ISIS – Page 2 – praag.org

ISIS posts warning after Garland attack

The terrorist group ISIS says they will murder Pamela Geller and kill anyone who shields her.

The terrorists also say they have 71 fighters in 15 different states and they 23 have signed up already for missions like the failed Sunday attack in Garland, Texas.

The attack by the Islamic State in America is only the beginning of our efforts to establish a wiliyah in the heart of our enemy. Our aim was the khanzeer Pamela Geller and to show her that we don’t care what land she hides in or what sky shields her; we will send all our Lions to achieve her slaughter. This will heal the hearts of our brothers and disperse the ones behind her. To those who protect her: this will be your only warning of housing this woman and her circus show. Everyone who houses her events, gives her a platform to spill her filth are legitimate targets. We have been watching closely who was present at this event and the shooter of our brothers. We knew that the target was protected. Our intention was to show how easy we give our lives for the Sake of Allah.

We have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states ready at our word to attack any target we desire. Out of the 71 trained soldiers 23 have signed up for missions like Sunday, We are increasing in number bithnillah. Of the 15 states, 5 we will name… Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, California, and Michigan. The disbelievers who shot our brothers think that you killed someone untrained, nay, they gave you their bodies in plain view because we were watching.

The next six months will be interesting, To our Amir Al Mu’mineen make dua for us and continue your reign, May Allah enoble your face.

The threat was posted by Abu Al Ameriki.

Second SA teenager wanted to join ISIS

State security services stopped a second Cape Town teenager from absconding to join the Islamic State group, South African State Security Minister David Mahlobo confirmed on Tuesday.

“Yes, we know about that one,” Mahlobo told ANA when asked about the high school girl from Grassy Park.

He said she was apprehended at Cape Town International Airport last month following a tip-off.

“The nice thing is that we are acting before these things happen,” he added.

“There are certain communities that are being targeted.”

It is understood that security services and the Hawks were in part acting on information given by a 15-year-old girl from Kenwyn who admitted that she was planning to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS) after she was taken off a flight from Cape Town to OR Tambo on Easter Sunday. The girls are believed to be friends, and tried to leave the country within 10 days of each other.

The incident has seen Mahlobo warn repeatedly that parents should monitor their children’s internet usage, as he did again at a media briefing ahead of his ministry’s budget debate in Parliament on Tuesday.

However, intelligence sources said they are also investigating the physical presence of recruiters for the jihadist group in the country.

Mahlobo said security agencies were being highly vigilant on the issue of recruitment by fundamentalist groups and staying in close contact with communities who are considered targets.

Source: ANA

Seattle teacher, Oz doctor recruiting for ISIS

A Twitter account with over 8,000 followers actively engaged in recruiting new people for the Islamic State group and transporting them to Syria may have been operated by a twenty-something girl from Seattle, Channel 4 reported.

The British news network investigated the @_UmmWaqqas account, which had been promoting the cause of the Islamic State (ISIS) until it was shut down on April 17. The woman behind the account is believed to be European.

Some early posts not related to IS or radical Islamism tweeted by @_UmmWaqqas indicated a passion for the Denver Broncos football team and take-out pizzas.

Channel 4 says it briefly contacted @_UmmWaqqas in March while working on the story and that the account was accessed from an IP address located in Seattle. But it couldn’t verify that Rawdah was actually writing, considering that several people may have access to the popular account. Her friends said she was no longer living in Seattle and named Saudi Arabia’s Medina or Denver, Colorado, as her possible whereabouts.

In an IS ‘travel guide’ for potential IS recruits who travel to Turkey to cross the border to Syria @_UmmWaqqas is listed as one of primary contacts, the report said.

In addition to advocating traveling to Syria and Iraq and joining the Islamic State, the account justified atrocities committed by the group, such as the execution by burning of a captured Jordanian pilot, saying it was ‘an eye for an eye’ retribution.

A white Australian doctor also appeared in an Islamic State propaganda video calling on medical “brothers and sisters” from around the world to come to Syria to join the “Jihad for Islam” against the West.

“My name is Abu Yusuf. I’m one of the medical team here. I came from Australia to the Islamic State to live under the khalifah,” the blue-eyed man with a distinctive Australian accent states in the YouTube video, which comes complete with a logo for the ‘Islamic State Health Service’.

He says he’s a doctor who traveled to Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, about 160km east of Aleppo, to offer his medical services.

According to news.com.au, the young doctor has been identified as former Adelaide University student Tareq Kamleh, believed to be in his late 20s, who completed his medical studies and later moved to Perth.

Australian Medical Association (AMA) Vice-President Stephen Parnis said the most influential membership organization representing registered medical practitioners and medical students of Australia has been outraged by ‘Abu Yusuf’s’ video.

Arabian media reports ties between ISIS and US

Arabian media have reported Wednesday about ties between Islamic State (ISIS) extremist group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the US. The reports appeared in response to US Senator John McCain’s attempts to deny his communication with al-Baghdadi.

The main evidence is the picture taken in 2013 in Syria, where Senator McCain met with opposition representatives whom the US supported in their fight against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The Elaph newspaper published an article titled “Photo of A-Baghdadi and McCain Adds Uncertainty to Relations between Washington and ISIS,” stating that the American politician held talks with al-Baghdadi at the meeting with the Syrian opposition.

Elaph noted that the photo triggered an “uproar” in social networks, with users claiming it provides a significant proof that there is secret connection between the US and the Islamist leader. Internet users say that the US, declaring the group its enemy number one in public, in reality provides financial and surveillance assistance to ISIS. Some users even go as far as claiming that the Islamic State, like al-Qaeda, was created by Americans.

The media wonder – why has not America destroyed al-Baghdadi and released him from a US prison? Elaph wrote that this proves there are ties between the Islamist and the White House, reminding readers that al-Baghdadi was released “in odd circumstances”. However, not long after releasing him, Americans declared al-Baghdadi “terrorist number one.”

Egyptian daily Al-Wafd published an article titled “Islamic State – America’s Mad Wolf,” saying Washington created the organization with the support from British and Pakistani special services. The main aim of Islamic State is to destroy Syria and Iraq, and the daily claims that US war on Islamism is “a big lie” that is used to justify Washington’s involvement in the framework of its military strategy. Militants’ attack on Iraq in 2014 is described by the newspaper as one of the operations planned with the participation of McCain and with the support of US and NATO.

Source: Itar-TASS

Genocidal ISIS cultists target Christians

Thousands of Christians have fled their historic cities, towns, and monastic communities for safety in other countries outside the rule of the self-proclaimed Islamic “caliphate” of ISIS.

The Middle East’s ancient Christian communities are targeted by Islamic State violence and have suffered more than Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, Shi’a Muslims, Syrian Alawites, moderate Sunni Muslims, and Palestinian refugees.

One of the first Christian communities to the flee from the pseudo-Muslim ISIS blood cult was that of Raqqa, Syria.

Raqqa was the first major city to fall to ISIS after the Israel and the CIA permitted arms allegedly destined for the almost-nonexistent Free Syrian Army to fall into the hands of ISIS and their Jabhat al-Nusra allies.

Although Christians represented only one percent of Raqqa’s 300,000 population, almost all fled or were killed after ISIS burned down and defaced churches and imposed a confiscatory religious tax on Christians of 17 grams of gold from each Christian male.

In all, half a million Syrian Christians have had to flee their country thanks to Saudi, Western, and Israeli support for ISIS advancing in their new Toyotas.

Mosul, in Iraq was the first major Christian population center to fall to ISIS, prompting most of the city’s 80,000 Christians to flee the region. ISIS destroyed churches of the Assyrian Orthodox diocese in Mosul. The Assyrians speak Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has denied that Aramaic was Jesus’s mother tongue, maintaining that Jesus spoke Hebrew, but Christian scholars have proven Bibi wrong.

In July 2014, ISIS leaders proudly proclaimed that Mosul had been cleansed of Christians.

There were three large Assyrian Christian denominations active in Mosul before the city’s fall to the new cultists, and priceless religious artifacts were smashed and burned by the marauders.

There was nary a peep from Israel about the religious cleansing of Mosul even though its propaganda machine conveniently ensures that the Nazi cleansing of Jews from Europe receives front page attention every time Israel faces criticism about the Palestinians.

ISIS terrorists kidnapped 300 Assyrian Christians in Iraq in February – including many children – from their villages along the Khabur River. The kidnapping sent some 1300 additional Assyrians fleeing for their lives.

ISIS then detonated the 4th Century Mar Benham Christian monastery in Bakhdida, near Mosul. The 1600 year-old building was built by Assyrian king Senchareb and was a UNESCO-protected World Heritage Site.

As ISIS approached the outer edges of Baghdad, many of the 100,000 Christians fled. Iraq’s Christians thrived before the US invasion and occupation. Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein, was a Christian.

The fanatically pro-Saudi CIA director, John Brennan, has, in addition to permitting weapons and financial aid to reach ISIS and allied forces in Syria and Iraq, provided intelligence, materiel, and propaganda support to the Saudi-led coalition battling Houthi and patriotic Yemeni forces in that nation’s multi-sided civil war.

Last month ISIS cemented ties with like-minded cultists in Libya, many of whom were propelled into power by the NATO intervention.

Thanks to the efforts of Israeli-French «philosopher» Bernard-Henry Levy, who shuttled between rebel-held areas of Benghazi and Netanyahu’s office in Jerusalem, the most radical Islamist jihadi factions took over power from Qaddafi in and around Benghazi.

These factions ultimately swore allegiance to the Islamic State, which, in February 2015 carried out the mass beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christian oil workers on a Mediterranean beach near Tripoli.

On April 3, 2015, Maundy Thursday, when Christians were celebrating Jesus’s Last Supper, cultists of the ISIS-aligned Al Shabaab group, stormed into the campus of Garissa University in Kenya and massacred 147 Christian students.

The attackers ensured that the Christians were singled out from other students before they were executed.

Pope Francis, in his Good Friday message, warned against the advance of ISIS: “We risk, all of us, the institutions and the people of the Western world, to be Pontius Pilate who wash their hands of such atrocities.”

Israelis, strangely, take pleasure in the fact that ISIS has declared Christianity, not Judaism or Shi’a Islam, to be its “Number 1 enemy”. This is spelled out in the ISIS propaganda booklet titled “Dabiq”.

ISIS says it will soon fly its black flag over Italy, Spain, the Balkans, and Austria.

Nagging questions about SA’s ISIS recruit

Following news that a 15-year-old girl was taken off a British Airways flight in Cape Town after a failed attempt to join ISIS, nagging questions remain about how a minor managed to book an international flight alone.

The suspicious circumstances surrounding her attempt to board a plane destined for Saudi Arabia at Cape Town International Airport has begged many questions about how British Airways screens its passengers.

British Airways reservations office at OR Tambo International maintains that a teenager does not need a legal guardian to fly abroad.

A “responsible person” signs the necessary forms on behalf of the minor and furnishes details of a “responsible adult” who will collect the minor at the destination, the airline says. A fee of $150 is payable by the “responsible adult”.

On Monday, State Security Minister David Mahlobo confirmed that a Cape Town teen that ran away from home to join the Islamic State was taken off a British Airways flight about to leave the city.

According to the Worldwide Visa Bureau, applicants from all countries require a visa to enter Saudi Arabia. Only transit passengers do not require visas.

Mahlobo says the investigation would centre around the “understanding the psyche of the child” however.

Meanwhile Gulf News has reported that NSA documents reveal the backers of ISIS:

The former employee at US National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, has revealed that the British and American intelligence and the Mossad worked together to create the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Snowden said intelligence services of three countries created a terrorist organisation that is able to attract all extremists of the world to one place, using a strategy called “the hornet’s nest”.

NSA documents refer to recent implementation of the hornet’s nest to protect the Zionist entity by creating religious and Islamic slogans.

According to documents released by Snowden, “The only solution for the protection of the Jewish state “is to create an enemy near its borders”.

Facts:

1) ISIS leader Al-Baghdadi was once a prisoner of the US government. Despite the fact that the US had offered a ten million dollar reward for him, the Obama regime ordered his release in 2009.

2) The Obama regime, with major support from Senate neo-cons John McCain and Lindsey Graham, gave hundreds of millions in military aid to Sunni Jihadists in Syria. Thousands of individuals receiving US aid are now members of ISIS. In fact, ISIS has even posted pictures of ISIS fighters with US Senator John McCain on the internet.

3) Israel has directly aided Sunni Jihadists in Syria by bombing Syrian military assets during Jihadist attacks.

4) The Israeli Prime Minister has reacted to the ISIS spearheaded Sunni/Shia Civil War in Iraq with borderline glee. The president of Israel has also suggested that a Sunni/Shia war is beneficial to the future of Israel.

5) The US and Britiain provided Sunni Jihadists with Toyota trucks in Syria. When, an army of ISIS fighters rolled over the Syria/Iraq border it looked like a commercial for Toyota.

ISIS blast kills 142 in Yemen

At least 142 people were killed when four suicide bombers blew themselves up in two mosques in the Yemeni capital Sanaa during Friday prayers, AFP reported.

Both mosques are known to be used mainly by supporters of the Shiite Muslim Houthi group which has seized control of the government.

The Islamic State group, an al Qaeda offshoot of Sunni extremists, claimed responsibility for the attacks, Reuters and AFP reported, citing an online statement by the group.

The four bombers attacked the Badr and al-Hashoosh mosques during midday Friday prayers, traditionally the most crowded time of the week, according to state news agency Saba.

The Shiite rebel-owned Al-Masirah TV channel said area hospitals were urging citizens to donate blood. It also reported that a fifth suicide bomb attack on another mosque was foiled in the northern city of Saada, a Houthi stronghold.

At the Badr mosque, militia guards caught the first bomber while searching worshippers at the entrance and he detonated his device there. Amid the ensuing panic, a second bomber entered the mosque and blew himself up in the crowd, Saba agency said.

Some 120 Muslim religious scholars this week published an open letter refuting the Islamic State’s claim to be a religious political movement. According to their view, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is flagrantly un-Islamic in its behavior.

The behavior of ISIS have more in common with Mao’s Red Guards or the Khmer Rouge than it does with the Muslim empires of antiquity which they claim to be heirs to.

In synthesizing aspects of both Western and Islamic civilization, the group has crafted a radical ideology which is distinctly modern despite its glorification of a pre-modern past. Recognizing this is the first step to negating the clash of civilizations narrative upon which they thrive, scholars say.

In the eyes of most Muslims the Islamic State is as “Islamic” as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is “Democratic”.

Welkom family lucky to be alive after Tunis attack

A Welkom family is lucky to be alive after two gunmen shot dead at least 21 people at Tunisia’s Bardo Museum.

Johan Cronjé and his family are holidaying aboard the MSC Splendida, which docked in Tunis on Wednesday. He told OFM News via satellite phone from the Mediterranean Sea, he and his family went past the museum in a private taxi and not as part of the cruise tour which had stopped at the museum.

Cronjé says he was informed by their taxi driver that a revolution that took place four years ago keeps rearing its head, and during Wednesday’s attack, the terrorists vented their anger at the government’s inability to provide jobs.

A South African woman also on board the cruise liner was wounded in the attack. The Department of International Relations has confirmed reports that a South African is among the tourists who died.

The Islamic State jihadist group has meanwhile claimed responsibility for an attack. In an audio message posted online, ISIS said “two knights from the Islamic State… heavily armed with automatic weapons and grenades, targeted the Bardo Museum” in the capital, Tunis.

The group, which has hundreds of Tunisians among its ranks, threatened more attacks, saying: “What you have seen is only the start.”

Authorities said they have identified the two gunmen shot dead during Wednesday’s assault.

US senator fears for Europe if Damascus falls

A Virginia state senator who once thanked the Syrian government for defending Christians is worried about the fate of Damascus, the Middle East and Europe.

“If Damascus falls, the dreaded black and white flag of ISIS will fly” over Syria, Virginia state Senator Richard Black told RT. “Within a period of months after the fall of Damascus, Jordan will fall and Lebanon will fall,” he said, adding that the self-proclaimed Islamic State would then target Europe next.

Black is no stranger to the Syrian crisis. Last year, he wrote a letter thanking the government in Damascus for a “gallant and effective campaign” to liberate Christian villages on the border with Lebanon. Most Americans are not aware that Christianity started in present-day Syria, he pointed out.

Years of US interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere have resulted in vast numbers of displaced Christians in Syria, Iraq and the Balkans. “If you look at the history of American involvement,” since the first Iraq war, Black told RT, “the one central theme has been that in each instance we’ve purged Christians from various countries.” Christians who lived in Kosovo for over a thousand years “are gone, completely annihilated.”

During the four-day pogrom in Kosovo 11 years ago, more than 4,000 Christian Serbs were driven out of six towns and nine villages. Over 900 houses and 39 churches were also destroyed by ethnic Albanian rioters.

Black, who served in the US Marine Corps and retired as a Colonel in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps before getting elected to the Virginia legislature, maintains that the Assad government is effectively fighting against the Islamic State and protecting the remaining Christians of Syria. Its fall, he says, would let ISIS quickly seize Jordan and Lebanon, and continue its drive westward.

“I look at Syria as the center of gravity… for Western civilization,” Black said, using the military strategists’ term for a place or event that can determine the outcome of a war. “If it falls, we’ll begin to see a very rapid advance of Islam on Europe.”

The current conflict in Syria began in 2011, when the US-backed opposition began an armed rebellion against President Bashar Assad’s government during the Arab Spring. By 2013, large portions of eastern Syria and western Iraq had fallen under control of militants known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS, or ISIS/ISIL). While declaring the need to fight ISIS, Washington has continued to demand the overthrow of Assad in favor of “moderate opposition.”

According to a recent report by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, six percent of the country’s population has been killed or wounded as a result of US intervention. Life expectancy went from 79.5 years in 2010 to 55.7 years. More than 5 million Syrians became refugees or migrated in search of work, while 40 percent of the remaining 17.65 million are internally displaced. The country has lost over $200 billion through destruction, looting, capital flight and GDP loss; unemployment is officially at 58 percent; and most of those who have jobs work for the government.

How Imam Obama Apostatizes Against Islam

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is not Islamic, announced Barack Obama, during a White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (with an emphasis on violence inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition). “They [ISIS] are not religious leaders, they are terrorists,” he asserted—an assertion that begs the question, as it assumes that a terrorist cannot be a religious leader as well.

President Obama further ventured that when we call them “Islamic,” we grant ISIS the “legitimacy” for which they thirst. For they are “desperate to portray themselves as religious leaders, holy warriors in defense of Islam.” Yet another non sequitur: Christening the group Islamic or not is unlikely to change that its members and a good many Muslims across the Ummah regard ISIS as thoroughbred Islamic.

What else did Imam Obama—who professes Christianity—proclaim in the name of the ISIS Islamic eschatology? Obama claimed that ISIS has “perverted the religion [of Islam]” and that it is peddling a “twisted ideology used to incite others to violence.”

“Weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate,” warns Graeme Wood, editor at The Atlantic, is something Western officials would probably do best to avoid. “When he claim[s] that the Islamic State [is] ‘not Islamic,’” Obama, in fact, has “drifted into takfiri waters,” explains Wood. For “non-Muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly.”

“In Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically perilous,” cautions Wood, in a seminal exposé on the Islamic State entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” “‘If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an infidel,’ the Prophet said, ‘then one of them is right.’ If the accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death.”

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His theologically and existentially perilous practice of takfir, notwithstanding, Obama lies about ISIS being antagonistic to Islam. Wood portrays “the group [that] seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom,” as Islamic as the Prophet Muhammad of the later, Medina period. He decries as “dishonest” the “campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature” and that it is indeed following “specific traditions and texts of early Islam.” “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. … the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, ‘the Prophetic methodology,’ which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail.

“We can gather that [the caliphate state] rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.”

And he has it on good authority. While Obama was offering up nostrums to the nation, Graeme Wood was speaking to leading authorities, among them “Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology.” This Princeton scholar “regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance.”

“People want to absolve Islam,” he told Wood. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.’ Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. ‘And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

Wood explains:

In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. ‘Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,’ Haykel said. Islamic State fighters ‘are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.’ … Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically … ‘embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion’ that neglects ‘what their religion has historically and legally required.’ Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, [says Haykel], are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”

Widely quoted in Wood’s ISIS exposé, Haykel takes a position not dissimilar to that of “the greatest theologian alive,” my appellation for Pope Benedict XVI. It is this: “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take” to justify their belief that ISIS is un-Islamic “is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid. [And] That really would be an act of apostasy.”

Which is precisely what Obama persists in doing.

Until the Islamic reformation is codified, those in the know—know-nothing Obama is not among them—will look upon the Islamic State as a religious, literalist, millenarian, apocalyptic group that is as Islamic as the Prophet and his band of belligerents during the Medina years.

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American, Israeli military advisors aiding ISIS terrorists in Iraq

American and Israeli military advisors were arrested while aiding Islamic State terrorists in Iraq.

Iraqi counter-terrorism forces arrested four foreign military advisors from the United States and Israel who were aiding the Islamic State, Iranian Tasnim News Agency reports.

Three of the arrested military advisors are dual citizens of the United States and Israel, while the fourth advisor is from a Persian Gulf country, Iraq’s Sarma News Agency said.

The foreign military advisors were captured in a headquarters, from where the Islamic State organized its military operations in Iraq’s Northern Province of Nineveh.

The arrests were made during the Operation, codenamed “The Sting of a Scorpion”. A number of other Islamic State fighters have been killed during the assault. The detained foreign advisors have now been transferred to Baghdad.

Source: sputniknews.com

Obama says Islam has always been part of United States

We hear a lot about the United States’ Judeo-Christian heritage, but according to President Obama, “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”

That’s what the president told a White House conference on “countering violent extremism” on Wednesday.

In his speech on Wednesday, Obama was making the point that Western nations must show that they “welcome people of all faiths,” at a time when “extremists” are saying that Western nations are “hostile to Muslims.”

However, America’s first dealings with Islam were tense and unpleasant.

According to a Heritage Foundation paper, shortly after America’s founding, the United States “was dragged into the affairs of the Islamic world by an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim pirates, the terrorists of the era,” who looted American ships and captured American sailors, holding them for ransom or selling them as slaves.

The paper notes that America’s struggle with Muslim pirates from the Barbary States (modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya) began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776 and continued for roughly four decades.

In his remarks on Wednesday, President Obama said Muslim Americans now serve as police officers, firefighters, soldiers, “and in our intelligence communities and in homeland security.”

He said Muslim American heroes are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, “having given their lives in defense of all of us.”

“And, of course, that’s the story extremists and terrorists don’t want the world to know — Muslims succeeding and thriving in America. Because when that truth is known, it exposes their propaganda as the lie that it is.

“It’s also a story that every American must never forget, because it reminds us all that hatred and bigotry and prejudice have no place in our country. It is not just counterproductive. It doesn’t just aid terrorists. It’s wrong. It’s contrary to who we are.”

So-called hate crimes against Muslims escalated in this country after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 — attacks perpetrated by Islamic radicals — but they have never reached the level of hate crimes against Jews, according to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Reporting statistics.

In 2013, for example, 62.4 percent of hate crime victims were attacked because of anti-Jewish bias, while 11.6 percent were victims of anti-Islamic bias.

Compare that with the year before the 2001 terror attacks: In 2000, of the 1,699 victims of anti-religious hate crime, 74.6 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Jewish bias; and only 2.1 percent were victims of an offender’s anti-Islamic bias.

President Obama on Wednesday stressed that U.S. is not at war with Islam:”We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” he said.

He also said the West and Islam are not in conflict; and that Islam is not incompatible with modern life.

Source: CNS News

Backdoor for jihadists?

Top U.S. counterterrorism officials say they worry a potential terrorist could be hiding among refugees who are looking to come to the United States after escaping the brutal war in Syria.

“It’s clearly a population of concern,” the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Nicholas Rasmussen, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, went further, saying it would be a “huge mistake” to bring refugees from the conflict to the U.S. – even as an estimated 4 million children, women and men have been forced to flee Syria and another 7 million have been displaced from their homes there, unable to leave.

Senior officials leading the State Department’s refugee efforts say the U.S. government has a long history of caring for the innocent victims of war.

“It’s not a matter of should we do it, it’s really a matter of how we do it,” Larry Bartlett, the State Department’s director of Refugee Admission for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, told ABC News. “One of the fundamental principles of our country is that we care about others. We will help others.”

With tens of thousands of Syrians joining groups in the region like the Islamic State, the U.S. government “cannot allow the refugee process to become a backdoor for jihadists,” Republicans added.

Source: Yahoo News

Outrage as ISIS beheads Christians

The Islamic State beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians over the weekend, propping the severed heads on the victims’ backs, a barbaric slaughter that led Reverend Franklin Graham to ask, “Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?”

“Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?” he asked.

The brutal killing of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians, who had been abducted in Libya by members of the Islamic State, was videotaped and the entire death film was posted online on Sunday, Feb. 15. It is entitled, “A Message Signed With Blood, To The Nation of the Cross.”

In a Facebook post on Feb. 16, Rev. Graham, who heads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said, “The militant Islamic terrorist group ISIS has released a video called A MESSAGE SIGNED WITH BLOOD TO THE NATION OF THE CROSS showing the beheadings of the 21 Egyptian Christians who had been kidnapped in Libya.”

“Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians?” said Rev. Graham. “Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world?”

“As we mourn with the families of those 21 martyrs, we’d better take this warning seriously as these acts of terror will only spread throughout Europe and the United States,” warned Rev. Graham.

“If this concerns you like it does me, share this,” he said. “The storm is coming.”

Source: cnsnews.com