To hit back, or not to hit back?
This is the question that has heated up debate within Tehran’s ruling Khomeinist circles for almost a week. The debate was triggered by the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a shadowy figure in the top echelons of Tehran’s murky establishment.
Despite an avalanche of obituaries and reports on the event, it is not yet quite clear who Fakhrizadeh was and what he was doing.
October 29. Nice, the main city on the French Riviera. A man in the Basilica of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption decapitates a woman and murders two other people while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is the greatest!”]
This is the second beheading in France by an extremist Muslim in less than a month. Two weeks earlier, on October 16, a middle school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in the suburbs of Paris after showing his students some Mohammad cartoons during a discussion on freedom of speech.
After 1,400 years of jihad violence against Jews everywhere that Muslims and Jews have lived in proximity, the Orthodox Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, who serves as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth, says that he finds it “alarming” that so many Muslims in the United Kingdom are anti-Semitic. But given Islam’s texts, teachings and history, what else did he expect?
What’s “Alarming” is that 56% lied.
One of three Americans hailed as heroes for overcoming a gunman on a train travelling to Paris has told a French court his main aim was to survive.
Spencer Stone, a 28-year-old ex-serviceman, described via video from the US how he and his friends saw Ayoub El Khazzani pick up a Kalashnikov rifle and prepare to open fire.
He counted three separate attempts the gunman made to try to kill him.
Mr Stone was one of two people wounded in the August 2015 Thalys train attack.
French security services failed to appreciate the gravity of the defamatory campaign on social media against the teacher Samuel Paty before his murder, an inspectors’ report has found.
Despite the school’s headteacher reporting concerns about increasingly incendiary posts targeting the history and geography teacher on Facebook and Twitter, intelligence officials underestimated the risk.
School inspectors said Paty, 47, who was killed in an Islamist attack in a Paris suburb in October, was given the full support of the school director and the national education authorities, but officials were “unable to assess the danger”.
The Belgian government has refused permission for the Grand Mosque in the EU quarter of Brussels to be recognised as a local faith community, claiming that the place of worship has been infiltrated by Moroccan spies.
The decision to deny the application was made by the justice minister, Vincent Van Quickenborne, following advice from the security services, according to media reports. Recognition as a faith community secures financial support and assistance from the government.
“We stand by our brothers from Azerbaijan and we will not allow unbelieving dogs of Armenia to live in peace in Germany”, and further: “We know you, we know where your children are, Day and night.”
Full English translation here.
Jihadists in northern Mozambique have intensified their military operations this year in an apparent attempt to establish an Islamic Emirate in the province of Cabo Delgado. The Islamist insurgency, which began in October 2017, remained below the radar until recently. The escalating violence, however, has become a security concern for Mozambique’s regional neighbors, including South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia. Radical Muslims from Kenya and Tanzania are transforming what was initially a low-intensity ethnic rebellion, into a full-fledged Islamic jihad against Mozambique’s central government.
French authorities are set to inspect 76 mosques across the country, in an unprecedented action against “separatism,” French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin announced on Thursday.
“76 mosques are now suspected of separatism,” Darmanin tweeted. “In the coming days, checks will be carried out on these places of worship. If ever these doubts are confirmed, I will ask for their closure.”
Too little, too late.
There are currently about 40 ongoing preliminary investigations against Daesh* returnees over war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. So far, almost none of the Swedish jihadists has faced trial.
A woman who travelled to Syria and joined Daesh has returned to Sweden. While the woman was arrested upon arrival at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport on suspicion of unlawful separation of children, her future remains unclear, the newspaper Sydsvenskan reported.
British police have arrested a 57-year-old after two women were stabbed while shopping in the northern English city of Burnley. The authorities have requested people not to speculate about the man’s motivations.
Lancashire police reported that they were called to an incident at 9:30am local time after two women were stabbed in a Burnley city branch of popular department store Marks & Spencer.
The Iran-backed Hezbollah terror organization in Lebanon will be the first to celebrate if and when a Biden administration returns to the 2015 nuclear deal between the world superpowers and Iran.
Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, has called on Biden to give Iran more money and return to the nuclear deal. “Now, an opportunity has come up for the next US administration to compensate for past mistakes and return to the path of complying with international agreements through respect of international norms,” Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency quoted Rouhani as saying.
WASHINGTON (AP) — As two Islamic State militants faced a judge in Virginia last month, Diane Foley listened from home through a muffled phone connection and strained to make out the voices of the men prosecutors say kidnapped her son before he was murdered.
Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh stand accused of belonging to an IS cell dubbed “the Beatles,” an incongruously lighthearted nickname for British citizens blamed for the jailing, torture and murder of Western hostages in Syria.
After geopolitical breakthroughs and stalemates, military actions in Syria and court fights in London, the Justice Department’s most significant terrorism prosecution in years was finally underway. For Foley, who months earlier had pleaded with Attorney General William Barr to pursue justice by forswearing the death penalty, the fact the case was proceeding at all felt miraculous.
A prominent British MP has warned against sanitising the deadly “ideological virus” of Islamism, claiming the woke minority are threatening efforts to root out Islamic terrorism.
Writing exclusively for the Telegraph, former home secretary Sajid Javid slammed those who cry “Islamophobia” when Western governments seek to deal with the challenges of Islamist extremism.
Javid, who is himself a Muslim, claimed that Western liberal democracies are under threat from a “grotesque form of separatism” that needs to be confronted. He added that President Emmanuel Macron is right – a reference to the French leader’s crackdown on Islamist extremism.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) scrubbed a tweet on Monday that included an anti-Semitic phrase often used by terrorist groups that seek the destruction of Israel.
Screenshots from the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” show that Tlaib retweeted a Saturday post that included a graphic promoting Palestinian solidarity and the phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.”
