A JetBlue Jihadist? The Great Press Cover-up

A JetBlue Jihadist? The Great Press Cover-up

If a radical Islamist hijacked an airplane, we might never know it was an act of terrorism. That is, if we rely only on the mainstream media.

Case in point: On September 22, Khalil El Dahr, a passenger on JetBlue Flight 261 from Boston to Puerto Rico, suddenly rushed to the front of the aircraft, choked and kicked a flight attendant, tried to break into the flight deck, and urged crew members to shoot him. It took a half-dozen flight attendants to restrain El Dahr, tying him down with flex cuffs, seat belt extenders and a necktie. On landing in Puerto Rico, El Dahr was arrested and charged with interference with flight crew members and attendants, a federal crime.

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Sir David Amess murder: Prevent ‘is failing to deradicalise extremists’

The Home Office must take greater responsibility for how deradicalisation programmes are working with potential terrorists, a review will recommend.

The review found that Prevent, the government’s counterextremism strategy, was ineffective in some parts of the UK because certain local authorities were involving Muslim groups that actively opposed the programme in the process of deciding whether individuals need to be deradicalised.

… Separately, a report by the Henry Jackson Society, a think tank, has warned of a “fundamental mismatch” between the threat posed by Islamic extremism and the number of referrals to Prevent.

Despite Islamic extremists making up three quarters of offenders in prison for terror-related offences and the vast majority of suspects on the MI5’s terror watchlist, they represent only 22 per cent of all Prevent referrals and 30 per cent of Channel cases.

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Taliban beheaded female volleyball player, posted photos online, coach says

An Afghan volleyball player on the girls’ national team was beheaded by the Taliban — with gruesome photos of her severed head then posted on social media, according to her coach.

Mahjabin Hakimi, one of the best players in the Kabul Municipality Volleyball Club, was slaughtered in the capital city of Kabul as troops searched for female sports players, her coach told the Persian Independent.

She was killed earlier this month, but her death remained mostly hidden because her family had been threatened not to talk, claimed the coach, using a pseudonym, Suraya Afzali, over safety fears.

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UK’s Prevent deradicalisation program undermined by Muslim groups – official narrative that far-right is the fastest growing threat is a ‘comfort blanket’ obscuring the ‘patently more potent threat of Islamist extremism’.

Calls to overhaul Prevent as it is revealed ‘divisive groups who DON’T believe in counter-terror strategy help decide if individuals need to be deradicalised’ – after Islamists behind four recent attacks were ALL referred to scheme

Prevent is being undermined by activists who are opposed to its very existence being allowed to decide if individuals need to be deradicalised, a review will find – as it emerged Islamists behind four recent attacks were all referred to the scheme.

The review – which will be handed to Priti Patel next month – found that Prevent was ineffective in some parts of the UK because councils were involving Muslim groups with a ‘divisive’ agenda.

… Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project, said the official narrative that the far-right is the fastest growing threat is a ‘comfort blanket’ obscuring the ‘patently more potent threat of Islamist extremism’.

‘The body count does not lie,’ he said.

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Bataclan survivors recall being held hostage as gunmen fired on crowd

Group of 11 were forced to watch massacre and then used as human shields, trial over Paris attacks hears

Survivors of the 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan concert hall in Paris have described their fear and panic when they were held hostage in a corridor for more than two hours by two gunmen armed with Kalashnikovs and wearing explosive vests.

Three witnesses – one a 23-year-old barman at the time of the attack and two IT workers who were in their 30s – told France’s biggest ever criminal trial how they were among 11 people first forced to watch as the gunmen took pleasure in targeting and shooting concertgoers from a balcony, and then taken to a narrow upstairs corridor and used as human shields.

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Giving genocide denial a platform: ISIS, the media and the Yazidis

Muslims tattooed their Yazidi girl slaves.

When the Dutch journalist Judit Neurink and her friends heard of the takeover of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from her base in Irbil (or Erbil), the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, they were surprised. Neurink, a Middle East specialist and editor of one of the leading Dutch daily papers, Trouw in Amsterdam, moved to Irbil in 2008. During the time she spent there, apart from reporting, she set up a media centre to train journalists and teach politicians and the police how to work with the media. She wrote her sixth book, The Women of the Caliphate, which described life inside ISIS territory, published in 2016. Yet, she had been as shocked as anyone when ISIS occupied Mosul, just 50 miles from Irbil and only 250 miles from Baghdad, on June 10, 2014.

Within two days, and with only an estimated 1,500 fighters, ISIS had overrun Iraq’s second-largest city, with a population of about one-and-a-half million people. The Iraqi troops simply melted away. It was hardly a fight.

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The myth of lone-wolf terrorism

Would David Amess still be alive if someone had spoken up?

My heart sank twice last week: first when I heard about the brutal murder of Sir David Amess; and again when I started to read some of the disturbing commentary about the 25-year-old arrested on suspicion of carrying out the attack.

For many, the ethnicity and heritage of Ali Harbi Ali were wholly irrelevant to his alleged behaviour. Acknowledging that Ali is of Somali background, we were told, is racist and xenophobic. He must only be identified as British.

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Prevent terror de-radicalisation scheme has been hijacked by political correctness and ‘Islamophobia’ claims while disproportionate resources are dedicated to far right, claims report

Britain’s flagship programme fighting radicalisation has been hijacked by political correctness, skewing it away from the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, a report claims.

The devastating analysis, published in the wake of Sir David Amess MP’s fatal stabbing, accused police and others who oversee the Prevent scheme of allowing its work to be swayed by ‘false allegations of Islamophobia’.

It claimed, as a result, anti-terror resources are being diverted away from the principal terror threat – Islamist extremism.

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The Left’s shameful tribalism

Reaction to the death of Sir David Amess has been dispiriting

The reaction from the political establishment to the murder of Sir David Amess has been what you might expect. Politicians and media commentators of all persuasions have been united in their condemnation of the brutal slaying of this evidently popular member of parliament. And that is, of course, how it should be.

But I detect that, deeper in the bowels of political activism, matters aren’t quite so categorical. There hasn’t, it seems to me, been the same kind of grassroots unity of purpose and solidarity accompanying Sir David’s murder as that which we saw in the wake of the dreadful assassination of Jo Cox. Fewer candles and words of unconditional condemnation, no Twitter hashtag, a little more reticence among those who were not of Sir David’s political hue.

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Downplaying Jihad: After an MP’s Murder, They’re Talking About Everything Except the Killer’s Motive

The UK does not want the focus to be on the latest terrorist killer’s Islamic ties.

As best I can remember, I’d never heard of Sir David Amess before learning of his murder. That’s a shame, because he appears by all accounts to have been that rare politician who was in it for the right reasons — who, that is, loved his country, cared about his constituents, and made “public service” sound like a fair job description rather than a cynical Clintonian lie. But then I guess that’s precisely the kind of politician who rarely makes the big headlines.

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Denying David Amess the Last Rites was a dreadful decision

The police refused to allow a Catholic priest to purify Amess’s soul. This is the inhumanity of bureaucracy.

Everything about the murder of David Amess is grim. One detail feels particularly bleak. Amess, a devout Catholic, was denied the Last Rites. A Catholic priest and friend of Amess – Fr Jeff Woolnough – arrived at the scene in Leigh-on-Sea not long after the stabbing took place. He asked to be allowed through so that he could perform the Last Rites ritual. But the police said no. They later said it was important that they ‘preserve the integrity of [the] crime scene’. The priest, with his holy oils and his plan to administer the sign of the cross to the dying man, was clearly judged to be a threat to that integrity.

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Death of an MP: On the horrific murder of Sir David Amess and the reluctance of British media to confront its likely motive

Why is Sir David Amess dead? The proximate explanation of the death of an MP that personified the best of parliamentary service is grimly straightforward: a horrifying act of violence during his weekly Friday meetings with his constituency. But what of the psychological, political, or ideological build-up to that moment? What drove someone to stab a dedicated public servant to death as his horrified constituents looked on?

To have read the British press in recent days is to be left with the impression that Amess’s death was, first and foremost, a consequence of a shortage of civility of British public life.

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Norway attack victims stabbed not shot with arrows, say police

Five people killed in Norway last week were all stabbed to death and not shot with arrows as initially suspected, police have announced.

Four women and one man, aged between 52 and 78, were killed on Wednesday in the attack in Kongsberg, a town about 45 miles (70km) west of the capital, Oslo.

The attacker was armed with a bow and arrow, which he shot at several people, wounding at least one, but on Monday the police inspector Per Thomas Omholt told reporters none of the deaths was caused by the weapon.

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