 AUSTRALIA'S most notorious terrorist Willie Brigitte will be free from jail next year, having served less than half his sentence for conspiring to blow up the nation's only nuclear reactor and the power grid. Caribbean-born Muslim convert Brigitte made headlines in 2007 when he was sentenced in France, following his arrest in Sydney, to a maximum nine years in jail for joining an al-Qaeda-backed Pakistani terror cell out to bomb Lucas Heights nuclear plant, the national electricity grid and/or a military base. But The Daily Telegraph can reveal that the French Justice Ministry is considering releasing the 41-year-old on an early release good behaviour plan - possibly in the new year. He is expected to immediately leave France for the Middle East, with Australia definitely off his itinerary. Authorities close to his case in Paris said the decision would no doubt cause some diplomatic ructions in Australia but that the judiciary was a separate arm of the state. "He will be free next year, it was nine years but with good behaviour," Mr Durimel said. "Of course he is happy. He had no problem in prison, he had good behaviour and when people are of good behaviour they may leave early." Mr Durimel visited Brigitte in his maximum security cell in a complex outside Paris in the past couple of months to break the news. "He is very angry because he thinks that the Australian authorities pursued him for a political purpose. He always said he was not a terrorist and that the file was empty but for him it was a political decision and not a judicial decision," Mr Durimel said. Brigitte was born on the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe, a French territory, to affluent parents. He joined the navy in 1989 but quit four years later and moved to Paris. There he embraced a radical form of Islam and began associating with members of Algeria's Islamist extremist Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. He ran survival training lessons in the forests outside Paris for those wishing to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan. Twice divorced, he moved to Pakistan in 2001 following the September 11 bombings. It was there he began to train in earnest for jihad with other foreigners at a base run by the al-Qaeda-backed Lashkar-e-Toiba, as they all awaited for their instructions to attack the West. He later moved back to Paris but in May 2003 was given money and instructions to move to Sydney and make contact with an established terror cell and await further instructions. Ten days after he arrived in Sydney he married his third wife, unsuspecting army reservist and recent Muslim convert Melanie Brown. She said she only became suspicious of her husband when he continuously questioned her about her time as a signaller in East Timor, the military equipment she used and her knowledge of army bases. She later sought to downplay the admission. He moved about in Lakemba in Sydney's southwest, with authorities oblivious to his background or intent. He worked at a takeaway shop and attended a local mosque. Then he made contact with Sydney architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi. The Pakistan-born architect was central to the plot to bomb a major icon such as the nuclear plant, Pine Gap spy base in central Australia, the national electricity grid or Holsworthy barracks. The plot was in its infancy when the French authorities discovered Brigitte had travelled to Australia and requested from the Australian Embassy any details of his travel. The request was initially ignored so the French sent ASIO a message, but it was a public holiday and the fax for urgent assistance was left on a machine in Canberra. About 10 days later Brigitte was arrested on immigration irregularities and was detained - and his full background revealed. Brigitte was deported in October and during interrogation said he was trained as a bombmaker and dispatched to cause death and destruction. The Australian
Paul Sheehan | March 30 I've been considering a request from a post-graduate student who wants to do a thesis on Islamophobia in Australia. She writes: "I am researching the topic Islamophobia, and I am trying to prove whether Islamophobia is based on religion fear or cultural fear of Islam." What about proving that Islamophobia exists at all? That would be the logical, ethical and scholarly starting point. But it appears the outcome has already been decided. This would fit the prevailing orthodoxy in academia that the default position for Muslims in Australia is victim. The jargon, "Islamophobia" is part of this ideological construct. Literally, it means fear of Muslims. I reflected on all this while on holiday in Malaysia and the Maldives last week. This was my twelfth visit to Muslim societies because I do not "fear" Muslims and do not "fear" Islam. Yes, there is ample evidence that Australians have become uneasy about Muslims in general and hostile in specific cases, but this is about cause and effect. Consider the series of blows to the image of Muslims in just the past three weeks, where the everyday decency of the majority have been collaterally damaged by the antics of the few. On March 8, the night of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, police say a group of about 100 young Muslim men, allegedly members of a loose gang called MBM - Muslim Brotherhood Movement - moved through the centre of the city intimidating, harassing and beating bystanders. On March 15, Abdul Darwiche was murdered, shot to death in a shopping centre in the latest hyper-violence involving two warring Lebanese Muslim clans. Police later arrested Darwiche's brother, Michael, for driving around with a loaded pistol. A third brother, Adnan, appeared in the NSW Supreme Court three years ago to be sentenced for a double murder. He and his fellow accused, Nasaem El-Zeyat and Ramzi Aouad, laughed and joked, going out of their way to express their contempt for Australian law. After the three men were all given life sentences they shouted "God is great!" This was the same Adnan Darwiche who purchased rocket launchers stolen from the Australian Army, which have never been recovered. Hundreds of mourners attended Abdul Darwiche's funeral at the Lakemba Mosque, where, within days, Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly was involved in yet another controversy. Channel Nine obtained a copy of a video surveillance tape which shows the former mufti of Australia kicking in a door, then returning soon after in the company of police. Apparently he called police over vandalism which he committed, blaming others who are engaged in a power struggle at the mosque. Sheik Hilaly has been embroiled repeatedly in controversy and provocation, making numerous inflammatory remarks about Australia and Australians. A few days later, yet another rape sentence was handed down to one of the K brothers, three of whom, during their various trials for gang rape, claimed they were victims of an anti-Muslim conspiracy. Between them, four K brothers have been convicted of gang-raping five girls. This sentencing followed closely on the conviction of seven Sydney schoolboys for the aggravated sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl in a toilet block in Yagoona in 2007. According to police, the ring-leader was on his phone speaking in Arabic during the assaults and most or all of the boys are of Muslim background. If this is so, these latest convictions produce a morbid tally of more than 30 young Muslim men involved in serious proven sexual assaults of non-Muslim girls in Sydney, involving the Skaf brothers, the K brothers, the E-M cousins, the Yagoona schoolboys and various others. Because sexual assault is the least reported crime (about 15 per cent of incidents are reported to police) this particular phenomenon was certainly much broader. Finally, there has been fatal violence between bikie gangs, accompanied by news that there has been an infusion of young Muslim men into the bikie culture. There is now warring between new gangs and traditional Anglo criminal gangs for control of the drug and protection markets. Gang leaders named Mahmoud and Hassan and Ismail have been prominent. Gangs like MBM, Notorious and Asesinoz have flaunted their ethnicity. Overtly racist videos have been posted on YouTube, such as the message that "Asesinoz is now targeting Aussies", with an image of a vandalised Australian flag. The events of the past week have been a variation on a theme police have been dealing with for years. It erupted spectacularly in 2005 when a self-styled "intifada" by armed Muslim men, travelling in convoys, staged numerous co-ordinated assaults across the eastern beach suburbs of Sydney. The attacks were in response to the most notorious case of anti-Muslim feeling in Australia, the Cronulla riot in December, 2005. The roots of this demonstration was the failure of the police, who for years had preferred to pretend the problem did not exist. Given the abundant evidence of violent cause and fearful effect, involving a small percentage of antagonists, the general charge of Islamophobia is an ideological fabrication. As for the criminal gangs, for more than 10 years I have argued that Australia needed anti-gang laws similar to the RICO laws (racketeering influenced corrupt organisations) used in the United States, which smashed the code of silence and solidarity by criminal gangs. Finally, the state Labor Government has begun to stir on this issue. Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Angus Hohenboken, Natalie O'Brien March 24 A FAULTLINE through the most powerful Muslim organisation in the country deepened last night as a breakaway faction of the Lebanese Muslim Association voted to sack its executive. The meeting of young MLA members, labelled the "Taliban of Lakemba" by controversial Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, was held outside Bankstown Town Hall in west Sydney after the group was reportedly shut out of the venue due to security concerns. The 54 association members at the meeting voted unanimously in favour of motions of no confidence in the board's six executive office-holders. "All we are asking is for a fair vote in April," Bilal Alameddine said. "From today there will basically be two boards directing what goes on in the (Lakemba) Mosque: nine on our side and six on their side." Members said that, while the no confidence motions named the board's six office-holders, no one was singled out -- rather it was a vote of no confidence in the executive amid concerns the vote for the new board at the annual general meeting next month would be rigged. The power struggle is mainly between the younger generation and the old guard, with tensions escalating in recent years. LMA president Shawky Kassir said the executive would not accept the vote, as the executive was accepted by the majority of the organisation's 400 members. "There is only one legitimate board," Mr Kassir said. "Irrelevant of its outcome, the meeting was not legal. "They go and meet wherever they want and whenever they want -- any decision outside the proper procedure of the LMA constitutional law will not be accepted by the members and everybody around the mosque." One senior Muslim said the younger group were "crazy and will stop at nothing". The LMA board had previously sent a letter to the members attempting to cancel the meeting, and failed in an attempt to get an injunction in the Supreme Court to stop the meeting going ahead. Mr Alameddine, who strenuously denied claims the group had Taliban ideology, said the cancelled venue booking was another example of the "political games" being played by the board. "The council asked the police for a risk assessment over the meeting and the police said there was no risk, but the council still cancelled the meeting because of security concerns," he said. "We are not radicals." Bankstown City Council could not be contacted at the time of going to publication. Trouble was expected at the Lakemba Mosque last Friday after confrontations last week between supporters of Sheik Hilali and his rivals, but a guest imam from Lebanon gave the sermon instead of Sheik Hilali. Several scuffles have broken out during prayer times after the Nine Network's A Current Affair played security video footage of Sheik Hilali kicking in a door in his own mosque before calling in the police to report an act of vandalism. The Muslim youths believe Sheik Hilali staged the vandalism to frame them and gain public support. Sheik Hilali has denied the allegations and says there is more CCTV footage that proves there was a break-in.
Source: The Australian
 Image is Photoshopped for entertainment purposes
Source: The AustralianTaj Din al-Hilali
Latest recipient of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
Natalie O'Brien | February 06, 2009
AUSTRALIA'S most outspoken Muslim leader, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, has compared the Israeli bombing of Gaza to the Holocaust, sparking outrage among Jewish groups.
Sheik Hilali, the imam of the nation's biggest mosque at Lakemba, southwest Sydney, lashed out at the Israeli leaders, branding them as "butchers" whose "Zionist racism" was creating another Holocaust.
"When we remember the atrocities of the Holocaust - it seems that what we are seeing is another Holocaust," Sheik Hilali said yesterday.
"It is not just about numbers of people killed - thousands as opposed to millions - but the atrocity itself, and here we have similar atrocities."
His comments drew an angry response from NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Vic Alhadeff.
Mr Alhadeff said comparisons between Israel's offensive in Gaza and the Holocaust were obscene and historically unsupportable.
"They trivialise the Holocaust and they falsify history," he said. "The racial hatred and anti-Semitism which Sheikh Hilali has been expressing for 20 years has clearly not dissipated."
Mr Alhadeff was referring to claims that Sheik Hilali gave an anti-Semitic lecture to a group of Muslim students at the University of Sydney in 1988, in which he was quoted as saying: "The Jews try to control the world through sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason and economic hoarding."
Sheik Hilali was appointed the following year as Mufti of Australia by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils in what was claimed to be a move designed to prevent him being thrown out of Australia over the comments.
Sheik Hilali hopes to lead a delegation into the Palestinian territory to deliver medical supplies to the wounded and to assess the situation.
The group, being co-ordinated by Melbourne-based group the Popular Committee for Palestine, has invited the attendance of Jewish journalist and the founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices, Antony Lowenstein, who said yesterday he did not believe Sheik Hilali's comments were anti-Semitic. Mr Lowenstein said it was important to make the distinction between anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli.
Sheik Hilali is waiting for permission for the delegation to enter Gaza via the Rafa crossing on Egypt's border, and is planning to take a delivery of hundreds of wheelchairs and three ambulances.
The 15-strong delegation is expected to include five doctors and representatives of several Muslim organisations.
In the wake of the Israel-Lebanon war in 2007, Sheik Hilali travelled to Lebanon to deliver aid.
At the time, he was accused of diverting funds to an Islamic leader with links to Hezbollah. But an Australian Federal Police investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing.
In 2005, Sheik Hilali travelled to Iraq in an effort to help secure the release of Australian hostage Douglas Wood.
Sheik Hilali, who is a member of the Gaza Committee, which has been established by several prominent NSW community members and religious leaders, said he wanted to be able to see where the funds raised by Australians would most help the Palestinian people.
The Gaza Committee, along with other charities, is understood to have raised more than $2.5 million to send to the Palestinians. Sheik Hilali said the money would only be given to registered charities or hospitals, and would not go to any political organisation. Source: The Australian
 January 03, 2009
ISRAEL’S continued demolition of the terrorist Hamas government of Gaza has highlighted the impotence of the United Nations.
In a small bonus, call it collateral damage, it has also flushed out some members of the Fifth Column in Australia’s Muslim community who are dedicated to the destruction of Western culture. The politics of war in the Middle East are often too muddied for all but the cognoscenti to follow, but the current situation is as clear as gin, which may be why there remain a few in the alcophobic Islamic world who attempt to deny the realities.
Since 2001, Hamas and its allies launched more than 6400 rockets, mortar bombs and other missiles at Israel. Not at specific military targets, not at strategic targets ... just at the nation.
Fortunately, there were few casualties because the Israeli Government was able to give its citizens a warning system that gave the 250,000 people in the most exposed areas exactly 15 seconds to take shelter.
Since mid-2008 a truce was nominally in effect, but Hamas chose to stockpile smuggled weapons through a series of tunnels from Egypt into Gaza. Israel sought to extend the truce when it expired last month but Hamas rejected the offer, firing some 80 rockets a day into Israel between December 24 and December 27.
Obviously Hamas’s leaders were unfamiliar with Stanley Holloway’s cautionary tale about Albert and the lion, in which young Albert Ramsbotham pokes his ``stick with an ‘orse’s ‘ead ‘andle’’ into the ear of Wallace the lion in the Blackpool Zoo, and is eaten for his troubles.
Perhaps Sheik Dr Nizar Rayan, one of the most prominent leaders of Hamas in Gaza who was killed in the first air strike in the Gaza Strip _ should have been reading Holloway’s instructional rhymes to the son he encouraged to become a suicide bomber, rather than applauding his decision to obliterate himself and two Israeli citizens.
The missiles that killed Rayan also killed nine other people, including one or two of his wives (the reports are conflicting) and three children.
Hamas said that a further 25 people were wounded when it issued a call for ``mass rallies of wrath’’.
Its call coincided with a rally in Lakemba, the centre of Sydney’s Muslim ghetto, by the familiar figure of the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia’s Keysar Trad, the faithful apologist for that old beneficiary of Labor politics, Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali, to protest the retaliatory attacks against the Hamas leadership.
No record can be found of any rallies conducted by these prayerful representatives of Australia’s Islamic friends in protest at Hamas’s prolonged rocket campaign against Israeli civilians. It should also be noted that the Israelis took the trouble to phone Rayan, who was an advocate of the strict Wahhabist line of Islamist extremism, and warn his family to evacuate their home because it was to be attacked.
Trusting in their underground shelter to protect them, they remained. Secondary explosions indicated that their shelter was used to store arms and ammunition. One need not feel distressed by Rayan’s demise. He repeatedly urged young people generally and young women in particular to enlist as suicide bombers.
Two days before he was killed, he delivered a sermon at a Gaza mosque calling on Muslims everywhere to pray for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, saying: ``We do not need money or weapons, we only need your prayers. We can handle the enemy ourselves.’’
Rayan was fiercely opposed to the moderate Palestinian Authority and to the notion of a secular Gaza. Last year, in an interview with the Palestinian al-Ayyam newspaper, he promised to turn the headquarters ofthe National Security Forcein Gaza into a huge mosque and to deliver sermons from the presidential headquarters.
As the moderates were defeated by the Hamas terrorists, he boasted: ``In a few hours, the secular era in Gaza will end without leaving a trace ... today heresy ends. Today the struggle is between Islam and the infidels, and it will end with the victory of the faith. [Once victorious], Hamas will open its arms to the members of the security forces, so that they will return to the faith, [for] Islam is generous with infidels [who repent]. We hold the truth and they [represent] falsehood ... how can we not fight against those who desecrate the sanctity of Allah, execute clerics and sell out the Palestinian cause _ those who blasphemed in houses of worship, burned mosques, Korans and [Islamic] education facilities and executed jihad fighters? We will hold dialogue with these [people] only through the barrels of our guns.’’
Today, even most of the so-called Arab street is tired of Rayan’s chosen form of dialogue.
And as Iran’s income from oil declines and it cuts back its sponsorship of Hamas and other terror groups, militants like the late Rayan will now find themselves further isolated.
In the clash of cultures, those who offer little more than death (and a promise of martyrdom) to followers, will find their currency doesn’t hold its value against the hope of prosperous, fruitful lives.
Little wonder that free, democratic and genuinely progressive Israel’s mere existence poses such a threat to its regressive, repressive Islamic neighbours. Source: The Daily Telegraph
 Natalie O'Brien | November 15, 2008
A FORMER Qantas employee who became the second person convicted under Australia's tough anti-terror laws has been found guilty in absentia of terrorism charges in Lebanon.
At a sentencing hearing in the NSW Supreme Court yesterday, lawyers for Belal Saadallah Khazaal, who has been found guilty of producing a book knowing it could assist in a terrorist act, argued that his convictions in Lebanon should not be taken into account because he was never able to put his side of the case.
Khazaal, 38, of Lakemba in Sydney's southwest, was convicted in absentia in Lebanon for his alleged involvement in funding the 2003 bombing of a McDonald's restaurant in Beirut.
He was sentenced in absentia to 15 years for falsifying a passport for another Australian man who had fled to Lebanon from Australia.
This information was not revealed to the jury in his NSW Supreme Court trial, at which he was convicted in September of producing a book described as a "do-it-yourself terrorism guide" containing an assassination hit-list that included US President George W. Bush.
In the first conviction of its kind in Australia, Khazaal was found guilty of the offence of compiling a book knowing it could assist in a terrorist act.
However, the NSW Supreme Court jury failed to reach a verdict on a second charge against Khazaal of attempting to incite a terrorist act.
On that basis, Khazaal's barrister, George Thomas, argued that any sentence handed down to his client must be at the lower end of the scale.
Khazaal was arrested and charged in June 2004 over the publication on the internet of a 110-page book titled Provision on the Rules of Jihad - short judicial rulings and organisational instructions for fighters and mujahideen against infidels.
He was among the first people charged after the federal Government introduced tough new terrorism laws in late 2003.
Khazaal's conviction followed that in June 2006 of Sydney architect Faheem Khalid Lodhi, who became the first person convicted under the new laws.
The book listed various means of assassination, including letter-bombs, booby-trapping cars, kidnappings, poisonings and shooting down planes.
The book also contained a hit-list of officials and countries to be targeted, including Australia and the US.
In the Supreme Court yesterday, Khazaal's close friend and doctor Tamir Khalil said Khazaal was suffering from medical ailments including a possible neurological condition that might have affected his behaviour at the time of the offence.
Dr Khalil said he had known Khazaal for many years and had never known him to display any violent tendencies, or even to talk about violence. But the doctor said Khazaal's medical history indicated a possibility he might have a tumour on his brain and this should be investigated.
Khazaal's wife, Mervat, gave evidence, telling the court her husband spent a lot of time working with angry Muslim youths, trying to protect them from their own emotions.
"He tried to cool them down," Ms Khazaal told the court.
She described her husband as a lovely man who was honest and generous and respected her.
During the trial, US terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann described the book as a do-it-yourself guide to terrorism aimed at people who did not have Osama bin Laden's telephone number.
Khazaal will be sentenced at a date to be fixed next year. Source: The Australian
 Dylan Welch Police Reporter
October 25, 2008
A PROMINENT youth worker has used the funeral of a young Lebanese man shot dead on Wednesday to appeal for other young men in Sydney to turn from a life of crime and empty machismo.
"All we seem to do is just turn against each other. That's why we're just dropping like flies," Fadi Abdul-Rahman told hundreds of mourners at the funeral of Mustafa Assoum, 26, at Lakemba Mosque.
Mr Assoum, a volunteer youth worker at Abdul-Rahman's youth centre, was shot dead at Warwick Farm early on Wednesday.
Mr Abdul-Rahman spoke to the congregation, which included Mr Assoum's wife, his four-year-old son and four-month-old daughter, about the perils of crime.
"When you stand before Allah it's not your macho that will make a difference. Not your dollars, not your castles, not all your cars … Learn from Mustafa."
Mr Assoum was murdered two months after the funeral for another young Lebanese-Australian man from Lakemba, who died from bullet wounds.
Kalid Dib, 25, from Lidcombe, was killed by a security guard during an abortive armoured van robbery in Parramatta in August.
Outside the mosque Mr Abdul-Rahman called on society to prevent more killings in the Lebanese-Australian community. Source: Sydney Morning Herald
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Copyright Muslims Against Sharia 2008. All rights reserved.
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AUSTRALIA'S most notorious terrorist Willie Brigitte will be free from jail next year, having served less than half his sentence for conspiring to blow up the nation's only nuclear reactor and the power grid. 
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