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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Rest easy, America. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about: Boston reservoir tests safe after late-night trespassers nabbed

By Perry Chiaramonte

Massachusetts State Police beefed up patrols around the reservoir that supplies Boston’s drinking water after seven foreign students were caught trespassing in the area late at night.

With the city still jittery after the April 15 terror attack at the Boston Marathon, word that two women and five men, reportedly from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Singapore, had been found in the restricted area around the Quabbin Reservoir caused concerns. The reservoir serves Boston and some 40 other communities in the area.

“As an extra precaution, water quality samples were analyzed at MWRA’s lab yesterday and all came back normal,” Ria Convery, of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, told the Boston Herald. “There is no evidence of any water quality issues at the Quabbin Reservoir following the trespassing incident.”

It was after midnight on Tuesday morning when a state trooper on patrol at the reservoir spotted two cars parked on the grass near one of Quabbin’s entrances. The cop investigated and found a group of seven people, five men and two women walking from the water back to their cars. When the police officer asked why they were trespassing, members of the group replied that they were chemical engineers and recent college graduates who had an educational interest in the reservoir, according to police….

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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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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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Muslim with altered Saudi passport and pressure cooker arrested at Detroit Metro Airport

By Robert Spencer

Pressure cooker bombs were used in the Boston Marathon jihad bombing. “Saudi traveler with pressure cooker arrested at Detroit Metro Airport,” by Tresa Baldas for the Detroit Free Press, May 13 (thanks to all who sent this in):

Federal agents arrested a suspicious traveler with an altered Saudi Arabian passport at Detroit Metro Airport over the weekend after discovering a pressure cooker in his luggage.

According to a criminal complaint filed today in U.S. District Court, the passenger, Hussain Al Khawahir arrived at Detroit Metro on Friday from Saudi Arabia via Amersterdam [sic]. He had a visa and a Saudi Arabian passport, and told officers in the baggage control area that he would be visiting his nephew at the University of Toledo, the complaint said.

In the baggage area, two customs officers interviewed the passenger and noticed a page had been removed form the man’s passport, the complaint said. The man said that he did not know how the page was removed form the passport, and stated that the passport was locked in a box that only he, his wife and three minor children have access to in his home, the complaint said. His hometown was not listed in court documents.

While at the airport, customs and border officials also examined his luggage and found a pressure cooker inside….

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