Security forces prevent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv

It is not often a Muslim suicide bomber chickens out but thankfully this one did.

By Rebecca Anna Stoil, jpost.com
Feb. 20, 2007
Security forces were trying to understand late Tuesday night why a Palestinian who succeeded in entering Israel with a large bomb wandered around the Dan region earlier that day but failed to detonate the deadly device.
In the early afternoon, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) received detailed intelligence that a bomber was planning to strike in the Tel Aviv area. It eventually emerged that he had planned to carry out his attack at the city’s Central Bus Station.
Police and security forces raised their alert level, setting up roadblocks and conducting searches throughout the area.
The activity focused on southern Tel Aviv, and later on Bat Yam immediately to the south. There, police searched apartments until they discovered the would-be bomber together with his driver and a number of other suspects.
Police evacuated the building, concerned that the bomb was hidden on the premises, but discovered that there were no explosives in the second-floor apartment.
During the initial questioning, the terrorist, a resident of Jilaboun, near Jenin, said he left Jenin on Tuesday morning with a heavy bag of explosives. After wandering around the Dan area, he left the bag in a trash receptacle in Rishon Lezion, south of Bat Yam.
The terrorist then led a long convoy of police and security forces to Rishon Lezion, where sappers found the bag, as the would-be bomber described, in a dumpster.
The sappers safely detonated the bomb and police announced that more than two hours of high alert in the Tel Aviv region had ended.
Police said they still did not know why the man, a member of an Islamic Jihad cell based in Jenin, did not detonate the explosives. They speculated he may have decided at the last minute that he could not bring himself to carry out the attack, or that he simply did not find an acceptable target.
The Jenin cell he belongs to is believed to have been behind several prior terrorist attacks.

Wahhabis Spread Terror in Bosnia and Herzegovina

A nice little article about a mini Muslim warlord terrorizing an entire Muslim community. Who would have thought such a thing was possible? Some of the mujahadeen in Bosnia and Herzegovina are older Afghan/Soviet era survivors and now some younger fighters have no doubt joined them or simply returned home. They move fighters around each time the male population dwindles. They receive a gift of a Muslim widow, instant family and property. I have heard differing accounts on if the women get a vote in this process. I have been to a few of the places mentioned and the radical Muslim’s do stand out. Most of the Bosniacks I met were name only Muslims and drinking and drugs were common among their youth. The even listened to American music. The older ones seemed nice enough but their reputation during the war was typical of most Muslims in time of conflict. When questioned about this they always blamed the outsiders brought in to fight the jihad. I suspect like all civil wars that all sides committed atrocities although few terrorize their own side. I guess the war continues one neighbor hood at a time. What is a little fear and blackmail among Muslim buddies? It’s all good, allahuackbar.

Javno,com, hat tip Ummah News Link
19 February, 07
We are forbidden to play music, they make our women cover themselves up, they call us infidels, say the fearful locals.
In the seemingly peaceful village of Barcici near Kalesija, several dozen families live in fear of the Wahhabis who gather in the village slaughterhouse, and whose leader is Jusuf Barcic.
Around thirty followers of Barcic’s teachings bow in the slaughterhouse every day, while other locals go to the mosque, located several kilometres in the direction of Kalesija, for religious service, report Nezavisne novine.
Locals claim that several dozen Wahhabis from Travnik, Bocinja, Mostar, Ilijas, and other towns, gather in Barcici on weekends.
Dead head will fall here
It is easy to recognize them as radical Islamists based on their appearance. Men have long beards and women have even their faces covered.
– The dead head will fall here. No one among us knows whether he or she will live to see the morning. When you are passing by the side of the road, he will hit you unless you get out of his way. He fears no one and says he only recognizes god’s law – say the frightened local inhabitants of Barcici.
They ask that all women cover themselves up
The locals say that, at night, the Wahhabis play cassettes in the slaughterhouse from military operations with recorded speeches of Alija Izetbegovic and Rasim Delic. Out of fear and because of the noise, they cannot sleep and, recently, about forty locals went to the police station to seek help.
The locals point out that Jusuf Barcic has been calling them infidels for years, that he asks all the local women to cover themselves up with scarves, that they are not allowed to play any kind of music in their homes, and that, at night, they hardly ever leave the houses.

More Cyber-Jihad Information

For those of you, like me, who enjoy the war of ideas:

http://www.terror.net: How Modern Terrorism Uses the Internet

Wed, 2007-02-21 02:17
Prof. Gabriel Weimann. 
The Asian Tribune

Summary

* The great virtues of the Internet—ease of access, lack of regulation, vast potential audiences, and fast flow of information, among others—have been turned to the advantage of groups committed to terrorizing societies to achieve their goals.

* Today, all active terrorist groups have established their presence on the Internet. Our scan of the Internet in 2003–4 revealed hundreds of websites serving terrorists and their supporters.

* Terrorism on the Internet is a very dynamic phenomenon: websites suddenly emerge, frequently modify their formats, and then swiftly disappear—or, in many cases, seem to disappear by changing their online address but retaining much the same content.

* Terrorist websites target three different audiences: current and potential supporters; international public opinion; and enemy publics.

* The mass media, policymakers, and even security agencies have tended to focus on the exaggerated threat of cyberterrorism and paid insufficient attention to the more routine uses made of the Internet. Those uses are numerous and, from the terrorists’ perspective, invaluable.

* There are eight different ways in which contemporary terrorists use the Internet, ranging from psychological warfare and propaganda to highly instrumental uses such as fundraising, recruitment, data mining, and coordination of actions.

* While we must better defend our societies against cyberterrorism and Internet-savvy terrorists, we should also consider the costs of applying counterterrorism measures to the Internet. Such measures can hand authoritarian governments and agencies with little public accountability tools with which to violate privacy, curtail the free flow of information, and restrict freedom of expression, thus adding a heavy price in terms of diminished civil liberties to the high toll exacted by terrorism itself.

Picking on the poor Muslims: Article of the Day

Okay, here’s another one of those, “Islamophobia gone wild” and, “can’t we just all get along” articles that tend to gloss over all of the, “kill the unbelievers,” messages contained in the Qur’an. The summation paragraph from the article had me choking on my Kibbles-n-Bits:

“We need to work on intercommunity relations, on spreading the words of harmony and peace, to look at religions as a set of moral values and not just a set of rituals or identities. We need to have the humane spirit prevail over the machinations of the interests of those out to grab the global and local resources for their own selves.”

First of all, most of us have a faith, not a religion. My set of moral values come from the faith I have in God (not to mention the moral codes re-enforced by my parents). Even an atheist has faith in his or her non-beliefs (like, for instance – in the beginning there was nothing. Then, Bang! Everything leapt into existence! – not far removed from the Judea-Christian beliefs, by the way…)

Islam, like most large, organized religions, has a poor record of moral values, so to take the article’s author seriously is just naive thinking. Furthermore, to suggest that we, “need to have the humane spirit prevail” is laughable at best. Had the, “humane spirit” prevailed throughout Hitler’s quest for world domination, we would all be speaking German… It is far better to let the Holy Spirit prevail, rather than the humane spirit, as humans are by no means perfect…

Manufacturing Islamophobia
By Ram Puniyani
21 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org

A friend’s son Murali, a bright engineer, was studying in US. Murali is amongst the commonest of names amongst Hindus. This word Murali stands for flute, the musical instrument of Lord Krishna, which acted as a big lure for Gopikas (daughters of milkman) to fall in love with the Lord. But my friend’s son Murali had a different fate. The US security agencies thought this is a name in disguise for a Muslim called Moor Ali, and the rest was the usual harassment meted out to the Muslim youth, resulting in Murali, returning to his home town, swearing at the US security agencies and all else concerned notwithstanding.

Post 9/11 the demonization of Muslims has gone several notches up. As such the demonization of Islam, Islam being presented as the new threat coincided; on one hand with the decline of Soviet states, and on the other with the coming to power of Ayatollah Khomeini, who succeeded in coming to power on the crest of the revolution which threw away the US stooge, Raza Shah Pehlavi. US was making merry with the Shah, who in turn was installed after the overthrow of democratically elected Mossadeq. Incidentally Mosaddeq to the great annoyance of US interests, nationalized Iran oil, and so was overthrow by a coup engineered by US agencies. The phenomenon overlapped in time to pave the way for US media and other propaganda mechanisms to project ‘Islam as the new threat’, the earlier threat as per the US was Communism. This propaganda picked up by and by and today, God forbid, if you have a Muslim sounding name or face or any other characteristic, the ‘security’ hounds will get for themselves enough work to show their prowess. The average person on the street will think twice before shaking hands with you, the lurking fear being that you may be carrying some bomb hidden on your body somewhere.