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EU proposes monitoring radical mosques
By COLLEEN BARRY, Associated Press WriterSat May 12, 4:30 PM ET
Security officials from Europe's largest countries backed a plan Saturday to profile mosques on the continent and identify radical Islamic clerics who raise the threat of homegrown terrorism.
The project, to be finished by the fall, will focus on the roles of imams, their training, their ability to speak in the local language and their sources of funding, EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini told a news conference after a meeting on terrorism.
Italian Interior Minister Guiliano Amato said Europe had extensive experience with the "misuse of mosques, which instead of being places of worship are used for other ends.
"This is bringing about a situation that involves all of our countries and involves the possibility of attacks and developing of networks that use one country to prepare an attack in another," Amato said.
The transit attacks in Madrid and London along with several thwarted terror plots have raised concerns across Europe about the susceptibility of disaffected young Muslims to the messages of extremist clerics.
British police have said the bombers in the July 2005 London suicide attacks listened to the sermons of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical cleric who was sentenced last year to seven years in prison for inciting followers to kill non-Muslims.
Britain also recently ordered the deportation of a Jordanian-born cleric, Abu Qatada, accusing him of links to terrorism and being a threat to national security. Abu Qatada is appealing.
Adel Smith, a well-known Muslim activist in Italy, said mosques in Italy are already extensively monitored and called the EU plan discriminatory.
"I think this is nonsense, I think mosques have been well monitored for some years," he said in a telephone interview. "It is a form of religious discrimination."
Frattini emphasized the need of deeper dialogue with the Islamic communities "to avoid sending messages that incite hate and violence."
Separately, the security officials from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland also pledged to work with African nations to interrupt a new cocaine route from Colombia across Africa into Europe.
"They have created bases in Europe and we need to have our counter-bases," Amato said, noting that the Spaniards have seen an influx of cocaine in the south and east of their country coming from beyond the traditional Atlantic route.
The officials proposed setting up drug-fighting bases in Portugal to monitor smuggling by sea and in Gibraltar to watch land routes.
While the US keeps tightening the airport security to ridiculous levels, the EU is actually looking at where homegrown terrorists are raised, then again, they've been dealing with this longer:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070512/ap_on_re_eu/eu_mosques
Looks like the kind of intelligent, practical plan the Bush administration is not known for coming up with.
Fortress America's gate is open
(http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/382787,CST-EDT-steyn13.article)
May 13, 2007
MARK STEYN
Most terrorists seem like bumbling losers if they're caught before the act: That's certainly true of the Fort Dix jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied. It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the prime minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a prenup committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who'd started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a P. G. Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria's Secret model and ex-wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.
But then Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 gang would have seemed pretty funny if you'd run into them in that lap-dance club they went to before the big day where the girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.
So, when we're fortunate enough to catch them in advance, it's worth pausing to consider what they tell us about the broader threat we face. According to genius New York Times headline writers, "Religion Guided Three Held In Fort Dix Plot." You don't say. Any religion in particular?
Well, the trio were Muslims, but Albanian Muslims -- i.e., they weren't Arabs and didn't have names like Mohammed and Abdullah (though their accomplices did). Even if Amer- ica were minded to profile, it's harder to profile against chaps with names like "Shain Duka" (Fort Dix) or "Rich- ard Reid" (the shoebomber) or "Jer- maine Lindsay" (a July 7 Tube bomb- er) or "Muriel Degauque" (a Belgian lady who self-detonated in a suicide attack on U.S. forces in Iraq) or "Jack Roche" (an Australian arrested for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra).
Second, the young Duka brothers are "radical Muslim" sons in a family of otherwise "moderate Muslim" oldsters. That, too, fits a pattern of de-assimilation, of young Western Muslims far more implacable and hostile than their parents and grandparents. The London bombers were British subjects born and bred, radicalized in the vacuum of contemporary multiculturalism. One of the Toronto plotters had a father-in-law who was the pharmacist at the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry base. The Princess Pats have done sterling work in Afghanistan, and pop supports their mission. But his daughter doesn't, and she named his grandchild after a Chechen terrorist killed by the Russians.
Third, what then radicalized so many Western Muslims? Answer: in many cases, the Balkans. When Yugoslavia collapsed 15 years ago, Jacques Poos told the Americans to butt out: "The hour of Europe has come!" he declared confidently. Poos was the foreign minister of Luxembourg, a country as big as your hot tub, but he chanced to be holding the European Union's rotating "presidency" at the time and, as it happened, the Americans were very happy to butt out. "We don't have a dog in this fight," said then-secretary of state, James Baker.
Well, the hour of Europe came and went, and a couple of hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too happy for Americans to butt back in again. So NATO bombed Christian Serbs in defense of Albanian Muslims, and a fat lot of good it did if the Duka brothers are any indication.
In theory, Baker was right. But out there in the Balkans, if you're one of the dogs in the fight, great-power evenhandedness can seem pretty one-handed by the time you hear about it. Don't take my word for it. Here's Osama bin Laden: "The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed."
Whoa, hold up there: How come a list of imperial interventions wound up with a bit of non-imperial non-intervention? Because, for serious nations, even not taking sides is seen as, in effect, taking sides. What was the single biggest factor in the radicalization of British Muslims? Omar Sheikh, convicted in Karachi for the kidnapping and beheading of Daniel Pearl, is British -- a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking London School of Economics student, until he was fired up by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims. And, while Europe dithered as the mountain of corpses piled up, Saudi money poured in, transforming the relatively mild Balkan Islam into something far more virulent. Look at the change in Muslim architecture in the region over the last 15 years: They build Wahhabist mosques now. Unlike the State Department complaceniks, the Islamists understand there is no stability.
Tough, you say. So what? Washington still has no dog in these fights. It's time to hunker down in Fortress America. Which brings me to the fourth lesson: What fortress? The three Duka brothers were (if you'll forgive the expression) illegal immigrants. They're not meant to be here. Yet they graduated from a New Jersey high school and they operated two roofing companies and a pizzeria. Think of how often you have to produce your driver's license or Social Security number. But, five years after 9/11, this is still one of the easiest countries in the world in which to establish a functioning but fraudulent identity.
Consider, for example, the post-9/11 ritual of airline security. You have to produce government-issued picture ID to the TSA official. Does that make you feel safer? On that Tuesday morning in September, four of the killers got on board by using picture ID they'd acquired through the "undocumented worker" network in Falls Church, Va. Half the jurisdictions in the United States issue picture ID to people who shouldn't even be in the country, and they issue it as a matter of policy. The Fort Dix boys were pulled over for 19 traffic violations, but because they were in "sanctuary cities," any cop who suspected they were illegals was unable to report them to immigration authorities. Again, as a matter of policy.
On one hand, America creates a vast federal security bureaucracy to prevent another 9/11. On the other hand, American politicians and bureaucrats create a parallel system of education and welfare and health care entitlements, main- taining and expanding a vast network of fraudulent identity that cor- rupts the integrity of almost all state databases. And though it played a part in the killing of 3,000 Americans, leaders of both parties insist nothing can be done to stop it. All we can do is give the Duka brothers "a fast track to citizenship."
The Iranians already are operating in South America's Tri-Border area. Is it the nothing-can-be-done crowd's assumption that the fellows who run armies of the "undocumented" from Mexico into America are just kindhearted human smugglers who'd have nothing to do with jihad even if the price was right? If you don't have borders, you won't have a nation -- and you may find "the jobs Americans won't do" covers a multitude of sins. ©Mark Steyn 2007
Thank you Detroit City Council
2007-05-12
This week the Detroit City Council unanimously approved an ordinance that bans the profiling of residents by police or officials based on race, ethnicity, physical appearance, dress or immigration status.
Detroit police and other city employees can no longer ask people about their immigration status unless it is specifically relevant to a crime or a federal investigation of terrorism. We commend the Council on this.
The ordinance, introduced by Council President Kenneth Cockrel Jr. after talks with Latino, Arab and Muslim groups, allows immigrants to call the police or request services without fear of being detained or deported.
It also allows people to breathe easy, without fear of being unfairly stopped, when they drive in the city wearing a skull cap, hijab, or having dark skin.
The group Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), based in Detroit, which brings together religious congregations for activism and empowerment, lead the push for the law to be passed.
Last week MOSES gathered 130 people at a Council hearing to ask council members to support the proposal.
Other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles have passed similar ordinances in the past.
Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings has said that people should always feel comfortable to contact police when a crime is committed and that police should not have to enforce federal immigration laws.
The passing of the ordinance was a culmination of efforts by different minority groups to cooperate and empower each other to achieve this goal.
The only disappointing aspect of this victory is that not enough Arab Americans were involved. The 130 people who swarmed the Council last Friday should have been 300, with half of them Arab Americans, even if the issue wasn't as relevant as it is to Arabs and Muslims. We should all be fighting for each other's causes.
At a MOSES-organized interfaith event last week, Rev. Charles Williams of the Mary Church Terrell Council, compared Detroit's minority groups to "crabs in a barrel," and said that we all need to "link up and climb out."
This ordinance brings everyone a little closer to the top of that barrel.
Well we are still behind the curve, setting up sanctuary cities:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/382787,CST-EDT-steyn13.article
Perchance, one of the American cities with a large population of legals and illegals:
http://www.arabamericannews.com/newsarticle.php?articleid=8552
Bush has had more than six years to tighten border security and curb illegal immigration and a GOP controlled Congress to do so...Just what has he done? Not a bloody thing, our borders are still about as secure a a box of Cheerios.
