Did Britain Get The Terror Boomerang?

The airwaves and Blogosphere have been spinning with speculation regarding the motives behind 7/7. I thought we knew what was behind 7/7 -- TERRORISTS! Let's all say it again -- TERRORISTS. I apologize for the caps, but some are still afraid to use the "T" word.

The reason the TERRORISTS struck on 7/7 is the same reason they struck on 2/26 and on 9/5 and on 9/11 and on 10/2 and on 10/23. They hate us.

They hate the way we treat women, or, don't treat women for that matter. They hate ink stained thumbs. They hate that our elections matter. Sorry John and Al, but our elections do count. They hate the fact that my neighbor is Jewish. They hate our separation of church and state. Mostly, they are just filled with hate.

It seems that there are still a few that don't understand this and I'm not talking about the TERRORISTS. I am talking about members of the MSM.

Asia Times recently ran an article by B Ramen that points the finger right back at Britain for what happened on 7/7. To be honest, the title of the piece points the finger, the rest of the piece is a laundry list previously reported facts, not unlike this very blog, that tries to come together in an effort to support the title. It doesn't. Like much of the MSM, this author hopes you won't read past the title and will just take his/her word for it.

Buckled in? The piece has obviously been translated into English, so beware. Here we go.

That three of the suspected perpetrators of the bomb attacks on London on July 7 were British youths of Pakistani origin should not only have been no surprise to British intelligence, it should have been anticipated: the radicalization of Britain's Muslim youth of Pakistani origin began in the mid-1990s with the full knowledge and complicity of British and US intelligence agencies.

Radicalization of youth? I'm interested. Please continue.

In the mid-1990s, the Pakistan-based jihadi group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM - previously known as the Harkat-ul-Ansar, HUA ) sent a contingent to help Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Serbs. They were sent by the government of Benazir Bhutto at the request of the Bill Clinton administration. The contingent, which was raised and trained by Lieutenant General (retired) Hamid Gul, former director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who himself used to visit Bosnia, included a large number of British Muslims of Pakistani origin.

HUM was sent by the Bhutto government? Odd. Wasn't it the Bhutto government that identified HUM as the sponsor of an aborted overthrow of the government in favor of an Islamic Emirate in Pakistan?

A decade before Bosnia, the CIA had raised and funded a large corps of jihadis of Arab origin - including Osama bin-Laden - to help the Afghan mujahideen in their jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

By the time of the Serbian crisis, these Arabs of Afghanistan vintage had already started creating mayhem beyond Afghanistan, notably in Indian-held Kashmir, so Western intelligence wanted to avoid the use of Arabs in Bosnia. They turned to Pakistanis, particularly Pakistanis living in Britain and other countries in Western Europe. Thus began the radicalization process of Muslim youth of Pakistani origin in western Europe.

Britain, remember? You were going to tell us how Britain brought this all on themselves.

The first three of four people believed to have carried out the four London attacks have been named.

Shehzad Tanweer. Aged 20 to 22, lived in Leeds. Believed to have blown himself up on a subway train near Aldgate station. He sometimes worked at his family's fish and chip shop in a suburb of Leeds. Described as a good student who played cricket for a local team. Reportedly went to Lawnswood school in Beeston, before studying sports science at Leeds University. He did not have a regular job. According to the Guardian, he recently travelled to Pakistan. His father, Mohammed Mumtaz, was originally from the Faisalabad region of Pakistani Punjab.

Mohammed Sadique Khan. Aged 30, from Dewsbury, a town about 14 kilometres from Leeds. Believed to be responsible for the explosion in a subway train at Edgware Road station. He was married to a Muslim woman from Gujarat in India, whose family had migrated to South Africa and then to the UK. He met her while the two were students at Leeds University.

Hasib Hussain. Aged 19, also from Leeds. Believed to have blown himself up on the number 30 double-decker bus near Tavistock Square. According to The Times, he had gone "a bit wild" as a young teenager, but had become devoutly religious about 18 months ago after returning from a trip to Pakistan to visit his relatives. He lived with his Pakistani-born factory-worker parents. He studied at the Matthew Murray High School and never went to university.

So far we have three TERRORISTS who were either students, worked in the family fish and chip shoppe, married a muslim woman of Indian origin or went a bit wild as a young teenager. Nothing in the description of these young men would lead me to believe that a single one of them was a TERRORIST. It is the same old story. Have you noticed that whenever a serial murderer or rapist is caught, the neighbors always say, "Well, he was very quiet, kept to himself, was kind to his mother and loved cats." Same thing here. Please, go on.

Questions are already being asked whether any of these suspects had previously come to the notice of the British police. There is some confusion. British Home Secretary Charles Clarke strongly denied a reported statement by French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that he (Clarke) had told a European Union counter-terrorism meeting on July 13 that some of the bombers had been arrested last year by British police.

Following this denial, Sarkozy clarified that he did not say that Clarke had said this, but he had only said that he (Sarkozy) had heard that some of them had been arrested last year. According to the BBC, Shehzad Tanweer was arrested by the local police in 2004 for disorderly conduct and cautioned. Hasib Hussain, reportedly a good friend of Shehzad Tanweer, was arrested in 2004 for shoplifting and released after a caution.

Disorderly conduct and shoplifting? Evidently, the Patriot Act is barking up the wrong tree. It appears that we should round up every university student that has been arrested by the local police for disorderly conduct. There goes the candidate pool for the 2008 general election.

This development recalls the case of Daniel Pearl, the American Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and then killed by members of the HUM and the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) in January-February, 2002.

Pearl's murder was orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British citizen of Pakistani origin who had studied at the London School of Economics before joining the HUA to go to Bosnia.

Omar then infiltrated into India and participated in some acts of terrorism, for which he was arrested and jailed by Indian authorities. In December 1999 he was released in a deal following the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane to Afghanistan by the HUM. From Kandahar, Omar crossed to Pakistan, joined al-Qaeda and opened its office in Lahore.

Yes, Sheikh was a British citizen who had allegedly studied at the London School of Economics, but how does that support the assertion that Britain brought this upon itself. The alleged bomb maker studied chemistry at North Carolina State University. Does that make Chris Washburn a TERRORIST? No. It made Chris Washburn a crappy center and a waste of the Golden State Warrior's first round pick in 1986 NBA draft. Confused, well the 1986 NBA draft has as much relevance to the author's assertion as the items presented in the article. Ramen goes on to state emphatically that Omar infiltrated into India, participated in some terrorist acts, was released following some sort of deal following the hijacking of a plane and then hung his al-Qaeda shingle in Lahore. What does this have to do with the murder of 50+ innocent people in Britain?

In the beginning of 2002, meanwhile, Pearl had heard that the instructions to Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, whose father was a British resident of Caribbean origin, to carry out his terrorist strike had come from an unidentified source in Karachi belonging to an organization called the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra (JUF), based in Lahore. Its leader, Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, had four wives, two of them African-Americans.

The JUF differed from other Pakistani jihadi organizations in some respects. It focused its activities on Muslim communities in the US, Canada and the Caribbean and its membership consisted largely of blacks recruited in the US, Canada and the Caribbean. It laid emphasis on the need to penetrate the armed forces of the US and the Caribbean by recruiting blacks serving in them. It was a highly secretive organization and not much was known about its leaders other than Gilani. It never issued any statements and never circulated any pamphlets or ran any websites.

Now the JUF is involved, has a leader who married African-American women and recruited blacks from the armed forces of the U.S. and various Caribbean nations, yet we still are no closer to a tie to London than when we started this trip.

Ramen's piece goes n and on; however, the horses never come home to roost and the chickens never dot their "I"s. This is typical of the reporting we are subject to on a daily basis. Rathergate wasn't a fluke. Jayson Blair was truthfully challenged and B Ramen doesn't get it.

They just hate us and they always have.

Open Post Thanks to The Mudville Gazette.