Mike Levine of FoxNews has a story,  “Somali-Americans Accused of Al Qaeda Ties Indicted on Terror Charges, Sources Say” about possible indictments  against Somalis in Minneapolis who were under Federal investigation for recruiting American Somali youths to join Al Shabaab, the al Qaeda affiliate. At the center of the FBI and grandjury investigations is the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in St. Paul.   This is a story we spotlighted a June NER article, “Foot Soldiers of Islam”  presented at the recent Nashville Symposium and in earlier posts on The Iconoclast. We had also urged Senator Lieberman’s Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee to reopen hearings on recruitment for Al Shabaab in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area given the murder in Mogadishu of 18 year old Burhan Hassan.

Here are some of the emerging details in the FoxNews report:

Among those charged is a man from Minneapolis who went to war-torn Somalia and then, about four months ago, relocated to Seattle, according to the two sources and a leader in the Minneapolis Somali community. The man was then arrested in a Seattle airport and transferred to a jail in Minneapolis, where he is currently being detained, according to the law enforcement sources.

The law enforcement sources said the man, described as in his 20s, has been charged with providing material support to a terrorist group, in this case al-Shabaab, which has been warring with the moderate Somali government since 2006.

Omar Jamal, the executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, Minn., identified the man as 21-year-old Abdifatah Ise. FOX News was unable to independently confirm that. Jamal said the man's family contacted him for "assistance" after the arrest, but he had been unable to speak publicly about it until now "in the interest of" a federal investigation.

For much of the past year the FBI has been looking into how dozens of young, Somali-American men were recruited to train and possibly fight alongside al-Shabaab in anarchy-stricken Somalia. The investigation has centered on Minneapolis, where a grand jury has been hearing testimony from witnesses for several months, but the investigation has also been active in Seattle; Columbus, Ohio; Cincinnati; Boston; and San Diego.

A source told FOX News in March that "several" recruits had returned to the United States, but counterterrorism officials have repeatedly said there is no intelligence indicating that any such recruits are planning attacks within the country.

"[Their] primary focus obviously is not on the homeland, it's abroad," Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said during a briefing with reporters last week. "But any time you have people who are being trained in terrorist-type activities, that's something that needs to be monitored."

Note the focus of these federal investigations and possible indictments: the Abubakar As-Saddique Mosque:

According to Osman Ahmed, whose 18-year-old nephew was one of those to go to Somalia late last year, at least a dozen people have testified before the Minneapolis grand jury in the past few weeks alone, including officials from the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center in St. Paul.

One law enforcement source said that shows "major progress" in the investigation, since the Abubakar mosque has been a focal point for investigators from the beginning.

Many of the men recruited to join al-Shabaab attended the Abubakar mosque, and several mosque officials, including director Farhan Hurre, could face indictment, one source said.

In addition, a youth volunteer at the mosque, Abia Ali, recently testified before the grand jury, and she is now worried that she could face indictment, according to Ahmed, who said he talked to someone close to Ali. Ahmed said he was told that Ali had been planning to visit family in Africa sometime in the next few weeks, but after testifying to the grand jury authorities told her not to leave the country.

In a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Ali acknowledged that she felt like a target of the FBI investigation, but she denied any involvement in recruiting Somali-Americans to join the fight in Somalia.

The scope of these Federal investigations in several US Somali communities underlines the failure of FBI and Homeland Security monitoring of radical Mosques largely Saudi funded,  the conflicts in loyalties of naturalized American Somali admitted to this country under our generous humanitarian refugee program administered by our State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement.  Further, it raises a serious question about the lack of screening of radical Imams who are admitted to this country using so-called religious orders Visas. 

These are issues that should propel Senator Lieberman’s HSGAC committee to reopen hearings on Al Shabaab recruitment, soon.

Tu quoque, "whataboutery", "yesbuttery", whatever you like to call it, is a classic strategy of denial. Reluctance to criticise Islam has led "feminists" into all kinds of contorted attempts at moral equivalence. Don't you know, they squeal, that one in five American women has been assaulted by her partner? And that only one in twenty British rapists is convicted?

It is wearisome to explain that wife-beating in Islamic countries is not even a crime, that the reporting of rape is only possible where the victim herself will not be punished, that, in short, the country to worry about is one that does not admit to problems. It is exhausting to repeat ad nauseam that the glass ceiling is not the same as the stoning of rape victims. But repeat it we must, until the wall of stupidity and dozy binthood is toppled - preferably without crushing a homosexual.

David Thompson frequently tackles the subject of moral equivalence. Here he defends Christina Hoff Sommers, who makes an eloquent and one would think uncontroversial plea for accuracy in comparing women's lot:

Needless to say, Sommers’ line of enquiry isn’t universally welcomed. Her points about gross errors, overstatement and competitive victimhood are often met with prickling indignation, not least from those whose activities include some combination of the above. Some denounce Sommers as “conservative” – a synonym for evil – a “female impersonator” and an “anti-feminist,” a term that suggests both the crime of apostasy and a very narrow definition of what “real” feminists should be concerned with and how they’re permitted see the world. One taker of umbrage offers the following, entirely without irony:  

That Sommers does not get that the vast majority of American women are every bit as hobbled by constrictions around dress, mobility and behaviour as women in developing countries tells me Sommers needs to get out more.

Readers will, I’m sure, be nodding in agreement. After all, women across America are accustomed to being given a three-day deadline to shroud themselves from head to toe or face imprisonment. And doubtless when American women find themselves pregnant out of wedlock they too have a very real fear of execution at the hands of local government. You see, in degree of constriction, the “vast majority” of American women are indistinguishable from Aisho Ibrahim Dhuhulow, a Somalian woman found guilty of extra-marital intercourse by her local Islamic court. No doubt all across America unfaithful wives risk sharing Dhuhulow’s fate. Which is to say, they too risk being bound from head to foot and buried up to the neck, screaming, while their skulls are pelted with rocks by 50 pious men until, finally, they scream no more. All in front of a crowd of equally pious onlookers.

Yes, “every bit as hobbled.” Not one iota less.

LATImes: In a movie career that flourished in the 1950s and '60s, Malden played a variety of roles in more than 50 films, including the sympathetic priest in "On the Waterfront," the resentful husband in "Baby Doll," the warden in "Birdman of Alcatraz," the pioneer patriarch in "How the West Was Won," Madame Rose's suitor in "Gypsy," the card dealerin "The Cincinnati Kid" and Gen. Omar Bradley in "Patton."

The variety of the roles established Malden, former Times film critic Charles Champlin once wrote, "as an Everyman, but one whose range moved easily up and down the levels of society and the IQ scale, from heroes to heavies and ordinary, decent guys just trying to get along."

Eva Marie Saint, who worked with him in 1954's "On the Waterfront" and became a good friend, called Malden "a consummate actor."

He "never changed, he always became the character. If you watch his work, he never falls, there's never a false move," she told The Times on Wednesday.

Malden was a longtime holdout on television roles until he agreed to play Lt. Mike Stone on the ABC police drama “The Streets of San Francisco.” It ran from 1972 to 1977 and earned him four consecutive Emmy nominations.

He won his sole Emmy for portraying a man who begins to suspect that his daughter was murdered by her husband in the fact-based 1984 miniseries "Fatal Vision." ...

He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago on March 22, 1912, the son of an immigrant mother from the nation that later became Czechoslovakia and a Serbian father, who was a milkman.

Malden spoke little English until his family moved from their Serbian enclave in Chicago to the steel-mill town of Gary, Ind., when he was 5.
 

Here is a clip from One Eyed Jacks (thanks to Alan).

Michael Farr of Queensland, Australia is our crossword winner for June. He will receive an autographed copy of Ibn Warraq's Defending The West.

Congratulations Michael!

Honorable mention once again goes to Aymenn Jawad of Wales.

About last month's puzzle, George McCallum wrote: "I believe that these crosswords were designed by the Lexcentrics people in London as revenge for losing the Revolutionary War."

Helen Thomas, who is 89 years old, has been a White House correspondent for every presidency since John F. Kennedy’s. She's mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

(CNSNews.com) - Following a testy exchange during today’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well--for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.” ...
 

Kirk Semple writes in the New York Times:

Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools’ holiday calendar.

But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the Council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.

The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with “a very large number of kids who practice.”

“If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.”

The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.

Mr. Bloomberg’s stance has irritated advocates of the measure, and some said he risked alienating many in New York’s fast-growing Muslim population as he seeks re-election in the fall.

Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be “catastrophic” among the city’s roughly 600,000 Muslims.

“We really have confidence in the mayor’s intelligence,” said Imam Talib, head of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem. “It’s an election year.”

The proposal to add the two holy days — Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha — has not drawn much visible public opposition. Some council members have expressed reservations about subtracting more classroom days from the school calendar, though only one, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, voted against it.

After the vote, Mr. Koppell said the existing schedule of religious holidays might have to be reviewed and trimmed, lest other growing religions in New York start demanding their own days off. “Where are we going to end with this?” he asked.

The resolution’s advocates said that since about 12 percent, or more than 100,000, of the city’s public school students are Muslim, they deserved recognition. The two holidays have already been adopted by school districts including Dearborn, Mich., and several municipalities in New Jersey.

Supporters also say that since the Ids (pronounced eeds) are floating holidays whose timing is set by the lunar calendar, they often fall on other religious holidays, on weekends or during the summer. During the next decade, for instance, at least one of the two Ids each year is expected to coincide with summer recess or an existing school holiday, according to a report by the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University.

It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Bloomberg would continue to have final say on the issue, because the State Legislature still has not passed a bill to extend his control over the schools. But some officials said that even if the bill did not pass, he would be able to exert indirect control through appointments to the Board of Education.

The Council resolution also urged the Legislature to pass two pending bills that would amend state education law to require the holidays in the city’s school calendar. That could allow the move without the mayor’s approval, said Councilman Robert Jackson of Manhattan, a co-sponsor of the resolution and a Muslim...

From Miadhu News of The Maldives
Islamic affairs ministry has revealed that women’s mosques across the country will be shut down in order to minimize government expenditure.
Speaking to media at Dharubaaruge Deputy Minister at the Islamic affairs ministry, Sheikh Mohamed Faroog said the ministry has decided to shut down all mosques used exclusively by women in order to cut down expenses. He further said, in Islam, the best place for women to pray was at home.
Sheikh Faroog said the government’s policy was to build bigger and larger mosques with separate areas for men and women. He said this would reduce the number of mosques in the country and would be more cost effective.
Sheikh Faroog further said in addition to women’s mosques, small and old mosques will also be closed once bigger mosques are erected.
Is it about cost of maintenace or is it about control? And will those women's areas be just as comfortable as those of the men or compare well with what the women are used to in their own mosques?

I first spotted this in The Times of India, who got it from the UK tabloid the Daily Star, well known for its pin-up models but also a useful source of odd stories. And writers from the Indian press, who I am sure are only there for the news, do find those stories of interest for their readers.
LONDON: In a bid to hit back at French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempts to ban the burqa in the country , hardline Islamic cleric Anjem Choudary has branded his wife Carla Bruni a prostitute.
Choudary has said that former model and singer Bruni, 41, represents the face of a depraved Western society where women are treated like sex objects.
Choudary, 42, below, wrote on the Islam4UK website: “Sarkozy may be content with being wed to a prostitute who flaunts her body to the world believing it to be righteous conduct, but he is reminded that a Muslim is not this shallow and depraved.”
That's a matter of opinion, of course. Child marriage, polygamy, slavery etc.

Michael Jackson’s untimely death has forced out of the closet a number of writers whose indifference to him is matched by a compulsion to tell us of it. New English Review’s Theodore Dalrymple imagines he’s the only one – well nearly:

I must be one of the few people in the western world who would not recognize a song by Michael Jackson. No doubt I have heard one or several of his songs, pumped inescapably into a public place like poison gas, but I have spent a number of decades reducing my exposure to this kind of thing to an absolute minimum. 

The other people in the western world who would not recognize his songs are my friends. 

Friends of Darymple be warned: if he catches you tapping your foot to Billy Jean, he’ll never speak to you again. Not that he’d know what you were tapping your foot to, of course. 

Alas, the circle of Jackson-snubbers is wider than Dr Darymple thinks. It includes Lawrence Auster:

I never took the slightest interest in Michael Jackson, other than to be instinctively repelled by him or just indifferent; I actually don’t remember which….If there are readers who do have a sense of Jackson, who knew his music and watched his performances at their best, it would be interesting to hear their thoughts. I can’t contribute to the discussion, having no impressions of him beyond what I have already said.

Auster now makes up for his indifference – or was it repulsion? - devoting four or five posts to the singer.

Erstwhile New English Review writer John Derbyshire scarcely noticed him:

What a fuss about Michael Jackson! I can’t say he ever impinged much on my consciousness, my interest in pop music having faded before he appeared. To me, Jackson was mainly a name that turned up in the jokes of late-night comics. There are people, though — including sane, grown-up people — who like his stuff and rank him up there with the pop greats.

Chippy American-in-exile journalist Carol Gould takes a break from attacking her adopted homeland the UK to ask:

Am I the only person in the world not moved by or concerned with the death of Michael Jackson?

No, Carol, you’re not. There are hoards of you, each more unmoved than the last.

So far defender of high culture Roger Scruton has remained loftily above the discussion.  In The Times, Sir Peter Stothard speculates on what Scruton might say were he to write a column on the subject. It would be along the lines of his critique of pop music:

Pop music, which presents the idealised adolescent as the centre of a collective ceremony, is an attempt to bend music to this new condition – the condition of a stagnant crowd, standing always on the brink of adulthood, but never passing across to it.  It shows youth as the goal and fulfilment of human life, rather than a transitional phase which must be cast off once the business of social reproduction calls.  For many young people, therefore, it constitutes an obstacle to the acquisition of a musical culture.  It is the thing that insulates them from the adult world, and all other uses of music – singing, formation dancing, playing an instrument, listening – arouse their suspicion."

And my own opinion of Michael Jackson? I couldn’t say, for I have never heard of him.

A Muslim dentist who tried to force patients to wear Islamic dress goes by the topsy turvy name of Omer Butt.

It seems he is to be given the elbow.

Virtually on the heels of my July NER article, “Zakat and Terrorism,” came this confirmation in a  front page article in today’s  New York Times (NYT), “In Refugee Aid, Pakistan’s War has a New Front: Islamic Radicals Vying With U.S. on Relief. ”   The  NYT article notes that Islamist charities have competed successfully against US Aid, as the latter is funneled via the Pakistani government to the two million internal displaced refugees from Taliban-controlled in the Swat Valley. The Pakistani government will not permit direct shipment of US aid to these refugee centers.  One Pakistani American businessman, Mahboob Mahmood, who was interviewed for this NYT article remarked with regard to US assistance, “They have been almost completely neutered.” Obama Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke has been  appearing  at  these  refugee camps saying that US aid is coming. But how are the refugees to know.

Instead radical Islamist charities are delivering refugees aid along with the message of Jihad against America and the West. 

Witness this from the NYT report:

Last week, a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad.

“The Western organizations have spent millions and billions on family planning to destroy the Muslim family system,” said the aid director, Mehmood ul-Hassan, who represented Al Khidmat, a powerful charity of the strongly anti-American political party Jamaat-e-Islami.

The Western effort had failed, he said, but Pakistanis should show their strength by joining the fight against the infidels.

Witness these comments from US refugee advocates and Pakistani local officials:

Yet Islamist and jihadist groups openly work the camps.

“Because of the lack of international agencies, there is a vacuum filled by actors that are Islamist and more than that, jihadist,” said Kristele Younes, a senior advocate with Refugees International, a Washington group established in 1979.

One of the most prominent jihadist charity groups, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, had been barred from the camps, according to Lt. Gen. Nadeem Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani Army’s disaster management group. The group was designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations Security Council in December.

Nonetheless, it set up operations in Mardan under a new name, Falah-e-Insaniyat, according to Himayatullah Mayar, the mayor of Mardan. After the order to leave the area, Falah-e-Insaniyat went underground but still appeared to be operating to some extent, Mr. Mayar said.

In our NER article on “Zakat and Terrorism,” we noted that among the express purposes of Zakat  or Muslim charity was support for the ‘way of Allah” or Jihad.  Thus, it would appear that the Obama Administration outreach to the Muslim ummah, especially in Taliban-racked Pakistan has failed.  We  have been shut out from any Pakistani  delivery of American humanitarian aid that will cost US taxpayers $110 million.  It’s all because Jihad rules.