The Coming Urban Terror

The Coming Urban Terror...

Systems disruption, networked gangs, and bioweapons

John RobbSummer 2007

For the first time in history, announced researchers this May, a majority of the world’s population is living in urban environments. Cities—efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital—are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.
Over the last few years, small groups’ ability to conduct terrorism has shown radical improvements in productivity—their capacity to inflict economic, physical, and moral damage. These groups, motivated by everything from gang membership to religious extremism, have taken advantage of easy access to our global superinfrastructure, revenues from growing illicit commercial flows, and ubiquitously available new technologies to cross the threshold necessary to become terrible threats. September 11, 2001, marked their arrival at that threshold.
Unfortunately, the improvements in lethality that we have already seen are just the beginning. The arc of productivity growth that lets small groups terrorize at ever-higher levels of death and disruption stretches as far as the eye can see. Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past. Thanks to global interdependence, state-against-state warfare is far less likely than it used to be, and viable only against disconnected or powerless states. But the underlying processes of globalization have made us exceedingly vulnerable to nonstate enemies. The mechanisms of power and control that states once exerted will continue to weaken as global interconnectivity increases. Small groups of terrorists can already attack deep within any state, riding on the highways of interconnectivity, unconcerned about our porous borders and our nation-state militaries. These terrorists’ likeliest point of origin, and their likeliest destination, is the city.
Cities played a vital defensive role in the last major evolution of conventional state-versus-state warfare. Between the world wars, the refinement of technologies—particularly the combustion engine, when combined with armor—made it possible for armies to move at much higher speeds than in the past, so new methods of warfare emphasized armored motorized maneuver as a way to pierce the opposition’s solid defensive lines and range deep into soft, undefended rear areas. These incursions, the armored thrusts of blitzkrieg, turned an army’s size against itself: even the smallest armored vanguard could easily disrupt the supply of ammunition, fuel, and rations necessary to maintain the huge armies of the twentieth century in the field.
To defend against these thrusts, the theoretician J. F. C. Fuller wrote in the 1930s, cities could be used as anchor or pivot points to engage armored forces in attacks on static positions, bogging down the offensive. Tanks couldn’t move quickly through cities, and if they bypassed them and struck too deeply into enemy territory, their supply lines—in particular, of the gasoline they drank greedily—would become vulnerable. The city, Fuller anticipated, could serve as a vast fortress, requiring the fast new armor to revert to the ancient tactic of the siege. That’s exactly what happened in practice during World War II, when the defenses mounted in Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad played a major role in the Allied victory.
But in the current evolution of warfare, cities are no longer defensive anchors against armored thrusts ranging through the countryside. They have become the main targets of offensive action themselves. Just as the huge militaries of the early twentieth century were vulnerable to supply and communications disruption, cities are now so heavily dependent on a constant flow of services from various centralized systems that even the simplest attacks on those systems can cause massive disruption.
Most of the networks that we rely on for city life—communications, electricity, transportation, water—are overused, interdependent, and extremely complex. They developed organically as what scholars in the emerging field of network science call “scale-free networks,” which contain large hubs with a plethora of connections to smaller and more isolated local clusters. Such networks are economically efficient and resistant to random failure—but they are also extremely vulnerable to intentional disruptions, as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi shows in his important book Linked: The New Science of Networks. In practice, this means that a very small number of attacks on the critical hubs of a scale-free network can collapse the entire network. Such a collapse can occasionally happen by accident, when random failure hits a critical node; think of the huge Northeast blackout of 2003, which caused $6.4 billion in damage.
Further, the networks of our global superinfrastructure are tightly “coupled”—so tightly interconnected, that is, that any change in one has a nearly instantaneous effect on the others. Attacking one network is like knocking over the first domino in a series: it leads to cascades of failure through a variety of connected networks, faster than human managers can respond.
The ongoing attacks on the systems that support Baghdad’s 5 million people illustrate the vulnerability of modern networks. Over the last four years, guerrilla assaults on electrical systems have reduced Baghdad’s power to an average of four or five hours a day. And the insurgents have been busily finding new ways to cut power: no longer do they make simple attacks on single transmission towers. Instead, they destroy multiple towers in series and remove the copper wire for resale to fund the operation; they ambush repair crews in order to slow repairs radically; they attack the natural gas and water pipelines that feed the power plants. In September 2004, one attack on an oil pipeline that fed a power plant quickly led to a cascade of power failures that blacked out electricity throughout Iraq.
Lack of adequate power is a major reason why economic recovery has been nearly impossible in Iraq. No wonder that, in account after account, nearly the first criticism that any Iraqi citizen levels against the government is its inability to keep the lights on. Deprived of services, citizens are forced to turn to local groups—many of them at war with the government—for black-market alternatives. This money, in turn, fuels further violence, and the government loses legitimacy.
Insurgents have directed such disruptive attacks against nearly all the services necessary to get a city of 5 million through the day: water pipes, trucking, and distribution lines for gasoline and kerosene. And because of these networks’ complexity and interconnectivity, even small attacks, costing in the low thousands of dollars to carry out, can cause tens of millions and occasionally hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.
Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict, the Spanish Civil War of our times. It’s the place where small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict—certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.
Another growing threat to our cities, commonest so far in the developing world, is gangs challenging government for control. For three sultry July days in 2006, a gang called PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, “First Command of the Capital”) held hostage the 20 million inhabitants of the greater São Paulo area through a campaign of violence. Gang members razed police stations, attacked banks, rioted in prisons, and torched dozens of buses, shutting down a transportation system serving 2.9 million people a day.
The previous May, a similar series of attacks had terrified the city. “The attackers moved on foot, and by car and motorbike,” wrote William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair. “They were not rioters, revolutionaries, or the graduates of terrorist camps. They were anonymous young men and women, dressed in ordinary clothes, unidentifiable in advance, and indistinguishable afterward. Wielding pistols, automatic rifles, and firebombs, they emerged from within the city, struck fast, and vanished on the spot. Their acts were criminal, but the attackers did not loot, rob, or steal. They burned buses, banks, and public buildings, and went hard after the forces of order—gunning down the police in their neighborhood posts, in their homes, and on the streets.”
The violence hasn’t been limited to São Paulo. In December 2006, a copycat campaign by an urban gang called the Comando Vermelho (“Red Command”) shut down Rio de Janeiro, too. In both cases, the gangs fomenting the violence didn’t list demands or send ultimatums to the government. Rather, they were flexing their muscles, testing their ability to challenge the government monopoly on violence.
Both gangs had steadily accumulated power for a decade, helped in part by globalization, which simplifies making connections to the multitrillion-dollar global black-market economy. With these new connections, the gangs’ profit horizon became limitless, fueling rapid expansion. New communications technology, particularly cell phones, played a part, too, making it possible for the gangs to thrive as loose associations, and allowing a geographical and organizational dispersion that rendered them nearly invulnerable to attack. The PCC has been particularly successful, growing from a small prison gang in the mid-nineties to a group that today controls nearly half of São Paulo’s slums and its millions of inhabitants. An escalating confrontation between these gangs and the city governments appears inevitable.
The gangs’ rapid rise into challengers to urban authorities is something that we will see again elsewhere. This dynamic is already at work in American cities in the rise of MS-13, a rapidly expanding transnational gang with a loose organizational structure, a propensity for violence, and access to millions in illicit gains. It already has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members, dispersed over 31 U.S. states and several Latin American countries, and its proliferation continues unabated, despite close attention from law enforcement. Like the PCC, MS-13 or a similar American gang may eventually find that it has sufficient power to hold a city hostage through disruption.
The final threat that small groups pose to cities is weapons of mass destruction. Though most of the worry over WMDs has focused on nuclear weapons, those aren’t the real long-term problem. Not only is the vast manufacturing capability of a nation-state required to produce the basic nuclear materials, but those materials are difficult to manipulate, transport, and turn into weapons. Nor is it easy to assemble a nuke from parts bought on the black market; if it were, nation-states like Iran, which have far more resources at their disposal than terrorist groups do, would be doing just that instead of resorting to internal production.
It’s also unlikely that a state would give terrorists a nuclear weapon. Sovereignty and national prestige are tightly connected to the production of nukes. Sharing them with terrorists would grant immense power to a group outside the state’s control—the equivalent of giving Osama bin Laden the keys to the presidential palace. If that isn’t deterrent enough, the likelihood of retaliation is, since states, unlike terrorist groups, have targets that can be destroyed. The result of a nuclear explosion in Moscow or New York would very probably be the annihilation of the country that manufactured the bomb, once its identity was determined—as it surely would be, since no plot of that size can remain secret for long.
Even in the very unlikely case that a nuclear weapon did end up in terrorist hands, it would be a single horrible incident, rather than an ongoing threat. The same is true of dirty bombs, which disperse radioactive material through conventional explosives. No, the real long-term danger from small groups is the use of biotechnology to build weapons of mass destruction. In contrast with nuclear technology, biotech’s knowledge and tools are already widely dispersed—and their power is increasing exponentially.
The biotech field is in the middle of a massive improvement in productivity through advances in computing power. In fact, the curves of improvement that we see in biotechnology mirror the rates of improvement in computing dictated by Moore’s Law—the observation, borne out by decades of experience, that the ratio of performance to price of computing power doubles every 24 months. This means that incredible power will soon be in the hands of individuals. University of Washington engineer Robert Carlson observes that if current trends in the rate of improvement in DNA sequencing continue, “within a decade a single person at the lab bench could sequence or synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet many times over in an eight-hour day.” And with ever tinier, cheaper, and more widely available tools, a large and decentralized industrial base that is hiring lab techs at a double-digit growth rate, and the active transfer of knowledge via the Internet (the blueprints of the entire smallpox virus now circulate on the Web), biotech is too widely available for us to contain it.
In less than a decade, then, biotechnology will be ripe for the widespread development of weapons of mass destruction, and it fits the requirements of small-group warfare perfectly. It is small, inexpensive, and easy to manufacture in secret. Also, since dangerous biotechnology is based primarily on the manipulation of information, it will make rapid progress through the same kind of amateur tinkering that currently produces new computer viruses. Terrorists also have a growing advantage in delivering bioweapons. The increasing porousness of national borders, size of global megacities, and volume of air travel all mean that the delivery and percolation of bioweapons will be fast-moving and widespread—potentially on several continents at once.
It is almost certain that we will see repeated, perhaps incessant, attempts to deploy bioweapons with new strains of viruses or bacteria. Picture a Russian biohacker who, a decade from now, designs a new, deadly form of the common flu virus and sells it on the Internet, just as computer viruses and worms get sold today. The terrorist group that buys the design sends it to a recently hired lab tech in Pakistan, who performs the required modifications with widely available tools. The product then ships by mail to London, to the awaiting “suicide vectors”—men who infect themselves and then board airplanes headed to world destinations, infecting passengers on the planes and in crowded terminals. The infection spreads quickly, going global in days—long before anyone detects it.
It’s very possible that many cities will fall in the face of such deadly threats. Megacities in the developing world—which often, because of their rapid growth, widespread corruption, and illegitimate governance, aren’t able to provide security or basic services for their citizens—are particularly vulnerable. However, cities in the developed world that properly appreciate the threats arrayed against them may devise startlingly innovative solutions.
In almost all cases, cities can defend themselves from their new enemies through effective decentralization. To counter systems disruption, decentralized services—the capability of smaller areas within cities to provide backup services, at least on a temporary basis—could radically diminish the harmful consequences of disconnection from the larger global grid. In New York, this would mean storage or limited production capability of backup electricity, water, and fuel, with easy connections to the delivery grid—at the borough level or even smaller. These backups would then provide a means of restoring central services rapidly after a failure.
Similarly, cities may combat networked gangs by decentralizing their own security. Cities have long maintained centralized police forces, but gangs can often overwhelm them. Many governments are responding with militarized police: China is building a million-man paramilitary force, for example; and even in the United States, the use of SWAT teams has increased from 3,000 deployments a year in the 1980s to 50,000 a year in 2006. But militarized police may too easily become an army of occupation, and, if corrupt, as they are in Brazil, they may become enemies of the state along with the gangs.
A better solution involves local security forces, either locally recruited or bought on the marketplace (such as Blackwater), which can be powerful bulwarks against small-group terrorism. Such forces may become a vital component in our defense against bioterrorism, too, since they can enforce local containment—and since large centralized services, like the ones we have today, might actually accelerate the propagation of bioweapons. Still, if improperly established, local forces can also become rogue criminal entities, like the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia and the militias in Rio de Janeiro. Governments need to regulate them carefully.
In the future, we probably won’t know exactly how we will be attacked until it happens. In highly uncertain situations like this, centralized solutions that emphasize uniform responses will often collapse. Heterogeneous systems, by contrast, are unlikely to fail catastrophically. Moreover, local innovation—supplemented by a marketplace in goods and services that improve security, detection, monitoring, and so on—is likely to develop responses to threats quickly and effectively. Other localities will copy those responses that prove successful.
In June 2007, the FBI and local law enforcement halted a plot to blow up the John F. Kennedy International Airport’s fuel tanks and feeder pipelines. This was another great example of how police forces, if used correctly, can defuse threats before they become a menace [see “On the Front Line in the War on Terrorism”]. However, our current level of safety will not last. The selection of the target demonstrated clearly that future attackers will take advantage of our systems’ vulnerability to disruption, which will sharply increase the number of potential targets. It also showed that these threats can emerge spontaneously from small groups unconnected to al-Qaida. More and more attempts will come, with higher and higher rates of success. Our choice is simple: we can rely exclusively on our current security systems to stop the threats—and suffer the consequences when they don’t—or we can take measures to mitigate the impact of these threats by exerting local control over essential services.

TRUCK STOPS' TARGET TERROR

By MURRAY WEISS

June 12, 2007 -- The NYPD has stepped up its inspections of trucks at checkpoints to protect against radioactive, biological or chemical bombs entering the Big Apple, officials said.
Enlisting an array of new detection tools, New York's Finest, working with a host of federal and state investigators, have launched a two-pronged assault against terrorists trying to slip bomb-making materials into the city.

On Sunday, about 40 cops using radiation detectors stopped some 50 trucks, trying to determine whether there were traces of radioactive isotopes - the type that would indicate a dirty bomb. They were also looking for other potential explosive ingredients, such as hydrogen peroxide or chlorine, which are favored by al Qaeda.

Inspectors thought they intercepted a radioactive threat a week earlier in lower Manhattan, in the days after the foiled terror plot against Kennedy Airport's aviation fuel system was revealed. But the truck's high reading turned out to be isotopes in the soot of an industrial vacuum.

In addition to these periodic checks, the NYPD's "Operation Rolling Vigilance" has cops at least once a week working with various state and federal investigators at bridges and tunnels, stopping trucks that are licensed to carry hazardous materials.

"We've always been concerned about the potential for trucks and other vehicles to be used to convey explosives or other weapons," said Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. "We also want to screen against the possibility of sensitive cargoes being diverted for use in an attack."

The screeners pay extra attention to dump and cement trucks.

Police officials believe the roving checkpoints and array of inspection technology could thwart potential plots, including ones involving fertilizer-based truck bombs like those used in the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

The NYPD recently put more emphasis on screening shipments of chlorine in response to evidence that it has become a favored ingredient of homemade bombs in Iraq. It can turn into a deadly toxic gas when exposed to air.

The truck inspections are among NYPD security measures - many relying on recent technology - adopted in the wake of 9/11 and various terror scares.

The department has been developing mobile radiation detectors that can be mounted on cars or bicycles.

Officers on the streets and in the subways also have begun wearing pager-like radiation detectors on their belts. About 1,000 of the devices are in use.

IDF Captures Rabbi Binyamin Ze'ev Kahane's Murderer !

IDF arrests Kahane's son's murderer in Ramallah

Yaakov Katz and jpost.com staff,
THE JERUSALEM POST May. 28, 2007

A senior commander of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades who is responsible for the deaths of several Israelis was arrested in a joint IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Services) operation in Ramallah on Monday.

Officials said that Khaled Shawish, head of the Tanzim in Ramallah, was behind the shooting attack that killed , son of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and his wife Talia in December 2002.

Shawish was also responsible for dozens of other attacks, including suicide bombings in Jerusalem as well as other shooting attacks on roads in the area, that left a total of five Israelis dead and dozens wounded.

Officials said that Shawish, 26, has been wanted by the IDF since 2000 and has spent most of his time in hiding near the Mukata. In 2001, Shawish was wounded during clashes with the IDF.

Security officials said that Shawish was a dominant force within the Palestinian terror infrastructure and added that his arrest was a success for IDF and the Shin Bet. He was arrested while in possession of a gun.

The Al Aksa commander - a senior officer with the Palestinian National Security Force - was also a bomb maker who taught Tanzim operatives how to manufacture explosives and explosive belts and how to lay roadside bombs. He planned to kidnap both civilians and IDF troops.

In March 2002, Shawish dispatched a suicide bomber who exploded on King George St. in Jerusalem killing three people and wounding 35. In February 2002 he dispatched a suicide bomber that wounded two people.

Also Monday, soldiers arrested two Tanzim operatives in Jericho. Palestinians reported that one of the men was seriously wounded when he was shot by troops during the arrest operation.

Earlier, IDF soldiers conducting sweeps near Jenin discovered homemade weapons, which they confiscated.

Overnight Sunday, IDF forces arrested eight Palestinian fugitives during operations in the West Bank.

TODAY'S TERRORISM UPDATE

Terrorism

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Al-Qaeda Plans Western 'Hiroshima' News.com.au/Daily Telegraph Al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq are planning the first "large-scale" terrorist attacks on Britain and other western targets with the help of supporters in Iran, according to a leaked intelligence report. Spy chiefs warn that one operative had said he was planning an attack on "a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki" in an attempt to "shake the Roman throne", a reference to the West, according to The Times newspaper in the UK. Another plot could be timed to coincide with Tony Blair stepping down as prime minister, an event described by al-Qaeda planners as a "change in the head of the company". The report, produced earlier this month and seen by The Sunday Times, appears to provide evidence that al-Qaeda is active in Iran and has ambitions far beyond the improvised attacks it has been waging against British and American soldiers in Iraq. There is no evidence of a formal relationship between al-Qaeda, a Sunni group, and the Shi’ite regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but experts suggest that Iran’s leaders may be turning a blind eye to the terrorist organization's activities," reports The Times. The intelligence report also makes it clear that senior al-Qaeda figures in the region have been in recent contact with operatives in Britain. It follows revelations last year that up to 150 Britons had traveled to Iraq to fight as part of al-Qaeda’s "foreign legion". A number are thought to have returned to the UK, after receiving terrorist training, to form sleeper cells. Fifty-One Killed in Somalia Fighting News.com.au/AFP At least 51 people were killed overnight as clashes between Ethiopian forces and Islamist insurgents raged in the Somali capital Mogadishu, bringing the toll to more than 200 after five days of fighting. Scores of rotting corpses lay abandoned in the streets as the rival forces exchanged artillery and machinegun fire, demolishing buildings in northern and southern Mogadishu. Hundreds of terrified civilians were streaming out of the city, adding to tens of thousands who have been forced from their homes in recent weeks amid some of the worst violence in the battle-scarred port city for 15 years. The latest deaths brought the death toll from the past five days to 219, Sudan Ali Ahmed, head of the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organization that tracks casualty figures, said. Sixty-two injured civilians were taken to hospital...Witnesses said the toll could be much higher as wounded and dead people lay in areas too dangerous to reach, while hospitals were being overwhelmed with casualties...Residents said both sides were firing without regard for the consequences to civilians. Hezbollah: We Get Our Orders from Teheran Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs For the first time, a linkage officially confirming active Iranian support of [Hezbollah]these operations has been made public. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist organization has declared that all terrorist attacks, suicide bombings and other operations against Israel must first be authorized by the Teheran regime before they can be carried out. This, in effect, places the responsibility for these attacks squarely on Iran. For many years, Hezbollah was careful not to implicate Iran in its terror operations. However, in a 15 April interview with the Iranian Arabic language TV station ‘al Qawthar’, Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Naim Kassem, told the interviewer that suicide bombings, terrorist attacks and even artillery barrages against Israeli civilians all receive prior approval from the Ayatollah’s in Teheran. "The religious doctrine which dictates Hezbollah's actions in general and those relating to the Jihad in particular, is based on the rulings of the spiritual leader in Teheran. The spiritual leader has the power to permit our actions, and the spiritual leader can forbid them. In order to know what is permitted and forbidden regarding the Jihad, we ask for and receive overall permission and only then do we carry out the operation." Virginia Tech Grad Testifies Against Terrorist al-Timimi Pittsburgh Tribune-Review He never made it to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban, but Yong Ki Kwon -- a Northern Virginia engineer who fled the United States nine days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- said it wasn't for lack of effort. Kwon, 29, is a South Korea-born graduate of Virginia Tech who is serving an 11-year prison sentence as a result of his guilty plea last year on federal conspiracy and weapons charges. He has emerged as the prosecution's star witness in the case against Ali Al-Timimi, an American Islamic scholar charged with recruiting soldiers for the Taliban just five days after Sept. 11. Al-Timimi, 41, who maintains his innocence, sat quietly with his attorneys as the case against him unfolded last week during Kwon's testimony in an Alexandria, Va. courtroom. Al-Timimi was indicted last year on 10 counts, including charges of soliciting others to levy war and inducing others to join the Taliban. If convicted on all counts, he could face life in prison. Kwon, one of nine men convicted last year in the so-called "paintball jihad" network, told a chilling tale of the birth of an American jihad. The holy war was conceived in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in the dawn of the 21st century and was born at a meeting in his Fairfax, Va. apartment Sept. 16, 2001, when Kwon said he and several companions decided to heed the call of spiritual adviser Al-Timimi and to be trained to join the Taliban. Four days later, Kwon was on a flight to Karachi, Pakistan. Congressman Invite Hezbollah to Capitol Hill New Media Journal A press release issued by the Washington bureau of a pro-democracy Lebanese group called The World Council of the Cedar Revolution reports that a congressionally sponsored democracy workshop will be attended by two members of the Lebanese Parliament from the Michel Aoun's Bloc, a group who has declared its alliance with the terrorist group Hezbollah. Ibrahim Kenaan and Ghassan Moukheiber are members of the Lebanese Parliament belonging to the Michel Aoun's Bloc, a group that has officially signed a memorandum of understanding with and lists Hezbollah as their closest Ally. Hezbollah is on the State Departments list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The World Council of the Cedar Revolution goes on to say that Nabih Berri, the current speaker of the democratic government of Lebanon was integral in Kenaan and Moukheiber's selection. Berri, the group says, is the main opponent to Democracy in Lebanon. They cite his closing the Parliament and unwillingness to convene any general sessions of the governmental body for their declaration. Nabih Berri's Amal Movement, the group claims, has also been implicated in the 1985 TWA high jacking in which US Navy diver Robert Stethem was murdered. The World Council of the Cedar Revolution declared itself as a partner of the US and coalition countries in the Global War on Terror. The groups US director, John Hajjar, said in the press release, "We must recognize that a war of ideas is taking place and we must act to stop this spread of disinformation warfare that can influence the decision makers of today and tomorrow."

More Headlines: Hamas Calls for New Terror Attacks on Israel Al Qaeda-Palestine Hits US Target in Gaza 113 Killed as Battles Spread in Mogadishu Muslim Brotherhood Calls For Attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan Severed Heads Delivered to Philippine Military 'Humanitarian Disaster' Emerging in Somalia Nearly 200 Killed in Iraq Bombings Nigerian Police Killed by Islam Sect Mob Acid Truck Bomb Attack Foiled in Iraq Qaeda Group: New Rocket in Development NY Man Sentenced to 13 Years in Terrorism Case

Kill Every Single Israeli and American

Palestinian Sheikh Calls on Allah to Kill Every Single Israeli and American

At a mosque in Sudan, the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Sheik Ahmad Bahr, calls for Israel and America to be annihilated and for Allah to kill every single Israeli and American citizen. (Courtesy of ">MEMRI TV.)

Let’s give them lots of money, and a state of their own!

(Click picture to play video. Requires Windows Media Player.)

Ahmad Bahr: “You will be victorious” on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet. Yes, [the Koran says that] “you will be victorious,” but only “if you are believers.” Allah willing, “you will be victorious,” while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: “You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives.” They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America’s nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere. [...]

America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims “will be victorious, if you are believers.” Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America, by whom many are blinded today. Some people are blinded by the power of America. We say to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel. [...]

I tell you that we will protect the enterprise of the resistance, because the Zionist enemy understands only the language of force. It does not recognize peace or the agreements. It does not recognize anything, and it understands only the language of force. Our Jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan. [...]

The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: “Son, go and don’t be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews.” He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: “My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son.” Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over seventy years old – Fatima Al-Najjar. She was over seventy years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists. [...]

Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent down His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet – defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day

Celebrating Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day

By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 20, 2007Last fall, Pace University student Michael Abdurakhmanov tried to hold a screening of Obsession, a documentary about radical Islam, on his campus. Hoping to show that Islam is home to moderates as well as extremists, and that it is important to distinguish between the two camps, he unexpectedly found himself beset by opposition. Muslim students angrily rejected the idea. University administrators took an even harder line, with the school’s dean ominously warning Abdurakhmanov that showing the film could be considered a “hate crime,” and intimating, less than subtly, that police might be invited to sift through his personal record.

Now Abdurakhmanov has received restitution in a big way. Not only has Pace president David Caputo tendered a personal apology to Abdurakhmanov for the school’s strong-arm tactics, but yesterday marked the first-ever “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day,” a nationwide effort to call attention to the threat of militant Islam by holding a mass-screening of the film that Abdurakhmanov’s school, quite literally, didn’t want him to see: Obsession. In total, 96 colleges and universities, among them Pace University, Columbia, Duke, and other prominent schools, together with three high schools and two military bases, showed the film, which was sponsored by the Terrorism Awareness Project, a new program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

David Horowitz, the center’s president, called the event “the most extensive demonstration by conservative college students ever.” Horowitz added that the event represented a clear challenge to academic faculty who, in the name of political correctness, have sought to shut down debate about Islamic extremism. “University administrators, caving to pressures from forces sympathetic to the Islamic terrorists have suppressed the showing of the film Obsession in the name of ‘sensitivity,’ which in an age of political correctness is the Orwellian term for closing down debate on American campuses,” Horowitz said. “The simultaneous showing of a film exposing the Islamist threat at nearly 100 universities is a tremendous victory for the forces of freedom and for intellectual diversity, which are now under attack.”

Reports from many of the participating schools lent support to that impression. Even as many schools successfully screened the film, many students found themselves pressured -- and in some cases openly harassed -- to cancel the event. They resisted, and showed the film anyway.

Josiah Lanning, a student at Ohio’s Columbus State Community College, offered one such story. Lanning recounted that his attempt to show the Obsession was nearly frustrated by the head of his school’s student activities center, which is in charge of such events. Even though he took pains to fill out the proper paperwork for the event, the center repeatedly intervened. First, Lanning was admonished for his proposed flyer for the event, which had the indelicacy to point out that terrorist groups like Hezbollah committed, well, terrorism. Forced to replace the flyers, Lanning was next told to suspend the film until further notice due, incongruously, to this week’s massacre at Virginia Tech.

One professor, meanwhile, wrote Lanning an abusive email, berating him for showing a film that, as she saw it, creates “barriers to acceptance of any Muslim person,” and judging his motives “suspect” because of the event's connection to David Horowitz. (“David Horowitz is insulting to me and to my colleagues,” the professor pompously informed him.) Only after Lanning appealed to the dean of students at the college was he at last allowed to proceed with the showing.

But if school administrators and faculty gave him a hard time, the students were much more receptive. Especially memorable, Lanning said, was a Muslim student from Somalia who approached him after watching the film. Bracing himself for an argument, Lanning found himself pleasantly surprised. “He said he was glad to see that the movie differentiates between radical Islamists and peace-loving Muslims, and he said he was a supporter of the war on terror,“ Lanning recalled. Even the school’s chapter of the College Democrats found little to quarrel with about the film, Lanning said.

College Republicans at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, who also showed the film, had a similar experience. Cassie Sgro, a student who helped organize the event, said that some students and faculty members worried that showing the film would encourage harassment against Muslim and foreign students. Sgro disagreed. “The point of the film is to separate innocent people in the religion from the radical minority,” she told them.

Carl Soderberg, chair of the school’s College Republicans chapter, encountered similar resistance. “There were some faculty members who pressured me to postpone the film until they could find someone who ‘could properly frame the issue,’” he recalled. (Soderberg confessed that he was unsure what was meant by this, but was unwilling to put it to the test.) In the end, the school showed the film to some 50 students and faculty. As for the screening, it was a success, Soderberg said: “The point of the film was to raise awareness about a problem that many have stopped thinking about in the last five and a half years, and the best place to do that is on a college campus.”

Ruth Malhotra, a student at Georgia Tech and a member of the school’s College Republicans chapter, had perhaps the most difficult time winning the right to show Obsession. Among the hurdles erected by the school, Malhotra listed the fact that an ad for the event placed by the College Republicans was “censored” by the campus newspaper (a second ad was later published as submitted). In addition, she faced regular interference by opposed faculty and school administrators, boycotts and counter-demonstrations from left-wing student groups -- and even death threats designed to prevent the screening. Of Obsession’s subject -- radical Islam -- Malhotra understatedly observed: “It’s an issue that ignites a lot of passion and opposition.” Be that as it may, Malhotra, who spent much of the day under police protection, has no regrets about trying to show the film. “It’s important for students to know that violent Islamic extremism does pose a threat to our way of life, and to challenge that threat we have to understand what it is we’re up against.”

Back at Pace University, Michael Abdurakhmanov finally got to show the film he had intended to show last fall. In a striking reversal, the same school officials who leaned on Abdurakhmanov not to show the film now cautioned students, nearly 50 of whom showed up for the event, to remain respectful throughout. As it turned out, the event went off flawlessly, with the sole sign of trouble coming when a handful of Muslim of students, only one of whom had actually watched Obsession, rudely interrupted a post-film discussion. “They said that the film was geared towards Jews who are more Zionist oriented,” Abdurakhmanov said. “But some of their comments began to loose their worth, because it was clear to most in the audience that they hadn’t seen the film and were just expressing their personal views about what people should or should not watch.”

Like other students who overcame campus opposition to show the film, however, he was pleased with the results. Obsession, he said, “showed us a point of view we’re not used to seeing: That there is a group of people -- radical Islamists -- who are unwilling to compromise, but that there are also moderate Muslims, and together with them we can march against the radicals and silence their voice.” And that, as Michael Abdurakhmanov will tell you, is all he wanted to achieve in the first place.

Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin@gmail.com.

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Is Osama bin Laden dead?

Has he really died of typhoid? robert fox weighs the claim and its implications He was known to have been suffering from acute typhoid and seeking treatment in Pakistan in August Osama bin Laden, charismatic founder of al-Qaeda, died of typhoid earlier this month in Pakistan, according to a highly classified intelligence brief given to the King of Saudi Arabia and President Chirac this week, and leaked to the French newspaper L'Est Republicain. The chief of the terror group was known to have been suffering from acute typhoid and seeking treatment in Pakistan in mid-August. This was picked up and tracked by Saudi intelligence services. The same sources, said by the French to be very reliable, believe he later died. The powerful Pakistani intelligence agency the ISI - at times virtually a parallel government, instrumental among other things in founding the Taliban - has not confirmed the report. "We have no information on Osama's death," a senior Pakistan Interior Ministry official said on Saturday morning. Bin Laden last appeared on video in 2004. A few poor-quality audio tapes purporting to be of his voice surfaced earlier this year - but it was impossible to say when the original recordings were made. The reaction of the bin Laden command cell of al-Qaeda to the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks was surprisingly muted and unfocused. It said al-Qaeda would attack "American targets" again, and that all Americans should "convert to Islam". It is now clear that most of the talking, and broadcasting, by the old command cell has been done by Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, spokesman and ideologue for bin Laden and always seen as his Number 2. The highly articulate doctor came to the surface in the security operations following the assassination of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. He can only exist in the shadow of the magnetism of bin Laden and is not seen as a leader or strategist in his own right. Much the same goes for the al-Qaeda movement as a whole. Like other, admittedly smaller, terrorist groups such as Italy's Red Brigades, it has found it hard to reprise its big spectacular. It has never done anything like 9/11 since. Attacks like the Bali and Mombasa bombs, the train and transport bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in July last year may have been carried out in the name of Islamic revolution - adopting the al-Qaeda logo as it were - but... The death would be a blow to sloganising neo-conservatives and their notion of the ‘clash of civilisations’ ------- they were not under bin Laden's direct command. The attacks appear to be loosely linked homegrown efforts whose ideological and operational roots are in Pakistan and Bangladesh as much as in the bin Laden training camps in Waziristan and Kashmir. The death of bin Laden, if it is confirmed, will be cloaked in the propaganda of martyrdom, mourning and revenge. It could also trigger a major rethink of such notions as "Global War on Terror", which is long overdue. It will be a blow to the sloganising of the neo-conservatives - and their notion of the "clash of civilisations" - and to the high-flown rhetoric of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. It is likely to mean not so much "back to basics" in tackling terrorism, but back to the practicalities of how to deal with terrorists in the real world.