Muslim from the U.S. is top Islamic State commander

How did a Muslim from the U.S. come to have the understanding that taking sex slaves and fighting for the Islamic State was his Islamic privilege and duty? After all, we’re constantly told that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam, and that Muslims in the U.S. all reject its view of Islam. So was Abu Abdullah “radicalized on the Internet”? If so, why was the peaceful, benign Islam that he supposedly learned in mosques in the U.S. not able to withstand challenge from a twisted, hijacked version of Islam that is so un-Islamic that even non-Muslims like John Kerry and the U.S. Catholic Bishops can spot its un-Islamic character a mile away?

Also, as you read this poor girl’s story, think of what awaits the young women in Europe and the U.S., if the feckless policies of their governments aren’t reversed, quickly.

“EXCLUSIVE – Revealed, AMERICAN jihadi is ‘top ISIS commander’: Yazidi slave reveals that she was beaten and held captive by US citizen who directs attacks and keeps vial of poison to kill himself if he is caught,” by Jay Akbar, Mailonline, September 29, 2015:

A Yazidi slave girl has claimed the high-ranking ISIS commander who held her prisoner was a white American who directed the terror group’s attacks and received personal letters from its leader.

Nada, 19, told MailOnline that US citizen Abu Abdullah al-Amriki (the American), 23, boasted about how beautiful women from all over the world wanted to join him in Syria and that he always kept a vial of poison on him – in case he was captured in battle.

She was bought by the ISIS emir – or local leader – at a slave auction in Islamic State’s de-facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, in October.

The tall, pale man with black hair and short beard bought nine girls in total but sold seven of them on.

Nada was taken to one of his ‘many’ heavily-guarded houses in Manbij, Aleppo, where she lived with the other Yazidi girl and her son.

The teenager, who is now in America, told her harrowing story to the US government after escaping with her captor’s phone. Her fellow Yazidi hostage, known as ‘Bazi’, is also in the country – she will give evidence against Abu Abdullah to Congress and wants the FBI to press charges against him.

MailOnline cannot independently verify these claims and Nada said she has never seen his picture before on videos or images released by ISIS.

She said Abu Abdullah was a very important figure in Islamic State and a stream of armed balaclava-clad militants from all nationalities visited the house.

She said: ‘Many guests were coming and he was always explaining things to them. He was drawing maps of the fighting. He was telling everyone how to fight, about how to make an ambush.

‘He was always ordering people to move and how to make a plan. He always carried a pistol and an AK47.

‘There were also sniper rifles in the house, lying around. He also carried a policeman’s stick which he used to beat me and the boy [another prisoner] with. He also slapped the boy.

‘They didn’t let me enter the room when they were talking. They only let me enter the room when they were talking tea to them.’

Nada described the wiry commander, who spoke Arabic badly, as a ‘nervous’ man who doused himself in strong perfume and yelled at her constantly.

He was so frightened of being captured that he always kept a vial of poison in his pocket, so he could commit suicide if his enemies ever took him alive.

One group of four men – who were always masked – visited Abu Abdullah regularly to bring him letters from ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, said the woman.

Nada said: ‘If Abu Abdullah was not at home, I’d have to sign for it. I was just receiving it and putting it in his room.

‘The mail contained letters and the envelope was from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The masked man who brought the mail from al-Baghdadi talked in English.

Abu Abdullah, who converted to Islam around four years ago and has many different identities, told Nada that he regularly travels to the United States to see his family, but there is no way to verify his sensational boast.

She said: ‘He showed me pictures of his family – he had a girl and a boy. He said his family were not around, that they were far away.’

Nada was captured in the northern Iraqi city of Tal-Afar, around 32 miles from Sinjar, in around August 2014.

The terror group abducted more than 500 Yazidi women and young girls and slaughtered 5,000 as its fighters stormed through the region.

ISIS views Yazidis, whose religion includes elements of Christianity and Islam, as ‘devil-worshippers’.

The extremists take the females as their personal sex slaves and execute the men who do not convert to their twisted brand of Islam.

The teenager was taken to Manbij, a north-Syrian town which earned the nickname ‘little London’ because of the high numbers of British jihadists who live there.

Manchester twins Salma and Zahra Halane, 17, are thought to live in the town where English and German are commonly spoken.

Danish charity worker Ahmad Walid Rashidi, who was held captive in Manbij for over a month, met a blue-eyed British fighter in its police station.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘It’s like a little London or a little Berlin. Manbij is definitely the most foreign-influenced place in Syria.’

Rashidi, 23, said foreign fighters were paid around £20 a month and received free food and medicine, while jihadi brides got a £2 allowance.

During Nada’s 20-day captivity, the American jihadi also showed her pictures and footage of American girls who he claimed were coming to Syria to join ISIS.

She said: ‘There were beautiful girls or women from everywhere, from every country – he showed me them.

‘He said: “They are free and they want to come and join us, so why is it that you want to leave? Why do you want to run away? This is a good country.”

‘Abu Abdullah told me that I and the other girl will have a long life with him as servants – and our children will grow up to be jihadis like them.’

The ‘other girl’ was a Yazidi known only as Bazi, 20, who was held hostage alongside Nada after she was abducted during the ISIS assault on Sinjar in August 2014.

Bazi told CNN that Abu Abdullah would pray and wash himself before he raped her and how she pleaded with him not to touch Nada.

She said: ‘The first time he raped me, he tried to rape the other girl who was with me but I told him since I felt I’m already raped, I don’t want the other one [to be raped].

‘So I became responsible for the other one. I told him to treat her as a servant for him, because he was sheikh, an emir, so he would just have her as a servant. I convinced him the whole time until we were able to escape from his house.’

Bazi’s physical description of Abu Abdullah matched Nada’s and she also claims he told her about visiting his family in America but, again, the claims cannot be independently confirmed.

The American terrorist and his ‘team of bodyguards’ beat them after each of their five failed escape attempts. He once prevented Bazi from seeing her son for an entire week, Nada told MailOnline.

One day, when Abu Abdullah and his guards went to battle in northern Iraq, Nada stole his phone and ran to another house in Manbij.

She said: ‘When they were away fighting in Kobani, me and the other girl broke the door and left with the boy.’

They kept a low profile until the Assayish – police from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) – came to rescue her.

She gave Abu Abdullah’s phone to the KRG, who interviewed her and took her to a refugee camp in northern Iraq.

Here, she was interviewed by US government officials who visited the settlement and showed her pictures of another American jihadi who went by the nom-de-guerre, Abu Zeyd.

She said: I recognized it. Abu Zeyd was a beautiful man – he had long blond hair, and no facial hair. But I don’t know who he is. They had no pictures of Abu Abdullah.’…

Obama serves up cliches and falsehoods as his anti-ISIS strategy

Platitudes, self-righteousness, distortions, tortured reasoning, self-promotion — that’s right, it’s another major speech by Barack Obama. Comments interspersed below.

“Remarks by President Obama at the Leaders’ Summit on Countering ISIL and Violent Extremism,” United Nations Headquarters, September 29, 2015:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, heads of state and government. Last year, here at the United Nations, I called on the world to unite against the evil that is ISIL, or Daesh, and to eradicate the scourge of violent extremism. And I challenged countries to return to the General Assembly this year with concrete steps that we can take together.

He challenged countries? It was up to them to come up with concrete steps to beat ISIS? This from a man who confessed in August 2014 that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to beat the Islamic State, and said in June 2015 that the U.S. had no “complete strategy” for training Iraqis to fight the Islamic State. Apparently he was waiting for other countries to draw up a strategy for him. Putin obliged him, but he rejected that one.

I want to thank everyone who is here today, including my fellow leaders, for answering this call. We are joined by representatives from more than 100 nations, more than 20 multilateral institutions, some 120 civil society groups from around the world, and partners from the private sector. I believe what we have here today is the emergence of a global movement that is united by the mission of degrading and ultimately destroying ISIL.

He used that language before. Since then, the Islamic State has only grown in strength, while Obama’s Pentagon had to resort to falsifying data to make it look as if Obama’s cosmetic airstrikes were successful.

Together, we’re pursuing a comprehensive strategy that is informed by our success over many years in crippling the al Qaeda core in the tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And we are harnessing all of our tools — military, intelligence, economic, development and the strength of our communities.

The al Qaeda core in Afghanistan is crippled? But al Qaeda’s ally, the Taliban, just took Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, a major city far from its usual sphere of influence. The Taliban doesn’t seem crippled at all.

Now, I have repeatedly said that our approach will take time. This is not an easy task. We have ISIL taking root in areas that already are suffering from failed governance, in some cases; in some cases, civil war or sectarian strife. And as a consequence of the vacuum that exists in many of these areas, ISIL has been able to dig in. They have shown themselves to be resilient, and they are very effective through social media and have been able to attract adherents not just from the areas in which they operate, but in many of our own countries.

They’re not attracting adherents because they’re effective through social media. That’s just the medium; the message is what attracts adherents. But Obama is bound as a matter of policy to ignore their message, so he has to pretend that the way they package it is what counts. And then he has the audacity to say we must combat their ideology — an ideology he has consistently refused to acknowledge even exists:

There are going to be successes and there are going to be setbacks. This is not a conventional battle. This is a long-term campaign — not only against this particular network, but against its ideology. And so with the few minutes I have, I want to provide a brief overview of where we stand currently.

Our coalition has grown to some 60 nations, including our Arab partners. Together, we welcome three new countries to our coalition — Nigeria, Tunisia and Malaysia. Nearly two dozen nations are in some way contributing to the military campaign, and we salute and are grateful for all the servicemembers from our respective nations who are performing with skill and determination.

Nigeria is the home of Boko Haram, which has allied with the Islamic State. Tunisia has sent a huge number of jihadis to join the Islamic State. It is likely that there are more Nigerians and Tunisians on the side of the Islamic State than will be joining the coalition against it.

In Iraq, ISIL continues to hold Mosul, Fallujah and Ramadi. But Iraqi forces, backed by coalition air power, have liberated towns across Kirkuk province and Tikrit. ISIL has now lost nearly a third of the populated areas in Iraq that it had controlled. Eighteen countries are now helping to train and support Iraqi forces, including Sunni volunteers who want to push ISIL out of their communities. And, Prime Minister Abadi, I want to note the enormous sacrifices being made by Iraqi forces and the Iraqi people in this fight every day.

Obama’s claims about the Islamic State losing territory have already been discredited.

In Syria, which has obviously been a topic of significant discussion during the course of this General Assembly, we have seen support from Turkey that has allowed us to intensify our air campaign there. ISIL has been pushed back from large sections of northeastern Syria, including the key city of Tal Abyad, putting new pressure on its stronghold of Raqqa. And ISIL has been cut off from almost the entire region bordering Turkey, which is a critical step toward stemming the flow of foreign terrorist fighters.

One step forward, two steps back: Turkey is more interested in fighting the Kurds than fighting the Islamic State. Turkish attacks on the Kurds weaken the most effective ground force currently facing the Islamic State. The U.S. has been accused of selling out the Kurds to gain Turkish support against ISIS, and that support has been meager in any case.

Following the special Security Council meeting I chaired last year, more than 20 additional countries have passed or strengthened laws to disrupt the flow of foreign terrorist fighters. We share more information and we are strengthening border controls. We’ve prevented would-be fighters from reaching the battlefield and returning to threaten our countries. But this remains a very difficult challenge, and today we’re going to focus on how we can do more together. In conjunction with this summit, the United States and our partners are also taking new steps to crack down on the illicit finance that ISIL uses to pay its fighters, fund its operations and launch attacks.

How successful has the U.S. been in stopping foreign jihadis from joining ISIS? Now30,000 foreign jihadis from 100 countries have joined the Islamic State.

Our military and intelligence efforts are not going to succeed alone; they have to be matched by political and economic progress to address the conditions that ISIL has exploited in order to take root. Prime Minister Abadi is taking important steps to build a more inclusive and accountable government, while working to stabilize areas taken back from ISIL. And our nations need to help Prime Minister Abadi in these efforts.

In Syria, as I said yesterday, defeating ISIL requires — I believe — a new leader and an inclusive government that unites the Syrian people in the fight against terrorist groups. This is going to be a complex process. And as I’ve said before, we are prepared to work with all countries, including Russia and Iran, to find a political mechanism in which it is possible to begin a transition process.

Obama’s repeated claims that the Islamic State can only be defeated if Assad is removed is based on the assumption that ISIS is not Islamic, and is just an opposition group to Assad, so that if Assad is gone, the Islamic State will vanish. Putin’s view is more realistic: he knows ISIS is Islamic, and claims to be the caliphate, and has global ambitions. He knows that if Assad falls, the Islamic State will be the main beneficiary.

As ISIL’s tentacles reach into other regions, the United States is increasing our counterterrorism cooperation with partners, like Tunisia. We’re boosting our support to Nigeria and its neighbors as they push back against Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to ISIL. And we’re creating a new clearinghouse to better coordinate the world’s support for countries’ counterterrorism programs so that our efforts are as effective as possible.

Ultimately, however, it is not going to be enough to defeat ISIL in the battlefield. We have to prevent it from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring others to violence in the first place. And this means defeating their ideology. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they’re defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and compelling vision. Building on our White House summit earlier this year, and summits around the world since then, we’re moving ahead, together, in several areas.

Ideologies are not defeated by guns? Really? Yet if National Socialism and Shinto militarism were not defeated by guns, what defeated them? Any serious and thoroughgoing effort to refute them as ideologies came after the guns had stopped firing, during the occupation of Germany and Japan, when the Allies worked to turn the hearts of the citizenry away from the beliefs in which they had been relentlessly indoctrinated for years.

What’s more, the United States is not trying to defeat the Islamic State, or the global jihad in general, with “a more attractive and more compelling vision.” Instead, we supervised the installations of constitutions that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Imposing Sharia is the goal of all jihad groups, including the Islamic State. The United States has never stood in Iraq or Afghanistan, or anywhere else, for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, equality of rights for women, etc. — all of which are denied in Sharia. In other words, we didn’t counter their ideas with a more attractive and compelling vision. We didn’t counter them at all, and still aren’t doing so, because to do so would be considered “Islamophobic.”

How is Obama going to counter their ideology when he won’t even acknowledge what it is? Three years ago, his administration banned the truth about Islam and jihad from counterterror training, bowing to the demands of Muslim, Arab and Pakistani organizations that wrote to John Brennan claiming that FBI and other agents were being imbued with “Islamophobia.” Since then, Obama, Brennan, John Kerry, Joe Biden and other Administration spokesmen have steadfastly refused to acknowledge that Islamic jihad has anything to do with Islam whatsoever – thus foreclosing upon any possibility that the United States will confront the jihad ideology in any serious or effective manner.

We’re stepping up our efforts to discredit ISIL’s propaganda, especially online. The UAE’s new messaging hub — the Sawab Center — is exposing ISIL for what it is, which is a band of terrorists that kills innocent Muslim men, women and children. We’re working to lift up the voices of Muslim scholars, clerics and others — including ISIL defectors — who courageously stand up to ISIL and its warped interpretations of Islam.

It’s interesting that he says that the Islamic State’s killing innocent Muslims is what will discredit them. He seems to know that their killing of non-Muslims won’t sway Muslims to oppose them. And as for the clerics and scholars who are exposing the Islamic State’s “warped interpretation of Islam,” does he mean these, who endorsed the concept of the caliphate, as well as jihad and dhimmitude in the course of condemning the Islamic State?

We recognize that we have to confront the economic grievances that exist in some of the areas that ISIL seeks to exploit. Poverty does not cause terrorism. But as we’ve seen across the Middle East and North Africa, when people, especially young people, are impoverished and hopeless and feel humiliated by injustice and corruption, that can fuel resentments that terrorists exploit. Which is why sustainable development — creating opportunity and dignity, particularly for youth — is part of countering violent extremism.

We recognize we also have to address the political grievances that ISIL exploits. I’ve said this before — when human rights are denied and citizens have no opportunity to redress their grievances peacefully, it feeds terrorist propaganda that justifies violence. Likewise, when political opponents are treated like terrorists and thrown in jail, it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the real path to lasting stability and progress is not less democracy; I believe it is more democracy in terms of free speech, and freedom of religion, rule of law, strong civil societies. All that has to play a part in countering violent extremism.

So he is going to address their poverty, even while admitting that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism, and their political grievances. In doing these things, he thinks their religious vision will fade away. This is, of course, because he refuses to face it for what it is, has no idea of its strength, and won’t believe it has anything to do with Islam. The result will be that he will shower money on Muslim countries and make political concessions to them, and then, to his dismay, will find that the jihad continues.

And finally, we recognize that our best partners in protecting vulnerable people from succumbing to violent extremist ideologies are the communities themselves — families, friends, neighbors, clerics, faith leaders who love and care for these young people.

Remember that violent extremism is not unique to any one faith, so no one should be profiled or targeted simply because of their faith. Yet we have to recognize that ISIL is targeting Muslim communities around the world, especially individuals who may be disillusioned or confused or wrestling with their identities.

“No one should be profiled or targeted simply because of their faith.” If he was referring to attacks on innocent Muslims, of course, no innocent Muslims should suffer any harm or injustice. He seemed to be saying more than that. The idea that it is wrong to fight Islamic jihad by paying attention to Muslim communities more than Baptist or Jewish or Hindu or Amish communities is absurd. Islamic jihad is committed by Muslims. Obama won’t even call it Islamic jihad or admit that it is a specifically Muslim phenomenon, and insofar as he diverts any resources to tracking “right-wing extremism” on the basis of bogus studies, he makes us all less safe.

But as far as Obama is concerned, that the Islamic State is “targeting Muslim communities” makes Muslims the victims, deserving of special favors:

And in all our countries, we have to continue to build true partnerships with Muslim communities, based on trust and cooperation, so that they can help protect their loved ones from becoming radicalized. This cannot just be the work of government. It is up to all of us. We have to commit ourselves to build diverse, tolerant, inclusive societies that reject anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bigotry that creates the divisions, the fear and the resentments upon which extremists can prey.

Islamic advocacy groups have worked for years to stigmatize all resistance to jihad terror as “bigotry.” Now the President of the United States is echoing their talking points.

…Like terrorists and tyrants throughout history, ISIL will eventually lose because it has nothing to offer but suffering and death. And when you look at the reports of those who are laboring under their control, it is a stark and brutal life that does not appeal to people over the long term. So we will ultimately prevail because we are guided by a stronger, better vision: a commitment to the security, opportunity and dignity of every human being. But it will require diligence, focus and sustained effort by all of us. And I am grateful that all of you who are already participating are committed to this work.

In reality, he never dares articulate that “stronger, better vision” in anything but platitudes. To do so in any realistic manner would require he discuss Islam and Sharia. And he will never do that.

Virginia online jihadi says he was “advocating what I believed were legitimate approaches based on Quran”

“‘I began to feel I was making an important contribution to a global movement that would result in a more just society for Muslims, and I was doing so by advocating what I believed were legitimate approaches based on Quran,’ he said. This was wrong, Ali told the judge at his sentencing. His advocacy for violence was unmoored from the central theology of Islam, he said.” Unfortunately, the story doesn’t explain how Amin came to that conclusion, or exactly what the Islamic State is doing that Amin came to regard as un-Islamic.

This Christian Science Monitor story is one of “radicalization on the Internet.” It is peppered with references to how local imams would not engage Ali Shukri Amin or answer his questions. It is a shame that Warren Richey didn’t interview any of them. It would be interesting, if the boy’s account is true, to hear them explain why they didn’t think it important to explain to him why the Islamic State’s understanding of jihad must be rejected. Would they have told them that? Was their hesitance to tell him that behind their reluctance to engage him on these issues? There remains the uncomfortable fact that there is not a single mosque or Islamic school in the U.S. that has any program to teach young Muslims to reject the theology of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Why not?

“One Virginia teen’s journey from ISIS rock star to incarceration,” by Warren Richey, Christian Science Monitor, September 29, 2015:

Washington — On Twitter, Ali Shukri Amin was on his way to becoming a giant within the online jihadist community.

Under the alias @Amreekiwitness, the Virginia teenager pumped out more than 7,000 tweets in support of the self-proclaimed Islamic State and its radical agenda.

In one of his best-known pranks, he superimposed the group’s iconic black banner onto the flagpole atop the White House in an online image. He heralded the organization’s “upcoming conquest of the Americas.”

Within three months, Ali had 4,000 followers, including active fighters and recruiters in Syria and Iraq. This was a big, big deal for a high school student in suburban America.
Test your knowledge How much do you know about the Islamic State?

Until his arrest.

On Aug. 28, standing before a judge at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., the teenager looked decidedly small, almost frail, hunched over in his jail-issued navy blue coveralls.

Behind him in the gallery were three solid rows of extended family members, the women in headscarves. They sat silently, some clutching tissues, as the judge announced his decision.

The 17-year-old was sentenced to serve 11 years in prison, pay a $100,000 fine, and submit to federal supervision for the rest of his life, including government monitoring of his Internet activities.

Defense attorney Joe Flood told the judge his client was a confused teen looking for guidance from adults in his life, including religious leaders, but wasn’t getting answers.

“The Internet gave him answers,” Mr. Flood said. “Albeit the wrong ones.”…

By all accounts, Ali is intelligent and articulate. He was an honors student at Osborn Park High School and had been accepted to the engineering program this fall at Virginia Commonwealth University. Now, instead of joining the freshman class, he’ll be finding his place in a prison cell in North Carolina.

The portrait of Ali that emerges from court documents is of a socially-isolated and awkward teenager who struggled with significant health issues, small stature, and an overprotective mother who had him sleep beside her until he was 13.

Ali did not participate in school sports, but he was smart and a good student. At 16, he was accepted into a prestigious curriculum for gifted students run by George Mason University. An acute medical problem forced him to miss classes for a number of weeks. He was unable to catch up and, in a huge blow to his self esteem, he was dropped from the program.
Online ‘friends’ ‘treated me with respect’

After returning to classes at his old high school, Ali turned to the Internet for support and reassurance to counter his mounting frustration. He had been exploring his Muslim heritage and tried to connect with local religious leaders in Virginia. They wouldn’t discuss the issues that interested him and refused to engage in vigorous political debate, he said in a three-page letter to the judge.

He wanted to know why more wasn’t being done to help innocent Muslims being killed in Syria. He questioned whether he, as a Muslim, was obligated to participate in “jihad” to protect them.

“The adults in my life could not provide adequate answers or seemed too busy to try, and this included several respected imams who engaged me briefly, but always were too busy,” he said.

“In the absence of a constructive dialogue about my religious obligations with adults that I respected, I began to correspond with a number of people on the Internet who filled the gaps and provided increasingly radical answers to my questions,” he wrote.

It wasn’t just question and answer. His new online associates encouraged him to demonstrate the depth of his religious conviction by posting his own comments on the Internet. Eventually, they began to urge him to advocate for violent jihad.

“Developing these relationships became very important to me because several of these ‘friends’ treated me with respect and occasionally reverence,” he said. “For the first time I felt that I was not only being taken seriously about very important and weighty topics, but was actually being asked for guidance.”

At the time, Ali was 16 years old.

That’s when he started his Twitter account and began proselytizing.

“I began to feel I was making an important contribution to a global movement that would result in a more just society for Muslims, and I was doing so by advocating what I believed were legitimate approaches based on Quran,” he said.

This was wrong, Ali told the judge at his sentencing. His advocacy for violence was unmoored from the central theology of Islam, he said.

The deeper he entered this Internet world of “virtual” struggle, the more disconnected he became from his family, his life, and his future, he said.

Amreeki Witness began to look for opportunities to spread his ideas. During the upheaval in Ferguson, Mo., he tweeted: “May Allah incite righteous jihad in Ferguson and guide its people to Islam,” according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadi activity on the Internet.

At one point during his proselytizing stage, Ali intervened in a debate on Twitter between someone with the US State Department’s “ThinkAgainTurnAway” anti-jihadist counter-propaganda program and a pro-jihadi Twitter user.

The ThinkAgain user tweeted that “those who follow #Bin Laden’s path will share his fate.” The post included a list of dead fighters.

According to the SITE Intelligence Group, Ali responded with this tweet: “these men are martyrs, insha’Allah, with their souls in pure ecstasy roaming the vastness of eternal paradise.”

The State Department replied that the fighters had slaughtered innocents.

“Slaughtered innocents?” Amin responded, according to the SITE report. “You mean like AbdurRahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old boy not involved with any militants? Or what about the thousands killed in drone strikes weekly that make the news? The thousands that don’t [make the news]?”

Two weeks after US-born militant cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a 2011 drone attack in Yemen, his 16-year-old son, also a US citizen, was killed in a different US drone attack while sitting at an open-air café in Yemen. No justification has been offered for the attack, although reports suggested it was a case of mistaken identity.

“You are nothing more than criminals who betray the Muslims you claim to defend across the globe, butchering them,” Ali said, according to SITE. “1.7 million in Iraq, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan, left, right, everywhere. Only an ignoramus who knows nothing about American foreign policy or any Muslim country could accept your lies…”

The State Department was apparently not amused by Ali’s ferocious debating style on social media. US government tweeters responded repeatedly to Amreeki Witness, and then finally decided to take a different form of action against him. They e-mailed his mother, according to a narrative in Ali’s psychological report. (The report does not disclose how the State Department learned that Ali was Amreeki Witness.)

Nonetheless, the government e-mail provoked a second major upheaval in Ali’s life within a few months, according to the psychological report.
A parent’s haunting question

Ali’s mother arranged for her son to consult with a local religious leader, but the intervention fizzled out when the two failed to make a genuine connection.

His mother doubled down by threatening to take away his computer. Under threat of losing access to his supportive circle within the cyber jihad, the teen moved out of his mother’s house and in with an uncle, where he stayed for two months….

He also began to associate with a student at his high school, Reza Niknejad, who was thinking about traveling to Syria to fight.

According to FBI affidavits, Ali facilitated a number of contacts over secure Internet connections to prepare the way for Mr. Niknejad’s journey….

But it is clear from the voluminous documents released in Ali’s case that his mother and stepfather were well aware of his dangerous Internet activities more than a year before his arrest by the FBI.

They turned to a local religious leader and threatened to cut off his access to the Internet. But these and other attempts at intervention failed….

“While we are glad that Ali did not go abroad, we also feel very confused and conflicted about having played a role in him being arrested,” Ali’s mother, Amani Ibrahim, wrote in a letter to the judge.

Mrs. Ibrahim wrote that she was pleased when her son first became eager to learn more about Islam and turned to the Internet for answers.

“I never thought that letting him have access to the Internet by himself would put him at the risk of finding the wrong information about Islam and meeting the wrong people who may guide him to the wrong path,” she said in her letter. “I see now that I was not only naive, but had abandoned an important responsibility.”

“The fact that we reached out to the authorities is the only light in this tragedy,” she wrote, “but it is a light that burns too.”…

Germany: Muslim refugees attack Christian refugees so often that police chief says they should be housed separately

“The police have reached their absolute breaking point. Our officials are increasingly being called to confrontations in refugee homes.” Why would the Muslim refugees target the Christian refugees? That doesn’t fit the media narrative of who these refugees are and what they are about at all. But no one will bother to offer an explanation.

“Christian and Muslim refugees should be housed separately, says German police chief,” by Melanie Hall, Telegraph, September 28, 2015

Christian and Muslim refugees should be housed separately in Germany to minimise tensions following growing levels of violence at asylum seeker shelters, a police chief has urged.

Jörg Radek, deputy head of Germany’s police union, said migrants should be divided, following increasing numbers of attacks on Christians in refugee centres.

“I think housing separated according to religion makes perfect sense,” Jörg Radek, deputy head of Germany’s police union, told German newspaper Die Welt, particularly for Muslims and Christians.

Two separate clashes erupted between refugees on Sunday at a temporary migrant shelter in Kassel-Calden in northern Germany left 14 people injured, police said.

The first outbreak of violence in the afternoon was triggered by a dispute in the canteen at lunchtime between two groups of around 60 refugees, followed by a second clash in the evening involving a group of 70 migrants against another of 300.

A few days earlier on Thursday evening, a fight broke out among up to 200 Syrian and Afghan refugees at a shelter in Leipzig, with migrants wielding table legs and slats.

German police have come under huge pressure during the refugee crisis as they are required to register new arrivals, settle conflicts in migrant homes and protect asylum seekers from Right-wing extremist protesters.

“The police have reached their absolute breaking point,” said Mr Radek. “Our officials are increasingly being called to confrontations in refugee homes. When there are 4,000 people in a home which only actually has places for 750, this confinement then leads to aggression where even a tiny thing like the corridor to the toilet can lead to violence.”

Mr Radek’s comments follow calls from German MPs from across the political spectrum for better protection for Christians, Yazidis and other religious minorities in asylum accommodation….

Obama chairs counter-terrorism summit at UN

How can Obama possibly defeat terrorism when he consistently denies its motivating and guiding ideology?

His repeated claims that the Islamic State can only be defeated if Assad is removed is based on the assumption that ISIS is not Islamic, and is just an opposition group to Assad, so that if Assad is gone, the Islamic State will vanish. Putin’s view is more realistic: he knows ISIS is Islamic, and claims to be the caliphate, and has global ambitions. He knows that if Assad falls, the Islamic State will be the main beneficiary.

As I explained here, Putin’s view is based on reality, Obama’s on fantasy. So Putin is leading the war on terror now.

“UN meeting: Obama chairs counter-terrorism summit,” BBC, September 29, 2015:

The US president is chairing a UN gathering of world leaders to discuss counter-terrorism, seeking support for the fight against Islamic State (IS).

Barack Obama said defeating the group in Syria would only be possible if President Bashar al-Assad stepped down.

Ahead of the meeting, the US said it was imposing new sanctions on IS figures aimed at cutting off their sources of financing.

The meeting is being held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

Ahead of the counter-terrorism meeting, the US imposed sanctions and penalties on 35 individuals and groups, which include four British and three French citizens.

The terrorist designations cover a wide range of nationalities, meant to highlight the global nature of the IS threat, reports the BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher in New York.

Among them are four British nationals, including two women. One is Aqsa Mahmood, who is described as an IS recruiter and member of an IS female police unit; and Sally Jones, the wife of an IS hacker killed recently in a drone strike.

Russia, which is president of the UN Security Council for the month, will chair its own meeting on Wednesday on countering extremism.

On Tuesday, Russia criticised the US counter-terrorism summit at the United Nations, calling it disrespectful.

“This initiative seriously undermines UN efforts in this direction,” Russia’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies….