GOOD: 2 Minnesota Women Convicted of Funneling Money to Terror Group in Somalia

Associated Press

Supporters of two Somali women scheduled to be sentenced for helping a terrorist group gather outside the Hennepin County Government Center on Thursday, May 16, 2013, in Minneapolis. The two women being sentenced went door-to-door in the name of charity to collect money for the terror group al-Shabab in Somalia.

Two Minnesota women who claimed they were helping the poor in Somalia were convicted Thursday of conspiring to funnel money to a terrorist group as part of what prosecutors called a “deadly pipeline” sending funds and fighters to al-Shabab.

After the verdicts, one of the women, Amina Farah Ali, told the judge through an interpreter that she was happy because she was “going to heaven no matter what,” and condemned those in authority, saying: “You will go to hell.” She was ordered into custody pending her sentencing.

Ali, 35, and Hawo Mohamed Hassan, 64, were each charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Ali also faced 12 counts of providing such support, for allegedly sending more than $8,600 to al-Shabab from September 2008 through July 2009, while Hassan faced two counts of lying to the FBI.

Both were found guilty on all counts. The terrorism-related counts each carry up to 15 years in prison, while lying to the FBI carries up to eight years. No sentencing date was set, and prosecutors said it was too early to predict what sentence they’d recommend.

The women, both U.S. citizens of Somali descent, were among 20 people charged in Minnesota’s long-running federal investigations into recruiting and financing for al-Shabab, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group with ties to Al Qaeda. Investigators believe at least 21 men left Minnesota — home to the country’s largest Somali community — to join al-Shabab.

Though others have pleaded guilty to related charges, the women were the first to go to trial.

The verdicts will likely lead to other guilty pleas, said Omar Jamal, first secretary of the Somali mission to the United Nations in New York. He also said it would be difficult for law enforcement agencies to rebuild the trust they had worked to establish with the Somali community.

Prosecutors had emphasized that the case was not about a community or a religion, but two women who deliberately broke the law….

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How American Muslims Radicalize

By Karen Lugo

Self-segregated. Embittered. Angry enough to be mentored by jihadists.

If this is what we mean by “radicalized,” then America needs to pay close attention to its neighborhood Islamic centers.

There is a nexus between disaffected Muslims and those who graduate to violence, and two studies point to the American mosque. Now that another plot has been executed rather than foiled, there is finally overdue focus on the imams who foment resentment and alienation.

We have allowed mosques to serve as citadels, cutting Muslims off from the democratic society outside. When Muslim marriages are arranged, then officiated and filed within the mosque; when large and small contract disputes are adjudicated by a sheikh; when marriages are ended and custody determined by the imam, and financial disagreements assessed by mosque officials, observant Muslims might as well be living anywhere.

Certainly, the conditions for those that live under tight mosque control do not reflect anything that resembles America.

Constitutional rights and due process protections do not penetrate many sharia-observant mosque domains. After speaking with several Muslim individuals seeking to reassert constitutional rights after summary judgments were rendered, it is apparent that what purports to be Islamic arbitration is really more akin to kindergarten sandlot refereeing. The documents reveal that there was no semblance of legal process expected in arbitration proceedings, no conflict of interest disclosures, and no provision for structural fairness rules.

Even Muslim legal scholar M. Ali Sadiqi, writing for the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, noted that Muslims would have difficulty bringing internal arbitration standards into conformity with American legal principles, since under sharia inheritance rules women are entitled to only one quarter of the estate — and one eighth if there are children.

In Germany, law enforcement authorities now see the Islamic courts as a competitive “shadow justice system,” and complain that sharia-styled tribunals interfere with the government’s duty to administer both civil and criminal justice.

In Britain, Baroness Cox has been working tirelessly for years to see British law reinstated and sharia jurisdiction reversed. During hearings on her bill, now called the Arbitration and Mediation Services Equality Bill, Baroness Donaghy (Labour Party) called the presumed acquiescence of women to unequal and often cruel treatment as “consensual as rape.” A Muslim woman told Baroness Cox:

I feel betrayed by Britain, I came to this country to get away from all this but the situation is worse here than in my country of origin.

From Britain to the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, France, Germany, and America, it is possible for Muslims to experience no notable difference between life in the West and the conditions that they fled back in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, and Iraq. The only mentionable difference: The generous social welfare programs offered in the Western cultures.

When I inquired of a local imam as to how he identified radicalization and whether he was concerned about it, he tellingly pivoted to accusations that the U.S. government does not do enough for immigrant Muslims.

In contrast, Western-oriented American Muslim Dr. Zuhdi Jasser called out clerics who urge adherents to “focus on their own victimization, patronizingly reminding the rest of America not to be ‘racists’ [or] ‘bigots.’”

The unquestionably radical nature of the Islamic Society of Boston mosque and its counterpart the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (called “small one” and “big one” by locals) illustrates the worst of Islamist subversion….

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Islam: Libido Unleashed?

By David Yeagley

Freaks in a frenzy

Islam is Freudian libido unleashed. Under the robes of dark religion, the system of Islam glorifies the most naked, destructive passions of human nature. Libido–undefined sexual energy—is expressed in gruesome death.  Among civilized people libido finds more tolerable expression through creative sublimation, such as art; but in Islam, sublimation is removed.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the famous Viennese Jewish psychologist, father of the “couch,” or “confessional” talk therapy, introduced a profound sexual theory in which libido explained what was formerly called mayhem andcannibalism.  In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud suggests cannibalism, along with incest, was an instinct.  Cannibalism, always involving mayhem, is directly linked to libido.  In Totem and Taboo (1918), Freud describes various cases of incest, and suggests that sexual taboos develop precisely around the most powerful but self-destructive desires.  (Civilization simply harnesses or re-channels these dreadful desires.)

But Islam glories in removing sexual taboos. The brutality of Islam, so unprecedented in modern times, is the studied absence of civilized inhibition.

What inspires such horrid Islamic acts of bodily dismemberment—the beheadings, the chopping off of body parts, the compulsive delight inblowing to pieces the human body, and the ghastly acts of cannibalism?

Libido.

Barbarity we thought characterized more primitive man, in more primitive times.  Tribal people have always relished the grotesque.  Indulgent violence is part of what it means to be “heathen.”…

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The Women of Benghazigate

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Suddenly, it seems we have broken through the most effective executive branch cover-up and complicit media blackout in memory.  Among the many recent revelations is one that has gone unnoted:  The prominent role played by women in the Obama administration’s: policy-making that led up to the jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012; its handling of the crisis; and its subsequent, scandalous damage-control operation.

Since, as they say, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, here’s a short guide to the Women of Benghazigate, whose contributions to one aspect or another of this affair have become public knowledge – thanks, in particular, to testimony from three whistleblowers before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week:

• First, there is Hillary Clinton, who was Secretary of State at the time. We now know she was personally responsible for at least some of the decisions that left personnel in the “special mission compound” in Benghazi highly vulnerable to attack.  Her whereabouts and activities are unaccounted for – like those of President Obama – during most of the seven-plus hours in which jihadists systematically assaulted first that facility and then a nearby CIA “annex.”  And then, the next day, she knowingly deceived the public about what precipitated the attack, blaming an internet video.
• The poster child for the Benghazigate cover-up is UN Ambassador Susan Rice.  She was chosen to make the rounds of all five network Sunday morning news programs on September 16, 2012.  She reinforced the false narrative that Mrs. Clinton first pushed out publicly four days before in a joint Rose Garden appearance with President Obama.
• State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland was evidently among those involved in massaging twelve different versions of “talking points” upon which intelligence officials drew to misleadingly brief the Congress.  Amb. Rice also used such guidance to justify the fraud that YouTube, not jihad, was responsible for the violence in Benghazi.
• Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, was formerly in charge of managing so-called “bimbo eruptions” during Bill Clinton’s 1992 run for the White House and administration.  According to one of last week’s witnesses, Gregory Hicks – who became the Chief of Mission in Libya after his boss, Ambassador Chris Stevens, was murdered on that fateful night, Ms. Mills has lately been suppressing equally unwanted eruptions concerning Benghazigate.  She upbraided the diplomat for challenging the party line about what happened then and thereafter.  She also reportedly sought to interfere with a congressional investigation into the matter.
•  Mr. Hicks testified that the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, Beth Jones, delivered her own, “blistering critique” of his management style after he asked “why the ambassador said there was a demonstration when the embassy reported there was an attack?”  Mr. Hicks believes he was demoted in retaliation for posing such unwelcome questions.

Curiously, the truth that has finally begun to emerge has yet to shed light on the involvement of two other women who almost certainly were players before, during and after the Benghazi attacks.

The first is Valerie Jarrett…

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KEEPING OUR HEADS IN THE SAND AFTER BOSTON

by STEVEN EMERSON

The Obama administration’s policy banning references to “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” in discussions about terrorism drew criticism during last Thursday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the Boston Marathon bombings.

The bombings “should again teach us that the enemy we face is violent Islamist extremism, not just al Qaida,” said former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman. “Osama bin Laden is dead. And the remaining leadership of al Qaida is on the run, but the ideology of violent Islamist extremism is rapidly spreading.”

The Boston investigation already has shown that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev “adopted the outrageously false narrative of violent Islamist extremism, that Islam and America are involved in a struggle to the death with each other,” Lieberman said.

It has been more than five years since the Department of Homeland Security, under the Bush administration, issued a directive about “the difficult terrain of terminology” as recommended by unidentified academics and Muslim American activists. “Jihadist” and “Islamist terrorist” were identified as terms to be avoided. Jihad “glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have, and damages relations with Muslims around the globe,” the memo said.

By identifying them as mere extremists or criminals, they lose some of the luster that attracts recruits, the argument goes.

Is it working? How can you tell?

Anecdotally, this strategy did nothing to dissuade the Tsarnaevs, or any of the other homegrown terrorist plotters in recent years. The policy’s effectiveness is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. But skeptics, such as Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program Director Jeffrey M. Bale, say the language policy is illogical.

“Why, after all, would Muslims look to non-Muslims to interpret their religion for them, or for guidance about how to identify and label Islamists?” Bale said in response to an email from the Investigative Project on Terrorism. “Indeed, if we call jihadists ‘criminals,’ it may actually have the counterproductive effect of garnering more sympathy for them given the levels of anti-U.S. and anti-Western hostility throughout the Muslim world.”

Jihadists routinely make it plain that – while religion may not be the sole factor driving them to violence – their Islamic beliefs and identities dominate their thinking. “We in the West just don’t seem to want to believe what they constantly say,” Bale wrote. (Read his full response here.)

Faisal Shahzad failed to set off the car bomb he built and parked near Times Square in 2010. But he said he tried to kill Americans because he saw himself as part of “the war against people who believe in the book of Allah and follow the commandments, so this is a war against Allah. So let’s see how you can defeat your Creator, which you can never do. Therefore, the defeat of U.S. is imminent and will happen in the near future, inshallah [God willing], which will only give rise to much awaited Muslim caliphate, which is the only true world order.”

Farooque Ahmed similarly thought he was acting to defend Muslims when he plotted to attack subway stops along Washington’s Metro.

FBI agents were drawn to Ahmed after he tried to make contact with terrorist groups so he could wage jihad against Americans. At Ahmed’s sentencing, public defender Kenneth Troccoli explained that Ahmed’s extreme religious beliefs helped land him in front of the court….

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