Thank you Carl
Category Archives: War on Western civilization
The Absurd Trial of Geert Wilders.
I would like to thank Snaphanen.dk for bringing this to my attention, as well as at last one major Canadian publication, Macleans, for actually noticing the most important trial going on in the world today. Something the rest of the Canadian media managed to avoid.
The absurd trial of Geert Wilders
by Mark Steyn on Thursday, February 18, 2010 7:00am – 22 Comments
There’s no shortage of volunteers. In the Low Countries, whenever anyone seeks to discuss Islam outside the very narrow bounds of multicultural political discourse, they wind up either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Ayaan Hirsi Ali) or killed (Pim Fortuyn).
It’s remarkable how speedily “the most tolerant country in Europe,” in a peculiarly repellent strain of coercive appeasement, has adopted “shoot the messenger” as an all-purpose cure-all for “Islamophobia.” To some of us, the Netherlands means tulips, clogs, windmills, fingers in the dike. To others, it means marijuana cafés, long-haired soldiers, legalized hookers, fingers in the dike. But the contemporary reality is an increasingly incoherent polity where gays are bashed, uncovered women get jeered at, and you can’t do The Diary of Anne Frank as your school play lest the Gestapo walk-ons are greeted by audience cries of “She’s in the attic!” Speaking as a bona fide far-right nutcase, I rather resent the label’s export to Holland: Pim Fortuyn wasn’t “right-wing,” he was a gay hedonist; Theo van Gogh was an anti-monarchist coke-snorting nihilist; Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a secular liberal feminist; Geert Wilders says he’s opposed to Islam because of its hostility to gay equality, whereas the usual rap against us far-right extremists is that we want the godless sodomites to roast in hell.
It’s not “ironic” that the most liberal country in western Europe should be the most advanced in its descent into a profoundly illiberal hell. It was entirely foreseeable. Geert Wilders is stating the obvious: a society that becomes more Muslim will have fewer gays. Last year, the Rainbow Palace, formerly Amsterdam’s most popular homo-hotel (relax, that’s the Dutch word for it), announced it was renaming itself the Sharm and reorienting itself to Islamic tourism. Or as the website allah.eu put it: “Gay Hotel Turns Muslim.” As a headline in the impeccably non-far-right Spiegel wondered: “How much Allah can the Old Continent bear?” It’s an interesting question, albeit if an increasingly verboten one. The Wilders show trial is important because it will determine whether the subject can be discussed openly by mainstream politicians and public figures, or whether it will be forced underground and manifest itself in more violent ways.
Yet, despite its significance, the trial has received relatively little coverage in the Western media, in part because, for those of a multiculti bent, there’s no easy way to blur the reality—that this is a political prosecution by a thought police so stupid they don’t realize they’re delegitimizing the very institutions of the state. Still, the BBC gave it their best shot, concluding their report thus: “Correspondents say his Freedom Party (PVV), which has nine MPs in the lower house of parliament, has built its popularity largely by tapping into the fear and resentment of Muslim immigrants.”
Gotcha. This democracy business is all very well, but let’s face it, the people are saps, gullible boobs, racist morons, knuckle-dragging f–kwits. One-man-one-vote is fine in theory, but next thing you know some slicker’s “tapping into” the morons’ “fears and resentments” and cleaning up at the polls.
Strange how it always comes back to a contempt for the people. Whenever the electorate departs from the elite’s pieties, whether in the Netherlands or in Massachusetts last month, it’s because some wily demagogue like, er, Scott Brown has been playing on the impressionable hicks’ “fears and resentments.” To the statist bullies at Canada’s “Human Rights” Commissions, their powers to regulate speech are necessary to prevent hate-mongers like me tapping into the fears and resentments of the Dominion’s millions of birdbrained boobs. Yes, that would be you, Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmoe of 22 Dufferin Gardens. Sure, you’ve voted for the Liberals every year since Expo, but c’mon, in your heart you know even you might be…susceptible…impressionable.
In the old days—divine right of kings, rule by patrician nobility—it was easier. But today’s establishment is obliged to pay at least lip service to popular sovereignty. So it has to behave more artfully. You’ll still have your vote; it’s just that the guy you wanted to give it to is on trial, and his platform’s been criminalized.
To return to where we came in, what does it mean when the Ministry of Justice proudly declares that the truth is no defence? When the law stands in explicit opposition to the truth, freeborn peoples should stand in opposition to the law. Because, as the British commentator Pat Condell says, “When the truth is no defence, there is no defence”—and what we are witnessing is a heresy trial. The good news is that the Openbaar Ministerie is doing such a grand job with its pilot program of apostasy prosecutions you’ll barely notice when sharia is formally adopted.
Ayn Rand on US foreign policy, Israel and Arabia
She got that one right
Norwegian Muslims warn of impending 9-11
Much more information is available here but in Norwegian. I am waiting on a translation but it would appear that due to the publication of a cartoon that Muslims didn’t like, massive but so far peaceful, demonstrations are taking place in Norway with veiled threats of a “9-11” style attack as a result of the publication. Yes we all have to make sure we do not upset the Muslims even if it means submitting quietly to the most violent, repugnant, sexist and racist irrational religious authority perhaps that the world has ever seen. Certainly the one that has done the most harm by orders of magnitude.
UPDATE:
‘Students’ disrupt Israeli embasador
The “Tolerance” of Radical Islam
by Guy Rodgers, Executive Director
Muslims in America and throughout the world regularly lecture us about how we are not sufficiently “tolerant” of Islam.
Students of the threat of radical Islam know how offensively hypocritical this is. America bends over backwards to be tolerant, so much so that “tolerance” has evolved into a corrosive political correctness which created the climate of military silence that led to the jihadist massacre at Ft. Hood.
Meanwhile, the “tolerance” of Islam is on display in Saudi Arabia, where a Christian can’t publicly carry a Bible and a Jew can’t wear a Star of David.
It’s on display in this video, shot at the University of California/Irvine, where radical Muslims and their sympathizers repeatedly shouted down a speaker at a public event. If you want to see the ugly face of the “tolerance” of radical Islam right here in America, click here.
Brigitte Gabriel knows all about this so-called “tolerance,” and if you’ve read her best-selling book Because They Hate you know her story.
For me, this so-called “tolerance” recently struck very close to home.
That’s when a good friend of our family, a pastor, was arrested in a Muslim-majority African country. (I am not revealing the pastor’s name or the country to protect his identity.)
The pastor was invited to speak at a small home meeting, a group of about 20 people, including children.
During the meeting, over 60 military police descended on this small group that somehow posed such a fearsome “threat” to the peace and well-being of the country!
The pastor’s Bible and personal effects were confiscated. Fortunately for him, his punishment was deportation. It could have been much, much worse.
The militant intolerance of radical Islam that dominates the Muslim world is not a relic of some ancient past. It is the reality of every nation where Muslims enjoy either a majority or a substantial minority of the population. Even countries characterized as more tolerant, such as Turkey, are rife with examples of this intolerance.
This intolerance is taking root in America. The UC/Irvine video is not an isolated case. Perhaps you recall the protestors in January, 2009, shouting at Jews on the streets of Florida “go back to the ovens” and “die, die, die!”
We must win the war against Islamic terrorism. But we must also win the war for the preservation of America’s values of freedom and our cherished right of free speech.
For the tolerance of evil is not tolerance. As Lee Harris notes in his book The Suicide of Reason, the tolerance of militant Islamist intolerance is cultural suicide.
London’s Islamic Radicals Speak Out
Great Britain recently raised its terror alert to “severe” following reports that al Qaeda was plotting new attacks.
But Britain may be facing an even greater threat from within — one the British government helped to create.
CBN News recently traveled to London to interview a number of leading Islamic radicals who have settled there with the full knowledge of the British government. Continue Reading →
Mayor of Anderlecht Brussels: You have to kill your family to go to prison here
Gaëtan Van Goidsenhoven (MR), mayor of Anderlecht, about the escalating violence in Brussels and the total incapacity to keep the situation under control because of the Muslim immigrants that are destroying public property everyday and recently have started to target police with AK-47’s
Thank you Patrupedbun
Trial of Geert Wilders resumes today
As I have no news yet as to the trial of Geert Wilders, I thought I would post what I consider to be the two most important videos in terms of the state of Islam in the Netherlands as well as a couple of quotes about Islam from previous famous world leaders.
Yes the government of the Netherlands have cleverly phrased the wording of the charge so that it does not matter if what Mr. Wilders said is true or not, but for the rest of us, its critical that we view this trial as one of Islam, and one of whether or not the truth itself can be made illegal.
Mohammad poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex…and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. The essence of his doctrine was violence and lust: to exalt the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature” – John Quincy Adams
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog…No stronger retrograde force exists in the world? (than Islam).” Winston Churchill
“I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that there have been few religions in the? world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad…it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are more to be feared, and I regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.” Alexis de Tocqueville
Here is the video that was translated and subtitled just a few days ago but is well worth reposting for anyone who has not yet seen it of a journalist who spent a year in a Dutch Madrassa learning hate of the non-Muslim.
This one, while subtle, is very important at a lot of levels. Not just on Islam, which is a small part of the issue here in my opinion, but how leftism created layers of laws and enforcement on the Dutch people which most are not even aware of, and which greatly impact their ability to make descisions for themselves as a people as free men and women. The fact that the Dutch policy of ‘non-escalation’ means that any event within Holland, that might cause conflict between communities such as the event below, may not be reported in the news etc. is an abomination within a free society.
Please watch the video below and spread it around as you can.
Thank you Proud Crusader for the quotes.
CDC: Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa
Here is a rather fascinating history of biological warfare on Europeans by Muslims by the Center for Disease Control. Thank you my youtube friend for posting this URL at the CDC
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Historical Review
Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa
Mark Wheelis*
*University of California, Davis, California USA
Suggested citation for this article: Wheelis M. Biological warfare at the 1346 siege of Caffa. Emerg Infect Dis [serial online] 2002 Sep [date cited];8. Available from: URL: http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no9/01-0536.htm
On the basis of a 14th-century account by the Genoese Gabriele de’ Mussi, the Black Death is widely believed to have reached Europe from the Crimea as the result of a biological warfare attack. This is not only of great historical interest but also relevant to current efforts to evaluate the threat of military or terrorist use of biological weapons. Based on published translations of the de’ Mussi manuscript, other 14th-century accounts of the Black Death, and secondary scholarly literature, I conclude that the claim that biological warfare was used at Caffa is plausible and provides the best explanation of the entry of plague into the city. This theory is consistent with the technology of the times and with contemporary notions of disease causation; however, the entry of plague into Europe from the Crimea likely occurred independent of this event.
The Black Death, which swept through Europe, the Near East, and North Africa in the mid-14th century, was probably the greatest public health disaster in recorded history and one of the most dramatic examples ever of emerging or reemerging disease. Europe lost an estimated one quarter to one third of its population, and the mortality in North Africa and the Near East was comparable. China, India, and the rest of the Far East are commonly believed to have also been severely affected, but little evidence supports that belief (1).
A principal source on the origin of the Black Death is a memoir by the Italian Gabriele de’ Mussi. This memoir has been published several times in its original Latin (2,3) and has recently been translated into English (4) (although brief passages have been previously published in translation, see reference [5]). This narrative contains some startling assertions: that the Mongol army hurled plague-infected cadavers into the besieged Crimean city of Caffa, thereby transmitting the disease to the inhabitants; and that fleeing survivors of the siege spread plague from Caffa to the Mediterranean Basin. If this account is correct, Caffa should be recognized as the site of the most spectacular incident of biological warfare ever, with the Black Death as its disastrous consequence. After analyzing these claims, I have concluded that it is plausible that the biological attack took place as described and was responsible for infecting the inhabitants of Caffa; however, the event was unimportant in the spread of the plague pandemic.
Origin of the 14th-Century Pandemic Continue Reading →
Brussels: Zero-tolerance against violence
Brussels: Zero-tolerance against violence A zero-tolerance policy will be implemented in several Brussels problem neighborhoods. Thus was decided during a meeting of the Brussels prosecutor Bruno Bulthé, the Anderlecht mayor Gaëtan Van Goidsenhoven (MR) and the head of the Brussels South police department. The Internal Affairs and Justice ministries also participated in the discussion, the Brussels public prosecution reported today. After a number of violent incidents, including several shooting incidents in which agents were targeted, and the attacks on the students of the Institut Supérieur Industriel de Bruxelles, the police and justice department decided to introduce a ‘zero tolerance’ policy in Anderlecht
Brussels: Zero-tolerance against violence
A zero-tolerance policy will be implemented in several Brussels problem neighborhoods. Thus was decided during a meeting of the Brussels prosecutor Bruno Bulthé, the Anderlecht mayor Gaëtan Van Goidsenhoven (MR) and the head of the Brussels South police department. The Internal Affairs and Justice ministries also participated in the discussion, the Brussels public prosecution reported today.
After a number of violent incidents, including several shooting incidents in which agents were targeted, and the attacks on the students of the Institut Supérieur Industriel de Bruxelles, the police and justice department decided to introduce a ‘zero tolerance’ policy in Anderlecht.
The intention is to act hard against any form of violence, and that any crime would be dealt with. It’s possible extra magistrates would be called in to be able to act quickly in the neighborhoods being targeted.
“So called no-go-zones are not accepted,” says prosecution spokesperson Jos Colpin. “In the neighborhoods concerned, zero tolerance will be employed, and the structures of the prosecution and the police would be adapted and where necessary reinforced.”
François Debats, director of the Institut Supérieur Industriel de Bruxelles, is satisfied with the decision. The director moved his 1st and 2nd year students to the Koningstraat campus last week, after various students were attacked by criminal youth in the area of the Anderlecht Grondelstraat. They were forced via verbal aggression or knife threats to hand over valuable items such as a cell-phone or mp3-player.
“The decision reassured me,” says Debats. “Everybody clearly told me that they’re aware of the problem and I’ve also felt manifest will to deal with the issue. I don’t blame the police of Anderlecht for anything because I know that they put in effort 100%. Whatever new regulation will now coem, I don’t know, but I have confidence in the fiture.”
The director is considering to return to the Grondelstraat campus after the winter’s vacation.
Earlier the police unions said they were planning to strike, after a police agent was seriously injured trying to stop a getaway car following a robbery. This is the third time police were shot at in the past few weeks. The VSOA union wrote in a press release: street gangs who sow terror undistrubed, offernder who are immediately freed, police agents who become victims of weapon-violence. These are the sad charachteristics of a region where gangsterism, violnce and lack of law seem to have the upper hand over public order.
Khadr repatriation overturned by top court
CBCNEWS… The Supreme Court of Canada has overturned lower-court orders that the federal government must try to repatriate Toronto-born Omar Khadr from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
However, the top court agreed Canadian officials violated Khadr’s human rights, and that he continues to be threatened by the effect of those violations.
In a unanimous decision released Friday, the court declared that Canadian officials breached Khadr’s right to life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
However, it concluded that ordering the government to ask the U.S. for Khadr’s repatriation to stop the continuing violation of his rights would interfere with the government’s jurisdiction over foreign relations. Therefore, it chose not to issue the order, even though it had the authority to do so.
“We … leave it to the government to decide how best to respond to this judgment in light of current information, its responsibility for foreign affairs and in conformity with the charter,” the ruling said.
Khadr, 23, has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since he was arrested in Afghanistan at age 15, accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. He is scheduled to be tried in July by a U.S. military court on charges of murder, conspiracy and support of terrorism.
Imam in Spain charged for menacing woman over veil
MADRID (AP) — Charges have been filed against an imam in northeastern Spain accusing him of threatening a woman who refused to wear an Islamic headscarf or abide by certain Islamic customs, prosecutors said Thursday.
The prosecutors are seeking a five-year jail sentence for Mohamed Benbrahim, a Moroccan, on charges of calumny, coercion and menacing behavior against fellow Moroccan Muslim Fatima Ghailan. The two live in Cunit, a town in Catalonia, a region with a sizable Muslim population.
The court filed similar charges against the president of the Islamic Association in Cunit and lesser ones against Benbrahim’s wife and his daughter.
In a statement to the court in the nearby town of Vendrells, Ghailan, 31, said Benbrahim had harassed her and campaigned to have her removed from her job in the town hall’s cultural department purely because she had a job, dressed in a Western style, drove a car and associated with non-Muslims.
She said the imam and his supporters also pressured her husband and children.
Ghailan filed a complaint in December, 2008, after she said she and her husband were accosted in the street by the imam, who told them they would be run out of the town.
Benbrahim was quoted by the Spanish daily El Pais as denying the charges and claiming Ghailan concocted the story. He said he simply felt the woman was not suitable for the job.
But the prosecutors office said the judge investigating the case had found the woman’s account credible and decided to press charges.
Ghailan and the imam cold not be reached for comment Thursday.
The prosecutors office said it could be a year before a trial is held.
About 725,000 Moroccans live in Spain.
Meet the new head of the Muslim Brotherhood
Mohammed Badie
JPOST… Last Saturday in Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood announced that it had elected Muhammad Badee as its new supreme leader, a succession which comes at a critical time. A few months ago, Muhammad Mahdi Akef – who had ruled the organization for the past six years – stated that he would not seek another mandate, thus sparking a crisis of major proportions.
But the trouble had already been brewing for a while.
Akef has continually fomented outrage in Egypt with extremist pronouncements. Not only does he overtly support Hamas and Iran, a year ago he proclaimed that he would rather see a Malaysian Muslim as president of Egypt than an Egyptian Copt.
Furthermore, an increasingly large number of Brothers are clamoring for reforms within the group. When the old leader came to the conclusion that he could not bridge the gap between the hard-liners and the reformers, he decided it was finally time to step down.
The younger generation of members are yearning to shake the yoke of the old guard and democratize the movement, and have thus become increasingly restive. They had pinned their hopes on Akef’s second in command, Muhammad Elsayed Habib, but he resigned in protest at the Akef’s policies and subsequently lost his seat on the Guidance Council (the governing body) in December.
Their discontent was only aggravated during the subsequent elections. The elections themselves – both for the seats in the Guidance Council and for the post of supreme leader -stirred anger, as many believed that they had been rigged. However, since the Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Egypt, the vote was held in secrecy and was therefore not monitored. What is known is that Badee was elected by a two-thirds majority of the advisory council, and that his ascension spells trouble for reformists.
THE BROTHERHOOD is far from a democratic movement open to pluralistic views. It has remained faithful to the extremist religious doctrine of the man who founded it in Egypt in 1928, Hassan el-Banna, and of its greatest theologian, Sayed Qotob.
Qotob was far more controversial than Banna. He radicalized Banna’s doctrine – which called for the restoration of the caliphate and the creation of one single nation for all Muslims under the sovereignty of Allah, with the Koran as the constitution and Shari’a as the legal system – by declaring that all Arab societies lived in jahalia (ignorance of the true Islam) as before the coming of Muhammad, and were therefore “infidels.” The meaning of his statement was clear: that it was legitimate to fight such Arab societies in order to form the new caliphate. To make matters worse, he also formed the religious basis that justified attacking non-Muslim states to bring them into the fold of Islam.
This doctrine has been adopted today by all jihadist movements – al-Qaida included – and gives them the legitimacy they need to kill innocent civilians, Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Continue Reading →
Berlin: Polish girls attacked in school
The headscarf debate is gaining a new, brutal dimension in Neukölln (Berlin): headscarf-wearing girls suddenly attack others, preferably blond students. The school administration and municipal school authority are very concerned.
Volker Steffens, head of the Thomas-Morus high-school says that twice girls with headscarves punched blond fellow students without headscarves, pushed them to the ground and kicked them. About 80% of the 500 students in the school are of foreign origin, representing 41 nations. The principal says that once a headscarf-wearing girl tried to set fire to the hair of another blond student, and that the victims are mostly Polish.
Rita Herrmanns of the Berlin school authority says that fundamentalist tendencies have been taking over in Berlin schools as well in recent years. Increasingly, more girls wear headscarves, more Muslim parents forbid their daughters from participating in class trips, swimming and sex-ed classes.
Principal Volker Steffens who sees the consequences on the front lines says that Islamist tendencies and direct racist attacks by girls are striking.
The victims are blond Polish girls since they’re Catholic and yet very liberal, and therefore embody everything that the headscarf-girls reject. Steffens says the reason for the conflict is often envy. The girls are banned from many things in their own strict religious upbringing at home, but in school they see other girls who are allowed more. They get jealous and want to beat up the children from more liberal families.
Volker Steffens sets limits to the violence and aggression and says that incidents are discussed with the students and dealt with, going from reprimands to being excluded from school events or from school.
Rita Herrmanns says that this is good, since the one thing that shouldn’t happen is to look the other way. This violence should be made public.
Women of terror: female suicide bombers trained to attack West
Now this is Islamist equality. Will they get their 72 young virgin boy-toys in paradise?
From The Telegraph U.K.
Al-Qaeda terror cells have trained a group of female suicide bombers to attack Western targets, US officials have warned.
By Phil Sherwell, in New York and Sean Rayment, Security Correspondent
Published: 8:30PM GMT 23 Jan 2010
Female terrorist Photo: Alamy
The women, who may have a “non Arab” appearance and be travelling on Western passports, have been prepared for their missions by the Yemeni group responsible for the operation to blow up an airliner over the United States on Christmas Day.
Details of the bombers emerged just hours after British spy chiefs raised the UK threat state to “severe” amid fears that al-Qaeda was planning a wave of attacks against western targets.
Terror experts within the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, a unit of MI5, now believe that an attack against the UK is “highly likely”.
US law enforcement agents have been told to be on the lookout for female suicide bombers who may attempt to enter the country.
At least two are believed to be connected to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula which dispatched underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who tried unsuccessfully to bring down a transatlantic airliner over Detroit.
Richard Clarke, a former chief White House counter terrorism adviser, said: “They have trained women.
“There are others who are still out there who have been trained and who are clean skins – that means people who we do not have a record of, people who may not look like al-Qaeda terrorists, who may not be Arabs, and may not be men.”
Security sources said that it was “inevitable” that al-Qaeda would eventually turn to using women with a western appearance to carry out suicide attacks.
Officials said that airliners and all forms of transport could be targeted as well as sports stadiums, ports and power stations.
Although female suicide bombers have been used to carry out attacks by al-Qaeda in Iraq and Palestinian groups in Israel, none are thought to have been used against European or US targets before.
It has also emerged that two male Arab nationals were refused permission to board planes from Heathrow Airport to the United States earlier this month after their names appeared on a US “no fly list”.
The first incident happened last Saturday when British officials refused to allow an Egyptian man permission to fly on American Airlines flight 113 from Heathrow to Miami.
The following day a Saudi Arabian passenger was stopped from boarding United Airlines flight 929 to Chicago. Officials said the man was sent back to Saudi Arabia by British immigration officials.
Both men were denied permission to board the US-bound flights after their names were “flagged” as being linked to potential Islamist terror groups.
Washington officials said the men were part of a surge of people named on its “no fly” list who have attempted to board flights to or in the US in recent days.
In two other cases involving people on the no-fly list, a man in Nairobi, Kenya was kept off a flight last Sunday that would have connected in Amsterdam to Dallas, and a passenger attempting to fly on an American Airlines flight to Los Angeles was stopped in Saint Maarten, in the Caribbean, before he could board a connecting flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico.
American officials say there were two additional incidents, in Minneapolis and in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in which people on the no-fly list were denied boarding, questioned and then allowed to leave the airport without being detained.
Mr Clarke, who was talking to ABC news in the United states, added: “What we don’t know is whether this is because everyone is doing a better job of enforcing the no-fly list, or because the list has been expanded, or because the terrorists are attempting to probe our security.”
A US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report has also revealed that around 70 American citizens, some ex-convicts, have disappeared into Yemen and Somalia and pose a Jihadist threat to the US.
The latest revelations follow the decision by the Joint Terrorism Analysis centre (JTAC), which is based at MI5’s headquarters in London, to raise the UK threat state from substantial to severe – a move which indicates that a UK-based attack is now “highly likely”.
The threat is believed to come from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular. Whitehall sources said that the group had demonstrated that it had both the “intent and capability” to mount an attack against a western target.
The decision to raise the threat level was made following briefings to the Prime Minister by the heads of the security services MI5, MI6 and Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), the covert listening agency, and a meeting of the Government’s Cobra emergency committee.
It is understood that the threat state was raised because of the increases in “terrorist chatter” picked up by GCHQ in the last month – a development corroborated by officials on Capitol Hill.
World Foreign ministers are preparing to meet in London this week for two conferences to discuss the threat of terrorism in both Yemen and Afghanistan.
But Whitehall sources were insistent that there was no specific intelligence which suggested that either conference was a potential target.
Announcing the raise in threat level, Alan Johnson said on Friday night that “there is no intelligence to suggest than an attack is imminent”.
He added: “We still face a real and serious threat to the UK from international terrorism so I would urge the public to remain vigilant and carry on reporting suspicious events to the appropriate authorities and to support the police and security services in their continuing efforts to discover, track and disrupt terrorist activity.”
But Patrick Mercer, the Tory chairman of the Commons Counter Terrorism Sub Committee, described the governments warnings as “vacuous”.
He said: “Without any information about what to do or how to do it, then informing us of the threat level is meaningless.”
Gordon Brown warned earlier this week that “a number of terrorist cells are actively trying to attack Britain and other countries.”
His speech to the House of Commons came after he received a briefing on the latest intelligence at a meeting of the Cabinet’s National Security Committee.
Mr Brown said the failed attack over Detroit signalled “the first operation mounted outside Arabia by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
He also talked about the increased threat from Somalia in east Africa and the Sahel in West Africa, adding that there would be a greater degree of intelligence sharing with foreign countries.
Abdulmutallab, who tried to set off a bomb in his underwear, has warned his FBI interrogators that up to 20 “more like me” may be preparing further attacks.