Many thanks to all who sent variations on this story. Although Dumont used a forged passport, the 90 day visa reiterates the importance of Daniel Pipes' observations, Europe's Threat to the West.
TOKYO (Kyodo News) — A senior member of the al-Qaida terrorist network repeatedly entered Japan on 90-day visas with a forged French passport in 2002 and 2003 to hide out in the city of Niigata for about a year, and had telephone conversations with a senior British member of the network during his stay, investigative sources said Wednesday.Lionel Dumont, 33, who was arrested in Germany last December, entered Japan from Singapore on July 17, 2002. He left Oct 5 that year just before his visa was to expire but then reentered Japan 11 days later with a new visa. He repeated this two more times until his final departure last September.
AP reports also that he attempted to organize a terrorist cell (Report: al-Qaida Member Had Japan Base ) and UPI provides further details:
Dumont was arrested in Germany last December. He had been sought by Interpol in connection with an attempted terrorist bombing related to the Group of Seven economic summit in Lyon, France in June 1996.Japanese authorities apparently are shocked by the fact that Dumont, 33, repeatedly shuttled between Japan and abroad, and remained in contact with foreign nationals in Japan after leaving the country in September, 2003.
Police found records of phone calls from Dumont to Pakistanis and Iranians resident in Japan, Yomiuri Shimbun reported. They are concerned he may have been raising money and forming a terrorist network in Japan.
And from what raw material did he hope to fashion this sleeper cell? Terrorists don't grow on trees, after all, and a whole pack of men with forged passports would (I should hope) be easily caught.
From reading between the lines, it seems to me that he's trying to use Muslims living in Japan as a resource base.
There is at least one mosque in Niigata:
Madani Masjid Niigata
Niigata City Tharodai 2557-1,
Niigata-ken, Japan 950-3101, JAPAN
Passports from France... the 2nd Islamic front in Europe. Need anyone say more? (but I expect and want you to).
Washington Times story on May 18, “Gangs eye kids as young as 7” by Jon Ward. Think about the commies and their support of terrorism? Think of jose Pidia ? Think of the mules that run drugs and terrorist into these United States?
We have enemy's with-in Remember a gun in hand is worth 2 cops on the phone!
Part of the American Tribe
God Bless the USA and her Fighting Forces and All who Fight with her give them Strength and Courage to stay the Course to Victory Amen
Islam is now the vehicle of choice for all those who are psychically or economically marginal. The first might once have become Nazis or Fascists; the second might once have become Communists. Both find the kind of annihilation of the self in a community of Believers to be welcome relief from the agony of consciousness, both of one's own inadequacy, or of the inability to fit into whatever this civilization, or any other, offers the individual.
That is the problem. There are many such people, for whom Islam offers a Total Explanation of the Universe. They are not offended by its totalitarian aspects; they welcome them. They positively revel in the manichaeism that neatly divides the world in two: the Believers (Good) and the Unbelievers (Bad). How simple, and what ease of use. La vie: Mode d'emploi, to borrow Perec's title.
It is not enough, not nearly enough, to put troops in Iraq, or to send forces hither and yon to seek and destroy terrorists. They are sown like dragons' teeth; their ranks can be constantly renewed.
Measures of many different kinds need to be employed in the long war against the Jihad. These begin with, but are hardly exhausted by, the use of of the military weapon (qital). There must also be the wielding of an the economic weapon, beginning with attempts to diminish the financial resources of the Arab and Muslim countries so that they lack all discretionary income, and every cent must be spent on subsistence, rather than money from OPEC revenues, or even worse, from Western foreign aid (which must end), rather than on the buying of arms (on which, since 1973, such countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars), or to pay for the building of mosques all over the Western world, or for the wholesale bribing -- both directly and through institutions -- of diplomats, journalists, academics, and others who help to deceive the unwary in the non-Muslim world). Another measure must include a complete halt to Muslim migration to the lands of those who, in the Muslim worldview, must be subjugated ultimately to Islam. Our civilization has no obligation to commit suicide, or to be prevented by its own hyperscrupulosity from protecting itself. If you do not regard with delight the prospect of Islam taking over Western Europe, then you must begin to discuss the matter of measures to make that area less, rather than more, hospitable to Muslims -- through a host of legislative measures, and through the willed hostility of the indigenous non-Muslims. We do not have to welcome those who wish us and our civilisation, for all of its faults one worth salvaging, ill, even if they sometimes disguise that hostility. Cool, rational, and widespread discussion of the measures that may need to be undertaken, including the mass expulsion of what is clearly a classic fifth column, must take place -- when it is clear that otherwise, within the lifetimes of our children, France, Italy, and Holland will have majority Muslim populations. What would Western civilization be like without the art of Italy? And who will insure the safety of those statues and paintings which are haram, forbidden, according to Islam?
But above all, there must be a discussion of the origins of Islam, as a geopolitcal cult. The new studies of Christoph Luxenberg, casting intelligent doubt through philological analysis, on the Qur'an as first existing in Arabic -- it almost certainly owes much to a pre-existing Aramaic text -- and a widespread awareness of how this religion/geopolitical cult began, can do much to undercut the certainty, and self-confidence, of its Believers, and perhaps, beginning at the non-Arab edges of the cult, such study will begin to eat away at the number of Believers. For Islam itself is far more brittle than Christianity or Judaism, and it cannot stand scrutiny or historical analysis in the same way: it is really a case of accepting the whole thing (all Muslims must be, or must pretend to be, literalists about Qur'an and hadith, and about the unedifying life of one "Muhammad" who may well not have existed).
Philology, scholarship, real study of the origins and growth of Islam, instead of the apologetic nonsense and pap of Esposito, or the anglican pieties of that religion-worshipping--better Islam than atheism was his view -- of Montgomery Watt, or even the subtlest and therefore most deadly form of apologetics, that offered by Bernard Lewis, who has never been a scholar of early Islam, and whose personal ties to so many Muslim friends, colleagues, and patrons (one thinks of those who fete him and treat him as the Westerner who desreves to be the toast of Istanbul, or better still, Amman, where his every bon mot, he fondly thinks, is roundly appreciated, and he himself doth bestride the Islam/Infidel divide like a colossus, writing books fit for reception by the intelligent members of either audience (which is to say he does not tell, and can not tell, the full dismal truth about the tenets, and history, of Islam).
Those whose duty it is to articulate current and future dangers should publicly note the appeal of Islam to the psychically marginal, and economically resentful, of whom there are many. Muslims, whether born into the belief-system, and unable or unwilling, for a host of reasons (including filial piety -- especially among Arabs whose entire identity may be wrapped up in Islam) to abandon its tenets, no matter how impossible they make true accomodation with non-Muslims, or allow for true loyalty to the Infidel nation-state or other polity, or still worse, those who convert and are therefore likely to be even truer believers (unless that conversion was hastily undertaken at the behest of a spouse) need not be indulged by a pretense that all is well, that Islam itself is not the problem but a few fanatical outliers. It is not true; it is not fair to Infidels. Our first loyalty must be to the skeptical, rational, bemused, creative, intelligent civilization that is our heritage and which, it seems, we are hardly doing enough to deserve.
Huge,
What else can we do we have men dieing to stop this, and to help start a reform when people have Freedom they think differantly.
Our President said this war on terror will take years.
Yes we are in a world war and some have awaken others will never awaken. Like the French if you go back in history to even the vickings the french made the wrong choice even then. The President said today this is going to get ugly and we will win stay the course we can eat this cake.
Part of the American Tribe
God Bless the USA and her fighting forces and all who fight with her give them Strength and Courage to stay the course to Victory Amen
PS remember Kerry wants to turn the defence of the USA over to the French[U.N]
Many thanks, Hugh. I read every word and with much pleasure.
"Our first loyalty must be to the skeptical, rational, bemused, creative, intelligent civilization that is our heritage and which, it seems, we are hardly doing enough to deserve".
Sadly, I have to agree with you that we are not yet motivated to do more to protect our civilization as we can't really believe that it is truly in danger. But, if we are indeed rational and intelligent, then we should be able to look into the future and see how everything we now take for granted can be lost. And once lost, it will be nearly impossible to retrieve it.
Everyone should become part of www.numbersusa.com and fight run-a-way immigration, for starters.
Thank you again for your comments, Hugh. Your words definately open doors of perception.
Japan already had a link with the Islamic terrorist "Roubaix Gang" and with Al Qaeda long before Lionel Dumont ever travelled there.
In the 1990’s a Japanese convert to Islam named Masumi Miyake married an Algerian named Hamid Aich, bin Laden's chief financial officer in Europe and the key suspect for the 1997 gun attack in Egypt which killed 71 tourists. Aich fought in Bosnia.
It was in Bosnia that Dumont’s friend Christophe Caze, a co-founder of the Roubaix cell, fought alongside another Algerian named Fateh Kamel. At Caze's death French police discovered Kamel’s phone number in his possession and traced Kamel to Montreal. French authorities maintain that Kamel was a leader of the Roubaix, among other cells in Canada, France, Bosnia, Italy and Istanbul.
Hamid Aich’s roomate in Montreal, Ahmed Ressam, was a close friend of Fateh Kamel (Kamel later corroborated this at his French trial). On the same day that Ressam was convicted in L.A. for the intended "Millenium Bomb Plot", he also was convicted in absentia and sentenced to five years in prison in France for his involvement in the Roubaix gang.
Hamid Aich also had shared an apartment in Vancouver with Abdelmajid Dahoumane, a co-conspirator with Ressam in the LAX plot. From Vancouver Aich and Miyake travelled to Dublin Ireland. There he got involved with an Islamic charity that American prosecutors have linked to the embassy bombings in Africa and to the purchase of weapons from Somalia. Irish police later established that the charity's director received calls from bin Laden's satellite telephone.
Upon giving birth to a daughter in Dublin Aich and Miyake were granted Irish citizenship. Although they lived off of a generous state pension, Aich vanished after Dublin police bungled his arrest - to the frustration of American authorities - and is still at large.
Miyake and their child fled to Japan though it's anyone's guess where they currently reside. Other than my own personal efforts, there is very little about her on the web. The Japanese and western media are apparently as clueless as the Japanese government claims to be surprised by Dumont's/Al Qaeda's presence in Japan, but hopefully Interpol has the situation in hand (?).
I'm very glad that "Jihad Watch" exists; I can't find anyone else in the US or the Japanese media who is interested in this story!
http://www.intellnet.org/news/2001/11/09/8113-1.html
http://www.geocities.com/irelandvus911/Weakebl2.htm
Timothy O'Connor
New York, New York