Al Qaeda Lives

By Thomas Joscelyn

What actually happened in Egypt and Libya on September 11, 2012? The story from the U.S. government has changed many times in an effort to craft a narrative that causes as little damage as possible to the Obama administration. Now the administration seems to have settled on something approaching a final version.

It goes like this:

On September 11, and in the days that followed, citizens in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa gathered to protest The Innocence of Muslims, a video on YouTube produced in California that was disrespectful to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. Protests that began peacefully outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo and elsewhere grew more violent as extremists decided to take advantage of the unrest.If the violence wasn’t justified, the demonstrations were understandable, given the deeply offensive content of the video. During his speech before the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, for example, President Obama argued that the video “must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.” And while the attacks in Benghazi, Libya, did not grow out of street demonstrations there, as initial reports had suggested, they did come in response to the protests in Cairo, which were sparked by the offensive film.

White House press secretary Jay Carney summarized this version of events during a November 27 briefing. “There was no protest outside the Benghazi facility,” he conceded. “To this day,” he continued, “it is the assessment of this administration and of our intelligence community and certainly the assessment of your colleagues and the press who have interviewed participants on the ground in the assault on our facilities in Benghazi that they acted at least in part in response to what they saw happening in Cairo and took advantage of that situation.”

Carney elaborated (emphasis added): “They saw what was the breach of our embassy in Cairo and decided to act in Benghazi. And as you know, the breach of our embassy in Cairo was directly in response to the video and was started as a protest outside of our embassy in Cairo.”

The Obama administration’s bottom line: The conflagrations across the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere can be traced back to an offensive video. In this telling, there is an almost civic quality to the protests—the demonstrators were concerned Muslims out to defend their religion from the unjustifiable bigotry of a misguided filmmaker (who is now in prison for parole violations).

This story leaves out what is arguably the most important detail: the role of al Qaeda in the attacks. It’s a sanitized version of reality. The true story is far more complicated—and gives reasons for both optimism and concern.

On the one hand, one could argue that the attacks on September 11, 2012, reflect a degradation of al Qaeda’s capabilities, 11 years after the catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The events earlier this year seem to have been planned as much to gain attention as they were to do lasting damage. That’s the optimistic interpretation.

On the other hand, al Qaeda and its supporters breached the walls of several American diplomatic facilities. They raised their own flags in place of the Stars and Stripes. And in a well-planned, military-style attack, they overran a U.S. consulate and killed an ambassador and three other Americans. It’s not 9/11/01. But neither is it the work of a group that is “on the path to defeat,” as the president claimed during his speech at the Democratic National Convention a week before the attacks….

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Al-Qaeda’s Female Suicide Bomber Death Cult

By Frank Crimi

Islamist terrorists have long used women as suicide bombers, but now their combatant role has expanded with al-Qaeda’s formation of an all-female jihadist fighting unit whose primary mission is purportedly to attack Coalition targets in Afghanistan.

The discovery of the all-girl military group, dubbed the “Burkha Brigade,” came to light in a recent onlinevideo that showed a bevy of fully covered women firing off a wide selection of heavy weaponry, including machine guns, assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades.

The women enlistees are thought to have been recruited from Chechnya, the semi-autonomous republic in the Russian Federation and a state which has long provided fertile ground for producing female jihadists.

That disturbing history was most notably on display in 2002 when bomb-strapped Chechen women were among 50 Islamist militants who held over 800 people hostage in Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater. In that assault nearly 130 civilians were killed.

While Muslim women, dressed as males, have in the past fought alongside Islamist militants, the creation of an all-female fighting force adds a new twist in the escalating use of women combatants by al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamist terror groups in the region.

Yet, while the overall use and effectiveness of the all-girl fighting brigade remains unclear, it is likely that its formation will not eclipse the feminine combative role most favored by Islamist terrorists: suicide bomber.

That terrifying function is, unfortunately, ideally suited for women given Islamic restrictions against searching females. Those taboos often allow Muslim women to hide explosive-laden suicide vests underneath their burqas and pass undetected through security checkpoints.

It should be noted that while women are highly valued by jihadists as human projectiles, children and the mentally impaired used in that same capacity are equally prized by Islamist terrorists.

The Taliban, in particular, has a predilection for utilizing youthful suicide bombers given that nearly ninety percent of the estimated 5,000 suicide bombers trained in Pakistan are under the age of 16. As Pakistani Taliban commander Qari Hussain once explained, “Children are tools to achieve God’s will, whatever comes your way you sacrifice it.”

However, not to be outdone, al-Qaeda has shown an appreciation for utilizing the mentally impaired for its suicide operations….

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Al-Qaeda-Allied Qatar Buys into Europe’s Busiest Airport

by Daniel Greenfield

London’s Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in the European Union with 70 million passengers passing through its corridors. It is busier than France’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and Spain’s Madrid-Barajas Airport. It has more than three times the traffic of New York’s JFK Airport and receives flights from around the world. Heathrow’s operator, BAA Limited operates multiple airports in the UK, including two in London and two in Scotland. And the Qatari monarchy has just bought a fifth of BAA.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11, was a former employee of the Qatari government. Mohammed had coordinated a mass air bombing plot with his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who had been behind the original World Trade Center attack, and had wired him money from Qatar for the World Trade Center bombing.

The 9/11 Commission Report states that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was able to evade capture after the World Trade Center bombing due to the intervention of a prominent Qatari official, widely believed to be Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, and the Minister for Islamic Affairs at the time. Presently Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al Thani is Qatar’s Minister of the Interior.

By aiding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Sheikh Al-Thani allowed him to continue plotting attacks against the United States and that led directly to September 11. It was Sheikh Al-Thani who had encouraged Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to move from Pakistan to Qatar. And from Qatar, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was able to engage in terrorist plots while officially working for the Qatari government.

Qatari links to Al-Qaeda have been one of the worst kept secrets in the region. Members of the Al-Thani royal family have aided Al-Qaeda and there are reports that Jihadists even had their own training camp in Qatar. A report by a former intelligence officer stated that Bin Laden was hosted by Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al Thani before the Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 Americans.

The Qatari government has reportedly been sending millions of dollars to Al-Qaeda every year and Wikileaks cables from the US embassy in Doha, the Qatari capital, revealed that US officials knew of a Qatari link to September 11 and described Qatar as the “worst” on regional counterterrorism—which is a truly horrible assessment when you consider that Qatar was being compared to the likes of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Al-Jazeera, the Al-Thani clan’s pet propaganda network, has been the destination of choice for Bin Laden videos. Bin Laden’s first statement, five days after September 11, was broadcast by Al-Jazeera, indicating a fairly quick turnaround time. The Bin Laden tapes gave Al-Jazeera a great deal of prominence even as the network was overseen by Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer Al Thani, Qatar’s Minister of Information.

In light of all that, Qatar’s buy of a fifth of BAA which controls six airports and which formerly managed four American airports, including Baltimore-Washington International Airport  and Logan International Airport, which was the departure point of choice for two of the 9/11 planes, giving it extensive inside knowledge of their operations, is extremely troubling. Qatar does not yet have a majority stake, but it has bought a sizable portion of the majority shareholder’s stake in BAA, which, if previous patterns hold, it will likely expand on…..

 

….In 1938, Winston Churchill delivered one of his most famous speeches in the House of Commons. At its conclusion he said, “Historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory.”

That speech was published as part of a collection under the title, “While England Slept.” Now England still sleeps. It slumbers as Qatar, Kuwait and the Saudis creep in, loot its treasures and seize its strategic assets. It snores while they knot a rope around its neck. And the United States is not in a much better position.

While Al-Qaeda terrorists hijack airplanes, their financial backers hijack airports. While suicide bombers kill dozens, the Islamist states of the Middle East plot to kill millions. The cries of Syrian Christians being murdered in Qatar’s latest war can’t be heard in the comfortable quarters of Canary Wharf. No more so than the cries of Sudeten Czechs were heard in 1938. And yet it might surprise those cheerfully selling out their native lands to consider that the fate of Egyptian Christians and Syrian Christians might one day be their fate.

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