Eleven people died and 60 were seriously injured when the Islamist Anis Amri drove a stolen truck into a Christmas market in central Berlin on December 19, 2016.
The 24-year-old Tunisian national whose application for asylum had been rejected had hijacked the semi-trailer truck, killing Polish driver Lukasz Robert Urban.
The attacker managed to escape and travel through Europe until he was shot dead by Italian police on December 23 after an altercation in Milan.
The first step in any effective rehabilitation program is acknowledging you have a problem. The United Kingdom has finally come to the realization that its deradicalization program for terrorists is an utter failure.
Jonathan Hall, Britain’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, made this admission, “…there is no evidence that deradicalisation programmes work,” publicly in a recent interview with the London Times.
The Austrian Constitutional Court has ruled that Austria’s ban on the wearing of headscarves in public schools violates the freedom of religion and the freedom of expression and therefore is unconstitutional.
The case highlights the constitutional restraints that European governments face in regulating political Islam and promoting integration.
The headscarf ban, introduced in June 2019 by a governing coalition comprised of the center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) and the populist Freedom Party (FPÖ), was an extension of a groundbreaking October 2017 “Integration Law” that sought to improve the integration of Muslims into Austrian society.
Islamist extremism remains the most threatening form of terrorism worldwide by far, according to the latest Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2020 report. Among the top 20 states most vulnerable to terrorism, 19 of them are mainly targeted by armed Islamist actors.
The four deadliest terrorist organizations identified in the study are the Taliban, Boko Haram, the Islamic State, and the al-Qaida affiliated al-Shabaab group based in Somalia. These Islamist organizations were behind over half of the total deaths recorded in 2019.
The US has announced charges against a Libyan suspected of making the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Abu Agila Mohammad Masud has been charged with terrorism-related crimes, Attorney General William Barr said on Monday, 32 years on from the atrocity.
The deadly bomb attack on the Boeing 747 killed 270 people, including 190 American citizens.
Prosecutors will seek the extradition of Mr Masud to stand trial in the US.
“A fundamental problem with Macron’s renewal program lies in a difference between Islam and Christianity, namely that the very idea of secularity is alien to Islam. The principle of the separation of church and state rests on biblical foundations. It was noteworthy that Marine Le Pen quoted a phrase of Jesus Christ in her recent speech against Islamism, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and render to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17). Nothing like this exists in Islam: everything is Allah’s, and the core of Islam is about the exertion of power in service of Allah. As Bernard Lewis repeatedly pointed out, classical Arabic did not even have the language to make the distinction between church and state, sacred and profane, spiritual and temporal, and ecclesiastical and secular. Such terms entered Arabic via the writings of Arabic-speaking Christians.”
Islam does not do integration.
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has always had friends in high places, and on Wednesday it celebrated another, announcing that it had “thanked Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-MI) – and the 29 congressional colleagues that joined her – in urging Facebook to take immediate action to eliminate anti-Muslim bigotry from that social media platform.” CAIR’s longtime spokesman Ibrahim “Honest Ibe” Hooper noted proudly that it was “one of several organizations named by Rep. Dingell in her press release announcing the letter.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Sunday said he was “relieved” that a “humanitarian” recovery operation had brought home 18 children and five “Islamic State” (IS) brides from Kurdish-run internment camps in northeastern Syria.
One of three German women brought back, identified in reports as Leonore M., 21, from Saxony-Anhalt state, was arrested a day earlier on arrival in Frankfurt airport, on charges including terror organization membership, said federal prosecutors.
All three German women reportedly face terror charges in Germany.
‘Trump is crazy’: Hezbollah sees threat in US president’s final days
For the past four years, the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has fought a war in Syria, supported Iraqi forces and stage-managed the politics of its homeland, all the while trying to avoid facing off with Israel. Yet its exhausted leaders fear the last gasps of Donald Trump’s presidency could deliver threats that eclipse everything else.
In the organisation’s heartland, Hezbollah members are watching the clock – and the skies. Israeli jets have been streaking overhead for more than a month, and over the past few weeks the frequency of flights has sharply increased, as has security in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the nerve centre of the region’s most powerful militant group.
French authorities have charged and detained four Pakistanis suspected of links to a meat cleaver attack by a compatriot outside the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly that wounded two people, the national counter-terrorism prosecutor’s office has said.
The four male suspects, aged 17 to 21, were in contact with the attacker, a source familiar with the case said on Friday.
They are suspected of being aware of the attacker’s plot and inciting him to carry it out, according to another judicial source close to the investigation.
The ringleader of a grooming gang who trafficked school girls as young as 13 into prostitution has been freed from prison after serving just a third of his sentence.
Ahdel ‘Eddie’ Ali, 32, led a sex gang with his brother Mubarak – known as Max- which targeted up to 100 vulnerable young women in Telford, Shropshire between 2006 and 2009.
Swedish Social Insurance Agency Director General Nils Öberg has admitted that the abuse of welfare systems has become so extensive that it can now be considered “systemic”.
At least 45 Daesh* terrorists have been supported by Swedish grants after they left the Nordic country to join the terrorist organisation, an investigation by the newspaper Expressen has revealed.
According to the newspaper, they received their benefits while they were fighting in Syria, in some cases over a period of several years. Twenty-four of the terrorists received money directly, whereas the rest were treated as “part of the same family community”.
Three men who stripped and dragged an elderly Christian woman through an Egyptian village over rumours that her son was having an affair with a Muslim woman have been acquitted by a court.
Soad Thabet, now 74, was the victim of the sectarian attack in 2016 which saw her paraded naked by a mob of vigilantes in Al-Karm.
The attack was accompanied by the torching of Coptic Christian homes and villagers angrily calling for the religious minority to be expelled.
Authorities turned a blind eye to group-based child-sexual exploitation because of racial sensitivities.
The Home Office report into group-based child sexual exploitation – more informally described as grooming gangs – has led many to conclude that the perceived prevalence of Asian or Pakistani Muslim perpetrators is a right-wing myth.
But this debate glosses over what remains the greatest problem on this front: the story is not so much the ethnic composition of grooming gangs, but rather how the ethnic composition of certain gangs influences how public authorities respond to these cases.
Iran’s Islamist proxies in the Arab world have resurfaced to condemn last week’s normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco just as they did with similar accords reached in the past few months with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.
As usual, the Islamists and their patrons in Tehran, who seek the elimination of Israel, are using texts from the Koran and sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammed to justify their opposition to the normalization of relations between Arabs and Israel.
