 PAKISTAN civilians began pouring out of the North West Frontier Province yesterday, driven out by fierce fighting between Taliban extremists and military forces sent in to stem the insurgents' march on the rest of the country. Frontier corps troops and helicopter gunships engaged several hundred militants in the Lower Dir Province, west of the Swat Valley and abutting the Afghanistan border. The clashes, which began on Sunday after Taliban fighters blocked the path of an army convoy trying to reach the Swat Valley, has brought to the brink of collapse an uneasy peace deal between the two sides. Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan yesterday said the February peace deal - in which the Government agreed to impose sharia law on the NWFP's Malakand region in exchange for the militants' laying down their arms - was now "worthless" as a result of the military action. The militants have suspended peace talks with the Government over Swat, a former tourist region within the NWFP now under their control, until the army halts its operation. They have also threatened to stage attacks across the Malakand - a group of six districts and home to three million people - if peace is not restored. Troops were finally sent into the NWFP late on Thursday after hundreds of Taliban militants poured out of Swat and seized control of towns and villages less than 100km from the capital, Islamabad. Taliban fighters quickly established control of several administrative centres within the Buner district, forcing women off the streets, issuing warnings to barbers and music shops and recruiting locals to their cause. Many eventually retreated on Friday following negotiations with local authorities and government warnings of military action, although reports from the region yesterday suggested the Taliban were still in control of Buner and patrolling the streets. However, militants had more quietly also seized control of Lower Dir in recent weeks, creating a new corridor for extremists fighting US-led coalition forces in neighbouring Afghanistan. One local official said the military moved into the region following reports that the Taliban had begun kidnapping prominent local residents for ransom. On Saturday, 12 local children were killed after playing with a bomb they mistook for a football. The latest offensive was ordered under pressure from the US, which has issued increasingly strident statements in recent days demanding action from Pakistan's leaders to halt the advance of the Taliban into the interior of the nuclear-armed nation. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused the Pakistani Government last week of "abdicating to the Taliban" and at the weekend expressed fears the Taliban could eventually hold the keys to Pakistan's nuclear weapons. More... Source: The Australian
Apr 26 AMMAN, Jordan – Jordan's king urged President Barack Obama Sunday to take a more forceful role in the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, warning of a new Mideast war if there is no significant progress in the next 18 months. Speaking to NBC's "Meet the Press," King Abdullah described the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as the core problem of the region and solving it would help the U.S. in dealing with Iran and combatting the appeal of radical Islamic groups like Al-Qaida. "In the next 18 months, if we don't move the process forward, and bring people to the negotiation table, there will be another conflict between Israel and another protagonist," he said in the interview recorded in Washington on Friday. "If it's left to the players, the Israelis and the Palestinians by themselves, we're not going to get anywhere — it can only happen if there is an American umbrella with a determined American president," he added. Jordan is one of two Arab countries that have signed a peace treaty with Israel and is a strong U.S. ally in the region. The majority of the country's citizens are also of Palestinian origin, making it very interested in the ongoing peace talks. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, relaunched in late 2007, have made little visible progress — in part due to Palestinian infighting. The new Israeli government also has not endorsed the goal of an independent Palestinian state. A Palestinian state alongside Israel is the centerpiece of U.S. peace efforts in the region. The king also addressed the use of torture, acknowledging that he had heard in the press that it was being used by United States, but denying allegations that Jordan was involved. Human Rights Watch, among other groups, has issued reports alleging that the Jordanian intelligence service brutally interrogated detainees on behalf of the CIA. Instead, Abdullah said his intelligence services specialized in turning enemy agents and using them as informants. "I think that we have been very smart in being intelligent (and) convincing operatives that we have come across to end up working for us — and you can't do that when it comes to torture," he said. The king also noted that Obama had substantially improved the image of the United States in the region. "America is providing a new image of how things should be done and I think the world has a belief in the president," he said. Source: AP
The entire Western Civilization, is on the verge of destruction, from the fifth columnists whom are hell bent to take over every single country in the world. Not since WW2@ have we truly faced a world menace of the type and dynamics of islamo-fascism and islamo-stealth jihad to destroy the west from within. Following the blue print discovered of the Islamic Brotherhood of Egypt and sent world wide, the stealth jihad is working steadily to achieve the object to overthrow governments, one country at a time, and institute Islamic sharia on all people, not just islamists, the dark ages is on the door step of our once powerful nations. What would Jesus do? He would say defend your people and your families, and fight the evil legally and democratically to expose all that they are doing, think Global, but act Local. Read more ...Source: Resistance is Not Futile
By Michael Scheuer | April 26 In surprisingly good English, the captive quietly answers: 'Yes, all thanks to God, I do know when the mujaheddin will, with God's permission, detonate a nuclear weapon in the United States, and I also know how many and in which cities." Startled, the CIA interrogators quickly demand more detail. Smiling his trademark shy smile, the captive says nothing. Reporting the interrogation's results to the White House, the CIA director can only shrug when the president asks: "What can we do to make Osama bin Laden talk?" Americans should keep this worst-case scenario in mind as they watch the tragicomic spectacle taking place in the wake of the publication of the Justice Department's interrogation memos. It will help them recognize this episode of political theater as another major step in the bipartisan dismantling of America's defenses based on the requirements of presidential ideology. George W. Bush's democracy-spreading philosophy yielded the invasion of Iraq and set the United States at war with much of the Muslim world. Bush's worldview thereby produced an enemy that quickly outpaced the limited but proven threat-containing capacities of the major U.S. counterterrorism programs -- rendition, interrogation and unmanned aerial vehicle attacks. Now, in a single week, President Obama has eliminated two-thirds of that successful-but-not-sufficient national defense troika because his personal ideology -- a fair gist of which is "If the world likes us more we are more secure" -- cannot tolerate harsh interrogation techniques, torture or coercive interviews, call them what you will. Surprisingly, Obama now stands alongside Bush as a genuine American Jacobin, both of them seeing the world as they want it to be, not as it is. Whereas Bush saw a world of Muslims yearning to betray their God for Western secularism, Obama gazes upon a globe that he regards as largely carnivore-free and believes that remaining threats can be defused by semantic warfare; just stop saying "War on Terror" and give talks in Turkey and on al-Arabiyah television, for example. Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families.
The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards." Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs? Before enthroning Obama's personal morality as U.S. defense policy, of course, some dirty work had to be done. Last Sunday, Obama's hit man and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel led the charge by telling the American people that the interrogation techniques are a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and its Islamist partners. Well, no, Mr. Emanuel, that is not at all the case. The techniques surely are not popular with our foes and their supporters -- should that be a concern in any event? -- but they do not even make the Islamists' hit parade of anti-U.S. recruiting tools. That list is headed by Washington's support for Arab tyrannies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, its presence on the Arabian Peninsula and its unqualified support for Israel. Still, Emanuel's statement surely sounded plausible to Americans who have received no education about our Islamist enemy's true motivation from Obama, George W. Bush, Clinton or George H.W. Bush. Next, the president used his personal popularity and the stature of his office to implicitly identify as liars those former senior U.S. officials who know -- not "argue" or "contend" or "assert" but know -- that the interrogation techniques have yielded intelligence essential to the nation's defense. The integrity, intellect and reputations of Judge Michael Mukasey, Gen. Michael V. Hayden and others have now been besmirched by Obama because their realistic worldview and firsthand experience do not mesh with the president's desire to install his personal "moral compass" as the core of U.S. foreign and defense policy. And after visiting CIA headquarters last week, the president made it clear that he rejected statements surely made by CIA officers who risked their careers to tell him how many successful covert operations against al-Qaeda have flowed from interrogation information. As with all Jacobins, Obama cannot allow a hard and often brutal reality -- call it an inconvenient truth -- to impinge on his view of how the world should and must be made to work. And so as the Justice Department memos farce plays out over the coming weeks, Americans can be confident that both parties will play politics to the hilt while letting the nation's safety take the hindmost. Obama and his team will "reluctantly" agree to a congressional investigation of former Bush officials and serving CIA officers, politically targeted indictments from Holder's minions and perhaps even a truth commission to prove that even the United States can aspire to be a half-baked Third World country. Republicans will welcome the Democrats' actions as a chance to reclaim their mantle as the most reliable protectors of U.S. national security. They will seek to prove that Obama and his party are eager to persecute the men and women who defend America and will denounce Democratic actions as a "witch hunt." Those words were used last week by Sen. John McCain, a man who seems to have forgotten that as a presidential candidate he, more than anyone, persuaded Americans that the interrogation techniques amounted to torture and gloried in calling the CIA and its officers a "rogue institution." Americans and their country's security will be the losers. The Republicans do not have the votes to stop Obama, and the world will not be safer for America because the president abandons interrogations to please his party's left wing and the European pacifists it so admires. Both are incorrigibly anti-American, oppose the use of force in America's defense and -- like Obama -- naively believe that the West's Islamist foes can be sweet-talked into a future alive with the sound of kumbaya. So if the above worst-case scenario ever comes to pass, Americans will have at least two things from which to take solace, even after the loss of major cities and tens of thousands of countrymen. First, they will know that their president believes that those losses are a small price to pay for stopping interrogations and making foreign peoples like us more. And second, they will see Osama bin Laden's shy smile turn into a calm and beautiful God-is-Great grin. Michael Scheuer, the chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, is the author of "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq." Source: Washington Post
April 25, Barack Obama's obvious comfort level with leaders of unfree countries shouldn't surprise anyone. He is not only our first black president. He is also our first president who doesn't like the free country he was elected to lead and feels his job is to change it. Obama's cordial encounter with Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez and his bow of deference in London to the Saudi Arabian king are extensions of behavior we have always seen on the black left. Jesse Jackson openly embraced Chavez, as well as having maintained relations with the likes of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and Yasser Arafat. This should be kept in mind as our president now makes his own effort to bring peace to the Middle East. It should be clear to anyone conscious and watching that central to Obama's Middle East strategy is to disabuse the long-held notion that there exists a "special relationship" between the United States and Israel. The sense of unique kinship between our country and the Jewish state has existed since Israel's founding just 60 years ago. The Arab world has always resented the U.S.-Israel connection and has felt that because of this, Americans would never be an honest broker in Arab-Israeli negotiations. Mr. Obama is out to change this. His first hundred days, from his very first television interview – given to an Arab television network – have focused on warming up our relations with Islamic nations and cooling down our Israeli ones. We should appreciate that this shift is more than a technical change in diplomatic strategy. It reflects a change in values. The "special" American-Israeli relationship has always reflected the shared values and traditions of the two countries: a commitment to freedom sustained by traditional Judeo-Christian core values. Freedom House is a widely respected non-partisan organization that publishes annual reports on the state of freedom around the world. They rate the state of freedom on a scale of 1 to 7, "1" being most free. According to the latest Freedom House data, released this past January, in the area of "political rights," Israel rates 1. On "civil liberties," Israel gets a 2. And Israel's Arab neighbors? On "political rights," Egypt scores 6, Jordan 5, Syria 7 and Lebanon 5. On "civil liberties," Egypt ranks 5, Jordan 5, Syria 6 and Lebanon 4. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, to whose king the president of the United States bowed deeply at the waist, ranks 7 in "political rights" and 6 in "civil liberties." Freedom House also reports on freedom of the press. Of 18 countries in the Middle Easter/North African area, they report only one country with a free press. Israel. Eleven of these countries have no free press, including Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Egypt and Lebanon are rated partly free. Despite being the youngest country in the region, Israel's per capita gross domestic product is five times higher than the average of all its neighbors. Also, despite having no great endowment of natural resources, its GDP per capita, at $24,097, is higher than Saudi Arabia's $22, 296, which has, by far, the world's largest oil production and reserves. The great American writer Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867 before Jews made their miraculous return to their ancient homeland. He reported that there was nothing there. "Palestine is desolate and unlovely." You have to be either blind or have a political agenda to refuse to see the incredible miracle that has occurred in the re-birth of the Jewish nation. Of course there is a special relationship between the United States and Israel. The same values and traditions have produced in both places freedom and prosperity from nothing. Should we denigrate Arabs and Muslims? Certainly not. But anyone who thinks that peace and prosperity will come from abandoning those very values that got us to where we are, and along with this our friends who share those values, is deeply misguided. Unfortunately, today we have an American president who is set on doing just that. Principled Americans and Israelis should tighten their seatbelts and prepare to defend the truths we hold dear.
Islam is the most democratic religion, says Albright. Yet in 1400 years of Islamic history, there has only been one democracy: Turkey. Albright says that Turkey is a "perfect example" of how Islam is democratic. But let's look at the record. In the aftermath of World War I, Mustafa Kemal, who called himself Ataturk, or Father of the Turks, established the first secular government in a Muslim society, leading the Sheikh who famously visited Osama bin Laden on video in 2001 to refer to “infidels like the Turks.” Ataturk declared that “the civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up. It is time to stop nonsense, such as ‘should we or should we not wear hats?’ We shall adopt hats along with all other works of Western civilization. Uncivilized people are doomed to be trodden under the feet of civilized people.” Hats were more than just a symbol: because of their brims, they interfered with the prostrations that were and are an essential element of Islamic prayer. By outlawing turbans and mandating hats, Ataturk was striking at the very heart of Turkish Islamic society. Within a relatively brief period the great Islamic empire that had been the seat of the caliphate and the lodestar of the Muslim world became a Western-style modern state. The unity of the polity was based on racial, not religious grounds (resulting in the murder and exile of millions of Armenians and a not inconsiderable number of Greeks, who fared marginally better even as dhimmis, at least until they were deemed to have violated the terms of the dhimma, than they did under the nationalistic and secular Turkish government). Ataturk accomplished this transformation by abolishing the caliphate, restricting political Islam and other expressions of Islam, including Islamic marriages, and letting mosques and Islamic shrines fall into disrepair. He worked hard to diminish the place of Islam in Turkish society. Isn’t this the dream of moderate, Western-influenced and Western-friendly Muslims and their non-Muslim patrons? Ataturk labored to erect a truly Jeffersonian wall of separation between mosque and state. If the notion of a modernized, secularized Islam really has any viability, it should show in Turkey, its principal research and development project. But there was resistance to Ataturk’s program in Turkey virtually from the beginning. Scholar Paul Dumont notes that “the expeditious secularization imposed on the country by Mustafa Kemal and his entourage created a shock wave through the country which has not yet died out.” Opposition to Kemalism, as secular rule in Turkey came to be known, was fundamentally religious. Rank-and-file Turks, according to Ataturk’s biographer Andrew Mango, believed that “misery was the fruit of impiety, prosperity the reward of obedience to the law of Islam.” Religious uprisings have been a feature of the Turkish secular state virtually since its inception, and those desiring to restore Islam to centrality in public life have made steady gains. By the 1950s, says Farah, the secular authorities “found it prudent henceforth to play up to Islamic loyalties and allow the ulama and other religious leaders a freer hand.” That hand has been growing even freer ever since.
Even Albright, while she was Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, expressed her displeasure with the “drift of Turkey away from secularism.” "Albright Praises Obama's Efforts to Engage Muslim World," by Mohamed Elshinnawi for VOA News, April 24 Source: JihadWatch
By John Bingham Complete with photographs of men in white robes with scarves covering their faces performing a variety of squats and sit-ups, it advises supporters to keep in shape so that they can "strike hard" against their enemies. There is also a warning against visiting "un-Islamic" western gyms including LA Fitness with their "music, semi-naked women, free mixing and the danger of showing off". And there is advice against using weights because of their unavailability on the front line in places such as Afghanistan. The advice is contained in Jihad Recollections, an English language online magazine believed to be published in the United States which openly supports al-Qaeda and contains an article purporting to be written by Osama bin Laden. Read more ...Source: TelegraphH/T: Jihad Watch
April 24 Fighting Terror: It's a very real threat when people who are our sworn enemies suddenly begin capturing territory at the expense of our allies. And today, that's exactly what's happening in Pakistan. Taliban Militants Stay In Control Near Pakistan Capital." That headline should send a chill through you. Because it means the forces of medieval darkness and terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan are gaining ground — and are perhaps just one leap away from capturing Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, and its nuclear arsenal. Pakistan's government made the big mistake a week and a half ago of agreeing to let Taliban-linked groups in the North-West Frontier Province enforce Sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley. Since then, the Taliban and its radical affiliates have begun infiltrating members into surrounding areas, especially the Buner Valley — just 60 miles from Islamabad. They smell weakness on the part of the Pakistani regime, and are going to push until they're stopped. At this rate, if unchecked, they'll control Pakistan by year-end — not to mention the Pakistani government's 24 to 55 nuclear weapons. We're glad to see this isn't going unnoticed. "Pakistan poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last Wednesday, in blunt remarks that took some by surprise. This, surely, is the "test" that Vice President Joseph Biden warned that President Obama would face early in his presidency. Now, the question is, recognizing the problem, what do we do? The answer's unclear. True, Obama has sent 17,000 added troops to Afghanistan. And pressuring the Pakistani government to "do more" will at least put the heat on it to take the Taliban seriously. But what concerns us is this administration's failure to recognize, as the previous administration did, that this isn't only about Pakistan; it's about Islamic extremism, a worldwide movement whose ultimate goal is to weaken, subvert, defeat and replace a demoralized West. Pakistan would be quite a prize for the extremists. As we said, that nation has nuclear weapons It lies adjacent to India, Pakistan's most bitter enemy, one of our best allies and the world's largest democracy. We agree with Clinton that this is a mortal threat. We wonder, though, how we can defeat our enemies if we can't even bring ourselves to call them terrorists. How we can win the global war on terror when we downgrade it rhetorically to merely an "overseas contingency operation"? And how can we defeat them if we're on the verge of revealing dozens of photographs that purport to show U.S. military personnel mistreating captives in Afghanistan? Surely, that will inflame Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, making the job of our military now engaged in a life-or-death struggle for Afghanistan with the Taliban all the more difficult. It will end up costing American lives. And for what? To score a few cheap political points against former President Bush's policy of pursuing terrorists to the hilt? The problem is, the only reason Pakistan's government made a deal with the Taliban in the first place is, frankly, it doubts the bona fides of the Obama administration when it comes to fighting terrorism. Better to cut a deal with the renegades and hope for mercy later than to have the U.S. sit and do nothing to aid a vital ally, as we did when the shah of Iran fell in 1979. Worse, if we and Pakistan's feckless government allow a Taliban takeover, how seriously will Iran take our protestations as it marches toward its own nuclear answer to the West? Last week, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on the world to defeat Islamic extremists, calling them as big a threat as communism was in the 20th century. "Our job is simple," Blair said. "It is to support and partner those Muslims who believe deeply in Islam, but also who believe in peaceful co-existence, in taking on and defeating extremists who don't." We agree. But it will take more than pressuring the locals and their governments to do the job. We have a major problem in Pakistan, and no, contrary to the assertions of the Obama White House, it's not just al-Qaida. It's only one part of a multifaceted, international problem, as Blair rightly pointed out. And while we show an interest in diplomacy, these foes see diplomacy as the last resort of weaklings. At the very least, we must insist that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani reassert control over the country. We also must recognize that the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which U.S. forces treat as something real and inviolable, is little more than fiction. The war on terror has no borders. Source: Investor's Business Daily
By Daniel Pipes | 24 Apr Does terrorism work, meaning, does it achieve its perpetrators' objectives? With terror attacks having become a routine and nearly daily occurrence, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the conventional wisdom holds that terrorism works very well. For example, the late Ehud Sprinzak of the Hebrew University ascribed the prevalence of suicide terrorism to its "gruesome effectiveness." Robert Pape of the University of Chicago argues that suicide terrorism is growing "because terrorists have learned that it pays." Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz titled one of his books, Why Terrorism Works. But Max Abrahms, a fellow at Stanford University, disputes this conclusion, noting that they focus narrowly on the well-known but rare terrorist victories – while ignoring the much broader, if more obscure, pattern of terrorism's failures. To remedy this deficiency, Abrahms took a close look at each of the 28 terrorist groups so designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001 and tallied how many of them achieved its objectives. His study, "Why Terrorism Does Not Work," finds that those 28 groups had 42 different political goals and that they achieved only 3 of those goals, for a measly 7 percent success rate. Those three victories would be: (1) Hezbollah's success at expelling the multinational peacekeepers from Lebanon in 1984, (2) Hezbollah's success at driving Israeli forces out of Lebanon in 1985 and 2000, and (3) the Tamil Tiger's partial success at winning control over areas of Sri Lanka after 1990. That's it. The other 26 groups, from the Abu Nidal Organization and Al-Qaeda and Hamas to Aum Shinriko and Kach and the Shining Path, occasionally achieved limited success but mostly failed completely. Abrahms draws three policy implications from the data. -
Guerrilla groups that mainly attack military targets succeed more often than terrorist groups that mainly attack civilian targets. (Terrorists got lucky in the Madrid attack of 2004.) -
Terrorists find it "extremely difficult to transform or annihilate a country's political system"; those with limited objectives (such as acquiring territory) do better than those with maximalist objectives (such as seeking regime change). -
Not only is terrorism "an ineffective instrument of coercion, but … its poor success rate is inherent to the tactic of terrorism itself." This lack of success should "ultimately dissuade potential jihadists" from blowing up civilians.
This final implication, of frequent failure leading to demoralization, suggests an eventual reduction of terrorism in favor of less violent tactics. Indeed, signs of change are already apparent. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif At the elite level, for example the former jihad theorist, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (a.k.a. Dr. Fadl), now denounces violence: "We are prohibited from committing aggression," he writes, "even if the enemies of Islam do that." On the popular level, the Pew Research Center's 2005 Global Attitudes Project found that "support for suicide bombings and other terrorist acts has fallen in most Muslim-majority nations surveyed" and "so too has confidence in Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden." Likewise, a 2007 Program on International Policy Attitudes study found that "Large majorities in all countries oppose attacks against civilians for political purposes and see them as contrary to Islam. … Most respondents … believe that politically-motivated attacks on civilians, such as bombings or assassinations, cannot be justified." On the practical level, terrorist groups are evolving. Several of them – specifically in Algeria, Egypt, and Syria – have dropped violence and now work within the political system. Others have taken on non-violent functions – Hezbollah delivers medical services and Hamas won an election. If Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden represent Islamism's first iteration, Hezbollah and Hamas represent a transitional stage, and Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, arguably the world's most influential Islamist, shows the benefits of going legitimate. But if going the political route works so well, why does Islamist violence continue and even expand? Because they are not always practical. Rita Katz of the SITE Intelligence Group explains: "Engaged in a divine struggle, jihadists measure success not by tangible victories in this life but by God's eternal benediction and by rewards received in the hereafter." In the long term, however, Islamists will likely recognize the limits of violence and increasingly pursue their repugnant goals through legitimate ways. Radical Islam's best chance to defeat us lies not in bombings and beheadings but in classrooms, law courts, computer games, television studios, and electoral campaigns. We are on notice. Source: Islam Watch
 By Roberta Bonazzi | April 24 Last March, the organisation Human Rights Activists in Iran issued an annual report on human rights violations in Iran. A total of 278 people had been condemned to death, 30 of whom were aged under 18. And 297 people had been executed, including 8 aged under 18. According to the report, the pressure on blog writers has progressively grown during the course of the year. Thousands of websites and blogs have been filtered, banned or closed down. Some 29 periodicals have also been banned and over 70 journalists had been brought before justice. Of these, according to the report, 21 have been fined, while 17 have received prison sentences. Students were not immune from the repression: 66 students had to pay large fines, while 215 students were imprisoned. Over 60 student newspapers were also banned and a total of 234 students were suspended for a number of university terms. Bahai students faced even harsher punishments: they were expelled from universities. The Human Rights Report also highlighted how also the situation of Iranian workers had deteriorated during the course of the year, with about 11,000 workers laid off and legal proceedings instituted against at least 26 workers. Tens of thousands of women have been detained for “failing to comply with Islamic dress codes”. Security forces issued summons against 25 female activists, interrogating them and putting them under pressure. Another 40 female activists had been condemned to long prison sentences and were now languishing behind bars. And several women had been in prison for some time without any court ruling. www.europeandemocracy.org Source: Hudson New York
 By Larry Neumeister NEW YORK (AP) -- A Pakistani immigrant described by prosecutors as "Hezbollah's man in New York City" was sentenced Thursday to nearly six years in prison for airing the militant group's television station. U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman handed down a sentence of five years and nine months to Javed Iqbal, who had pleaded guilty in December to providing aid to a terrorist organization. Iqbal, 45, admitted as part of a plea agreement that he used satellite dishes on his Staten Island home to distribute broadcasts of Al Manar, the TV station of the Lebanon-based Hezbollah, which has been fighting Israel since the early 1980s and has been branded by the U.S. government as a terrorist group. Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder said Iqbal recruited Al Manar, even traveling to "the belly of the beast, South Beirut," to meet with its general manager. "He was, in a very real sense, Hezbollah's man in New York City," Snyder said. Snyder said Iqbal bought special satellite equipment to allow Al Manar to provide 24-hour programming from November 2005 through May 2006 so Hezbollah could use it to recruit followers and suicide bombers. Prosecutors said Iqbal's business was paid $28,000 monthly for at least five months for airing the station to its North American customers. Read more ...Source: AP H/T: Jihad WatchJaved Iqbal
Latest recipients of the Distinguished Islamofascist Award
A potentially significant terrorist case in California is being exploited by radical Islamist groups to mount a campaign against FBI efforts to collect intelligence on suspected terrorists. The case involves Ahmadullah Niazi, who has been indicted on immigration charges. His brother-in-law has served as Osama bin Laden's security coordinator. During a February bond hearing, an FBI agent testified that Niazi referred to bin Laden as "an angel" and provided an informant with taped sermons from an imam considered to have been a spiritual advisor for two September 11th hijackers. Rather than praising law enforcement for rooting out a would-be terrorist from their community, Islamist groups are casting FBI efforts - the use of an informant inside mosques - as an assault on the civil liberties of all Muslim Americans. Read more ...Source: IPT News
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