Could be an attempt to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (Qur’an 8:60).
“Quebec – Police Investigate Pro-Islamic State Propaganda,” a translation of “Des autocollants montrant l’État islamique à Repentigny : la police enquête,” by Hadi Hassin, Le Huffington Post Québec, September 5, 2015, via Blazing Cat Fur:
The Repentigny police are investigating a case of public mischief after hate stickers were placed on cars of Valmont street and in the parking lot of a shopping center.
According to Bruno Marier, spokesman for the Repentigny police, nearly a hundred of stickers have been introduced on cars in the last twenty-four hours including the Valmont Street near a Tim Hortons and a Jean Coutu store. Cars parked near the Galeries Rive Nord were also targeted by vandals.
The stickers show what appears to be a picture of a gunman waving the flag of the Islamic State terrorist group.
“Quebec is a land of Allah. Convert or else … ” it reads.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Quebec-convert-or-else-e1441623779888.jpg370640Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2015-09-07 07:04:412015-09-07 07:05:01“Quebec is a land of Allah. Convert or else.”
“Here you have a building for Muslims, and normally that would be discriminatory because other religions could not be accommodated there. But the Human Rights Code says if it’s a special-interests organization — religious, philanthropic, educational or social — they can discriminate in that way.”
Oh. Where is the taxpayer-funded housing for Christians only? For Jews only?
Ezra Levant weighs in on this travesty here. “Disabled man told subsidized housing is for Muslims only,” by Marco Chown Oved, Toronto Star, August 26, 2015 (thanks to Eli):
A young wheelchair user has been taken off the waiting list for a publicly subsidized apartment because he is not a member of the Muslim community that established the building — a practice that, while legal, raises concerns that accommodations for cultural and religious groups could be limiting access to affordable housing.
According to a letter that arrived at his mother’s house last week, Austin Lewis, 21, was removed from the waiting list at the Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace building on Finch Ave. W in North York because he is not a member of their faith.
“It was mostly confusing, more than anything else,” he said. “Why would a government segregate its own building?”
The 16-storey building, which provides a range of services to its residents including a prayer room that accommodates 250, was actually approved in the 1990s as part of a provincial program to encourage non-profits and religious groups to build affordable housing, according to its property manager.
Lewis, who has used a wheelchair since a disease attacked his spinal cord when he was 8, says he applied to more than 100 accessible buildings in Toronto, Brampton and Peel Region, and there was no notice that any of them were restricted to a certain community.
“We had no idea. The letter came as a complete shock,” he said.
The city provides a $1.7-million subsidy for 94 rent-geared-to-income units under a five-year agreement, which began Jan. 1, that restricts tenants to “members of the Muslim Jama’at.”
“The City’s mandate policy allows social housing providers to restrict their housing to individuals belonging to an identifiable ethnic or religious group if specific conditions are met,” says a statement provided by city spokesperson John Gosgnach.
There are eight such buildings in Toronto, catering to Muslims, Macedonians, Germans and seniors who are Christian, Chinese, Greek, Hungarian or Lithuanian.
Karin Tahir, Ahmadiyya Abode of Peace’s property manager, said the building does not discriminate on race, colour or ethnicity. “Ahmadiyya is in 200 countries,” he said.
“We’re not bumping anyone off the list,” Tahir added. “The real issue is the 90,000-person waiting list for an affordable unit. Where is the new stock?”
It’s already hard enough to find affordable housing in the GTA, Lewis says, but when you’re in a wheelchair, your options are limited even further.
“It does seem incredibly odd. There is housing for people 50 and over, but there is no housing specifically for people in chairs,” he said.
His mother, Laura Whiteway, is incensed that her son could be turned away from a wheelchair-accessible building.
“They’re being given a licence to discriminate. It’s just wrong,” she said.
Lawyer Barry Swadron, who has extensive experience in disability law, says the Ontario Human Rights Code allows for this kind of discrimination.
“Here you have a building for Muslims, and normally that would be discriminatory because other religions could not be accommodated there.
“But the Human Rights Code says if it’s a special-interests organization — religious, philanthropic, educational or social — they can discriminate in that way,” he said. “It’s very unfortunate, but that’s how the law was written.”
While the intention was to create safe spaces for minority communities, this kind of permissible “positive discrimination” inevitably produces collateral damage, Swadron said….
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Austin-Lewis-e1440752535694.jpg370640Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2015-08-28 05:03:252015-08-28 05:04:16Toronto: Disabled man told that taxpayer-subsidized housing is for Muslims only
Ezra Levant is not your typical Canadian. He is outspoken and driven to seek out the truth about dangers to free speech and homeland security in our neighbor to the north. Fortunately for Canadians his truth telling appears nightly on his program, The Source on the Sun News Network. His opinion pieces frequently appear as columns in Sun Media publications. Starting in law school in the Province of Alberta in the 1990’s Levant was involved in the Reform Party and the “unite on the right” that morphed into the Canadian Alliance with the Progressive Conservatives. The Party is now led by incumbent PM Stephen Harper. Levant had filed to run in a West Calgary riding as a Conservative candidate in 2002. He withdrew at the behest of party leaders in favor of Stephen Harper who ultimately became Canada’s Prime Minister in 2006. Levant maintains cordial relations with the Harper family and was a volunteer in the Harper 2008 election.
In February 2006, he had the courage to publish the Mohammed cartoons from the Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, in The Western Standard. That action, while lauded by many Canadians, became the subject of complaints brought before the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission (AHRCC) by Syed Soharwardy of theIslamic Supreme Council of Canada (ISCC) and the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities (ECMC). Levant shrewdly requested permission to videotape an interview by an investigator from the AHRCC that he uploaded on YouTube. That may have brought pressure on Soharwardy to withdraw his complaints before both the Commission and the Calgary police. Ultimately, the ECMC compliant, identical to the one filed by Soharwardy and the ISCC, was dismissed by the AHRCC. Levant’s dramatic and successful defense of free speech coincided with complaints brought before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Ontario Human Rights Commission by the Canadian Islamic Congress against McLeans Magazine and columnist Mark Steyn over an excerpt published from Steyn’s book America Alone. Levant roundly criticized these various human rights bodies in his 2009 book, Shakedown: How our government is undermining democracy in the name of human rights. In 2011, Shakedown wonthe Writers’ Trust of Canada and Samara Best Political Book of the last 25 Years competition. His 2010 book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands advanced the view that development of the low sulfur Athabascan bitumen deposits would reduce Canada’s dependence on imported oil from countries with notorious human rights records. This development would contribute to competition in the world’s energy markets and would be environmentally sound. It was given the National Business Book Award in Canada in 2011. Following the re-election of President Obama in the US in November 2012, Levant proposed an Eight Point plan to “Innoculate Canada’s Economy” from economic problems in the US through paying off of its external debt, directing energy resources by trading with Asia and adopting positive immigration and economic development policies to foster economic growth.
Levant vigorously opposed the return of Canadian Al Qaeda terrorist, Omar Khadr from U.S. detention at Guantanamo Bay in October 2012. Khadr had killed U.S. Amy Special Forces medic Sgt. Christopher Speer in Afghanistan in 2002. Levant criticized PM Harper’s cabinet for consenting to the deal with the Obama Administration – a deal that reduced a 40 year conviction at a 2010 Military Trial in Guantanamo to eight years with seven years of the commuted sentence to be served in a Federal Canadian prison with eligibility for parole in 2013. In his 2011 book, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr, Levant relied heavily on the expert evidence of renowned American forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Welner, presented at the Guantanamo Tribunal. See our June 2012 Iconoclast article on the Sun News The Sourcepresentation of “Welcome Back Khadr?” with Dr. Welner.
Watch this Sun News presentation by Ezra Levant on the return of Omar Khadr to Canada on October 1, 2012:
Jerry Gordon: Ezra Levant, thank you for consenting to this interview.
Ezra Levant: Thank you for inviting me.
Gordon: What was your background in fostering the merger of the Reform Party with the Progressive Conservative Party an antecedent to the Canadian Alliance?
Levant: I don’t want to overstate my role in that merger, which was the result of many people working over several years. But it is true that while I was in law school, along with a couple of other conservatives, I helped organize a convention to “unite the right” in Canada — to lay the groundwork for the merger of the two parties. It was attended by dozens of key conservatives, including Stephen Harper, currently the Prime Minister.
Gordon: You stepped aside in the 2002 contest for the Calgary Southwest riding under pressure from the Canadian Alliance leaders to facilitate the election of Stephen Harper, Canada’s current PM. What relationship did you subsequently have with PM Harper?
Levant: I have kept in touch with Stephen Harper and Mrs. Harper, and with his staff. I occasionally visit them, and in the 2008 election I was a full-time volunteer in the Conservative Party’s election headquarters.
Gordon: In the late 1990’s you were an advocate for granting Quebec separatism. Given the renaissance of the Bloc Quebecois do you still hold the same opinion and why?
Levant: I wrote one column in 1995, slightly tongue in cheek, pointing out how the rest of Canada would benefit from Quebec secession. The Bloc Quebecois is nearly defunct federally. The provincial win by the Parti Quebecois was with the slimmest margin, and it is a minority government. No-one believes they have a mandate for secession.
Gordon: What prompted your founding of TheWestern Standard in 2004?
Levant: The demise of the Alberta Report left a void for a conservative magazine, and I sought to fill it. Given the rise of the Internet, the idea was likely obsolete before it was even started.
Gordon: In 2006, The Western Standard published the Jyllands Posten Danish newspaper cartoons of Mohammed. What was the reaction in Canada that became the subject of your award winning bookShakedown?
Levant: Most of our subscribers loved it – we were the only magazine (or newspaper or TV show) in the country to treat our readers as adults – that is, to show them what the fuss was about for them to make up their own minds about it. The general public reaction was similar – people were sick of political correctness. Most journalists were supportive of us, as they had been restricted from doing the same thing. A small minority of journalists opposed what we did, either out of political correctness or out of a sort of jealousy or embarrassment.
Gordon: How did your actions during the Alberta Human Rights Commission hearings expose the threat to Free Speech by Islamist groups in Canada?
Levant: By videotaping my interrogation and putting the videos on YouTube, and by blogging about the investigation, I was able to shine a light of public scrutiny on a shadowy kangaroo court that was not well known or understood by the public. I sought to denormalize the human rights commissions, and put it on trial in the court of public opinion.
Gordon: Were Islamist groups also behind the complaints brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress before the Canadian Human Rights Commission, British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and Ontario Human Rights Commission against former Macleans columnist Mark Steyn?
Levant: The complaints against Mark Steyn were brought by the Canadian Islamic Congress, led at the time by Mohamed Elmasry. Different Islamic groups complained about me.
Gordon: Did the cost of your defense during the Alberta Human Rights Commission (AHRC) hearings result in a decision to sell the remaining assets of The Western Standard?
Levant: No. The prosecution did not help The Western Standard financially, but it had been in financial duress even before the AHRC investigation.
Gordon: When did you begin your new career as a daily commentator for the Sun News and how much editorial freedom do you have?
Levant: I have written for the Sun newspapers on and off since 1995. I started up again in the summer of 2010 and have had a daily TV show on Sun News Network since April of 2011. I believe I have tremendous freedom, and in fact I call myself the freest journalist in Canada.
Gordon: In 2008, you testified before the US Congressional Human Rights Coalition about radical Islamist groups’ Lawfare effectively stifling free speech. Do you view UN Human Rights Council Res.16/18 on Combating Religious Intolerance as an attempt to insinuate Shariah blasphemy codes suborning protected speech here and in Canada?
Levant: I believe that the United Nations is a threat to free speech in the U.S. and Canada, because it is dominated by countries that do not respect freedom of speech as much as we do. However, there are other domestic organizations in the U.S. that are also actively undermining free speech. Campus speech codes are one example.
Gordon: Four states in the US (Arizona, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kansas) have adopted anti-Sharia statutes. Would the Harper Government in Ottawa consider adopting something similar at the federal level?
Levant: I can’t speak for them of course. I doubt that a stand-alone bill would be proposed like that, unless there was a specific problem of Sharia law taking root. Right now in Canada, there is a growing problem with so-called “honor killings”, which is receiving increasing media attention. It is more likely that a pressing problem like that would receive some sort of policy attention.
Gordon: Muslim immigration in Canada has witnessed significant growth under both Liberal and Conservative governments. There is concern in Canada about radical Muslim growth. Do you support a moratorium on immigration from “extremist producing countries”?
Levant: I think we ought to screen immigrants for Canadian values, including non-violence, equality of men and women, pluralism, etc. There are obviously some truly liberal Muslims who wish to flee authoritarian regimes and to adopt a Canadian lifestyle.
Gordon: In your book, The Enemy within: Terror Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr, you made a compelling case as to why the Canadian –born al Qaeda Terrorist should not have been returned to Canada. What was your position based on and why in your opinion did the Harper Government consent to his return to Canada in October 2012?
Levant: Omar Khadr is lawfully detained until the war on terror is over. He is analogous to a German soldier captured in 1940: he can be detained until hostilities cease. In addition to that indefinite detention, he was tried and convicted for war crimes including murder, for which a jury gave him 40 years in prison.
The U.S. government pressed Canada to accept a transfer of Khadr after just one year (with paperwork it turned out to be two years). This was clearly against the will of the Conservative government (and of the previous Liberal government) but it was something insisted upon by the Obama Administration.
Gordon: What dangers could there be in Canada if Khadr is released under existing parole laws?
Levant: Khadr is an unrepentant terrorist, he is more fundamentalist than ever, and all of his peers — his family in Canada, and his friends and connections from Guantanamo Bay — support terrorism. This makes it quite likely that he will be dangerous. That is also the unrebutted testimony of Dr. Michael Welner, the forensic psychiatrist who testified at Khadr’s sentencing hearing.
I do not know if Khadr will engage in violence again. I think it is likely that he will be an Al Qaida poster boy — fundraising, recruiting, and generally engaging in public relations for Al Qaida, which is more valuable to them.
Gordon: In the wake of the Obama re-election you have advocated that Canada take advantage of its natural energy resources, international trade and immigration policies. Why do you hold these views?
Levant: In short, Canada can no longer count on hitching an economic ride with the U.S. If the American economy continues to stagnate, and if President Obama continues to block an important oil pipeline from Canada, than we must take steps in our own economic self-interest. These include increased trade with Asia, including selling our oil there.
Gordon: Why has the Harper Government been the best friend of Israel in the West?
Levant: Stephen Harper and his cabinet take a principled view of foreign affairs that supports democracies and liberty and countries that share our western values. That makes supporting Israel a natural fit.
Gordon:What should Canadians do to preserve Free Speech?
Levant: Canadians need to adopt an attitude of non-compliance with regards to censorship. At every opportunity, they ought to take steps to incrementally expand the scope of free speech – and to stare down those who would censor them, and who have come to expect obedience and compliance.
Most normal people will not encounter censorship in their lives. But some will – students on campus facing a speech code; some government bureaucracy’s internal “equity committee” telling you what words you can say and what you can’t, etc.
I found, in my fight with the Alberta Human Rights Commission, that censors are typically bullies who are good at attacking, but not good at defending – especially if their censorship is dragged into the spotlight of public scrutiny.Gordon: Ezra Levant thank you for this timely interview.
Levant: Thank you for this opportunity.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/canada-religious-liberty.jpg406610Jerry Gordonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Gordon2015-08-02 09:46:482015-08-02 09:46:48Canada: How Multiculturalism Thwarts Religious Freedom [Video]
We were prompted to post an earlier version of this on my Facebook page in response to a Jewish Press op-ed by Varda Meyers Epstein, “How Could we Have Known: Jews who voted for Obama.” A native of Pittsburgh who made aliyah to Israel; she ably cataloged a number of warning signals about President Obama who has proven to be a cunning transformationalist. Here are Ms. Epstein’s opening and closing tropes.
Beginning in 2007, those of us who saw the writing on the wall began campaigning against Obama. We knew he was bad for Israel from the things he said in interviews and from the people he hung out with, past and present. We posted articles that slammed him on social media and we lost friends for our insistent and incessant need to make our case: the one that would save Israel and Israeli Jews.
[…]
You want to tell me you really didn’t know about Obama’s hatred for the Jews and for Israel? Sorry, but I’m having trouble buying that story. But at the very least, you need to come out from under that rock and get a little, um, daylight. You’ve been looking a little pale since Tuesday.
We added to Ms. Epstein’s dossier with those of our own thereby expanding on her theme. After posting it on my Facebook page we received a welter of “likes” and positive comments from Australia, Canada, Israel and the U.S. My chaver, ZoA stalwart in Philadelphia, Steve Feldman, who runs the Israel Activism Facebook page, thought it was “stupendous”. A bit of hyperbole that, but thanks for the compliment, Steve. However, I was brought up short by another chaver in Calgary, Bill Narvey, who, while he agreed with what I said, could we please “paragraph “it. So here is a suitable presentation for Narvey and others. The title for this piece was borrowed from a headline on Feldman’s Facebook post of what we originally wrote:
[H]ow could normally sensible Jewish Democrats have believed all that hokum about “Hope and Change” back in 2007 from an untried US Senator from Illinois who never completed a full term in office after leveraging a speech at the 2004 Democratic convention and two ghost written New York Times biographies allegedly by Bill Ayres . Who as a State Senator from Chicago voted present 100 times in the Illinois state legislature?
Or allied himself to the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian crowd at annual dinners of the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee with Michelle and him seated at a table back in 1998 with one of his alleged mentors, the late Columbia Professor Edward Said. Or when he told his Chicago Pal Ali Abunimah of The Electronic Intifada blog, during his run for US Senate backed by the gullible Chicago Jewish billionaires from the Pritzker and Crown Families of the Standard Club, that he wouldn’t forget both Abunimah and the Palestinian cause when he got to Washington.
Tell them how Obama lied about he had Israel’s back or that there was no diplomatic daylight between the US under his helm with Israel the only democratic ally in the Middle East. Tell them how he undertook secret negotiations with Iran back in the fall of his 2012 re-election using his Chicago mentor Valarie Jarrett to discuss a possible Iran nuke deal with Ali Akbar Salehi in Dubai, her childhood friend from living in Iran with her Chicago doctor father and mother after her birth in Shiraz.
Or ask them to explain how the July 14th announcement of a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to cut off Iran from a bomb was followed by a UN Security Council unanimous endorsement a week later. That was less than a day after the Iran nuke pact was submitted to Congress for a review and vote by Rosh Ha Shanah in 2015.
Ask them why Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains in place and the EU-3 will commit to hardening it preventing Israel from sabotaging it. Ask them if they ever thought a sitting President would use his executive powers to transform this country into just another member of the multilateral Euro-trash socialist club. Ask them why he cozyied up to the Muslim Brotherhood both in the Middle East and here in the US, only to dump them for apocalyptic End times Shiite Iran giving them a free pass to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and boost the Islamic State ranging on Israel’s borders.
Yes, tell your talented chaverim v mispochim who funded and voted for Obama, not once, but twice, that he is laughing at them behind their backs now that he honored his commitment to his Chicago radical and Palestinian fellow travelers. Tell them to watch out for the Palestinian State UN Resolution that may be introduced for a vote soon now that his Iran nuke pact legacy has been endorsed by the Security Council even before the General Assembly UN meetings in September in Manhattan. Tell them to watch him manipulate gullible Jewish Democratic Members of Congress securing a yes vote for the Iran nuke deal enabling him to veto any negative majority GOP and minority Democrat vote by Rosh Ha Shanah.
Tell them all that and ask them finally, why they voted for this destroyer of their children and grand children’s futures here in America and in Israel. Go ahead, ask them that.
Then tell them to watch this NER You Tube video interview with contributing NER editor, Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein in June 2010. Tell them to note his prescient bottom line assessment of Obama, as “the the most radical President, ever:”
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/obama-jewish.jpg435638Jerry Gordonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Gordon2015-07-22 12:55:302015-07-22 13:22:10American Jewish friends: Are we talking about you or someone you know?
Quebec’s maple syrup “marketing board” first made big news in 2012 when the culprits of an $18 million maple syrup heist (really) from the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve (really) were caught by provincial police. (See the whole story in a feature film, coming soon, starring Jason Segel — …really.) The board is making news again thanks to recent crackdowns on producers who want to sell syrup outside its control.
Quebec’s maple syrup is managed by the Federation of Maple Syrup Producers, a legal cartel that has been given special privileges under provincial law — including the power to enforce a monopoly in syrup sales — since 1966. All syrup goes through the Federation, which withholds enough from the market to keep the price high, takes a 12% cut of sales, and then (eventually) passes the remainder on to producers.
This month, the Federation stationed security guards in several sugar shacks to ensure that producers don’t sell their own syrup because some of them have begun to fight back.
In defiance of the rules, [Angèle] Grenier exported hundreds of barrels of maple syrup to New Brunswick from 2002 through 2014 — just so she could collect the money she earned.
Last year she knew she was being watched. Her brother and her neighbour each brought a tractor. In under an hour, with three tractors, the team loaded 40 barrels of syrup on a truck.
“All the children came and we did it quick, quick,” she says. The truck sped off down her dirt road.
The federation has now shut down Grenier’s exports.
Last month Justice Clément Sampson of Superior Court in Ste-Joseph-de-Beauce wrote an order permitting “a sheriff to penetrate into the sugar shack of [Grenier], without notice, at any time judged reasonable and as frequently as they judge appropriate … to verify the inventory of maple syrup, take photos and videos of the locale and the inventory, and put a mark, a seal, a tag or any other necessary identifying label on every maple syrup container.”’
Advocates for the syrup quota say it’s needed because prices aren’t enough to keep supply stable for a crop with a harvest that fluctuates from year to year. But if bad seasons are the danger, what syrup producers need is insurance (or futures markets). That could be accomplished simply and cheaply by setting aside money, rather than warehouses full of syrup guarded by state-of-the-art security to prevent Mission Impossible-esque heists.
The marketing board doesn’t protect producers from a bad harvest. It protects big producers from consumers — from you, me, and our dollars that could tempt sellers to compete with them outside the system.
The Federation estimates that only 75% of producers support its fixed prices, but it has the legal power to strong-arm the 25% who don’t. Dissenting producers don’t — can’t — have the same rights under the law if it’s to be enforced. Without equal rights under the law, there cannot be secure rights to property.
One rebellious seller remarks that since he defied the Federation, “They can come into my house anytime they want.” Perhaps that’s why producers in Ontario and New Brunswick, who still benefit from the price supports, have declined to join Quebec’s Federation.
How did this happen? Quebec producers sought legal privileges for themselves by organizing into the Federation. Now that that privilege exists, it’s been seized not only by maple syrup producers, but by a specific contingent who benefit most from it. Special powers, once created, benefit the especially powerful.
The good news is that prices still work. High prices have tempted others to enter the market, and as a result Quebec’s share of global production has fallen from 78% ten years ago to 69% today. If the trend continues, the cartel may become unstable — or it may try to convince (or, failing that, force) others to join in the racket.
In the end, it’s not just those who love maple syrup on a warm stack of flapjacks or that sweet, messy maple taffy who lose out when Big Syrup gets special privileges. Rather, it’s the people who want to act and innovate without permission. Innovation is the great enemy of the status quo, and those who benefit from that status quo, like the Syrup Federation, know this. Their message is clear: conform, syrup slingers, or find yourself in a sticky situation.
Janet Neilson is a founding member and program developer for the Institute for Liberal Studies and a contract researcher in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/maple-syrup-fee.jpg317640Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFoundation for Economic Education (FEE)2015-05-02 15:24:372015-05-02 15:32:41The Sweet, Sweet Privilege of the Maple Syrup Federation
Last week the Toronto Sun reported on two women from Montreal who apparently left to join Daesh (ISIS) in November. While these are not the first Canadians who have travelled for this purpose, this definitely points to an emerging trend in that the individuals were female. What draws women to join one of the most notorious terrorist organizations on the face of the planet? Perhaps we think that women (in some cases teenage women) are less susceptible to recruitment or radicalization. Realistically, though, that simply isn’t the case and Canadian women are, more and more, coming up on the radar as engaging with and travelling to support ISIS.
Case in point, iBRABO began monitoring a female, whom we’ll call L.A., shortly after publishing our story on the New Zealand jihadist, Mark Taylor. Based on his tweets about his experiences in the “Islamic State,” we were able to track him through Syria through his twitter geo-location. One of the benefits of tracking terrorists through geocoded tweets is they are like a virtual trail of breadcrumbs. While surveilling ISIS strongholds in Syria and Iraq, our analysts observed another social media account of a Western ISIS supporter that concerned us. In this case, the twitter trail that we were able to follow led us directly back to a female account in Toronto. L.A. had been actively moving about throughout Toronto and broadcasting her location up until the 23rd of November 2014. At that point she disappears and isn’t seen again until her Android phone starts broadcasting on the 8th of December from Ar Raqqah, Syria (below). Ar Raqqah is one of the major stronghold cities for ISIS and for that reason is intensely monitored by several organizations.
THE PATH TO ENGAGEMENT WITH VIOLENT EXTREMISM
So how is it that a Canadian woman ends up in the heart of what ISIS calls the “Islamic State”? Some of the answers for this lie in her Twitter page (vetted below).
L.A.’s Twitter background image is a picture of an ISIS beheading from al-Furqan Media Foundation from the Video Althought the Unbelievers Dislike It. To see the full video refer to the conclusion. The image was identified through the Al-Furqan media icon in the upper left corner of the image (below).
RETWEETING PROPAGANDA AS PREDECESSOR TO RECRUITMENT
While viewing propaganda imagery in and of itself doesn’t mean a person has radicalized (we have watched more than our fair share), we have found that individuals who then go on to rebroadcast or adopt those images as their own in social media are posting a potential red flag. Another predictor relates to peer influence, and in that regard social media has changed the traditional need for direct peer interaction. Looking at the peer network L.A. has built on her twitter account, there are several dozen ISIS fighters and supporters she follows and engages with. This past week several of those members were suspended in a mass cull by Twitter, who was looking to eliminate some of the thousands of ISIS accounts on its platform.
L.A. makes numerous references to her support for ISIS in her twitter feed stating, “God bless those who live on His path and who die on His path”. As well as defending ISIS against arguments by others that they are Khawarij (a derogatory name many in the Arabic world now use for the group)
THE FIRST DOCUMENTED CASE OF A FEMALE ON THE FRONTLINES WITH ISIS
GEO-LOCATING L.A.’S ACTIVITIES SINCE ARRIVAL
Perhaps the most damning evidence of her involvement with ISIS are her activities once she arrives in Syria. Unlike the typical “domestic” role that is described in Institute for Strategic Dialog’s recent article “Becoming Mulan”, L.A. appears to take a very active role with ISIS. Examining her Twitter geo-location track L.A. has travelled on numerous occasions to virtually every major city that ISIS controls. To put this in perspective, L.A. has travelled across more ISIS controlled territory than any other ISIS account we have monitored. Some of these travels include Ar Raqqah, Dier ez Zur, Mosul, Aleppo and the embattled town of Kobane (lead photo). On the 25th of December 2014, L.A. travelled to the frontline in Kobane when ISIS was starting to take on major losses inflicted by both coaltion strikes and the fight with the Kurdish YPG. Typically, ISIS takes the position that it does not allow women to be involved in fighting. It is possible that with the severe loses ISIS was experiencing they needed the ability to gather intelligence using women, and thus allowed L.A. to penetrate into Kobane (below). While on the frontline in Kobane she comments on her interaction with the fighters, “I did not see in their actions, anything but the utmost of respect for me as a sister.”
L.A. then travels to the ISIS controlled city of Mosul in Iraq on the 9th of January 2015 before continuing on to Aleppo where she stayed from January 11-16 (Below). While in Aleppo she spends all of her time in territory controlled by ISIS’s enemies including: Regime opposition and YPG controlled areas. Given her previous trip to Mosul and her attendance directly in Aleppo, a reasonable inference would be that L.A. may have again been facilitating surveillance for ISIS during her time in Aleppo. Previous reports have discussed the use of the al-Khansa Brigade, “an ISIS unit – predominantly foreign – of women who handle security and intelligence in Raqqah“. This unit is also trained on and regularly carries AK-47’s. ISIS has had its eye on Aleppo since its push into Syria and the timing of L.A.’s visit would be consistent with reports of ISIS’s advances on the city and attacks on Jabhat al-Nusra (JN).
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2015-01-29-at-9.37.56-AM.png299600Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortiumhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngTerrorism Research & Analysis Consortium2015-03-20 12:36:552015-03-20 12:40:09A Canadian Woman On The Frontlines With ISIS
There is a debate afoot about what to call Salafist Jihadi perpetrators of such recent spectacular murders that we have graphically seen in Ottawa, Montreal, New York, and Oklahoma. Counterterrorism officials have called them lone wolves to emphasize that they are not affiliated with known foreign sponsors of Islamist terrorism. They may be ‘self-actualized’ by the jihadist doctrinal aspects of their new found faith espoused by Salafist preachers and the social media of terrorist groups Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and most prominently the Islamic State, formerly ISIS.
According to Dr. Rich Swier, publisher of the eponymous e-Magazine, noted U.S. counter terrorism expert, Patrick Poole has suggested calling them “known wolves”. “Cowboy”, a former CIA covert officer and counterterrorism consultant wrote us after we posted on “The Danger of Lone Wolf Jihadists Among Us,” saying, “we still perpetuate the false myth of Islamic lone wolf terrorists. If the counter-terrorists can’t even get their story straight, how can anyone else?”
That led me to ponder both Poole’s and Cowboy’s remarks. I thought it over and reached out to someone I know in Israel. That is Islamic and Eastern Studies scholar, former Hebrew University professor and author, Raphael Israeli. You may recall our New English Review interview with him about the lecture he gave in January 2012 at B’nai Israel Synagogue in Pensacola, Florida, Islam, Democracy and the Arab Spring: An Interview with Raphael Israeli. He and his wife Margalit were passing through from a trip to New Orleans and we prevailed upon him to set the record straight about Islamic doctrine.
We had first encountered Professor Israeli during a sabbatical term he spent in 2003 at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He was substituting for a member of the faculty Dr. Vera Schwarcz, who, like Israeli, is a specialist in East Asian studies. I encountered Israeli in Schwarz’s office at Wesleyan in the midst of compiling footnotes for his latest book at the time, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology. The focus of Islamikaze was on what motivated Muslim suicide bombers in the Middle East and the 19 perpetrators of 9/11. The term Islamikaze was modeled on the Japanese suicide Kamikaze (meaning divine wind) pilots of World War II. They, not unlike the Islamikaze, were motivated by the bushido doctrine of self sacrifice and death without surrender exemplified by the Samurai that was adopted by the Japanese militarists.
These questions raised by counterterrorism consultants about what to call the Salafist Jihadis prompted me to write Professor Israeli in Jerusalem and ask him if these lone wolf jihadis weren’t one and the same as Islamikazes.
Here is Professor Israeli’s response:
Of course they are Islamikaze. Because even if in these cases they acted alone, they must have been indoctrinated and motivated, or shown the example by someone. No lone wolf just gets up in the morning and decides to murder human beings. Besides, Islamikaze has an element of self-sacrifice. A common murderer would do it for personal gain of some sort. Here, in both Canadian and US cases, they committed the murder, being aware of the danger of risking their lives, and they were not deterred.
So, perhaps instead of calling the Salafist perpetrators of Islamic terrorist attacks, lone wolves, Islamikaze may be what they really are. Given these Islamic terrorist developments here in America, this may prompt Professor Israeli and his publisher to update and re-issue, Islamikaze.
The final weeks of October 2014 were devastating for America. We had lone wolf jihadis in Ottawa and Montreal killing and wounding Canada Forces service personnel. In New York we had a Muslim convert and former U.S. Navy serviceman shot dead in the midst of a deadly hatchet attack on two NYPD officers in Queens. All three appeared to be operating below the radar screen of surveillance inspired by Islamic State jihadist social media imploring Salafist brethren in the West to mount attacks on uniformed military and law enforcement officers. These were so-called ‘citizen jihadists’ wreaking havoc against any means of law enforcement stopping them from their spectacular suicidal missions. There is a coming Detroit federal court trial on November 4, 2014 against a naturalized US citizen, Rasmieh Odeh. She was a member of a Palestinian terror group, who lied on her application about a prior conviction and incarceration in Israel for a 1969 bombing in Jerusalem that killed two university students.
To answer questions about what drives lone wolf Jihadis undertaking such murderous acts, The Lisa Benson Show on Sunday, October 26, 2014 heard from three prominent experts. They noted US terrorism expert Steven Emerson, executive director of Washington, DC-based, The Investigative Project, Ottawa-based David B. Harris Canadian consultant on Islamic terrorism and former official at Canada’s Security and Intelligence Service, and Dr. Michael Welner, founder of the Manhattan based, The Forensic Panel, a noted US Forensic Psychiatrist frequently called as an prosecution witness in mass killing and terrorist cases. Dr. Welner was joined by his mother, a holocaust survivor and trained gerontology nurse who presented her views noting their participation in the recent protest of the Met Opera production of The Death of Klinghoffer. This was more information for our listeners packed into 43 minutes of air time than many two hour cable TV documentaries.
Watch video of Attack on Ottawa Parliament, October 22, 2014.
The Odeh case
On Monday, October 27, 2014 Steve Emerson ‘s IPT released the first in a five part series, “Spinning a Terrorist into a Victim. Rasmieh Odeh a Chicago area Palestinian activist is the subject that report. She was arrested by the FBI for not reporting on her application for US citizenship her incarceration in Israel for her participation in a 1969 bombing by the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They bombed a supermarket in Jerusalem that killed two Hebrew University students, injuring several others. A second bomb planted at the British consulate did not explode. Odeh was sentenced by an Israeli military court in 1970 to life in prison for her participation in the bombing. Odeh was released in 1979 as part of a group of 76 PFLP terrorist prisoners in exchange for an IDF soldier captured in Lebanon. Odeh came to the US in 1994 from Jordan, settling in Evergreen Park, a suburb of Chicago. She received her US citizenship in 2004. Odeh was arrested on October 22, 2013 under a Federal indictment for not disclosing her prior Israeli conviction, sentencing and incarceration for the PFLP terror bombing. If convicted, Odeh, now 66, may face a 10 year sentence and deportation. Odeh has been vigorously defended by the Council on American Islamic Relations, Students for Justice in Palestine and other so-called human rights groups. Emerson pointed out that Odeh defended her misrepresentations on her application for citizenship on the grounds that she had been tortured while incarcerated in Israel. The IPT team, Emerson said, had interviewed a number of the relatives and friends of the students killed and injured in the PFLP bombing, many now in their 50’s and 60’s.
Canada’s exposure to Islamic terrorism
David B. Harris told about appearing before a US Congressional Committee with Steve Emerson in 1999. He told the Committee had Canada had perhaps the largest number of foreign terrorist groups in the West, surpassed only by the US. That is reflected in the rapid growth of Canada’s Muslim population, a reflection of the ruling governments’ multi-cultural agenda of aiding immigration. This conscious policy is reflected in the following figures he cited. In 1981 Canada had 98,000 Muslim citizens. By 2001, that had risen to about 580,000 and in 2017 projections are that the number will reach 1.4 million. In two decades it is reported that 1 in 13 Canadians will be Muslim and by 2031, 2.9 million Canadians will be Muslim. In 1981, Jews in Canada outnumbered Muslims by two or three to one. In less than sixteen years, Muslims in Canada will outnumber Jews by almost seven to one. Canada’s estimated current Jewish population is 380,000. So we are seeing the result of laws and policies that have brought about a substantial liberalizing of immigration access, over the last three or four decades.
Against the backdrop of the mushrooming Muslim population, Harris cited a 2007 Environics poll showing that approximately 12 percent of Muslims in Canada would be willing to support a plot in Canada to undertake simultaneous mass casualty attacks. That could include bombing and invading certain government and media premises, including the parliament buildings of Canada. That would translate into at least 49,000 Canadians, which should concern reasonable Muslim and non-Muslim Canadians alike.
Referring to the two Canadian lone wolf jihadis, he said that in the case of Martin Couture-Rouleau there is evidence the mosque he attended was frequented by an extremist Imam who cited Shariah law mandating both mutilation and beheading as appropriate punishments for alleged crimes under Sharia. In the instance of the late Michael Zehaf-Bibeau there are indications that he may have been applying for Libyan citizenship to supplant his Canadian passport that was withheld in view of his “high risk traveller” designation. Denial of passports may have been a motivating factor for both of these individuals coupled with the broadcast of ISIS social media calling for attacks on military and law enforcement in Canada.
A fascinating exchange referenced a long term outreach effort by the RCMP to Muslim groups and leaders tied to the Muslim Brotherhood that began in 2005 following the events of 9/11 in the US. On September 29, 2014, two Canadian Muslim groups, Islamic Social Services, Inc. (ISS) and the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), published a so-called de-radicalization manual, “United Against Terrorism: A Collaborative Effort towards a Secure, Inclusive Canada.” The manual was supposed to be a collaborative effort among the RCMP and the two Canadian Muslim groups. NCCM is the renamed Canadian branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim Brotherhood Front and unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Dallas Federal Holy Land Foundation trial. The objective of the 21 page document was to dissuade Canadian Muslim youths from joining Islamists. Instead, the manual suggested that “terrorists were not Jihadists “and Jihad was a “Noble” cause. The RCMP immediately dropped it like the proverbial hot potato calling it “adversarial” and not distributing to its officers.
At the conclusion when prompted by a question on how vulnerable our Northern border is he commented that there are not enough agents to cover likely crossings. As one indication he cited the example of the Millennium plot by an Al Qaeda operative who came to Canada as a refugee and was caught by an inquisitive US border agent. Thus began the unraveling of the Millennium plot, an attempt by al Qaeda using sleeper cells in the US and Canada, to conduct an attack on the Los Angeles International Airport. For more comments about Canada’s Islamist threats, see our August 2012 New English Review interview with him, “A Self-Inflicted Injury: Immigration, Infiltration and Canada’s Growing Islamist Threat.
What motivates the Jihad of Lone Wolves?
Dr. Michael Welner addressed the question of whether there are so-called lone wolves who undertake actions influenced by, yet not part of terrorist groups. His research into mass killing and terrorist cases has evolved a paradigm as to how these should be viewed professionally. First are instances involving attacks directly planned and organized by designated terror groups like, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Islamic State using specifically trained recruits for these missions. The second are attacks that are undertaken by foreign affiliates of terror group such Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Shabaab and Boko Haram. The third are what he termed “dead enders”, recent converts who are susceptible to undertaking spectacle planned attacks using weapons at their disposal to gain celebrity hood as jihadist terrorists. They may be motivated by doctrinal influences and social media exhortations to demonstrate fealty to their new found faith of Islam committing deadly jihad against innocent unbelievers.
That would explain a host of recent and historic Islamic extremist actions in America. The list would prominently include Maj. Nidal Hassan’s jihad against fellow US Army personnel at Fort Hood, Texas, the killing of US Army Private Andy Long at a Little Rock, Arkansas recruiting office by Muslim convert Carlos Bledsoe (Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad). See our October 2014 New English Reviewinterview with Dr. Welner regarding the Oklahoma beheading by Alton Nolen or Jah’ Keem Israel.
Barbara Welner Comments
Barbara Welner’s appearance on the Lisa Benson show was an inspired emotional moment as a holocaust survivor who ran away from Nazi killer in a Polish ghetto and survived innumerable threats to the life until liberated. Lisa Benson father was honored as a liberator of a Nazi death camps during the last weeks of WWII. Ms. Welner is one of the few persons of her background who has recognized the threat of Islamic Jihadism to both Israel and the Jewish people. See my 2007 Israpundit post, “Moral Clarity from a Holocaust Survivor: Yom Ha Shoah comments of Barbara Welner”. Note this telling comment:
If the Holocaust and the sacrifice of the many millions of innocent lives are to have any meaning for future generations, then our immediate lesson should be to insure our resolve.
I recognize the same intense desire to dehumanize the Jews to utterly destroy them from all quarters of Arab and Muslim life today. The only difference between what I saw from the Nazis is that the Nazis were coy to the outside world about how much they wanted to kill the Jews. The Arabs are quite loudly and vocally advertising how they plan to annihilate Israel.
She recognized that the program provided vital information about a new danger among us here in America. She chastised the Met Opera for conveying a thoughtless production of the Klinghoffer Opera that, as her son said humanized the Palestinian terrorists who killed the defenseless wheelchair bound New York Jew, killing him in cold blood and dumping his body overboard the Italian Cruise vessel, the Achille Lauro. She couldn’t understand why more people in a liberal city like New York with millions of fellow Jews that more people like her son and she didn’t protest the Klinghoffer opera.
Conclusion
What this discussion illustrates is the fatal myopic mindset of counterterrorism agencies in both Canada and the US reflecting prevailing multi-culturalism. In order to secure both countries, a revitalized effort has to be made to understand the threat of Islamic Jihad. Further this may require intrusive community and social media surveillance and targeting of potential jihadists in our midst.
Listen to the October 26, 2014 Lisa Benson Show with Steve Emerson, David B. Harris, Dr. Michael Welner and his mother Barbara.
https://drrichswier.com/wp-content/uploads/Gray+Wolf+Face-e1407707040736.jpg480640Jerry Gordonhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJerry Gordon2014-10-28 17:12:272014-10-28 17:14:40The Danger of Lone Wolf Jihadis Among Us
