls prove correct it will be a huge shock and Switzerland risks international pariah status and a backlash across the Muslim world.

Sunday’s vote was forced by members of the far-right Swiss People’s party (SVP) which has provoked a national debate over immigration with powerful billboard images.

The stark “stop” posters depicting a Muslim woman in a burka against the backdrop of a Swiss flag studded with missile shaped black minarets have been banned in many towns.

Hanspeter Rentsch, an executive director at the watch company Swatch, has warned that the referendum, and the poster propaganda, could damage Switzerland in the eyes of the world.

“The ‘Swiss’ brand must continue to represent values such as openness, pluralism and freedom of religion. Under no circumstances must it be connected with hatred, animosity towards foreigners and narrow-mindedness,” he said.

Campaigners demanded the referendum to halt “political Islamisation” by amending the Swiss constitution to add a clause stating “the construction of minarets is prohibited”.

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the Swiss justice minister, has suggested that a vote for a ban could fuel Islamist radicalism and violent protests, such as those that greeted Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2006.

“This is not an appropriate instrument for combating religious extremism. It risks the opposite, of serving the cause of fanatics,” she said.

But Oskar Freysinger, an SVP MP, compares warnings of anger in the Muslim world to the arguments used by “appeasers” of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

“It is what Chamberlain thought in Munich in 1938. If these are the consequences, it is the proof that what we are doing to defend ourselves is legitimate,” he said.

The vote is required because campaigners got over 100,000 signatures on a petition against minarets triggering a vote under the Swiss constitution.

The campaign followed a row over a minaret in the tiny town of Langenthal, in the Bern canton of Switzerland.

Earlier this year Langenthal’s 750 Muslims asked for planning permission to add a minaret, 30 feet high, to their mosque in a town with 11 churches and 14,500 inhabitants.

The reaction to the apparently harmless request has polarised Switzerland and crossed borders to feed into British, French, Dutch and Austrian fears over Islam and national identity.

“This minaret is a symbol of conquest and power which marks the will to introduce Sharia law as has happened in some other European cities. We will not accept that,” said Ulrich Schueler, an SVP politician and leader of the “stop” minaret campaign.

Muslims have rejected the argument that a minaret symbolises Muslim power. Mutalip Karaademi, leader of Langenthal’s Muslim community and of Albanian origin, accused Mr Schueler of telling “dirty lies”.

“A minaret is a symbol nothing more. It s nice to see a house of god with a minaret or a church steeple or cupolas on a synagogue,” he said.

“They call us terrorists. They call us Taliban, so many labels all wrong. They insult us. We love this country, almost more than our own. Our children were born here.”