So, Who Was the ‘Asia Head of State’ Who Supported Al-Qaeda?
Find immediately below the URL for the latest story on the super-injunction controversy in which the Asian head of state’s support of Al-Qaeda came up. It differs very little from the piece that originally appeared in the EWI Digest.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/9111931/Exclusive-Lawyers-order-Parliament-to-stop-publishing-super-injunction-document.html
Now, a story appears on ABC Net Australia (http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2009/s2682461.htm ) that
suggests Channel Island businessman Mark Burby’s Parliamentary submission may have been motivated by the killing of one Michael McGurk, a business associate of his, whom he knew to be planning to “blackmail” the Sultan of Brunei. “Mr Burby contacted McGurk when he read in the media that the Sydneysider was suing the Sultan of Brunei for not paying for a rare miniature Koran. Mr Burby had also sued members of the royal family for reneging on a business deal and he wanted to see if the two lawsuits had any similarities.” The interview characterizes Mr. Burby as fearing for his life since hearing about the shooting of McGurk, although Burby can’t really say that the Brunei royal family was the cause of the shooting.
As noted, Burby had his own run-in with the Brunei royal family in the past. Between 2001 and 2005, Burby claimed to have been defrauded by members of the royal family and won a judgment of £50M in lost earnings. As of 2009, this had not been paid.
So, the answer to the question as to which Asian head of state supported Al-Qaeda and knew of the July 7, 2005, London bombings in advance is obviously the Sultan of Brunei, at least as far as an uninjunctioned Mr. Burby would be concerned. There have been rumors for years of the Brunei royal family’s support for Al-Qaeda, but unless Mr. Burby has something solid, they are likely to remain rumors.
Incidentally, the “ex-wife” Burby mentions must be the Sultan’s second wife, former airline stewardess Miriam Abdul Aziz, whom he divorced in 2003 after 21 years of marriage. If you want to read about the Sultan’s latest divorce, seehttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/sultan-of-bruneis-lowkey-third-marriage-ends-with-quiet-divorce-2002597.html
Shari’a & Shari’a Banking
Funding for Toronto’s Salaheddin Islamic Centre
National Post of Canada has raised the issue of foreign funding for Toronto’s Salaheddin mosque. Part of the problem is that, while the mosque reported its donors to the Canadian Revenue Agency, the CRA has been forestalled by Canadian law from revealing who gave what and in what amounts in response to questions. Iman Aly Hindy has, however, said that $400,000 (US) came in 2010 from the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia and that other donations came from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. From what the National Post has been able to discovered, 2010 donations from outside the country made up a quarter of the mosque’s budget, whereas in 2009, such donations amounted to only a tenth.
This might not have been much of an issue except for Hindy’s reputation (he has said that the 9/11 attacks were a CIA operation and he refused to sign a statement condemning the 2005 London bombings), and his recent remarks on homosexuality, which he regards as an illegal sexual act. In speaking about such matters, he said “Illegal means illegal in Islam, not illegal in the Canadian law, because everything is legal in the Canadian law, except children. Other than that, they allow everything.”
As in other instances where Shari’a law is proclaimed “the issue raised questions about sovereignty, the role of foreign funding in aiding those intent on breaching liberal democratic values, and whether mechanisms were needed to ensure that Western freedoms were not exploited to advance illiberal ideas.” This, from Christian Leuprecht of the Royal Military College and Queen’s University.
Goldman Sachs: Shari’a Catch-22
Joy Brighton has provided an update on the Goldman Sachs sukkuk bonds dilemma. You will remember that GS announced a $2bn Shari’a compliant Islamic bond issue last September. Brighton reports that as of February 15, “Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank’s Shariah scholars decided that Goldman Sach’s Islamic bond program was ‘noncompliant with Shariah.'”
She cites and article in Arab News that claims the imams declined religious approval because Shari’a law forbids the use of proceeds from the GS bond derivative to fund non-Islamic business. So what good is Islamic business to GS?
As Brighton pointedly says, “Stringent requirements placed on Western banks wanting to engage in Shariah banking were created to pull Western and American dollars out of free capital markets and divert into imam-controlled financial markets.
“This explains why one of the first official mandates of Ayatollah Khoemini of Iran in 1983 was to install Shariah banking, and outlaw that nation’s existing Western banking system.”
In order to get into the sukkuk business, Brighton says “Western banks must invest in Middle East economies; and they must not invest in ‘Western’ business ventures that threaten the supremacy or undermine the defense or moral sanctity of Islamic-majority countries.”
So if GS wants to proceed with Shari’a banking it would, for instance, have to withdraw as an underwriter of the upcoming Facebook IPO, Facebook and its advertisers having been deemed “anti-Islamic” by the imams.
Finally, Brighton says “In search of short-term profits, will Goldman Sachs and fellow Wall Street firms try to tap into Shariah dollars, and expand imam-controlled Shariah businesses in the United States? Who will suffer the long-term loss of economic and political independence?”
Mullahs, millions and missing gold bars
Tarket Fatah reports in the the Toronto Sun that 32 gold bars worth nearly $2m were taken from “an Islamic Sharia Finance” company in Toronto days before the company went into receivership. The Sun says that the local police and the RCMP “are either not interested in this or are too scared to investigate a possible crime that may risk them being labelled as ‘racist’.”
Apparently, there was little coverage of this in the Canadian media. The Sun asks whether this might be due to “a fear of discussing the shenanigans of Toronto’s powerful Mosque establishment run by those promoting sharia law in Canada?”
The story told is interesting.
“An Islamic Sharia finance company, UM Financial Inc. and UM Capital Inc., headed by Omar Kalair, went into receivership last year with its business partner, Central 1 Credit Union, suing UM in court for $31 million.
“Days before agreeing to go into receivership, Kalair converted $2.2 million of the company cash into gold and silver. In October he unloaded it from the trunk of his car and gave the bullion to Joseph Adam.
“Kalair later testified the gold and silver were partial payment to five Toronto area imams, including Imam Yusuf Panchbaya. But instead of giving the gold to the Toronto imams, Adam claims he took the gold bars to Egypt where he gave them to 20 Egyptian clerics.”
The moral of the story? The fruits of Shari’a must not be used for, um, “secular” things like court settlements.
British Muslims recruited to fight for Al-Shabaab
The Telegraph UK reports that British intelligence experts believe that Al-Shabaab has been recruiting “up to 50 British volunteers” to form the core of an international force of fighters. Others will be drawn from Canada, the United States, Europe and East Africa. This comes the heels of David Cameron’s decision to fund “another chance” at state rebuilding in Somalia.
Fresh strife looms for Lebanon
Playing off of recent skirmishes in Tripoli, Gulf News has offered a detailed analysis of recent events in Lebanon suggesting that events in Syria will eventually bring on a catastrope for the Lebanese.
As the author puts it so well,
“Over the years, polarising internal divisions between supporters and opponents of Arab regimes like Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and others, created an entirely new class of merchants who successfully marketed themselves, selling the country to the highest bidder.”
Another attack on Copts in Egypt
AINA reports that on February 14 a mob of some 20,000 radical Muslims attempted to break into and burn the Church of St. Mary and St. Abram in the village of Meet Bashar, in Zagazig, Sharqia province. Although they did not succeed in breaking in, they did burn the home of the church’s porter and three cars.
Al-Qaeda front group underwrites Indonesia’s newest Wahhabi madrassa
Money Jihad reports that Qatar Charity, “an entity that Osama Bin Laden once regarded as one of Al Qaeda’s three most important charitable front groups, has committed 760,000 Qatari rials (about 200,000 USD) to build a madrassa in West Java, Indonesia.”
Two articles on Islamic terrorism in Thailand
The Diplomat argues that, despite the fact that Islamic terrorism has been on the scene across Southeast Asia for the past decade, things are shifting.
The fight against Israel and the West will increasingly be waged in Asia. The piece proceeds from Iranian attacks on Israeli diplomats in Georgia and Thailand.
As we reported with regard to the Iranian drug trade in Australia, the article quotes John Boyd, Chief Executive Officer for regional security group Independent Protective Services, as saying
“The Iranians are also big into the drug smuggling scene in the region now…and there’s a huge influx of Iranians coming into the region now doing illegal activities.”
“Boyd says the botched Bangkok bombing would have proved disappointing, but
argues that the Iranians had also proved they had access to C4 from either
military sources or a supplier with supplies of stolen C4 and ‘with those type of resources an experienced member could do a lot of damage’.”
The article goes on say that
“In Thailand, and for much of Southeast Asia, terrorism is being redefined from the JI and al-Qaeda dictates of hard-line Islamic designs over sovereign interests that underpinned attacks around the world alongside separatist rebellions like those in the Southern Philippines and Indonesia.”
Quoting Boyd again, the piece predicts more Mumbai-style attacks in Asia, with “Sabah in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia [as] obvious staging grounds.”
Boyd sees the withdrawal of U.S. Forces from the Middle East ” Asia will start to see foreign insurgents from the Middle East come in to conduct their operations.”
Ganesh Sahathevan in Sydney has sent us a piece on the Islamist separatist assault on Buddhists in deep South Thailand, replete with pictures I do not reproduce here because of their graphic nature.
Although Muslims account for only 4.6 percent of the population, there has always been ethno-religious strife in the South. But separatist violence has markedly increased since 2004 and 4300 lives have been lost to Islamist insurgency. The death toll increased to 2,579 by mid-September 2007 and surpassed 3000 in March 2008.
The piece reports that Southern Buddhists have been leaving the area in significant numbers.
“Southern Thailand resembles modern day Afghanistan and Somalia because in both these nations the radical Sunni Islamists show their extreme intolerance of other faiths. In addition to Buddhists, moderate Muslims are also being killed by radical Sunni Islamic fanatics of Southern Thailand. The methodology of killing is intended to spread fear to all who oppose the Islamization of Southern Thailand.”
UNITED STATES
42P intervention in Syria?
Former Policy Planning head Anne-Marie Slaughter, writing in National Review of all places, has come up with a scheme for halting the butchery in Syria. As might be expected, her proposal she describes as “defensive.” She is opposed to arming the Syrian opposition on the grounds that this would lead to a proxy war in the country and its splintering.
She puts her hope in the Friends of Syria, who met in Tunis on February 23. She sees this group as leading an intervention to create “no-kill zones” in Syria “to protect all Syrians regardless of creed, ethnicity or political allegiance.” Slaughter sees the Free Syrian Army, defectors from the government army, as the agent to set such zones up near the Turkish, Lebanese and Jordanian borders. Such zones would allow for “short humanitarian corridors” to provide humanitarian relief and be managed by civilian committees she claims are already active.
“Establishing these zones would require nations like Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to arm the opposition soldiers with anti-tank, countersniper and portable antiaircraft weapons. Special forces from countries like Qatar, Turkey and possibly Britain and France could offer tactical and strategic advice to the Free Syrian Army forces. Sending them in is logistically and politically feasible; some may be there already.
“Crucially, these special forces would control the flow of intelligence regarding the government’s troop movements and lines of communication to allow opposition troops to cordon off population centers and rid them of snipers. Once Syrian government forces were killed, captured or allowed to defect without reprisal, attention would turn to defending and expanding the no-kill zones.
“This next step would require intelligence focused on tank and aircraft movements, the placement of artillery batteries and communications lines among Syrian government forces. The goal would be to weaken and isolate government units charged with attacking particular towns; this would allow opposition forces to negotiate directly with army officers on truces within each zone, which could then expand into a regional, and ultimately national, truce.”
As noted above, Slaughter regards “The key condition for all such assistance, inside or outside Syria, is that it be used defensively — only to stop attacks by the Syrian military or to clear out government forces that dare to attack the no-kill zones.”
Slaughter apparently sees no role for the United States in the proceedings unless “the international community should not act without the approval and the invitation of the countries in the region that are most directly affected by Mr. Assad’s war on his own people. Thus it is up to the Arab League and Turkey to adopt a plan of action. If Russia and China were willing to abstain rather than exercise another massacre-enabling veto, then the Arab League could go back to the United Nations Security Council for approval. If not, then Turkey and the Arab League should act, on their own authority and that of the other 13 members of the Security Council and 137 members of the General Assembly who voted last week to condemn Mr. Assad’s brutality.”
Ms. Slaughter’s devotion to 42P is maintained, although she is on the verge of sounding like an ordinary military planner and would very much like to be thought of as “leading from behind.” However, the scheme raises so many political obstacles as to make it abstract in the extreme.
The NYPD
We close today with a couple of pieces on the NYPD.
We’ve reported in the past on the “scandal” caused by the showing of “The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America” in and around the NYPD’s counterterrorism training program. We also mentioned Mayor Bloomberg’s outrage and noted Zuhdi Jasser’s defense of the objective character of the film he contributed to and narrated. However, we missed a February 5 article on the matter in the Daily News by Tom Ridge and Jim Woolsey, who both appeared in the film.
Ridge and Woolsey counter CAIR demands for Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s resignation and for the appointment of “an outside inspector general” to watch over the NYPD. The jist of the piece is that Raymond Kelly knows what he’s doing when it comes to Islamist terrorism (“The department he leads has foiled numerous terror plots and developed into one of the most sophisticated counterterrorism forces in the world.”) and that “essentially under the banner of political correctness, the advocacy groups calling for his resignation are working to brand those fighting crime as criminals, and those fighting violent bigotry as bigots.”
Ridge and Woolsey point out that the fact that CAIR is leading the push to oust Kelly is ironic:
“During the Holy Land Foundation trial of 2008 — the largest terror funding trial in U.S. history — CAIR was officially designated by the U.S. Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator and/or joint venturer.
“As a result, the FBI severed formal ties with the group.”
The authors then recommend that the NYPD and the major’s office “should cease relations with CAIR as well.”
AP has come by documents showing the extent of the NYPD’s surveillance of mosques. Police documents “showed police collecting the license plates of worshippers, monitoring them on surveillance cameras and cataloging sermons through a network of informants.” Recently, the NYPD has had to defend itself from criticism of its monitoring of Muslim student groups and cataloguing mosques and business groups in Newark, New Jersey.
Read the article, which is a good example of the usual attack on legal counterterrorism intelligence in the name of American civil liberties and human rights.