Islamic Societies Review WEEKLY

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

More evidence about Saudi connections to terror organizations emerging at an increased rate

Wednesday, February 04, 2015 No comments

There has long been evidence that wealthy Saudis provided support for bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction magnate, and Al Qaeda before the 2001 attacks. Saudi Arabia had worked closely with the United States to finance Islamic militants fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Al Qaeda drew its members from those militant fighters.

“I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia,” wrote Mr. Graham, who has long demanded the release of 28 pages of the congressional report on the attacks that explore Saudi connections and remain classified.

Mr. Kerrey said in the affidavit that it was “fundamentally inaccurate and misleading” to argue, as lawyers for Saudi Arabia have, that the 9/11 Commission exonerated the Saudi government.

The three former officials’ statements did not address Mr. Moussaoui’s testimony.

The 9/11 lawsuit was initially filed in 2002 but has faced years of legal obstacles. It was dismissed in 2005 on the grounds that Saudi Arabia enjoyed “sovereign immunity,” and the dismissal was upheld on appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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No limits to ISIL cruelty: Jordan, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia facilited the funding and arming of fighters who eventually joined ISIL

Wednesday, February 04, 2015 No comments

Just when its cruel and degrading ways is thought to have peak, ISIL finds ways to shock even its own supporters: Jordanian Salafis and others react.

Safi al-Kasasbeh, the pilot's father, called for the Jordanian government to do "more than just executing prisoners".

"I call for [IS] to be eliminated completely," he told reporters on Wednesday.

An official Saudi Arabian source quoted by the country's SPA news agency described the killing as a "barbaric, cowardly act, which is not sanctioned by the principles of tolerant Islam... and cannot be perpetrated except by the bitterest enemies of Islam".

Arab League secretary general Nabil al-Arabi said the killing was "brutal" and "beyond belief", adding that IS was "a menace which should be stopped".

Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar University in Egypt and one of the leading authorities in Sunni Islam condemned the killing, saying the burning to death of Lt Kasasbeh violated Islam's prohibition on the mutilation of bodies.

Even clerics sympathetic to the jihadist cause said the act of burning a man alive and filming the killing would damage Islamic State, an al-Qaida offshoot which controls wide territory in Syria and Iraq, and is also known as ISIL or ISIS.

"This weakens the popularity of Islamic State because we look at Islam as a religion of mercy and tolerance. Even in the heat of battle, a prisoner of war is given good treatment," said Abu Sayaf, a Jordanian Salafist cleric also known as Mohamed al-Shalabi who spent almost ten years in Jordanian prisons for militant activity including a plot to attack U.S. troops.

"Even if the Islamic State says Muath had bombed, and burnt and killed us and we punished him in the way he did to us, we say, OK but why film the video in this shocking way?" he told Reuters. "This method has turned society against them."

SITE, a U.S.-based monitoring service, quoted Abdullah bin Muhammad al-Muhaysini, whom it described as a Saudi jihadi, as saying on Twitter it would have been better if Kasaesbeh's captors had swapped him for "Muslim captives." His killing would make ordinary people sympathetic to Kasaesbeh, he said.

America's Allies Funded ISIL

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), now threatening Baghdad, was funded for years by wealthy donors in Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, three U.S. allies that have dual agendas in the war on terror.

The extremist group that is threatening the existence of the Iraqi state was built and grown for years with the help of elite donors from American supposed allies in the Persian Gulf region. There, the threat of Iran, Assad, and the Sunni-Shiite sectarian war trumps the U.S. goal of stability and moderation in the region.

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Jordan to Execute al-Qaeda Prisoners After ISIL Burns Pilot Taken Hostage

Tuesday, February 03, 2015 No comments

Jordanian pilot taken hostage by ISIL in December has been killed by the militant group. Jordan will execute al-Qaeda prisoners: Sajida al-Rishawi, Ziad al-Karbouli and four other militants.

The Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Kasaesbeh, who was captured by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in December after his plane crashed on the terrorist-controlled territory in Syria, has reportedly been burned alive on Tuesday.

Jordan has been making efforts to exchange the pilot for an al-Qaeda prisoner Sajida al-Rishawi, who was arrested after a failed suicide bombing attempt. However, one of the conditions for the exchange was that ISIL shows proof of the pilot being alive.

Earlier, Jordan has threatened to hang every ISIL prisoner they currently hold if their pilot was harmed.

A video that shows the pilot being burned alive was distributed on a twitter account that posts ISIL related propaganda.

The video shows Kasaesbeh wearing an orange jumpsuit, inside a cage, being consumed by fire.

The pilot's family and Jordanian officials have confirmed the video is authentic. Jordanian State TV reported that he was killed back on January 3, 2015.

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Sunday, February 01, 2015

How Americans really feel about Netanyahu and why it matters

Sunday, February 01, 2015 No comments

By Shibley Telhami January 30

The controversy over an invitation to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address Congress shortly before Israeli elections has polarized the U.S. political scene. Netanyahu has been here before, of course. His transparent support for the Republican candidate for president in 2012, Mitt Romney, generated much resentment in the Democratic Party hierarchy, and certainly in the Obama administration. But this time – together with House Speaker John Boehner – he is a central player in a highly charged national political environment pitting a Republican-controlled Congress against a Democratic president; public and media attention is much greater, and the consequences potentially higher.

How this will play out in terms of U.S. politics and the impact on relations with Israel depends in part upon a more basic question: How do Americans see Bibi Netanyahu in the first place? And how do these attitudes play into a broader, and growing national divide about policy toward Israel? Some of the questions in a November 2014 poll I conducted – fielded by the research company GfK – among a nationally representative panel of 1008 Americans offer some intriguing evidence.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

CIA and Mossad killed senior Hezbollah figure in car bombing

Saturday, January 31, 2015 No comments

On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the Syrian capital was tracking his movements.

As Mughniyah approached a parked SUV, a bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of the vehicle exploded, sending a burst of shrapnel across a tight radius. He was killed instantly.

The device was triggered remotely from Tel Aviv by agents with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, who were in communication with the operatives on the ground in Damascus. “The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” said a former U.S. intelligence official.

The United States helped build the bomb, the former official said, and tested it repeatedly at a CIA facility in North Carolina to ensure the potential blast area was contained and would not result in collateral damage.

“We probably blew up 25 bombs to make sure we got it right,” the former official said.

The extraordinarily close cooperation between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence services suggested the importance of the target — a man who over the years had been implicated in some of Hezbollah’s most spectacular terrorist attacks, including those against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the Israeli Embassy in Argentina.

The United States has never acknowledged participation in the killing of Mughniyah, which Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Until now, there has been little detail about the joint operation by the CIA and Mossad to kill him, how the car bombing was planned or the exact U.S. role. With the exception of the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the mission marked one of the most high-risk covert actions by the United States in recent years.

U.S. involvement in the killing, which was confirmed by five former U.S. intelligence officials, also pushed American legal boundaries.

Friday, January 30, 2015

New Saudi king announces major government shake-up

Friday, January 30, 2015 No comments

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia's new King Salman on Thursday (Jan 29) further cemented his hold on power, with a sweeping shakeup that saw two sons of the late King Abdullah fired, and the heads of intelligence and other key agencies replaced alongside a cabinet shuffle.

Top officials from the Ports Authority, the National Anti-Corruption Commission and the conservative Islamic kingdom's religious police were among those let go.

The new appointments came a week after Salman acceded to the throne following the death of Abdullah, aged about 90.

Salman also reached out directly to his subjects on Thursday. One of his more than 30 decrees ordered "two months' basic salary to all Saudi government civil and military employees," the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said. Students and pensioners got similar bonuses.

"Dear people: You deserve more and whatever I do will not be able to give you what you deserve," the king said later on his official Twitter account. He asked his citizens to "not forget me in your prayers".

SPA said Salman "issued a royal order today, relieving Prince Khalid bin Bandar bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, Chief of General Intelligence, of his post."

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Ancient Sea Rise Tale Told Accurately for 10,000 Years

Wednesday, January 28, 2015 No comments

Aboriginal stories of lost islands match up with underwater finds in Australia

Melbourne, the southernmost state capital of the Australian mainland, was established by Europeans a couple hundred years ago at the juncture of a great river and a wind-whipped bay. Port Phillip Bay sprawls over 750 square miles, providing feeding grounds for whales and sheltering coastlines for brine-scented beach towns. But it’s an exceptionally shallow waterway, less than 30 feet in most places. It’s so shallow that 10,000 years ago, when ice sheets and glaciers held far more of the planet’s water than is the case today, most of the bay floor was high and dry and grazed upon by kangaroos.

To most of us, the rush of the oceans that followed the last ice age seems like a prehistoric epoch. But the historic occasion was dutifully recorded—coast to coast—by the original inhabitants of the land Down Under.

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories—many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar—that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Debating Howard Dean's statement that Paris Terrorists "About as Muslim as I Am"

Saturday, January 24, 2015 No comments

Debating Howard Dean's statement that Paris Terrorists "About as Muslim as I Am":

HOWARD DEAN: You know, this is a chronic problem. I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says. Europe has an enormous radical problem. I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.

BRZEZINSKI: Interesting, yeah. Hmm.

DEAN: And I think you got to deal with these people. The interesting thing here, is we talked about guns the last time in regarding the United States, regarding how guns get in the hands of the kind of people that kill the two police officers here two weeks ago.

France has tremendous gun control laws, and yet these people are able to get Kalashnikovs. So, this is really complicated stuff, and I think you have to treat these people as basically mass murderers. But I do not think we should accord them any particular religious respect, because I don’t think, whatever they’re claiming their motivation is, is clearly a twisted, cultish mind.

Watch it:

Howard Dean defended his position even when challenged by Bill Maher, who believes that Islam, not just a specific interpretation of it by a specific cult or sect and unlike other religions, is a inherently violent religion:

Friday, January 23, 2015

Text of the "To the Youth in Europe and North America" issued by ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei Jan. 21, 2015

Friday, January 23, 2015 No comments

In the name of God, the Beneficent the Merciful

To the Youth in Europe and North America,

The recent events in France and similar ones in some other Western countries have convinced me to directly talk to you about them. I am addressing you, [the youth], not because I overlook your parents, rather it is because the future of your nations and countries will be in your hands; and also I find that the sense of quest for truth is more vigorous and attentive in your hearts.

I don’t address your politicians and statesmen either in this writing because I believe that they have consciously separated the route of politics from the path of righteousness and truth.

I would like to talk to you about Islam, particularly the image that is presented to you as Islam. Many attempts have been made over the past two decades, almost since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, to place this great religion in the seat of a horrifying enemy. The provocation of a feeling of horror and hatred and its utilization has unfortunately a long record in the political history of the West.

Here, I don’t want to deal with the different phobias with which the Western nations have thus far been indoctrinated. A cursory review of recent critical studies of history would bring home to you the fact that the Western governments’ insincere and hypocritical treatment of other nations and cultures has been censured in new historiographies.

The histories of the United States and Europe are ashamed of slavery, embarrassed by the colonial period and chagrined at the oppression of people of color and non-Christians. Your researchers and historians are deeply ashamed of the bloodsheds wrought in the name of religion between the Catholics and Protestants or in the name of nationality and ethnicity during the First and Second World Wars. This approach is admirable.

By mentioning a fraction of this long list, I don’t want to reproach history; rather I would like you to ask your intellectuals as to why the public conscience in the West awakens and comes to its senses after a delay of several decades or centuries. Why should the revision of collective conscience apply to the distant past and not to the current problems? Why is it that attempts are made to prevent public awareness regarding an important issue such as the treatment of Islamic culture and thought?

You know well that humiliation and spreading hatred and illusionary fear of the “other” have been the common base of all those oppressive profiteers. Now, I would like you to ask yourself why the old policy of spreading “phobia” and hatred has targeted Islam and Muslims with an unprecedented intensity. Why does the power structure in the world want Islamic thought to be marginalized and remain latent? What concepts and values in Islam disturb the programs of the super powers and what interests are safeguarded in the shadow of distorting the image of Islam? Hence, my first request is: Study and research the incentives behind this widespread tarnishing of the image of Islam.

My second request is that in reaction to the flood of prejudgments and disinformation campaigns, try to gain a direct and firsthand knowledge of this religion. The right logic requires that you understand the nature and essence of what they are frightening you about and want you to keep away from.

I don’t insist that you accept my reading or any other reading of Islam. What I want to say is: Don’t allow this dynamic and effective reality in today’s world to be introduced to you through resentments and prejudices. Don’t allow them to hypocritically introduce their own recruited terrorists as representatives of Islam.

Receive knowledge of Islam from its primary and original sources. Gain information about Islam through the Qur’an and the life of its great Prophet. I would like to ask you whether you have directly read the Qur’an of the Muslims. Have you studied the teachings of the Prophet of Islam and his humane, ethical doctrines? Have you ever received the message of Islam from any sources other than the media?

Have you ever asked yourself how and on the basis of which values has Islam established the greatest scientific and intellectual civilization of the world and raised the most distinguished scientists and intellectuals throughout several centuries?

I would like you not to allow the derogatory and offensive image-buildings to create an emotional gulf between you and the reality, taking away the possibility of an impartial judgment from you. Today, the communication media have removed the geographical borders. Hence, don’t allow them to besiege you within fabricated and mental borders.

Although no one can individually fill the created gaps, each one of you can construct a bridge of thought and fairness over the gaps to illuminate yourself and your surrounding environment. While this preplanned challenge between Islam and you, the youth, is undesirable, it can raise new questions in your curious and inquiring minds. Attempts to find answers to these questions will provide you with an appropriate opportunity to discover new truths.

Therefore, don’t miss the opportunity to gain proper, correct and unbiased understanding of Islam so that hopefully, due to your sense of responsibility toward the truth, future generations would write the history of this current interaction between Islam and the West with a clearer conscience and lesser resentment.

Seyyed Ali Khamenei

21st Jan. 2015

France has seen almost as many anti-Muslim acts since the Paris attacks earlier this month as in all of 2014

Friday, January 23, 2015 No comments

France has seen almost as many anti-Muslim acts since the Paris attacks earlier this month as in all of 2014, a French Muslim body says. The figures could be higher as they do not include incidents recorded in Paris.

There were 128 anti-Muslim actions or threats between 7-20 January in France - not including the densely populated Paris region - compared to 133 in all of last year, including Paris, according to an internal study released on Friday by the French Council of the Muslim Religion.

Police in Paris are yet to release their own figures.

The 128 anti-Muslim incidents are made up of 33 acts against mosques, and 95 threats reported to authorities, the Council said. According to its own figures, the incidents in 2014 represented a drop of 41 percent from 2013.

January 7 was the day brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, who have been linked to al Qaeda, burst into the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine, killing 12. They were themselves killed days later by French security forces following a siege. A third gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, killed a policewoman and four hostages in a Jewish kocher supermarket in Paris, himself also killed later on in a police raid.

In total, the days of attacks left 20 people dead, including the three gunman.

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