Tag Archive for: Patrick Poole

Irony: Funeral of Garland, Texas AFDI Assailant will be held at KC Mosque that Sought to Ban Free Speech

The funeral for assailant Nadir Hamid Soofi of the Garland, Texas AFDI Muhammad Art Contest event   will be held Thursday, May 7, 2015 at The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City (ICGKC) in Missouri.  The ICGKC is controlled by the Muslim American Society, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. A  former leader  at the ICGKC, Mohammed Soltan,  who  led a national  blasphemy  petition campaign in 2012 denying free speech under  our First Amendment critical of a religion,  is currently on trial in Egypt  for his role in fomenting Muslim Brotherhood  riots in 2013.  Soofi, 34, and his Phoenix, Arizona roommate Elton Simpson, 30, were killed Sunday evening, May 3, 2015, in an apparent Jihad assault at an American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) sponsored event held at the Curtis Culwell Education Center in Garland, Texas. They were endeavoring to commit a mass shooting at the Garland AFDI event as punishment for the AFDI’s “blasphemous” sponsorship of Muhammad art event.  The causingfitna (CF) blog posted today on the Soofi funeral and the irony of ICGKC sponsorship of a blasphemy petition against free speech. The ICGKC petition was disclosed by noted counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole in 2012.

CF reported:

KCTV5 is reporting that the funeral for one of the Garland, Texas jihadists will be held this Thursday at the Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City. The text of the story does not mention the location, but a video report does mention the Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City at the end of the video…….

While Nadir Soofi never lived in the metro his father lives in an Overland Park neighborhood near 158th Place with his wife, Nadir’s stepmother. A woman who came to the door at the home told KCTV5 that the family didn’t want to talk about what happened to Soofi.

Police say the 34-year-old and 30-year-old Elton Simpson opened fire at a Dallas area conference center on Sunday. An art exhibit and contest depicting the Prophet Mohammad was being held there.

They wounded a security guard before police shot back, killing both.

Sharon Soofi said her son was a devoted Muslim, but never thought he could hurt someone.

CF noted this about the ICGKC blasphemy petition:

Knowing that the Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City put out a petition asking for President Obama to put a ban on Free Speech is an outrage. The ISGKC leadership [apparently espoused] the same end goal as the jihadists who attacked the cartoonists in Garland, Texas……. Infidels who should know their place, and be quiet. The petition asking for the ban on free speech was found.. first by CF and picked up by Patrick Poole who made clear the seriousness of the petition.

Kansas City media also reported on the blasphemy petition with opposing comments by a local ACLU attorney:

Watch this Channel 41 reported edited by CF:

Mohammed Solton seen in the Channel 41 report extolling the ICGKC Blasphemy petition against free speech  is currently on trial in Egypt for his involvement in organizing Muslim Brotherhood riots.  Patrick Poole in a March 9 2015, PJ Media  report wrote:

Egyptian-American Mohamed Soltan is currently on trial in Egypt for his role in organizing and directing the violent Muslim Brotherhood protests in 2013. The protests wracked Egypt following the massive June 30 protests that led to the ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.

Soltan is the oldest son of senior Muslim Brotherhood leader Salah Soltan, also in prison in Egypt on charges of inciting violence.

He is charged with being part of the operations cell that ran the main Muslim Brotherhood protest at the Raba’a Al Adeyawa mosque in Cairo. His cause has been touted by major U.S. media outlets, including the New York Times, as well as by prominent U.S. Islamic organizations. It was also highlighted on Twitter with the #FreeSoltan hashtag.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Ohio Somali Muslim Émigré indicted on Terrorist Charges

Various news stories reported the transfer into federal custody  in Columbus, Ohio yesterday of 23 year old Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud indicted for allegedly traveling to receive Al Qaeda training in Syria, returning to plan a possible attack on a military installation in Texas. Eric Stakelbeck, whose latest book ISIS Exposed targeted the Somali émigré community of over 100,000 in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis–St. Paul as the hub for Al Qaeda and now ISIS recruitment. Columbus, Ohio is the second largest Somali émigré community in America with over 40,000 to upwards of 80,000.

Noted Counter terrorism analyst, Patrick Poole has monitored radical elements in the Columbus Somali émigré community for nearly a decade including alleged recruitment for Al Qaeda affiliate Al Shabaab.  This indictment of Mohamud  is reflective of deep problems arising from a virtually UN controlled U.S. Refugee Program subsidizing the growth of a population in this country that reject American values and laws and are  prone to recruitment as Jihadis by Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, 23 years old, allegedly trained with extremists in Syria last year as part of that country’s civil war before receiving instructions to attack police officers or military targets in the U.S., according to an indictment released Thursday. No such attack appears to have taken place.

The case stands out among recent charges against Americans accused of trying to join Islamic State or other extremist groups because the Justice Department says Mr. Mohamud actually got to Syria and received training in explosives, weapons and hand-to-hand combat.

Defendants in nearly all the other cases were arrested at U.S. airports as they attempted to leave the country. In many of them, the terrorist recruiter they thought they were working with was an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent.

In February of last year, Mr. Mohamud, who is a native of Somalia, obtained his U.S. citizenship, the indictment says. A week later, he sent in an application for a passport. Then, in April of 2014, Mr. Mohamud bought a one-way plane ticket to Athens, with a layover in Istanbul. But, according to the indictment, he never got on the flight to Greece. Instead, he allegedly met up with men who took him to Syria.

Mr. Mohamud was arrested in February of this year on state terrorism charges and held by Ohio authorities. Before he was indicted on federal charges, he tried to negotiate a plea deal with prosecutors, but those talks fell apart, said people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Mohamud was being transferred to federal custody Thursday. He faces one charge of providing material support to terrorists, another of providing material support to the al Qaeda affiliate known as Nusra Front, and a third of lying to federal agents. Each charge carries up to 15 years in prison.

The WSJ noted the family terrorist tradition:

The man who helped Mr. Mohamud get to Syria was allegedly an actual fighter—his brother, Abdifatah Aden Mohamud, according to the indictment. In late 2013 and early 2014, Abdirahman allegedly exchanged messages with his brother in which he said he was proud of him and they plotted about how Abdirahman could join him in Syria. In one message, Abdirahman told his brother that firing a rifle brought one closer to heaven.

Mr. Mohamud also posted messages on Facebook before he allegedly left the U.S. In one, according to the indictment, he said, “We will never lose to these pagan Alawites,” an apparent reference to the Alawite sect of Islam to which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad belongs. In another, he posted an image of a soldier with the Islamic State logo and the words, “Among the believers are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah.”

The indictment quotes from online conversations between the two men who transported Mr. Mohamud to Syria from Turkey. One said that Mr. Mohamud had gone to the al Qaeda affiliate, the Nusra Front, but had wanted to join Islamic State.

How social media entrapped Mohamud:

Once in Syria, Mr. Mohamud appears to have sent videos to a contact in the U.S., the indictment says. One showed him carrying a gun on his hip and saying he was in Syria. In a video allegedly sent to another contact, Mr. Mohamud held an AK-47 rifle.

That June, according to the indictment, his brother appears to have been killed in battle in Syria. Just before he was to begin fighting in Syria, a cleric allegedly told Mr. Mohamud he should instead go home and launch an attack. Mr. Mohamud returned to the U.S. He allegedly told someone—identified in the indictment only as Unnamed Person #1—that he had gone to Syria and received combat training.

Mr. Mohamud allegedly said he wanted to attack military or police targets. He told a second person he wanted to do “something big” in the U.S., like going to a military base in Texas and executing a few American soldiers, the indictment said.

This February an FBI agent interviewed Mr. Mohamud. He denied.

How Mohamud was arrested upon his return to the U.S.:

Mr. Mohamud attended high school in Columbus, after which he worked at warehouse jobs in the area and had “virtually no contact with the criminal justice system,’’ his lawyer said.

But last December, after Mr. Mohamud returned from his trip overseas, he was arrested after walking out on a restaurant check without paying and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, according to a lawyer who represented him in that case. He was scheduled to be sentenced in February, but didn’t show up in court. A few days later he was arrested on state terrorism charges.

Hassan Omar, head of the Somali Association of Ohio is cited by the WSJ saying:

This is very unfortunate news. It is not something we had been expecting from this community. There is not a single Somali youth who left here to join Al Shabaab or any terrorist groups. We are law-abiding and not violent.”

“Nobody expected a young man educated in the U.S. to do this.

Really, both Mr. Mohamud indictment and his late brother recruited him and later died fighting in Syria put the lie to that statement.  It begs the question of how radical elements within the Columbus Somali émigré community

Note this comment from Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) of the House Homeland Security Committee about this Ohio indictment:

The indictment Thursday “highlights the grave threat we face from returning American jihadists. “Terrorist groups like ISIS and al Qaeda are luring Americans to the combat zone in Syria and Iraq, and radicalized individuals are now clearly returning with the training and motivation to bring terror to our shores.”

In a  March 22, 2015 Iconoclast post, we reported a  New York Times front page story on the chronicle of a pair Somali émigré youths in the Twin Cities,  one of whom successfully traveled to Syria to join ISIS, while his friend was stopped before he could board a flight  to join his fellow mujahideen.    The conclusion to our post can also be applied to the indictment of Columbus Somali émigré Mohamud.

This is the latest story of how the U.S. humanitarian refugee program, controlled by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, flooded this major Midwestern community with in excess of 40,000 plus East Africa Muslims. Many of them failed to assimilate into American culture with radical Mosques  possibly recruiting dozens of native born jihadists to fight and die for first al Shabaab in Somalia and now for ISIS in Syria. We have written about this repeatedly since 2008. The Wall Street Journal  article didn’t delve into how the Somali refugees came to the Twin cities with the assistance of voluntary agencies paid by the State Department and Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement to process them, provide cash assistance, Medicaid and receive a green card to  eventually citizens. All while many of these Muslim émigrés rejected American values, instead seeking to impose their Sharia law on the host non-Muslim community.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of Abdirahman Sheik Mohamud, left, speaks with his attorney, Sam Shamansky, during a hearing in Columbus, Ohio, in February. Photo: Andrew Welsh-Huggins/Associated Press.

Obama Administration supports Radical Islam: State Department Hosts Pro-Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian Contingent

Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council   State Department  1-1-27-15

Waleed Sharaby, Secretary  General of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council, who flashes the Rabia Muslim Brotherhood resistance sign. U.S. State Department 1-27-15, Source: screenshot.

Tuesday evening in Washington, D.C., we had more evidence of the Administration’s policy of appeasing Muslim Brotherhood opponents of the Al-Sisi government in Cairo, the latter seeking to reform radical Islamic doctrine espousing Salafist Jihad.  Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon reported this latest example of outreach to Radical Islamist groups in the Ummah, “Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department:”

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

That delegation member, Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and a spokesman for Judges for Egypt, a group reported to have close ties to the Brotherhood.

The delegation also includes Gamal Heshmat, a leading member of the Brotherhood, and Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardery, a Brotherhood member who served as a parliamentarian from Luxor.

Sharaby, the Brotherhood-aligned judge, flashed the Islamist group’s popular symbol in his picture at the State Department and wrote in a caption: “Now in the U.S. State Department. Your steadfastness impresses everyone,” according to an independent translation of the Arabic.

Another member of the delegation, Maha Azzam, confirmed during an event hosted Tuesday by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID)—another group accused of having close ties to the Brotherhood—that the delegation had “fruitful” talks with the State Department.

Note this comment of Eric Trager of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

Maha Azzam confirms that ‘anti-coup’ delegation, which includes 2 top [Muslim Brothers], had ‘fruitful’ conversations at State Dept,” Egypt expert Eric Trager tweeted.

“The State Department continues to speak with Muslim Brothers on the assumption that Egyptian politics are unpredictable, and the Brotherhood still has some support in Egypt,” he said. “But when pro-Brotherhood delegations then post photos of themselves making pro-Brotherhood gestures in front of the State Department logo, it creates an embarrassment for the State Department.”

Sam Tadros, Egypt expert at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom in Washington, DC commented:

“I think the Muslim Brotherhood visit serves two goals,” Tadros said. “First, organizing the pro Muslim Brotherhood movement in the U.S. among the Egyptian and other Arab and Muslim communities.”

“Secondly, reaching out to administration and the policy community in D.C.,” Tadros said. “The delegation’s composition includes several non-official Muslim Brotherhood members to portray an image of a united Islamist and non-Islamist revolutionary camp against the regime.”

Counter terrorism expert, Patrick Poole said:

What this shows is that the widespread rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, particularly the largest protests in recorded human history in Egypt on June 30, 2013, that led to Morsi’s ouster, is not recognized by the State Department and the Obama administration,” Poole said.

“This is a direct insult to our Egyptian allies, who are in an existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, all in the pursuit of the mythical ‘moderate Islamists’ who the D.C. foreign policy elite still believe will bring democracy to the Middle East,” Poole said.

It is beyond time for the GOP-controlled Congress to investigate why the Administration deigns to provide auspices to invite Egyptian and other foreign Muslim Brotherhood leaders to meet publicly with White House National Security and State Department officials in Washington. This latest example continues the impression that the Obama Administration supports Radical Islamic doctrine.  It is a further example of how far the Administration has gone in fostering infiltration of Muslim Brotherhood domestic and foreign groups in the U.S. enabling their  “messaging”.  All while this Administration persists in deracinating the vestiges of Jihad threat doctrine training for our military, homeland security and national law enforcement agencies.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Are Lone Wolf Jihadis Islamikazes?

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?”

islamikaziThat 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 MartyrologyThe 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.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Call it Jihad: ‘Terrorism’ Just Doesn’t Define This Threat

2014’s spate of Islamic terror attacks against Western targets leaves observers grasping for words to describe what’s happening. President Obama doesn’t want to deal with it at all, so after a Muslim convert beheaded a woman in Oklahoma, he thought it appropriate to send the beheader’s mosque (the Islamic Center of Greater Oklahoma City) warm greetings about “shared peace” and “a sense of justice.” (The occasion was the Muslim feast of Eid Ul-Adh, but the timing was awful.) U.S. national security agencies are no help either—under the tutelage of the Muslim Brotherhood, they were purged long ago of any vocabulary useful for dealing with jihad. “Lone wolf” gets a lot of play with the media, but as Michael Ledeen, Andrew McCarthy, and Patrick Poole (herehere, and here) have all pointed out, there’s nothing ‘lone’ about Muslim warriors, self-selected or otherwise, engaging in fard ‘ayn (individual jihad) in obedience to the doctrine of their shared faith.

Nor are these attacks simply “terrorism” in any way that is uniquely descriptive. As Ledeen noted, the Unabomber was a domestic terrorist. The FBI calls the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) terrorist. The Black Liberation Army was accused of murdering more than a dozen police officers in its day. But none of these operates today in obedience to a 1400-year-old ideology that claims a divine commandment to conquer the earth. Nor is any of these other ‘domestic terrorists’ the 21st century embodiment of a force that already has overrun many powerful civilizations, including the Buddhist, Byzantine, Middle East Christian, Hindu, and Persian ones.

It’s time to call this what it is: Jihad.

Jihad is a unique descriptor: it is motivated solely by one ideology—an Islamic one. It encompasses any and all tactics of war, be they the kinetic violence of terrorism, the stealthy influence operations of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian intelligence agencies, or funding, speaking, teaching, and writing. Importantly, the term ‘jihad’ is the one used by its own practitioners—the clerics, scholars, and warriors of Islam. Arguably the most valid qualification of all is that Islamic Law (shariah) defines jihad as “warfare to spread the religion [Islam].” Warfare encompasses many things, though, and not all of them are violent.

Katharine Gorka, President of The Council on Global Security, has an astute new essay entitled “The Flawed Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy” in which she skewers the Obama administration’s misguided policy it calls “Countering Violent Extremism.” She explains how America’s counter-terrorism ‘experts’ have tried haplessly to apply Social Movement Theory to what actually is a totalitarian ideology cloaked loosely in a handful of religious practices. A decade or more of attempting to apply the language of grievance, poverty, and unemployment laid at the door of Western colonialism or secular modernity has achieved little but the neutering of America’s national security defenses. Yet, even this dead-on analysis doesn’t quite get us where we need to be.

Just as Obama’s bland “violent extremism,” deliberately devoid of meaning identifies neither the enemy nor the ideology that animates him, so in its way, ‘terrorism” likewise falls short. For if “terrorist” can and does mean anyone from a nut job like Ted Kaczynsky to assorted tree huggers, neo-Nazi skinheads, as well as Islamic warriors committing atrocities in the name of Allah, then its scope is just too broad to define precisely the paramount threat to global stability in the 21st century: jihad.

The magnitude of the jihad threat demands its own category. Neither Kaczynsky nor animal and environmental activists nor neo-Nazis could threaten the very existence of our Republic. Certain 20th century totalitarian ideologies arguably did, though, and that’s why the U.S. marshaled every resource at its disposal to fight them to defeat. Islamic totalitarianism is such an ideology, albeit one that has survived cyclical periods of defeat and resurgence for many centuries. We constrain ourselves both conceptually and legally, however, when the only way to label an act of violence ‘terrorism’ is when it is carried out against civilians for a political purpose and the perpetrator(s) can be tied to a designated terrorist organization, with no consideration for the ideology that so many of them—and others not on such lists—share.

Islamic terror attacks of recent decades typically involved identifiable Islamic terror groups such as al-Qa’eda, Ansar al-Shariah, HAMAS, Hizballah, and the PLO, but were often funded and supported by jihadist nation states such as Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. As Katharine Gorka described in her white paper, though, the Obama administration’s willfully amorphous term, “violent extremism,” ensured that no enemy threat doctrine called ‘jihad’ that unifies these diverse yet similarly-motivated actors and that actually may threaten the Republic, was ever permitted to be articulated—or confronted.

Now, after the overwhelming post-9/11 Western retaliatory offensives, both al-Qa’eda and more recently, the Islamic State, increasingly have called for acts of ‘individual jihad’ (fard ‘ayn, according to Islamic doctrine). Such attacks by Islamic true believers against armed service members, civilians, and law enforcement officers as well as ordinary citizens duly are proliferating across the West, but the U.S. national security establishment grasps for any term—lone wolf, violent extremist, workplace violence—to avoid saying either ‘terrorism’ or ‘jihadist.’ Granted, as Daniel Pipes noted in his 24 October 2014 essay, “Terrorism Defies Definition,” there are legal consequences under the U.S. Legal Code for “formally certifying an act of violence as terrorist.” But as we see, it’s more than that – and it’s why we need to use “jihad” more often and “terrorism” less.

To properly identify individual jihad attacks is to acknowledge that there is an established ideology behind them that derives its inspiration from Islamic doctrine, law, and scripture. To acknowledge that would mean the threat actually is existential, at a minimum in its objective: universal conquest and enforcement of shariah. Until and unless the entire American citizenry, federal bureaucracy, Intelligence Community, law enforcement, and the U.S. military understand that failing to acknowledge, confront, and defeat the forces of Islamic jihad and shariah indeed do endanger the very existence of our Republic as we know it, and mobilize to meet this challenge, the inexorable advance of shariah will continue. As Pipes notes with some understatement, the current “lack of clarity presents a significant public policy challenge.

The term “terrorism” will continue to provide useful applications in security categories and lists. But it is much too inclusive and yet restrictive to offer a precise definition of the Islamic threat. The forces of Islamic jihad and shariah are mounting a whole of civilization assault against liberal, modern, representative, secular civil society. Nation states, sub-national terror organizations, transnational alliances, academics and scholars, media conglomerates, networks of mosques and Islamic Centers, so-called ‘charitable foundations’ and their donors, battlefield fighters, and too many individual Muslims are united in a jihad that is not only violent but insidious, inexorable, and sophisticated. Unless we learn to resist in the same way—a whole of civilization way—that list of subjugated civilizations may yet include one more: ours.