Modern Crime: Italian Mafia May Have Been Supplying Weapons to ISIS

Organized criminal groups in southern Italy may be supplying assault weapons to groups and individuals that are associated with the Islamic State, according to European investigators. British newspaper The Guardian said last week that security officials in Italy, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe have traced weapons used by Islamists to at least one arms cache that entered the European black market through a Sicilian crime family with links to the mafia.

According to The Guardian, the initial link to the supply of weapons seems to originate with an organized criminal family in Catania, on Sicily’s eastern coast. The family, known locally as the “Ceusi”, is part of the “Santopaula” clan, which is the dominant criminal network in that part of Italy. Investigators have confirmed that two years ago the Ceusi family purchased a cache of 160 deactivated AK-47s from AFG Security Corporation, a Slovakia-based European weapons dealer. The purchase of the weapons, for $40,000, was legal. But the Sicilian mafia then illegally reactivated the weapons by removing the deactivating metal pins that had been inserted into the weapons’ barrels. The reactivated weapons were then supplied to the ’Ndrangheta, the Italian organized crime network that operates in the region of Calabria, in the Italian mainland. In turn, the ’Ndrangheta, which specializes in the trafficking of contraband to and from Europe, sold many of these reactivated weapons to a smuggling ring headquartered in the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

It was the Egyptian network, say investigators, that sold the AK-47s to Islamist militants in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, who have close connections with the Islamic State in Syria and other Islamist groups. A few of the weapons even ended up in the hands of European Islamists in France and elsewhere. Much of the intelligence regarding the AK-47s comes from telephone intercepts, said The Guaridan. But the newspaper cautioned that concrete links between the Mafia and the Islamic State have not yet been established. Nevertheless, the paper said that, according to European investigators, “organized criminals are increasingly open to trading with extremists”, and there are mounting “signs of an even closer relationship between organized criminals and Islamists” operating in North Africa and the Middle East.

Read the Original Article at Intel News

Crusader Corner: Why Is Nobody Talking about the Link Between BLM and Jihadist?

How soon most Americans forget. The Black Power/Black Militant Movement has re-emerged under a new name: BLM. And just like in the 60’s, their connection to the Nation of islam and Islam Fundamentalism should be of VERY serious concern. -SF

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamic supremacist groups have assiduously courted Black Lives Matter, and linked their propaganda efforts against “Islamophobia” to the Black Lives Matter stand against perceived racism. In Dallas last night, we see where this is tending: as Kyle Shideler notes in the March article below, “At the event, MAS leader Khalilah Sabra openly discussed the importance of Muslim support for Black Lives Matter, and urged ‘revolution.’ Comparing the situation in the United States to the Muslim Brotherhood-led Arab Spring revolutions, she asked, ‘We are the community that staged a revolution across the world; if we can do that, why can’t we have that revolution in America?’” And with the mass murder of police in Dallas last night, we’re getting there.

The Nation of Islam is not an orthodox Muslim group, and subscribes to a great deal of racial mythology that is nowhere in Islamic tradition. It is, however, also true that many black Americans first enter the Nation, and then become orthodox Sunni Muslims. And given the increased racial tensions of the Obama era, many people in both the NOI and among mainstream Sunnis have a taste for the “revolution” that is brought about by means of jihad.

“Dallas police shootings: Race rally cops killed in Dallas sniper ambush,” The Australian, July 9, 2016:

Heavily armed snipers killed five police and transit officers in downtown Dallas and wounded seven more, in a ­premeditated and triangulated “ambush-style” assault during a rally protesting against the killing of black men after two shootings this week….

As the FBI and local authorities launched an investigation, their focus was expected to probe militant black rights groups set up in Dallas. Anti-police groups include the New Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton Gun Club, named after the founder of the 1960s activist Black Panther Party.

The Huey P. Newton Gun Club includes a coalition of BARC (Blacks Against Racist Cops) and other African-American groups, who agitate against police ­brutality. The group ­attended the Nation of Islam’s Muhammad mosque in Dallas in April to monitor protests by an anti-­Islamic group, the ­Bureau of American ­Islamic Relations. Both sides were armed, and moved on by police….

It’s useful to recall this: “Black Lives Matter and a History of Islamist Outreach to African Americans,” by Kyle Shideler, Townhall, March 17, 2016:

Once the dust settled, last week’s protest of a Donald Trump rally in Chicago demonstrated a growing nexus between Islamist groups in the United States and the radical leftist “Black Lives Matter” movement.

This rhetoric of unity between these movements was clearly on display at the 2015 joint conference of the 2015 Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). MAS was described by federal prosecutors as the “overt arm” of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, and ICNA is recognized as the front for the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) founded by one of the foremost thinkers on modern Jihad, Syed Abul A’la Maududi.

At the event, MAS leader Khalilah Sabra openly discussed the importance of Muslim support for Black Lives Matter, and urged “revolution.” Comparing the situation in the United States to the Muslim Brotherhood-led Arab Spring revolutions, she asked, “We are the community that staged a revolution across the world; if we can do that, why can’t we have that revolution in America?”

Reporting on this merging “revolutionary” alliance goes back as far as the first outbreak of disorder in Ferguson. Few may recall the attendance at Michael Brown’s funeral of CAIR executive director Nihad Awad. Awad was identified in federal court as a member of the Palestine Committee, a covert group of Muslim Brothers dedicated to supporting Hamas in the United States.

CAIR joined other groups named by federal law enforcement as Muslim Brotherhood organizations and lined up behind the Ferguson protests.

In November of 2014, Fox News reported on an effort by CAIR Michigan Director Dawud Walid to link the death of Michael Brown at the hands of police and the death ofLuqman Abdullah, a Detroit imam shot during an FBI raid.

Abdullah was described by the FBI as a leader of a nationwide Islamic organization known as “The Ummah,” run by convicted cop-killer Jamil Abdullah Amin. Abdullah’s group engaged in criminal activity in order to raise funds in order for an effort to establish Sharia law in opposition to the U.S. government.

Amin and CAIR have a long association together, with CAIR providing funding for Amin’s legal defense, and issuing numerous press releases in support of the Georgia radical imam and former Black Panther.

While this linkage of Islamist front groups to radical racial politics may seem a relatively new development, the reality is it has been the result of a nearly four decade long effort by Islamist groups. A major thinker on this effort was a Pakistani immigrant and ICNA leader named Shamim A. Siddiqui, who knew JeI founder Maududi personally. Siddiqui wrote his work, Methodology of Dawah Il Allah in American Perspective in 1989.

Siddiqui defined Dawah Il Allah as,

“an organized, a determined and a continuous effort to call the people of the land to the fold of their Creator and Sustainer, Allah (SWT), as priority Number One [of the Da’ee], towards accepting Islam as a way of life and convincing them to the need and urgency of establishing the Deen of Allah in the body politics of the country, with the sole objective to get the pleasure of Allah.” [Emphasis added]

In other words, Siddiqui focused not solely on religious proselytizing, but on the promotion of Islam as a political system. Siddiqui spends much of Methodology of Dawah discussing the efforts being made at recruiting and indoctrinating African Americans, and complained that the “revolutionary” aspect of Islam (his words) was being ignored by those working to convert the African American community.

Ultimately, Siddiqui believed that the Dawah mission depends on merging the grassroots intensity of radicalized African American Muslim communities—like those led by Jamil Abdullah Amin—with the doctrinal and more sophisticated Muslim Brotherhood-led immigrant communities. Siddiqui writes:

“This again, will not be possible without bringing both the immigrant and Afro-American Muslim communities of America on to one platform. The resources of one and the political awakening of the other, when combined together with the Islamic Movement of America, will be able to play miracles…There will be no dearth of resources, both of men and material, at that time. Only the Islamic Movement of America can get this job accomplished.”…

Read the Original Article at Jihad Watch

Examining Terrorist Tactics: The Machiavellian Method of ISIS

Like communists of yore, the soldiers of the caliphate are seeking to ‘exacerbate the contradictions’ of those ranged against them.

PARIS — Saudi King Salman bin Abdelaziz sounded at once angry and plaintive as he marked the end of this blood-drenched month of Ramadan.

The so-called Islamic State, ISIS, had just staged attacks in three Saudi cities, hitting near the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, a Shia mosque in Qatif, and even a mosque in the holy city of Medina.

Two days before, a car bomb in Baghdad and the fire that followed had killed more than 250 people. Before that, attackers in Bangladesh slaughtered Western patrons and locals at a popular Dhaka café. Days earlier came the stunning attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, and before that the murder of a husband and wife from the French police in front of their 3-year-old son in a Paris suburb. Still earlier: the horrific slaughter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

 All that happened in one month on the Muslim calendar, all in the name of Allah.

Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and second in command, had declared Ramadan a time of “conquest and jihad.”

“Get prepared, be ready… to make it a month of calamity everywhere for the non-believers,” he said in a recording released in May. But as usual, most of the slaughter targeted other Muslims.

King Salman, “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” vowed this week to meet these threats with “an iron fist,” as of course he would. But his statement acknowledged the heart of the problem with a more original and more memorable phrase: the “biggest challenge,” he said, is how to keep young people away from the “masterminds of misleading ideas.”

Salman also called for Muslim unity to face the ISIS menace. But given that the Saudis’ proxy wars with Iran from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, in Bahrain and in Yemen are waged with sectarian vehemence, the king’s call for “Muslim unity” sounds oxymoronic, a true contradiction in terms.

 And contradictions, in fact, are the foundation that ISIS is built on.

The so-called Islamic State chooses its targets and tailors its terror to reach specific audiences. To do this, it tries, as communist revolutionaries once did, to “exacerbate the contradictions” among its rivals: build on suspicions, inflame resentments, inspire violence and repression that engenders more violence and rebellion.

In a global war of attrition, which is what we’re looking at, the key to defeating ISIS—aside from killing its operatives—is to resist absolutely and unequivocally its strategy using terror to divide and demoralize.

But that’s no easy feat. There are just so many contradictions in Arab and Western society, and ISIS understands them better, it seems, than many Arab and Western leaders do. Its “masterminds of misleading ideas” employ what the French call la polique du pire,a policy that provokes a society to turn on itself, aiming eventually to make the masses ungovernable, and daily life unbearable.

In the last few weeks, as ISIS has come under pressure on the ground in Iraq and Syria, its response has not been a blind, senseless lashing out. It has been a carefully calculated campaign using a wide array of available human tools, some of them acting under direct orders, some of them loosely affiliated, and some merely inspired to carry out mass murder against a backdrop of psycho-sexual confusion—but always serving the interest of the self-anointed “caliphate” that ISIS claims to be.

Let’s go down the list from this gruesome month of fasting, prayer and slaughter:

Read the Remainder at The Daily Beast

Crusader Corner: Killing The Terrorist Before They Can Kill You

This is not just great advice for LEO but also for Armed Civilians.

Everybody say with me like you mean it:

“Cut the Head off the Snake before they DETONATE!” -SF

The video footage of the terrorist attack at the airport in Turkey will have to be developed into a police training tool.

A new tool, used to teach cops to become combat thinking soldiers.

In the past they have been trained to be arresting law enforcement personal. The terrorist shot his way into the inside of the Turkish passenger terminal and then was himself shot. He hit the ground and his rifle went flying across the floor out of range, for the murdering Muslim to be able to retrieve it and continue killing innocent people.

In the cop world you are trained to think that now he is not only obviously wounded, he is unarmed.

So your seasoned skills tell you to secure the situation, and then render first aid to the poor wounded human writhing on the floor in such obvious pain.

Times have changed, the first thing you need to do is put a bullet into his head.

The Muslim terrorist, while writhing in pain was trying to get to his detonation switch and kill even more innocent passengers. One man in the video can be seen looking down at the Muslim terrorist on the floor and then realizing that “My God or My Allah, it looks like Mohammad has an explosive suicide vest on—I must run away.” If only that person had had a firearm and the training to dispatch the Muslim terrorist before the suicide vest was detonated.

Unless we change our training in the US, the average American cop can, and will make the same mistake.

You have to cut off the head of the snake–before he can detonate.

American cops do not execute the bad guys. No, we want to arrest them, read them their rights and then process them through our legal system, and that is how it should be. However, it will have to change when Mohammad the Muslim terrorist is writhing on the floor of the Mall of America. When one shot to his head will save the lives of countless shoppers who will otherwise be killed or injured when Mohammad detonates his suicide vest on US soil, hard decisions must be made.

In 1987 I was stationed at Chanute Air Force Base in central Illinois. The base was being evaluated by a higher headquarters inspection team. Part of the inspection was an anti-terrorist, graded exercise. During the course of the exercise the General’s aide (a Captain) was taken hostage and a “simulated” suicide vest was placed on her. The inspector “terrorists” held the base hostage for hours during that exercise. At one point two “terrorist” and the “hostage” came out of the building they were holed up in, and started walking toward a 1000 man dormitory full of young Airmen. We were told by the “terrorists” that if we tried to stop them they would kill the Captain. All the senior flying officers were concern with what we should do.

I told them the goal was to keep the terrorists from killing a large group of Airmen if they got into that dormitory. They offered no suggestions how to solve the crisis.

I contacted my tactical team sniper and told them to shoot both of the “terrorist” and they did. Of course in the exercise scenario the poor young Captain was killed when the bad guys detonated the suicide vest (outside and away from people–simulated of course). Did the flying officers ever have a fit. I can still hear it “Captain Harl you got Captain “Jones” killed and you may have cost us a passing grade on the terrorist exercise.” You know what, we passed the exercise test. When the senior inspecting Colonel asked your General how else did he plan to save the lives of so many Airmen, there was no other alternative. You have to be willing to anticipate “acceptable losses.”

I went from being the “dog” of the exercise to having a very happy General when we got an excellent grade for stopping these “terrorists.”

I was a trained Air Force cop and I understood that you were supposed to pull your Miranda card out, read the bad guy his rights and then cuff and stuff him in to the back of a squad car. Senior flying officers do not like the term acceptable losses, to them it means losing airplanes. I was however also an Army trained Infantry officer and we did not worry about your “rights” in combat, we just killed you, before you could kill us. There are always loses in Infantry combat and you had better learn to accept some.

This concept of killing before the Muslim terrorist can kill you will become second nature in the future.

For a while there will be a learning curve that will involve many a US cops getting killed for not killing the snake fast enough, or having their law enforcement career destroyed because they did shoot first. Once there are hundreds of dead Americans lying in their own blood at a mall or a sports stadium, and everyone gets to see it up close on 24/7 TV news, concern for the terrorist’s rights will shift to rapid snake killing.

Close quarters combat training will have to become the norm for all on duty cops, not just the tactical teams. Every cop will need an “evil” black rifle and will find themselves carrying that rifle more and more as a daily tool and not something setting in the patrol car just in case. This will cost money for departments to acquire the rifles and the money for training time and ammo. Of course the public will be upset at first, but after a while not seeing a long gun in the hands of a cop will be the oddity.

Private Citizens will start to exercise their abilities to open carry long guns, that will take some more getting use to, but it is coming.

Life is changing and those who do not like guns but expect strangers in uniforms to show up with their guns and save the day will suffer the most.

“Cut the snake’s head off” will have to become the cry of the average American.

Making sure you have the correct tools to fight the snake is something that needs to be dealt with now. So, do not wait until the snake slithers into your town.

As an American police officer it is time to insist that you always have a long gun in your squad car with lots of extra loaded magazines ready for the snake fight at any moment. As an American citizen, if you do not own a gun, buy one, if you own a gun then by a second one.

As always when in doubt, buy fresh ammo. Call the folks at Buffalo Bore Ammunition (buffalobore.com); their “snake” killing ammo is Strictly Business.

Strictly Business is an interesting term and implies a seriousness of the situation and the need for not only being prepared, but being prepared with the correct quality tools that will keep you alive.

Killing the snake, staying alive and keeping your family safe. Now that is Strictly Business.

Major Van Harl USAF Re. / vanharl@aol.com

Read the Original Article at Ammo-Land

Learning From Terrorist Tactics: In Bangladesh Attack, Those Who Could Recite Qur’ran Were Spared

“The gunmen were doing a background check on religion by asking everyone to recite from the Quran. Those who could recite a verse or two were spared. The others were tortured.”

And even in the face of this, which we saw before in the Westgate Mall jihad massacre in Kenya and in other jihad massacres, authorities will continue to insist that this has nothing to do with Islam. We live in a truly insane age.

Those who could cite Quran were spared: Gulshan attack victim’s family,” by Rashidul Hasan,Daily Star, July 2, 2016:

Those who could recite a verse from the Quran were spared, others were tortured, said a rescued hostage of the Gulshan restaurant attack where at least two lawmen were killed.

“The others were tortured by the gunmen,” said Rezaul Karim, father of Hasnat Karim who was held hostage inside Holey Artisan Bakery in the diplomatic zone for over 10 hours.

Hasnat Karim, his wife Sharmin Karim and daughter Safa, 13, and Rayan, 8, went to celebrate Safa’s birthday at the Spanish restaurant in Gulshan’s Road no-79 last night.

The birthday celebration took a dangerously unprecedented turn when gunmen stormed into the restaurant and took about 20 people, including foreigners dining there, hostage.

They were finally rescued after a joint drive of the military, paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh, police and elite force Rapid Action Battalion pushed a heavily-manned offensive this morning.

“They (gunmen) did not behave rough with the Bangladesh nationals,” Reazul said quoting his victim son Hasnat. “Rather they provided night meals for all Bangladeshis.”

“The gunmen were doing a background check on religion by asking everyone to recite from the Quran. Those who could recite a verse or two were spared. The others were tortured.”

According to him, the gunmen were done with the foreign nationals dining in the eatery by 11:00pm last night. By the end, five gunmen sustained bullet injuries and “probably died.”

Read the Original Article at Jihad Watch