Month: January 2024

The pro-Hamas protests in London are not, apparently, as organic and spontaneous as their organizers would like them to seem.

At least four groups with links to Hamas are reportedly behind several of the marches: The Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), the Palestinian Forum for Britain, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and the Friends of al-Aqsa. The same groups were behind the largest protest so far, on November 11 in London, where it is estimated that around 300,000 people participated.

Supporting Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK, could lead to up to 14 years in prison.

The MAB was co-founded and directed for almost a decade by Muhammad Kathem Sawalha, who in the late 1980s was a Hamas leader in Samaria in the West Bank, where he reportedly “masterminded” Hamas’s terrorist strategy. He fled to the UK in the late 1990s and, incredibly, obtained British citizenship, despite being on Israel’s most-wanted list.

The US Department of Justice named Sawalha as a co-conspirator in the 2004 indictment of Hamas recruiter and financer Muhammad Salah, “for allegedly participating in a 15-year racketeering conspiracy in the United States and abroad to illegally finance terrorist activities in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including providing money for the purchase of weapons… “

“All three defendants allegedly used bank accounts in the United States to launder millions of dollars for disbursement to support Hamas, which has publicly claimed credit for engaging in suicide bombings that resulted in the deaths of Israeli military personnel and civilians, as well as American and other foreign nationals in Israel and the West Bank.”

According to Israeli authorities, his son, Obada Sawalha, is now the MAB’s vice-president.

The Muslim Association of Britain has links to the Muslim Brotherhood — of which Hamas is also an offshoot. A 2015 UK government review of the Muslim Brotherhood reported:

“In the 1990s the Muslim Brotherhood and their associates established public facing and apparently national organisations in the UK to promote their views. None were openly identified with the Muslim Brotherhood and membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained (and still remains) a secret. But for some years the Muslim Brotherhood shaped the new Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and played an important role in establishing and then running the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). MAB became politically active, notably in connection with Palestine and Iraq, and promoted candidates in national and local elections.”

According to the Telegraph:

“Another of the Muslim Association of Britain’s three directors, Dr Anas Altikriti, co-founded a group called the British Muslim Initiative with a senior commander in Hamas, Mohammed Sawalha, and Azzam Tamimi who has been described as a Hamas ‘special envoy’ in Britain.”

Another group behind the protest, the Palestinian Forum for Britain, is led by Zaher Birawi, who was designated by Israel as a terrorist in 2013. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center described Birawi as a “Hamas-affiliated Palestinian” in 2017, when Birawi was in charge of the so-called flotillas to Gaza, which he oversaw as part of Hamas’ propaganda effort.

The Meir Amit Center wrote in 2017:

“Birawi was recently interviewed by Felesteen, Hamas’ daily newspaper. He discussed, among other things, the many current difficulties in dispatching flotillas to the Gaza Strip, but tried to minimize their significance and importance. He said the flotillas’ main goal is propaganda aimed at keeping the Palestinians, the Gaza Strip and the ‘siege’ as ‘live’ topics in international public discourse. According to Birawi, the objectives of the flotillas are to defame Israel, and to increase the effect of the political and media campaigns accompanying the flotillas…

“[T]he real aim of the Mavi Marmara was not to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, but rather for propaganda and political capital: to demonstrate support for Hamas, to exert pressure on Israel to unilaterally change its policy of closure on the Gaza Strip; to create sympathy in the media for the suffering of the Palestinians resulting from the ‘siege’ and to deepen Israel’s isolation.”

Birawi met Ismail Haniyeh and other leaders of the terror group in Gaza in 2012.

The real reason for the Mavi Marmara flotilla, of course — the reason Israel stopped it — was not propaganda. Turkey’s supposedly humanitarian relief organization, the IHH, turned out to be secretly carrying weapons to Gaza. Israel had first offered the flotilla to dock in the port of Ashdod for inspection. There appear to be propaganda counter-efforts to suppress information about the attempted arms transfer.

Too often, unfortunately, those many propaganda goals evidently correspond to what the organizations behind the never-ending pro-Hamas protests in London — and around the world — seek to obtain: Creating sympathy for Hamas and the Gazans, demonizing Israel, which is fighting terrorism for all of us so that we will not have to, and increasing pressure for a permanent ceasefire that will enable Hamas to survive.

Two former leaders of the third group behind the protest, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, reportedly met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza in 2012.

The fourth group behind the protests, is the Friends of al-Aqsa (FOA). According to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center:

“Is an anti-Israeli NGO established in Britain in 1997… the FOA qualifies Israel’s policy as ‘apartheid’, supports Hamas and the ‘resistance’ (i.e., terrorism), and seeks to put an end to Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people under the title of ‘liberation of Palestine’. Similarly to other organizations taking part in the delegitimization effort, the FOA attempts to conceal and play down its real objectives by fine-tuning its rhetoric for Western ears and using such terms as ‘peace in Palestine’, ‘respect for international law’, ‘respect for human rights, and ‘implementation of UN resolutions.'”

FOA’s leader, Ismail Patel, has met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza.

All of the above prompted critics to demand that the protests be cancelled. According to Sky News, half of all Britons wanted the march that took place on Remembrance Day, November 11, to be banned. Sir Mark Rowley, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, however, apparently saw no grounds to ban it.

This extremely lax relationship of the British police towards Hamas-affiliated groups in Britain is dangerous to the UK itself.

At the beginning of December, Israel sent personal letters to about 20 European leaders, including the UK, that included evidence of the terrorist activity of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in European cities. The letter stated:

“Since the [October 7] massacre, calls for violence against Jews worldwide have increased by 120% – a shocking statistic. Unfortunately, Hamas’s bloodlust is not limited to Israel and Jews but also extends to Europe and Christians. I want to remind you that in the past, Hamas members expressed the Islamic intention to conquer Europe…”

Tzur Bar-Oz, Head of the Research and Foreign Relations Division at the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, added in the letter:

“Hamas has been operating for many years worldwide, mainly through covert humanitarian donations. It is a complex network of hatred operating in many countries, including Western and highly democratic ones. This phenomenon must be uprooted and eradicated as soon as possible.”

Uprooting Hamas in the UK anytime in the near future, given the lack of enthusiasm that the Met Police have shown in the wake of the pro-Hamas demonstrations, sadly seems unlikely.

“Speeches at pro-Palestinian rallies in the UK might have glorified terrorism” according to the UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, to his immense credit, as soon as the pro-Hamas demonstrations began in the UK, said:

“Inciting violence, racial hatred, is illegal. People who are acting in an abusive or threatening manner causing distress are breaking the law. The police have the power and the tools that they need to ensure they can stop that from happening and you will see that in full force in the coming days to make sure anyone who breaks the law meets the full force of that law.”

While the Met Police have made some arrests, they have overall allowed the chanting of terrorist slogans to continue at the many weekly protests. On one occasion, police even tried to explain away the meaning of chants of “jihad” that had occurred at one Hizb-ut Tahrir protest:

“The individual has not been arrested with the Met saying the word jihad has ‘a number of meanings’, and specialist counter-terrorism officers had not identified any offences arising from it. Instead, officers spoke to the man to ‘discourage any repeat of similar chanting.'”

In London, it is still appeasement time.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20264/hamas-in-london

By Norman Rogers

A popular saying is that those that don’t believe in God will believe in anything. Global warming provides and excellent reason for making an effort to believe in God, or at least in Judeo-Christian ideology that is the basis of our civilization.

Global warming religion originates in well-financed scientific organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scientific basis of the catastrophe theory is junk science made to seem authoritative by dressing it up with lengthy reports based on dubious computer models. These organizations and scientists greatly benefit from rivers of government money and bask in the prestige that comes from being credible-seeming prophets.

The junk science is bad, but the camp followers in the media and environmental non-profits are far worse. They amplify the junk science claims into hysterical predictions of imminent doom. The climate science establishment mostly sits on the sidelines, the members abdicating their responsibility as public servants and apparently happy with ignorant exaggerations of their scientific conclusions.

In 2005, when I retired, I took up the study of global warming. I joined the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. I went to their annual meetings of both organizations. I exhibited posters and went to the AGU annual climate change banquet in San Francisco Chinatown. I attended Gordon Research Conferences that related to climate change. These conferences encourage open discussion by requiring attendees not to quote other attendees. I made every effort to build relationships with climate scientists.

At one Gordon Conference a former insider at the National Science Foundation stood up and said that the NSF was corrupt in various ways, for example directing grants to their friends. You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody defended the NSF and nobody agreed with the critic. They all pretended to be turtles. Presumably most of them had pending grant applications or plans to submit applications.

As President Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address about government support of science: “the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”

Although I was deeply invested in studying the science, the friendships with climate scientists were the most helpful aspect of my study. Very few establishment climate scientists openly depart from orthodoxy. But plenty of climate scientists doubt the orthodoxy but are afraid to speak up.

The orthodoxy is that the atmospheric climate models can predict the future and that we face a catastrophe caused by burning fossil fuels. This is obviously a leap of faith. There are many models from different science groups and they disagree with each other. According to a well-known climate scientist, their outputs do not “correspond even remotely to the current observed climate.” Models are evaluated by simulating past climate to see how well the model can track it. This is analogous to creating a mathematical model of the stock market that tracks past ups and downs and then applying the model to try to predict the future. This doesn’t work well as evidenced by the fact that there are not hordes of stock market forecasters that are billionaires. The problem is that fitting the past with a model is often an exercise in curve fitting that has no predictive power about the future.

Academic life is in varying degrees oppressive. Scientists go through a long apprenticeship starting as graduate students. Although climate science strives to be like physics with well-defined rules and principles it doesn’t work out that way due to the complicated nature of the Earth’s climate. Climate science is more like medicine than physics. The senior authorities or high priests of climate science have converged on the doomsday view. Doomsday works for them. Contradicting high priests is not a good way to get ahead.

A consequence of the intellectual oppression in climate science is that there are no early career mainstream climate scientists that are public critics of the orthodoxy. If one should emerge, he would be looking for a new line of work very quickly.

As exhaustively documented by the websites realclimatescience.com and wattsupwiththat.com there is nothing new about climate doomsday predictions. What’s worse the official climate records of the government are both unreliable and tampered with.

Global warming orthodoxy emphasizes CO2 as the main driver of climate. But other well-known factors such as solar cycles, cosmic rays, and the overturning circulation of the oceans are capable of influencing climate. The Danish scientist Hendrik Svensmark has built a convincing climate theory based on changes in the sun’s magnetic field that influence cosmic ray bombardment of the Earth and subsequently the formation of clouds. Svensmark is attacked or ignored by the establishment faith.

Once after the AGU climate banquet in San Francisco I was walking through Chinatown with a prominent senior scientist that had dissented to an extent from orthodoxy. We encountered another scientist, and my friend introduced me as his favorite skeptic. The other scientist became angry, and my friend became obviously upset if not fearful. My friend was making the mistake of associating with me, a subversive. Climate scientists that associate with the wrong people can lose their jobs.

I don’t want to exaggerate. American universities and research institutions are not North Korea. I think casual skepticism is tolerated. Skepticism becomes a problem when the orthodoxy is criticized in scientific or public forums.

Richard Lindzen is a climate scientist that speaks his mind and cannot be fired because he has made too many important discoveries. He wrote an exemplary insider’s article.

Somehow the use of wind and solar energy for generating electricity has become official government policy. The idea is that wind and solar don’t generate CO2 and thus will thus reduce CO2 emissions from burning coal and natural gas to make electricity. Important climate scientists have attacked their followers for promoting wind and solar technologies that are highly impractical and very expensive. The companies that build these billion-dollar installations are of course engaged in promotion of their defective technology.

The generation of electricity is well understood engineering. Wind and solar cost too much and must be backed up by traditional generating plants. Wind and solar only work when the weather is favorable. Solar does not work at night or if it is cloudy. Wind works when the wind is blowing strong enough but not too strong.

The only scalable method of generating electricity without CO2 is nuclear and the environmental left hates nuclear even though they claim to be terrified of global warming. You can read my book, Dumb Energy, if you want the details.

Corruption of science is not new. Examples include Lysenkoism, Pathological Science, and Cold Fusion. Wrong science may be driven by individual and organizational self-interest but it can also be the consequence of wishful thinking, confirmation bias, or honest mistakes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/junk_climate_science.html

An illegal immigrant from Sudan who supports ISIS has been awarded permanent residency in the UK after his lawyers successfully argued that returning him to his home country would violate his human rights.

Judges in the United Kingdom have disregarded Home Office fears about the threat posed by a Sudanese immigrant who entered the country illegally in 2005 and again in 2018 after having his British passport revoked. According to security services, the migrant had actively spread propaganda for the Islamic State (ISIS) and has now been granted UK citizenship and lifelong anonymity.

Reports on Sunday (31st December) stated that attorneys representing the Sudanese national, who has only been allowed to be referred to as “S3,” were successful in convincing judges that deporting him would violate his human rights as doing so would subject him to torture and detention should he return to the African country. The justices appeared to be persuaded by this argument even though S3 had returned to his native country several times without encountering any problems.

The illegal migrant started actively disseminating ISIS propaganda on social media during one of his four-month stays in Sudan, according to the MI5 security service. Thus, the government contended that S3 was a risk to the British public’s national security.

The Sudanese man “had demonstrated a commitment to the extremist ideology of ISIS,” according to court documents seen by the MoS. Additionally, as per MI5, there was a realistic possibility that he would seek to radicalize other individuals and encourage them to engage in Islamist extremist activities. 

In their defence against his deportation, the illegal immigrant’s legal team referenced the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Brexit has no bearing on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or its Strasbourg-based court, even though the UK has left the EU. This is because the ECHR is an institution that exists independently of the EU.

Brexiteers, such as Nigel Farage and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, have maintained that for the administration of Rishi Sunak to fulfil its pledge to retake control of the country’s borders, it must leave the European Convention on Human Rights. According to the reports, there were rumours in February 2023 that the government was using the ECHR as a defence to keep at least 53 terrorists who had been found guilty of their crimes from being deported.

The verdict this month will allow the suspected Islamist to stay in the country indefinitely, and the people who live near him will not be entitled to know that they might be cohabiting with a possible terrorist.

Former leader of the Conservative Party Sir Iain Duncan Smith criticized the decision, calling it “ridiculous.” Judges should be aware that a person has given up his human rights to be in the UK when the Security Services determine that he poses a threat to the public in Britain, he said. 

Alp Mehmet, the chairman of the Migration Watch UK think tank also commented on the matter and said, “Either our immigration judges are gullible or they derive a perverse pleasure from siding with chancers, crooks, and terrorists, and putting their interests before those of the British people. If terrorists are to roam freely among us, we have a right to know who they are and what harm they could potentially do.”

British judges have a long and gross history of obstructing the deportation of terrorists and foreign criminals. In a contentious instance, judges in the UK halted the deportation of the majority of convicts from Jamaica, including a rapist and a killer convicted of a crime, because the inmates had been temporarily denied access to cell phones while in custody.

Also, in 2020, a judge in Scotland ruled that a terrorist from the Taliban should not be sent back to Afghanistan because he had PTSD from fighting against Western allies, possibly including British soldiers, and should instead receive free medical treatment in the UK because the same level of care was not available in his home country.

https://www.opindia.com/2024/01/isis-jihadi-uk-citizenship-deporting-sudan-violate-human-rights-mi5-warning-ignored/

German police arrested three people on Sunday over an alleged attack plot targeting the cathedral in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.

The “alleged means of attack” is a car, said police in the western city, adding that security measures have been stepped up around the site.

The three suspects are believed to be linked to a Tajik who was arrested on Christmas Eve, said Cologne police chief Johannes Hermann.

The Tajik was detained by German police on the same day, as Austria announced the arrests of another three suspects in Vienna.

Bild Daily had reported then that the four suspects were all Tajiks who allegedly wanted to carry out attacks for Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), an ISIS offshoot in Afghanistan.

“Islamist people and groups” are “more active than ever at the moment,” warned Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia state, where Cologne is located.

Investigations following the Tajik’s arrest a week back had found that there was a plot to deploy a car as a means of attack, but “in which way is not known to us,” said Frank Wissbaum of Cologne police.

Officers had deployed sniffer dogs to search the underground parking of the cathedral for explosives, but they have not yet turned up anything suspicious.

Nevertheless, protective measures have been significantly stepped up, with around 1,000 police officers deployed since this afternoon to “protect the cathedral and the population in Cologne city center.”

Reul voiced confidence that New Year’s festivities can go ahead.

“I think that people can celebrate calmly in Cologne today,” he said.

Germany has been on high alert in recent weeks over possible Islamist attacks, with the country’s domestic intelligence chief warning in late November that the risk of such assaults is “real, and higher than it has been for a long time” because of the Israel-Hamas war.

In late November, a report released by a federal agency found that Germany has seen antisemitic incidents surge 320 percent since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.

The report recorded three cases of “extreme violence,” including an attack on October 18 in which two Molotov cocktails were thrown at a Jewish community center.

The deadliest attack by Islamist extremists in Germany was carried out by an ISIS supporter who rammed a truck into a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016, killing 12 people.

Germany issued a ban on Hamas activities and organizations linked to the group in the wake of the terror group’s brutal assault on Israel on October 7.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/german-police-thwart-suspected-islamist-attack-on-cologne-cathedral-on-new-years-eve/

A New Year message from Peter Whittle, Director of the New Culture Forum, in which he explains why he is more optimistic now than 2 or 3 years ago. He also outlines the work that the New Culture Forum has done this year in the fight to save Britain.