17-Jul-18: Prayers for the dead, prayers for the living

There's going to be a public discussion this evening in London about the events we mention below. What we write in this blog post will, we hope, reach the people gathered at JW3 and be understood as a constructive contribution to a fraught but important dialogue:

Devastation at Sbarro pizzeria, Jerusalem, August 9, 2001

We’re living in morally confused times.

The handful of young British Jews, a few dozen according to reports, who assembled in Parliament Square in mid-May and solemnly said Kaddish for 62 dead Palestinian Arab Gazans, surely didn’t see themselves as compromising any principles or betraying any values.

They likely felt they were on moral high ground by being in solidarity with unfortunate, peaceful, unarmed, aggrieved protesters who clashed with Israeli army bullets on Gaza’s side of the Hamas/Israel border.

Our fifteen year old daughter Malki was murdered in Jerusalem by a woman foot soldier in the Hamas fighting forces. This happened in the Battle of Sbarro Pizzeria. That female terrorist saw herself as unarmed too - as a protestor, as aggrieved.

This she expressed by planting a bomb – a walking, breathing human bomb – in the pizza place.

After the massacre was done, she said she chose that site because at two in the afternoon it attracted children. She needed dead children. Lots of dead Jewish children.

We now know that just a few hours before the London Kaddish, a Hamas insider owned up to how at least 50 of the 62 deceased “protestors” were in reality Hamas fighters. Another Gazan terror group immediately piped up and claimed several more of the dead as their fighters. Most, maybe all, of the Gazans who passed on in that ‘demo’ were there to fight. And - at almost any price - to bring extreme harm to Israelis.

Hamas’s Salah Bardawil acknowledges 50 Hamas fatalities among the
62 killed on Israel-Gaza border, May 16, 2018 (Screenshot) [Source: MEMRI]

It’s unfair to blame the Kaddish-sayers for not knowing the truth about them - those rioting, murder-minded Gazan jihadists. The news professionals at the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian evidently didn’t know either. Some still don’t know it even now.

But we can ask those youngsters, some of whom had had some instruction in the basics of Judaism, if they know what Kaddish means. 

Beyond the fact that it’s said for the dead, do they recognize these words?

May there be abundant peace from heaven. And life for us and for all Israel. And say, Amen. May the Maker of peace in His celestial heights make peace for us and for all Israel and say, Amen.

Kaddish doesn’t mention the dead at all – not even once. It’s a central Jewish prayer for goodness. An expression of gratitude for Heaven’s power to bring peace and beneficence into our lives and into the world.

At the heart of the Kaddish is something that has been at the top of my mind constantly since Malki’s life was stolen from us. It’s not peace. Heaven knows, we haven’t had much of that.

No. It’s the importance of us, of our side: Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu – May He make peace for us. 

Losing a child to triumphant, barbarous murder is an experience – I can tell you from first-hand knowledge – that fiercely concentrates a person’s mind. It forces you to look very closely at what the enemy wants. And then to decide what our side wants. 

I don’t believe we Jews are better than other people. I don’t suggest for a moment that peace is something only we, our side, ought to have. On the contrary.

Malki Z"L, on her way to

a Passover hike when she was 14

Some of us knew before the Hamas thug admitted it that the Gaza mob was there at the fence to do as much harm to us as humanly possible. Those who didn’t know it then must surely know it now, even as the BBC and its ilk conceal this reality. 

The Gazan side want to win, to triumph. And to destroy us. Peace isn’t on their minds at all.

The moral confusion I mentioned just now is what causes some young Jews to lose their sense of us. Feeling part of us doesn’t, mustn’t, mean wishing bad to the other side. But it does mean understanding that if we want good – for us and also for them – we have to protect our own side first: our own homes, our own children, our own lives.

And be vigilant because we face a real, shooting, incinerating, bombing foe who means to wreak the greatest possible harm on us.

If the shocking display of Jews saying Kaddish was meant in the same way we say it for our deceased grandparents and family members, then it signifies a failure by all of us in preparing young Jews for a life that sadly includes unwanted confrontation with an unfathomable evil that targets us – all of us.

But if it was intended as a cry for more peace, then I wish those young people knew, and maybe they do, that on the Israeli side, the passion for peace is real and easy to find.

If we want a passion for peace to take root among the Gazans, we owe it to ourselves to first acknowledge that calls for peace – as opposed to calls for victory, self-sacrifice and triumph – have completely gone from Gaza and not only from Gaza. And for now at least, they don't seem to be coming back soon.

That’s something worth praying for.


Postscript: The families of Malki Roth הי"ד and Michal Raziel  הי"ד invite friends of the two girls, murdered together in the Sbarro massacre on the 20th day of Av, seventeen years ago, to pray with us at their gravesides in Jerusalem's Har Tamir cemetery (part of the Har Menuchot complex) on Wednesday August 1, 2018 starting at 5:30 pm. We will be glad to provide more specific details [click].

18-Mar-18: Unanswered questions about terrorists hiding in plain sight

Ahmad Hassan [Image Source]

This past Friday in London, a criminal court convicted a young man, just 18, of attempted murder.

This arose from his planting a bomb on a busy London Underground train carriage whose detonation at Parsons Green station injured 51 people. His name is Ahmed Hassan. The judge, Mr Justice Haddon-Cave, is reported to have told Hassan that his conviction by the jury was on the basis of "overwhelming evidence". He is going to be sentenced this week.

The Guardian's report of the trial's outcome sets the tone for a somewhat familiar scenario:

Small, shy and undoubtedly damaged, Ahmed Hassan attracted no end of kindness and sympathy when he arrived in Britain in the back of a cross-Channel lorry in October 2015, saying he was Iraqi and 16 years old... ["'A duty to hate Britain': the anger of tube bomber Ahmed Hassan", March 16, 2018]

From the brief reports, it seems life in England was not so terrible for the refugee. He won an Amazon voucher for becoming "student of the year"; he then used it buy one of the key chemicals for the explosive device. Just before executing his plan, he texted to a woman described in reports as his college mentor: "It's almost better to be back in Iraq. It's better to die because you have heaven."

Another clue to the personality throbbing inside the young jihadist is (as ITV nooted that he "got off the train one stop before the bomb partially exploded on the floor of the carriage" and "fled London with more than £2,000 in cash but was picked up by police at the Port of Dover the next day."

Also that he filled the bomb with shrapnel, including five knives, two screwdrivers, and nails and screws. This is what you do when you want to maximize carnage and agony, as the man who made the bomb that destroyed the Jerusalem Sbarro pizzeria in 2001 did.

Some details from ITV's report:

• The court was told Hassan told Home Office officials he was trained by Islamic State "to kill" after he arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry in 2015. He was taken in by foster parents Penny and Ron Jones MBE, and studied media and photography at Brooklands College in Weybridge.
• The Iraqi-born teenager is said to have prepared the attack while his foster parents were away on holiday between September 1 and September 8 last year... The Old Bailey heard he wanted to cause "maximum" carnage to avenge the death of his father, who was blown up in Iraq more than 10 years before.
• One woman, known only as Miss S, giving evidence from behind a screen said she had been horribly scarred and burnt. Through tears she described hearing the bomb, seeing a giant flame and then realising her body and clothes were burning.
• Another victim, Ann Stuart told jurors: "What I saw was this flash and whoosh that came up from my side. My hair was smoking. I patted myself out and got off the train and this man picked me up and held me."
• Some 23 passengers suffered burns, with some describing their hair catching fire and their clothes melting in the blast. Another 28 suffered cracked ribs and other crush injuries in the stampede to get out of the platform via a narrow stairway.
• Commander Dean Haydon, head of Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command, said: "I describe Hassan as an intelligent and articulate individual that is devious and cunning in equal measures... On the one hand he was appearing to engage with the (Prevent) programme but he kept secret what he was planning and plotting. We describe him as a lone actor... It was only through good fortune that it only partially exploded. If it had, without a doubt we would have been dealing with many fatalities."

Here's how the UK's Security Minister at the Home Office, Ben Wallace, greeted Friday's verdict.

"I welcome the conviction of Hassan who sought to spread terror in this country and murder innocent people. This case is a bleak reminder of the devastating consequences of radicalisation... It is clear that there are some lessons to be learned in this particular case... However we should not allow this to undermine all the good work taking place across the country to stop terrorism and our work to help those who are legitimately in need. Ultimately, no one should be in doubt that those who bear responsibility for the atrocious attacks we have seen in the past year are the terrorists themselves."

The shrapnel

There is another way to look at this. It's well expressed in a leading article in today's Times of London. Some excerpts:

More than a century ago, in his book The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton introduced us to the idea of the terrorist hiding in plain sight... 

Ahmed Hassan, a teenage Iraqi asylum seeker, who in 2015 arrived in Britain illegally on a lorry going through the Channel tunnel, could hardly have done more to show he was serious about his terrorism... 

When it was discovered by staff at his sixth-form college that he seemed to be raising funds for Isis, he said it was his duty to hate Britain. He was referred to the government’s Prevent programme and its Channel project, which has the aim of mentoring young people and steering them away from radicalisation. It failed.

When he received a prize of an Amazon voucher for his studies at the college, he bought bomb-making equipment.

When he was placed with Ron and Penny Jones, foster parents appointed MBEs for their work, they were not told about his claims of Isis links or fears that he was being radicalised. But his behaviour did lead them to think he was suffering from a “mental deterioration”. They are now said to have stopped fostering.

There are so many things wrong with the Hassan case that it goes beyond what Ben Wallace, the security minister, has described as “some lessons to be learnt”. The collective failure of the security services, Surrey county council and other bodies could easily have resulted in a devastating loss of life... Many of those who were injured at the time are still affected. More questions need to be asked about Prevent, supposedly a deradicalisation programme.

Above all, why was Hassan here at all? At a time when this country has problems enough neutralising the danger from returning British Isis fighters, providing asylum to an Iraqi who claimed he had been trained to kill by Isis seems perverse in the extreme. His story, that he had been kidnapped and trained against his will, was hokum. He should have been put on the next plane out of Britain. Where terrorists are concerned we can never afford to be a soft touch. This time we were. ["Britain was a soft touch for this terrorist", The Sunday Times, March 18, 2018]

If these questions posed by Time of London's editorial people aren't asked in the right places, and the right places are not only in London or the UK, then it's a certainty that luck is going to run out at some point. The next seething, zealous, well-trained would-be mass-murderers are almost certainly located right now already inside the countries they lust to attack. It's insanity to ignore, in the name of political-correctness, the life-and-death dangers they respresent.

And if you're a senior politician doing the ignoring, that's irresponsible recklessness of a kind that has no expiation.

07-Oct-17: A quiet evening

London's museum precinct this afternoon: The driver
is pinned down by police [Image Source]

It's an ordinary Saturday night here in  Jerusalem.

Alright, not so ordinary since the whole country is in the midst of the Jewish religious festival of Sukkot which runs for a week and whose central motif is the temporary and generally-flimsy dwellings that are built by hundreds of thousands of families all over the country, and wherever in the world Jews live. It's the tail end of summer, the days are still sunny and warm and the evenings - Jerusalem's summer evenings are like this - are breezy and pleasant. A relaxing time.

All of which has gotten us thinking about the range and volume of news reports about terror in tonight's bulletins. A selection:

• Authorities in New York City revealed last night (Friday) that they have arrested three ISIS sympathizers who planned terror attacks on various New York locations including the MTA subway, music concerts and targets in the Times Square area. NBC News says the FBI arrested Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy, 19, a Canadian citizen, who [source] has been in US custody since May 2016 when he was arrested in New Jersey and who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in October 2016; Talha Haroon, 19, an American citizen living in Pakistan and arrested there; and Russell Salic, 37, a Filipino who is being sent to the US for trial. It quotes Federal prosecutors saying the three men’s goal "was to kill and injure as many people as possible"  and that El Bahnasawy had already acquired bomb-making materials and secured a cabin to build them. They also planned - shades of last week's Las Vegas massacre - to shoot civilians "at specific concert venues". Reuters says "documents unsealed in federal court in Manhattan on Friday [showed] El Bahnasawy and Mr Haroon planned to carry out attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ran from early June to early July."
• In Switzerland, a man wielding two knives rushed at police and two refugees inside a refugee center in the southern Italian-speaking region of Ticino at 2:00 am, local time, today. Police fired at the attacker as a result of which he is now dead. The French news agency AFP says the assailant was a 38 year old Sri Lankan "asylum seeker". Police were called to break up a fight in Brissago, on the shores of Lake Maggiore and were in the building when the man with the knives attacked the other people. 
• French police yesterday (Friday) charged three men in Paris with launching an explosive attack on a residential building in the city's upscale 16th Arrondissment. The plot failed when the gas canisters they rigged up failed to ignite. According to Times of Israel, two of the suspects were already on a police terror-watch list. The three, identified as Amine A, his cousin Sami B, and Aymen B., are now charged with multiple crimes and in detention. Police found four gas cylinders after being called to the scene: two in the hallway attached to a mobile phone which evidently served as a detonator and two more on the sidewalk outside the building. Associated Press says the charges against the three are attempted murder linked to a terrorist enterprise, transporting explosives and participating in a terrorist association aimed at preparing attacks. All three have prior French criminal convictions; we are not yet able to learn the details.
• In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a little-reported shootout today between police and terrorists, according to an RT news story, resulted in the deaths of a "gunman and two guards... as the Saudi Arabian security forces prevented a terrorist attack near the royal Al Salam Palace... There has so far been no confirmation of the attack from Saudi authorities. The US Embassy in Saudi Arabia has issued a security warning to American citizens in Jeddah over the reported attack." This is bound to get more coverage but there's almost none tonight. 
• Another little-reported terror attack though on a much larger scale in the huge (but almost invisible to Western eyes) West African state of Niger. CNN says "three US Green Berets were killed and two others were wounded... near the Mali-Niger border when a joint US-Nigerien patrol was attacked Wednesday... Initial indications are the Green Berets were ambushed by up to 50 fighters who are thought to be affiliated with ISIS... The Green Berets were part of a team advising and assisting local forces when they were attacked." A sizable French and US military presence is seeking to stem the incursion of ISIS forces into Niger: some 800 US troops are currently based there; some are called advisers but that's likely to be mere foreign policy camouflage. CNN: "The US military has maintained a presence in the northwest African country for five years, with small groups of US Special Operations Forces advising local troops as they battle two terrorist groups, ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram and al Qaeda's North African branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb." 
• In Malaysia, where the authorities have been on high alert for human bombs and shooters since "Islamic State launched multiple attacks in Jakarta, the capital of neighboring Indonesia, in January 2016", Reuters says 8 people, four foreigners and four Malaysians, were taken into custody today "for suspected involvement in terrorist activities linked to Abu Sayyaf, the Islamic State and Jemaah Islamiah". Those arrested are said to include three Filipinos, one Albanian (a law lecturer at a local university) and two people convicted in 2016 of participating in terrorist activities (so people might be asking why are they free now).
• And here in Israel, the death of Reuven Shmerling, a Jewish Israeli in his 70s who lived with his family in Elkana and whose body was found on Wednesday at a location on the outskirts of Kafr Qassem, an Israeli town whose residents are overwhelmingly Arab, now appears (after the police expressed initial doubt) to have been the result of terrorism. Haaretz says "Shmerling left his home on Wednesday morning and went to a warehouse in Kafr Qasem, which belonged to his son. When his wife Hanna noticed he did not return home and is not answering his phone, his son was called to the warehouse, where he discovered his father's body. Paramedics pronounced Shmerling dead. In a statement, Shmerling's family stressed they have no doubt he was killed in a terror attack."

Two additional alarming reports turn out (so far at least) to be unrelated to terror:

• An incoming-missile alert was sounded in the Israeli communities closest to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip around the time we started writing this report. As of now (10:30 pm Saturday), the alert appears to be without basis and there were no actual rockets. This happens.
• In London, a car drove onto the sidewalk outside a popular museum at 2:20 pm London time today. According to Financial Times, this happened "at the junction of Exhibition Road and Cromwell Road, between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Natural History Museum — is part of a shared space experiment and the pavement is at the same level as the road." The response from security services was rapid and large: "dozens of armed officers flooded the area and a 200 metre cordon was created around the scene. Witnesses fled in panic as police told them to "keep running" and put businesses around the area in lockdown." [Telegraph UK]
  The BBC quotes the Metropolitan Police saying one person was arrested. But earlier concerns that this was a terror attack were now being set aside, and "the incident was being treated as "a road traffic collision". London Ambulance said the people it treated - including the detained man - had mostly sustained head and leg injuries. Nine were taken to hospital." Meanwhile the driver "is being held in custody at a north London police station." The British are uncommonly tense over the prospects of more terror in their lives; as BBC notes tonight: "The current terror threat in the UK is at "severe" - the second highest level - meaning an attack is highly likely."

Life is so much more relaxed when you ignore what terrorists are planning and doing. But the difficult reality is that ignoring them doesn't make them go away.

19-Sep-17: The UK has more consumers of jihadi web content than anywhere else in Europe

Today's British report, online here

While thoughtful parts of Western society ponder the need to find the right balance between personal security and personal liberty, and how and whether governments should interfere with the flow of information and ideas on the Internet, reality keeps intruding.

Like for instance the attempted bombing of an underground train in London in the last few days ["Bucket Bomb’ Strikes London’s Vulnerable Underground", New York Times, September 15, 2017] and the sheer good luck that explains why it did not end up as a massacre of innocents.

Not so surprisingly, public opinion gets impacted by encounters with the lethal bigotry that forms a core part of such barbaric assaults.

So - a brief update here on one of the rootest of root causes of jihadist terror in Europe and especially the United Kingdom:

Online jihadist propaganda attracts more clicks in the UK than any other country in Europe, a report has found | Britain is the fifth-biggest audience in the world for extremist content after Turkey, the US, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, Policy Exchange's study said. The think tank suggested the UK public would support new laws criminalising reading content that glorifies terror. The government has told internet companies like Facebook and Google to do more to to remove jihadist material. Former US military chief General David Petraeus, who wrote a foreword to the report, said efforts to combat online extremism were "inadequate". He said the bombing of a London Tube train last week "merely underscored once again the ever-present nature of this threat." "There is no doubting the urgency of this matter," he said. "The status quo clearly is unacceptable."
...Under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000, it is currently an offence to possess information that could assist a would-be terrorist, but not material which glorifies terrorism... [BBC, September 19, 2017]

The Policy Exchange report itself [here], published today, is considerably more revealing than the BBC summary and worth delving into.

More than 130 pages long, it challenges the idea that the impact of ISIS as an online force is in decline. It notes that the "the death of key figures, loss of territory and ongoing fighting" have not prevented its production and dissemination from churning on and influencing the audiences it addresses:

The spate of terrorist attacks in the first half of 2017 confirmed that jihadist radicalisation is a real and present danger to the national security of the UK and its allies... ISIS is producing extremist content online at a consistent rate and this is spread across a vast information ecosystem: it is disseminated to core followers via Telegram, before being pumped out into the mainstream social media space (via Twitter, Facebook and other leading platforms). For this reason, we argue that more must be done to force jihadist content out of the mainstream. It is clear that the status quo is not working; it is time for a new approach... [W]e argue that society as a whole must act to overcome this serious threat to the security, vitality and prosperity of western societies. ["The New Netwar: Countering Extremism Online" (PDF), Policy Exchange, September 19, 2017] 

And this not exactly unrelated news snippet from a July 26, 2017 article in Independent UK:

A record number of anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded in the UK as monitors warn of “unprecedented” reports of attacks, abuse and harassment. The Community Security Trust (CST) recorded 80 violent assaults targeting Jews in the first six months of this year, as well as verbal abuse, graffiti, vandalism, hate mail and abuse via social media and the internet. A total of 767 incidents were reported between January and June – a rise of almost a third on the same period in 2016 and the highest since the CST’s records began in 1984... Gideon Falter, chairman of Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, said the CST’s report corroborates its own research, indicating that 2017 was “likely to be the worst year on record for anti-Semitic crime” and the fourth record-breaking year in a row. “The reason for this rise appears to be a failure to enforce the law,” he argued. “Over the past several years, anti-Semitic crime has been rising dramatically whilst there have only been a paltry number of prosecutions. This emboldens anti-Semites who increasingly fear no consequences for their actions.”
["Anti-Semitic attacks hit record high in UK amid warnings over rise of 'hatred and anger'", Independent UK, July 26, 2017]

As for current British attitudes towards Jews, a new report on anti-Semitism in the UK

caps the ‘hardcore’ anti-Semite population at five percent [but] detects a further 25 per cent who feel negatively about Jews and hold one or two viewpoints that most Jews would consider anti-Semitic. These include traditional Judeophobic tropes of undue influence, divided loyalty, and ill-gotten wealth... The study, a joint enterprise by the Community Security Trust and the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, is an in-depth exploration of anti-Jewish attitudes, the role of animus towards Israel, and the prevalence of prejudice in 2017... It is a sober analysis and the researchers tend towards restraint – sometimes a little too much restraint – in drawing conclusions from their data. It is this very interpretive modesty that makes the findings all the more concerning. The far-right remains the most anti-Semitic demographic but the far-left, by the force of numbers and its new-found influence over British politics, is roughly on an even keel with reactionaries when it comes to hating Jews... ["Britain has an anti-Semitism problem. Here are the numbers that prove it", Stephen Daisley, The Spectator, September 13, 2017]

And finally two related sound-bytes about how Britain's Jews view the political landscape. One:

The vast majority (83%) of British Jews believe the Labour Party is too tolerant of anti-Semitism among its MPs, members and supporters, a poll suggests. This compared with 19% for the Conservatives and 36% for the Liberal Democrats, according to the YouGov survey for Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). [Jewish News UK, August 20, 2017]

and two: how they are translating this into personal life-changing decisions:

Almost one in three British Jews has considered moving abroad in the past two years, a survey [of] nearly 4,000 members of the community during 2016 and 2017 [has found.] One in six British Jews (17%) reported feeling unwelcome in Britain and over a third (37%) said they had felt the need to conceal their Judaism in public... 31% of British Jews had considered moving abroad, a rise from 28% during their last survey two years ago. ["More British Jews considering move abroad as anti-Semitism fears grow - poll", SKY News, August 20, 2017]

27-Aug-17: On British and Belgian streets - terrorist attacks, religious declarations, fast responses

The child is Palestinian Arab, and so is the incitement. But the message
has reached Europe and European targets and it's not directed just at Jews or Israelis

Everyone in this incident is of course innocent until determined by law to be guilty, and there's no terrorism involved until the police say there is, and no one should draw inferences about the role that this or that or any religious doctrine played in the events of this past Friday.

A terror suspect drove at police outside Buckingham Palace and yelled 'Allahu akbar' while reaching for a 4ft sword before he was arrested by three unarmed officers. The 26-year-old from Luton was wrestled to the ground and incapacitated with CS gas by the officers, two of which suffered injuries, at about 8.30 pm... Metropolitan Police said the suspect had been arrested under the Terrorism Act and was currently in custody in a central London police station... As three unarmed PCs exited the van and approached the blue Toyota Prius, the suspect reached for a 4ft sword in the footwell. [Daily Mail, August 26, 2017]

A lone wolf? Of course:

Commander Dean Haydon, the head of the Met's Counter Terrorism Command, said: 'I would like to pay tribute to the bravery and professionalism of these officers who quickly brought this incident under control... Officers from the Counter Terrorism Command are now investigating and searches are being carried out in the Luton area today.
'We believe the man was acting alone and we are not looking for other suspects at this stage. 'While we cannot speculate on what the man was intending to do - this will be determined during the course of the investigation - it is only right that we investigate this as a terrorist incident at this time. [Daily Mail, August 26, 2017]

That was then. Today it looks different:

A second man has been arrested over a suspected terrorist attack outside Buckingham Palace, during which police were attacked by a man armed with a sword. A 30-year-old man was apprehended by officers at an address in west London on Sunday morning, Scotland Yard said. Police are carrying out a search in the area...  The second man was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorism and was taken into custody. The arrest was carried out by officers from the Met’s counter-terrorism command... Police initially believed the 26-year-old man acted alone and said their investigation would look into the first arrested man’s mental health. Some other incidents thought to have been terror attacks have later turned out to have been driven by mental health problems.["Second man held after sword attack at Buckingham Palace", The Guardian, August 27, 2017]

It's been a busy weekend:

The assault in London came just two hours after a knifeman attacked patrolling soldiers in Brussels in what authorities said was an "attempted terrorist murder". Belgian prosecutors said the attacker yelled "Allahu akbar" when he rushed at the soldiers from behind and struck them with a knife, prompting one of them to open fire. The assailant -- a Belgian national of Somali origin born in 1987 -- was shot and died shortly afterwards in hospital, a prosecutors' statement said. Granted Belgian nationality in 2015 after arriving in the country in 2004, he was not known for any terror-related activities, although he had an assault and battery charge from February on his record, authorities confirmed. Police later raided his home in Bruges, in northwest Belgium. One of the soldiers was slightly hurt in the attack which Brussels Mayor Philippe Close said had been carried out by a "lone individual"... [AFP (France), August 27, 2017]

The Independent UK on Saturday adds that the Brussels stabber

"was in the possession of a firearm replica and two Quran books... The federal prosecutor’s office has handed the investigation to a specialist anti-terrorist judge and the case has been classed as “attempted terrorist murder”.

From Gaza, a religious leader who preaches the kind of attack
Europeans are now experiencing [Image Source]

The same article goes on to speculate on root causes:

Isis has been intensifying calls for terror attacks on the countries bombing it as part of the US-led coalition, issuing detailed advice on carrying out stabbings, vehicle rammings and making explosives.
Officials, including [British] security minister Ben Wallace, have warned that the threat is increasing as Isis loses territory in Iraq and Syria, with the group turning to attacks as a means of maintaining momentum and publicity. “I think the threat is still increasing, partly driven by the fact Isis is collapsing in Syria and people are either unable to get out there to fight for Isis and so they look to do something at home, or also because people have come back and tried to inspire people with their stories and tales of the caliphate,” Mr Wallace said last week, echoing concerns raised by analysts across Europe.
Brussels was the location of the first Isis-linked attack in Europe, where a militant killed four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in May 2014. [Independent UK]

A handful of tentative conclusions.

• Lone wolf attacks, it's increasingly clear, often turn out to be anything but. 
• And attacks of the kind which began with massive incitement among Palestinian Arabs - in their schools, in their mosques and in the chambers of their political leaders - against Jews in Israel over the past 3 years more and more appear to be replicated on the streets of Europe. The range of their targets has greatly widened.
• For Israelis, it's hard not to notice how quick-witted, fast moving security officials on those European streets are being (entirely correctly) praised while the equivalent actions done in Israel by Israeli security officials have come in for withering criticism in previous years... from Europe.

21-Feb-17: Planning a trip got these British children arrested

No need to get overly concerned: it's just a
"drama/documentary" [Image Source]

Today is another of those fleeting moments when a Western country is again presented with evidence of something deeply malevolent festering in its midst.

Is this news going to get serious attention? Will it be reported in vague terms that carefully step around salient aspects? Will reasonable consumers of current events reporting come away with an actionable sense of a process underway that is gathering momentum?

From a variety of British sources, it emerges that police in the UK yesterday made a cluster of arrests of children on what sound like serious charges. In summary:

• Five teenagers were arrested by Met Police in London on Monday. 
• The suspicion is they were planning a trip "to join a banned terror group" [Daily Mail]. Their ages range from 15 to 19. All are males.
• Prior to the Monday arrests, police had carried out raids at four different homes on January 14, 2017. It's said that the raids were the prelude to yesterday's arrests.
• The police doing the arresting are all from the (London) Metropolitan Police Service Counter Terrorism Command. Internally, it's known as SO15 and defined on the London Metropolitan police website in these not-so-very-clear terms: "The Operations Strand comprises of those units who directly deliver disruptions through both proactive and reactive operations, as well as direct engagements with communities and partners. The strand comprises of five sections: Investigations, Specialist Investigations, Local Operations, Ports and International Operations."
• It was formed in October 2006 with the merger of two predecessor units; the Anti-Terrorist Branch (SO13) and Special Branch (SO12) [source].
• Quote: "Scotland Yard did not elaborate on which organisation the teenagers were attempting to join..." Naturally, the news reports we saw don't engage in idle speculation. 
• Those arrested are a 17-year-old male living in south London; a 16-year-old male living in a different south London location; a 17-year-old male living in west London; a 19-year-old male also living in west London but at a different address; and a 15-year-old male arrested in east London at a residence that, from the context, appears not to have been searched last month but which was searched yesterday. Another home, this one in Lambeth (a neighbourhood right in the middle of London) was also searched on Monday "in connection with the investigation".
• The five arrested individuals are said early this morning to have been detained under TACT, the name commonly given to the United Kingdom's Terrorism Act 2000. All five were being held as of a few hours ago in "a central London police station pending further enquiries" into their alleged "plans to travel to join a proscribed organisation". 

The BBC, which notoriously steps gingerly around the word "terror" in its news reports - unless it can quote someone authoritative using the word and then puts it between quotation marks - has a brief report on these events. Surprisingly, the current version of that BBC report ["London terror arrests: Metropolitan Police hold five teenagers", BBC, February 20, 2017] uses the actual word terror in the headline. But don't be surprised if that later gets removed by BBC editors (and note that we have it archived here just in case). It opens with this line:

"Five teenagers have been arrested in London on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts, the Metropolitan Police said."

Another British news source which knows the facts at least as well as we do, including the ages of those arrested, describes the people arrested as "men":

Five teenagers have been arrested on suspicion of terror offences in London. The five men, all aged under 20, were arrested on Monday on suspicion of the preparation of terrorist acts, the Metropolitan Police said... [Telegraph UK, February 20, 2017]

But at least four of them are not men. The average age of the five is 16.8. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child calls anyone under the age of 18 a child. And child offenders in the vague and ill-defined field in which the British arrestees allegedly engaged is not a British-only phenomenon as we tweeted a few days ago [here] in the wake of the arrest of a sixteen year-old girl in France.

How interesting it would be if we could find a common element, some shared belief or affiliation that ties her actions with the London Five? Come to that, what do the five Londoners have in common with each other, beyond being boys and residing in the British capital? Maybe something, maybe nothing, maybe a lust for travel. It's hard to know from the reports.

Still, here's a little context: according to a British news report from early this morning quoting a UK government source:

there were 255 terrorism-related arrests in Britain for the year ending 31 March 2016. The only age group to see a rise in the number of arrests was under-18-year-olds... 

So what might it mean for the UK if certain undefined groups of under 18s show an interest in the kind of travel that gets them arrested? Well, not being British, we wouldn't know. But we can't help noticing this report of a BBC television production that is going to be aired early next month:

The Attack: Terror in the UK | This World
With a mass-casualty terror attack in the UK seen as almost inevitable, this drama documentary dramatises what terrorism experts fear is the most likely scenario for Britain's next major terror attack. Counterterrorism police believe that the greatest threat to our security comes from Marauding Terrorist Firearms Attack (MTFA), which can result in dozens of fatalities even if armed police respond within minutes. There are more than a thousand high-priority terrorism suspects in the UK, but there are only enough surveillance officers to monitor a fraction of these at any time. Based on extensive research, The Attack: Terror in the UK tells the story of an Islamic State-inspired terrorist group planning a firearms attack and follows the ongoing police investigation. It focuses on Joseph, a young man who, while in prison for drug and firearms charges, is recruited, converted and radicalised by Islamic extremists - highlighting the fear that links are being forged between Jihadists and street gangs with access to automatic weapons.

It's scheduled to be screened on BBC Two television on Thursday March 2, 2017 at 9:00 pm, UK time. We hope there's an opportunity to view it from outside the UK. Could be interesting, not least because it got the BBC to speak the word "terror" without hanging it around some other person's neck. And as today's news shows, it's surely timely.

Though on reflection, wouldn't it be better for the Brits if the BBC - masters of selectively-opaque reporting, circumlocution and wrong-headed political "correctness" - were take this kind of robust approach in its news content and not only in its docu-dramas?

24-Mar-16: In the UK, a near hit

The convicted would-be shooters
[Image Source]

No one needs to be told how much media attention, and follow-on political attention, was generated in the past 36 hours because of the terrorist assaults on Brussels.

Given the focus of this blog, we pay more attention than most people to the many instances of terrorism that get stopped in time because something fortuitous intervened. Many discussions we have about how serious the threat posed to ordinary lives and large societies by terrorists - and jihadists in particular - is seem to go right over the heads of those with whom we are having a dialogue. People just don't know.

Here's an example from today that, unless you are in the UK, you probably won't be hearing.

A couple of university students were convicted of plotting to carry out a series of drive-by shootings in London, targeting police and soldiers. Here's how The Guardian sums up the case:

Two university students have been convicted of wanting to kill on London’s streets in the name of Islamic State in what counter-terrorism officials believe was the most significant jihadi plot targeting Britain in a decade.

We posted about them when we first heard of the charges ["12-Oct-14: In London, they are monitoring thousands of suspected terrorists" and "18-Oct-14: If UK travel is in your plans... Part 1". Now we know more about their involvement with jihad and how close they came carrying out its aim. In the words of the head of the Crown Prosecution Service's counter-terrorism division, Sue Hemming:

These are dangerous men with strong beliefs. Had their plot not been exposed when it was, I am in little doubt that they would have gone on to murder.

The now-convicted jihad-minded terrorists are Tarik Hassane, 22, and Suhaib Majeed, 21. They knew each other from primary school. Hardly no-hopers, Hassane was born in London to a Moroccan mother and a father who was a Saudi diplomat. Unable to get into Kings College London because his marks were not good enough, he headed to Khartoun, Sudan where he was accepted into the faculty of medicine. That's where, in the summer of 2014, he took a pledge of allegiance to the Islamists of ISIS. Majeed, studying for a bachelor's degree in physics, was chairman of the Islamic Society at prestigious King’s College London.

Majeed, born in Iraq but holding a British passport since 2002, acquired a handgun, ammunition and a silencer on Hassane's orders but was arrested in September 2014 before managing to carry out the plan. Hassane, aware of the arrest, came back to London to execute a shooting attack but he too was arrested. Police had been monitoring his movements.

Both plotters bought weapons from a pair of British Muslim converts who, once arrested, pleaded guilty to supplying them. They were cleared of knowing about the jihadist attack plot. It might have been interesting to know what brought the jury to that view.

The Independent UK's report of Hassane's and Majeed's conviction, published a few hours ago. notes that the jury were not told that Hassane had links to a notorious mosque in west London which Mohammed Emwazi, the now-deceased ISIS murderer/executioner better known as Jihadi John also attended. Majeed had a video of one of Emwazi’s "execution" murders on his tablet. Hassane is thought to have gone to Syria during his Sudan sojourn, and to have visited Emwazi there.

Thanks to a joint operation by Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command and Britain’s domestic and foreign intelligence services (according to The Guardian), their plans were thwarted. Instead of becoming martyrs in the eyes of the communities that nurtured them, they are likely to spend decades in British prisons. The rest of us should be thinking of how close they came to carrying out their plans, and how many others are in line behind them or inspired by their story to do it better.

07-Mar-16: In the UK, the jihadist threat now has Scotland Yard's full attention

Ms Dare's older son, aged 4 [Image Source]

The child in the image on the right is four years old. Speaking with a British accent and dressed in military fatigues, he is the central figure in a ten-minute-long ISIS propaganda video that got considerable media coverage in January 2016.

Without exaggerating, it's a hideous production. The little boy points off in the distance and says, “We will kill kuffar [infidels] over there.” Before it's over, the clip shows five shackled men dressed in orange boilersuits who are said to have “confessed” to spying for the UK. They are then killed.

The boy is the son of a notorious Islamist zealot, Khadijah (nee Grace) Dare, the daughter of a Christian family from Nigeria who raised her in Lewisham, UK. Despite her good Catholic school education, she transplanted herself to the killing-fields of Syria in 2012 in order to marry a Swede with the adopted nom-de-guerre Abu Bakr and who is now thought to be dead. Mrs Dare-Bakr "used social media to gloat about the beheading of the American journalist James Foley and said she wanted to be the first British woman to kill" a hostage, evidently by removing his head. A serious-minded person, she "missed junk food and Chinese takeaways, but said she would never return home" [Telegraph UK, January 4, 2016].

As well as the little boy in the photo above, she has a second son who is younger still. It's not clear when he will be pressed into serving the Islamist cause, but the path ahead of him seems to be clear.

How serious is the existential threat posed by the unchecked spread of ideological terrorism? We think the answer is "very" and have been saying so for 14 years. The masthead of this blog includes some language intended to express that deep concern.

Not everyone agrees with us. 

Madrid, March 11, 2004 [Image Source]

In the next few days. Spain will mark the anniversary of 11-M, the name they give to the March 11, 2004 jihadist massacre at Madrid's Atocha central train station [see our blog post "8-May-14: Madrid moments"]. 

In the dozen years since it happened, the atrocity has been the subject of a kind of partisan tug-of-war over how it ought to be understood. 

Compare, for instance, an article in The Guardian ["The worst Islamist attack in European history", October 31, 2007], with Wikipedia's survey of the Spanish voices - notably including El Mundo and La Razon newspapers - that claim it was not the Islamists at all but a consortium of other malevolents, among them the police and the Basque separatists of ETA.

For some people, warnings about how badly the battle against the terrorists is going are treated as noise and dismissed as causing more confusion than clarification. Some others pay lip-service (this includes public figures from among the many we have personally encountered) but their actions show they are not convinced and don't regard the dangers as serious or the warnings actionable.

Today, the "UK's national head of counter- terrorism" gave a media briefing from which we have extracted some bullet pointed quotes below. His views are being translated into action, and though we are not close enough to the UK to appreciate how seriously this is being taken by the wider public, his views seem to be mainstream.

Mark Rowley has been the Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations in the Metropolitan Police Service for the past four and a half years. That's the body that, with its tens of thousands of employed officers, police staff, Community Support Officers and volunteer police, provides greater London with policing services. When people speak of Scotland Yard, they mean the MPS. The Guardian calls Rowley the policeman who "leads on counter-terrorism for Scotland Yard".

[Image Source]

Some of what he said today:

• The nature of the threat from ISIS is changing. "Going from [a] narrow focus on police and military as symbols of the state to something much broader. And you see a terrorist group which has big ambitions for enormous and spectacular attacks, not just the types that we've seen foiled to date..." [Telegraph UK, today]
• Where, in the recent past, ISIS was thought to be trying to incite small-scale attacks by individuals, using knives or vehicles, their goals seem much broader now, In the wake of the Friday 13th massacre in Paris during November, Rowley and other counter-terrorism chiefs believe ISIS has "the capability and intent to stage a mass-casualty attack in the west".
• Rowley said ISIS "is trying to get supporters who have received military training in Syria into northern Europe to stage attacks". What sort of alarm bells ought this insight to be ringing in those European countries currently swamped with waves - hundreds of thousands - of newly-arrived and still-arriving "refugees" said to be fleeing the blood-letting in Syria?
• Abdelhamid Abaaoud, regarded as the ringleader of the Paris terrorism attacks [we have some interesting things to say about him here], is now known to have visited Birmingham and London during 2015. "Found on his phone were pictures taken during his visit to fellow jihadis. Rowley declined to comment on this." [The Guardian, today]
• ISIS recruiters are increasingly targeting (a) people with mental illnesses (b) women and (c) teenagers, and they are successfully drawing them in. In terms of 2015 arrests under counter-terrorism laws in the UK, 77% were British nationals, 14% were female and 13% were 20 or younger. The Guardian quotes him saying "Over half of those arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences ended up being charged with a terrorism offence."
• Dozens of children were “safeguarded” (a police expression) during 2015. These interventions arose because their parents tried to take them to Syria or Iraq, or because of suspicions that they were being radicalised.
• The overall view taken by the authorities is that the terrorists still want to kill soldiers or the police but are increasingly focused on "attacking western lifestyle targets".
• About those re-education and community-based efforts to intercept would-be jihadists before they get completely weaponized, this sobering comment from The Guardian: "Privately, counter-terrorism officials see no sign of ISIS’s internet propaganda campaign being thwarted by community and government efforts and believe the group still has the same ability to attract devotees."

If the police analysis is even half right, there's good reason for the UK's citizens to be seriously agitated.

07-Jul-15: A decade after British Islamists murder dozens in London, not much room for optimism

Devastated London bus, July 7, ten years ago today [Image Source]

As the UK today marks the tenth anniversary of "the terrorist attacks that killed 52 people in London... the worst single terrorist atrocity on British soil", some of the more sober commentary has a pessimistic tone.

The key words in that last sentence come from a BBC report today. Given how the BBC has institutionalized a near-allergic avoidance of the word "terror" in its journalism, it's a welcome - though rare - resort to plain speaking.

The anniversary, to be marked by a minute's silence at 11:30 this morning, recalls a series of attacks on July 7, 2005 in which 52 people were murdered and 750 injured when human bomb attackers , all of them born, raised and educated in the UK, exploded three tube trains and a bus in London. The commemoration has provoked what The Guardian calls "soul searching about Britain’s progress in fighting terrorism".

Few cities can make the claim London can and does to being a cosmopolitan urban centre, tuned to the spirit of the times. What it says about itself and the experiences through which it has passed make it worth stopping to read and absorb.

To illustrate the direction the anniversary-driven introspection is taking, The Guardian's editors have chosen to publish an interview ["Ex-head of counter-terror: UK should lay on charter flights to Syria for jihadis"] with the man who was head of special operations for Scotland Yard in 2008-09, serving in that role as Britain’s "most senior counter-terrorism officer". The core message he conveys is stark:

Quick gave a bleak assessment about the danger Britain faced – a sense of pessimism shared by others who have served at a senior level in Britain’s counter-terrorism struggle. He said: “We’re in a worse place, in a more precarious place than ever. Ten years ago, we were dealing with relatively small numbers, who travelled mainly to Pakistan. They were engaged in conspiracies that were quite elaborate, involving plotting and communications that could be intercepted. “Now we are dealing with large numbers, who have travelled to Syria – we don’t know how many will come back with horrible intent – and the homegrown extremists who are here. We are in a less safe position than we were then, because the world outside our borders is less safe than 10 years ago. There are more people who are motivated, inspired or encouraged to mount these attacks. “Our understanding of radicalisation, what is at the heart of dissatisfaction with UK society, is very little understood.”

Other influential British voices are sounding a similar note:

Britain is at a greater threat from terror attack now than it was at the time of the 7/7 bombings a decade ago, according to an expert from a leading UK security think-tank. The national terror threat level was not public knowledge at the time of the attacks, when British youths killed 52 and injured more than 700 by detonating four bombs across London’s transport network. With the level now standing at “severe”, meaning an attack is “highly likely”, experts at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said the threat had only grown in the past decade... Margaret Gilmore, a senior associate fellow specialising in national security at RUSI and a former BBC home affairs correspondent at the time of the attack, said that the rise of Isis and the ongoing threat of al-Qaeda made the dangers of a terror attack on home soil “more intense”. [Independent UK, today]

Underlining how much less safe life is for Londoners today, this report from three days ago:

Three men have been arrested on suspicion of plotting terror attacks in London on the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings. Security forces arrested the men on Thursday after Isil and Taliban propaganda and maps of London were allegedly found on their computers. They were found with four laptops and computers in the raid near Peshawar in Pakistan... [Telegraph UK, July 4, 2015]

British targets have been sought and savagely attacked outside the UK as well, of course: "Tunisia terror attack: 30 of 38 people killed are British, UK says", CNN, July 2, 2015]

What can be done to make life better and safer? Former Chief Superintendent Quick has a concrete suggestion, quite different from current policy in every Western society as far as we can tell:

[T]hose wanting to go to Isis-controlled territory in the two countries should have to hand their British passports in as they leave. The condition of them being allowed to travel to join Isis could be they would never be allowed to return to Britain. He said: “You have to think how do you confront it, if you have hundreds or thousands who want to go there and live that life? We should try and convince them not to go. If they want to go, you have to ask the question, are we better off, if they surrender their passports and go? It’s better than them festering away here... Quick said an extremist Islamist pathology and British values were irreconcilable. [The Guardian, yesterday]

It's evident that jihad-based terrorism is going to be endlessly perplexing for Western societies. It helps to start with a large dose of openness to new views and humility about the things we seem to know and not know. Quick's admission above is just the sort of thing people need to hear: British understanding of what turns people like the 7/7 plotters into mass murderers is poorly understood.

The Economist, which does a good job of explaining complex issues, wrote this in an editorial after the terrorism of a decade ago:

More legislation may make Britons feel safer, but it will not tell them what they most want to know: who supplied the bombers with equipment and trained them to use it? And how many more British citizens are queuing up to martyr themselves beneath the streets of London? [Economist, July 14, 2005]

The honest answer is no one knows, a decade later. We will be scouring their website today to see if they revisit those questions.

A non-trivial voice in Britain's public discourse on lessons learned over the past decade comes from the UK's organized Moslem communities. One of the groups outspoken in propounding the case that it's actually Islamophobia - and not terror - that needs society's major attention, is Islamic Human Rights Commission ("set up in 1997... independent, not-for-profit, campaign, research and advocacy organization based in London"). For them, the recent Islamist massacres teach a specific kind of lesson:

Today's terrorist attacks in Kuwait, Tunisia and France provide further evidence, if any was still needed, that Muslims are the biggest victims of the extremism manifested in groups like Daesh (ISIS) and that is wrong to hold them collectively responsible for the actions of a morally depraved minority [IHRC press release, June 26, 2015]

Leaving aside its explicit hostility to Israel (which certainly illuminates what they mean and don't mean by "rights"), IHRC is outspokenly against anti-terrorism legislation; has been for at least the past decade. The Islamist massacres in London a decade ago appear to have provoked no condemnation or protest from its human rights-focused activists (at least, as far as we could tell from searching their site - and we would love to be corrected). An IHRC press release issued on July 22, 2015, a fortnight after the bombings, focuses on "the complete absence of sympathy and condemnation from both the media and the government... Such inaction indirectly legitimises the backlash attacks themselves." Sympathy not for Britain or the people murdered and maimed, but for the victims of post-7/7 British hostility to Moslems as Moslems. It will be interesting to see if they issue a press release on today's tenth anniversary.

Today is another appropriate moment to ask ["30-Jun-15: We need to be calling them what they are: human bombs"] that using the false and misleading term "suicide bomber" should end.

21-May-15: Why is this man still free? Human rights, the Qataris, dignity and football

2010 announcement by FIFA that Qatar was the successful bidder
to host the 20122 Mondial. That's the previous Qatari emir
beaming on the left.

Something about terrorism - it's clearer to us as the years go by - makes rational, otherwise intelligent people act irresponsibly and strangely. They may have a well-developed sense of right and wrong, of lawful and illicit, of moral and bestial. But once terror is added to the reality with which they cope, odd results follow.

And this is as true of governments and major international organizations as it is of prominent people and ordinary folk. And individuals throughout the length and breadth of the mass media and the news reporting industry. The engineer of the massacre that ended our daughter's life is living proof (see at the end of this post).

We focused some blog attention here on Qatar earlier this week. Our two posts looked at the outrageous arrest there of a BBC reporting team and the connection this had to one of the world's richest and most watched sporting events, the FIFA World Cup which (at least for now) is going to be hosted by Qatar in seven years. See "18-May-15: As the Qatari thug says, Disneyland it's not" and "18-May-15: Peeking behind Qatar's genteel, manicured and increasingly disastrous public relations".

Negative mass-media news about Qatar is not so common. Partly, this seems to be a function of the branding for which Qatar's management seems to have a considerable appetite. In itself, it's a subject worthy of close attention (and here's a good methodological starting point).

Qatar had been our minds before this too, mainly because of the way it's widely treated as a country while acting like a family business (there are numerous such states in the Arab world). And also because Qatar is perceived by people whose views we take seriously as a global player in the business of terrorism. It has stood close to the Hamas thugs for years, side-by-side, giving them protection, money, cover, a conduit to the civilized world, and a safe haven for its leading figures (who make no secret of it) to set up personal luxury residences and live - comfortably and well.

Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, is greeted by President
Obama at White House, May 13, 2015 [Image Source]

Yet watch some of the world's major television networks - especially CNN International and BBC World - and advertisements for Qatar itself, for its airline, for its tourist attractions (2006; 2011, 2012) and its businesses, seem to appear at a rate and frequency ridiculously out of proportion to a country that has a mere 300,000 citizens. Then of course there's Qatar's own home-grown global network, the fully-owned-by-Qatar Aljazeera. Confidential US State Department cables exposed by Wikileaks said [see The Guardian] it had "proved itself a useful tool for the station's political masters". The reference is to the owners of Qatar, the Al-Thanis.

Those advertising funds that find their way to CNN and other outlets seem to deliver nice returns on investment. See "On CNN International, the ‘news’ isn’t always the news" [Columbia Journalism Review, October 28, 2014] for an indication of how that process works.

Looking at Qatar and its acceptance in polite circles around the world gets a person thinking. Being frank, that's especially so when you are the parents of a child murdered by the pampered proteges of Qatar's owners and operators [see  "30-Jul-14: Is Qatar's stupendous wealth connected with Hamas' ongoing terrorism?"]. In fact, the more we learn about aspects of the role Qatar and its dealings play on the rest of the world, the sharper is the somewhat bizarre picture that emerges. 

Qatar's Al-Nu'aymi: Man of many parts,
still walking and living free

It's unlikely most readers will immediately recognize the name Abdurrahman bin Omair Al-Nu'aymi. (Eleven different ways to write it appear in this US government press release). He's a Qatari with a distinguished profile: a one-time professor of history at Qatar University (though we don't see his name there now); an advisor to the Qatar government and well-connected to its ruling elite; a one-time president of the Qatar Football Association; an activist for a certain sort of human-rights; and, in Islamic terms, a conservative. So much so that...

When the Emir decided in 1998 to give women the right to vote, protests were heard from Islamists. One of these was Dr. Abd al-Rahman bin Umayr al-Nu’aymi, professor of history at Qatar University. He was so vocal that the emir had him arrested and put in jail, although they were friends. After a thousand days without a trial, Dr. Nu’aimi was released, but he still expresses his conservative Islamic views and heads an important intellectual center. [Source]

Prison seems not to have been an obstacle to his rise. In 2004, Al-Nu'aymi went on to co-found al-Karama (from the Arabic word for dignity), a Geneva-based NGO that purported to "uncover human rights violations in the Arab world and to help victims", and became its top official. It has a strange Wikipedia page that clearly was written, in part, by its own officers, and claims that it sought:

to contribute to an Arab World where all individuals live free, in dignity, and protected by the rule of law. With this goal in mind, the founders decided to address the most serious violations of human dignity, physical integrity and freedom, namely extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and arbitrary detention... [and] contribute to a better understanding of human rights and raise awareness of the UN's human rights protection mechanisms in the Arab civil society... Alkarama's action, documenting and denouncing violations, has made many States in, or with interests in the region resent its work, which has led to reprisals against our organisation (smear campaigns, trials and arrests of members, accusations that the organisation was pro-Israeli, pro-Qatari, protecting terrorists or supporting political groups and other contradictory accusations)... Alkarama unambiguously and irrevocably denies all these accusations... [Wikipedia]

Along the way, Al-Nu'aymi became deeply involved with money.

The Al-Karama body went on to forge ties with the United Nations, with multiple UN organs, and with notable players in the human rights industry including Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Gulf Center for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others [one source; another source]. As the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor noted [here, December 23, 2013], this raises troubling questions regarding "the lack of due diligence and professional judgment of NGOs when selecting allies... [T]hese organizations have an obligation to review the status of the officials responsible for such collaborations, alliances, and affiliations."

When terrorism charges were leveled at its president, Al-Karama found itself profiled in a Swiss business magazine article in December 2013 ["President of Swiss foundation al Qaeda's banker?"] (The article claims Al-Nu'aymi stepped down as head of the organization once the allegations were out in the open. But the same Wikipedia profile cites a source ["Press Release by the Council of the Alkarama Foundation, 8 January 2014, retrieved 16 January 2014"] claiming the board rejected his resignation.)

What was he alleged to have done?

In November 2014, a detailed expose in the UK's Telegraph newspaper ["Terror financiers are living freely in Qatar, US discloses" | The Telegraph UK, November 16, 2014] called him one of "al-Qaeda’s most senior financiers". Al-Nu'aymi was added to the US sanctions list and identified as a terrorist at the end of 2013. The British only got around to doing the same ten months later [source].

The claims are [see "Money Trail: Terrorists for Human Rights", Eli Lake in The Daily Beast, December 20, 2013] that as a major source of funding for Islamist terrorists, Al-Nu'aymi

oversaw the transfer of hundreds of thousands of dollars to al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen over the last 11 years. In 2013, the [US government's announcement] says, al-Naimi ordered the transfer of nearly $600,000 to al Qaeda via the group’s representative in Syria... If the Treasury Department’s allegations are correct, the story of al-Naimi, who until Thursday was the president of al-Karama’s board, illustrates how sometimes human-rights advocacy can also be used as political cover for jihadist networks... [The Daily Beast]

Qatar's Emir Al-Thani, is greeted by Queen Elizabeth II
in London, October 29, 2014 [Image Source]

The Telegraph quotes some very damning statements about the man and even more so about Qatar, coming from David Cohen, the US Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

Mr Cohen has accused Qatar and its near neighbour Kuwait of being “permissive jurisdictions for terrorist financing” but until now the fate of a number of money men — identified as Specially Designated Global Terrorists by the US government — has not been known.Qatar has refused to say what has happened [to al-Nuaimi and another terror-funder who are] accused of raising millions of dollars for al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups... The revelation casts serious doubt on the Gulf state’s insistence that it does not support terrorists, including jihadists in Syria and Iraq... Al-Nuaymi, a former president of the Qatar Football Association, is accused of being one of the world’s most prolific terrorist fundraisers, accused of sending more than £1.25 million a month to al-Qaeda jihadists in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of pounds to Syria. He was designated a terrorist in the US last December and added to a British sanctions list only in October this year. [Qatar] introduced a designated terrorist list but to date not a single individual has been put on it... The US treasury believes countries such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have clamped down on jihadist financiers in recent months whereas Qatar and Kuwait have failed to tackle the issue — much to the frustration of Washington. The US... is wary about the Qatari government’s overt support for Hamas and also for the Muslim Brotherhood... Mr Cohen added: “There’s more work to do both in Qatar and Kuwait. We have been deeply engaged with both countries for a number of years. We have seen others make really substantial progress in combating terrorist financing.

It then quotes a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, who believes Cohen's revelation

proves meaningful cooperation behind the scenes [between Qatar and the West] is virtually nonexistent. “It suggests maybe the Qataris are quite happy being a permissive jurisdiction for terrorist finance. It may also bear noting that the previous emir of Qatar has reportedly praised Nuaymi as his old friend. Arrests, indictments and convictions are only one dimension of whether Qatar is taking the fight against terrorism seriously, but historically it is one of several dimensions in which the [ruling] al-Thani family has miserably failed the test. [David Weinberg, The Telegraph UK, November 16, 2014]

Qatar's response to this is more interesting than we might have expected:

In his only broadcast interview the current emir, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, said “We don’t fund extremists” and explained that terrorism was “not acceptable in our culture and our religion”. [Then adds:] “There are differences between some countries, of who are the terrorists and who are the maybe Islamist groups, but we don’t consider them as terrorists.” [The Telegraph UK]

And that is what this is all about.

Qatar is not so different from most places. "You may say these people are terrorists but we disagree." The UK knows the man is central to the world of Islamist terror but finds it hard to actually do anything about it. Might this be connected to the phenomenal wave of Qatari investment that has found its way into the London property market, and into UK business in general?

A very partial description of Qatar's investment portfolio includes significant ownership stakes in British Airways, the Barcelona soccer team, Volkswagen, Porsche, Barclays Bank, Sainsbury's, Miramax, Canary Wharf, Royal Dutch Shell, London's Chelsea Barracks, London's Savoy Hotel, the luxury Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, One Hyde Park ("the world’s most expensive apartment block", the London Stock Exchange, as well as complete ownership of Harrods, Credit Suisse's London headquarters, the French football club Paris Saint-Germain, the famous London office tower The Shard, the US embassy building in Grosvenor Square, and a long list of London's choicest real estate trophies as catalogued by the Daily Mail UK. It funds religious institutions in Europe that propagate a message of "radical Islam", and is a major funder worldwide of the work of the Muslim Brotherhood. On the far side of the Atlantic, it provides lavish funding for the hugely-influential Washington-based Brookings Institution, and signed colossally-large arms-purchase agreements with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing and other US suppliers in March 2014. The list goes on and on.

Direct from friendly, supportive Qatar: Proud, unrepentant
celebrity terrorist interviews happy (and free) fellow
convicted murderers of Jewish children [Screen capture from video]

A recent item in New Statesman ["How Qatar bought London"] quotes a British trade union source warning that "Britain has to ensure that it never falls out with Qatar, or one day we might wake up and find this Gulf state has us at its mercy".

But as we have learned to our sorrow, it's not only in Qatar that people look the other way when Islamist terrorists walk freely in their midst.

For the record, our daughter's murderer had no difficulty going to Qatar in 2013 from her home base in Jordan and basing herself and her team there to film an episode of her weekly television show - the one that exists to rejoice in the killing of Jewish children and the 'heroism' of her fellow terrorist savages. Click on this YouTube clip to watch as she giggles and beams her way through an hour of interviews with other freed Shalit Deal murderers living in Qatar with their new, young families.

As with so much else in the Qatar story, the evidence is plain for anyone who wants to see.