Some chilling statements from the Tarik Shah case.
"Tapes Capture Bold Claims of Bronx Man in Terror Plot," by Alan Feuer for the New York Times:
“You really want to learn how to rip somebody’s throat out?” Tarik Shah asked the man he thought was a terrorist. It was March 2004, and Mr. Shah did not know that the man was recording him for the government.“I’m talking about damage to the inside so they drown on their own blood.”
Mr. Shah, a jazz musician and martial arts expert, demonstrated the move on the neck of his stand-up bass. “You give them internal bleeding,” he said. “It fills their lungs with blood.”
Mr. Shah, 44, was arrested two years ago by the F.B.I. and, with an old friend, Rafiq Sabir, a physician, charged in a plot to provide close-combat training and medical assistance to Al Qaeda. But in that time, few details emerged: His federal indictment laid out the charges in the sparest form, and hearings revealed little beyond his background as an American-born man raised in the Bronx.
Then, last month, Mr. Shah stood up in Federal District Court in Manhattan and pleaded guilty to conspiracy, ending the possibility of a public trial.
But now his story is being told in full — and in striking detail — at a different trial, Dr. Sabir’s. Charged with conspiracy, Dr. Sabir, an emergency room doctor with a Columbia University medical degree, is the only one of the four men eventually charged in the case to fight the accusations. Along with Mr. Shah, who faces 15 years in prison, two other men — a paramedic from Washington and a Brooklyn bookseller — have pleaded guilty.
[...]
They begin in fall 2003 as Saeed and Mr. Shah get to know each other over music and musings on Islam in which Mr. Shah starts to display an animosity toward the West. He speaks bitterly of paying “taxes to infidels.” He says the United States destroyed the “only Islamic government of Afghanistan.” He claims that Westerners “have been killing Muslims on a consistent basis for almost 200 years.”
“They have been at war with us,” he says, “which means we are at war with them.”
[...]
By the next month, Mr. Shah has confessed to Saeed that what he really wants is to open a martial arts studio where he can “teach the brothers.” As it happens, Saeed knows of a place: a warehouse in Long Island City, Queens. (Saeed, a drummer, claims he used to use the space for drum and dancing lessons, but the chilly concrete floors did not agree with his dancers’ bare feet.)
[...]
A few days into the new year, Saeed approaches Mr. Shah with a new proposal: Some people he knows — “a brother from Saudi” and another from Iran — are looking for a self-defense expert. Would he like to meet them? Mr. Shah says yes, then makes his own proposal: He and Dr. Sabir can work together with the men in what Saeed will later call “a package deal.”
So Saeed and Mr. Shah take a train from Pennsylvania Station to Plattsburgh, in upstate New York, to meet a man named Ali, whom Mr. Shah believes is a terrorist recruiter. Ali’s full name is Ali Soufan and, in fact, he is an undercover agent for the F.B.I.
In Plattsburgh, the agent’s own hidden microphone records Mr. Shah talking about the racial profiling of Muslims, the “police state” and how he learned his martial arts from a fighter who took part in the riots in Malaysia in 1969. Mr. Shah proclaims himself an expert in a certain form of Filipino knife fighting. Yet when the agent asks if he has any questions — adding this “is the real thing,” not a joke — Mr. Shah seems to lose his composure.
“At this point no,” he says, “you, you, you, from already, from what I gather from what we’ve spoken about, you have done some traveling with the brothers, you have been different places, you have seen certain things.” Then he adds, “All I’ve done is listen.”
[...]
The two men take a walk, stopping at a store where a young girl smiles at Mr. Shah. He smiles back and tells the agent: “I could be joking and cutting their throats in the next second. It’s a strategy.” The agent then asks him to prepare a syllabus and video for a two-month self-defense class, reminding him to wear a ski mask while on camera — “if the video, God forbid, fall in somebody’s hands.”
[...]
Finally, on May 19, 2005, Dr. Sabir flies in from Fort Lauderdale and meets Mr. Shah at Mr. Shah’s mother’s apartment on Grant Avenue, in the Bronx. The very next day, the agent comes to visit and promptly tells Dr. Sabir that Al Qaeda is badly hurting for medical personnel and that “Sheik Osama considers doctors our No. 1 resources.”
The agent is himself flying out that afternoon and before he leaves asks Mr. Shah and the doctor if they are willing to swear an oath of loyalty to Al Qaeda. The men agree to do so, and are picked up on the agent’s microphone repeating these words in Arabic:
“God’s pledge is upon me and so is his covenant to commit myself to the orders of the guardians of the agreement, for the misfortune and for the prosperity. And to be a loyalist to the path of jihad, and to my brothers, until God’s word is exalted. And to be protective of the secrecy of the oath and to the directives of Al Qaeda.”
His lawyers missed the chance to argue that one too many bass player jokes pushed him over the edge.
Marisol:
My favorite is the one with the explorer in the jungle, hearing drums beating for three days and finally asking the locals, "Can't you get those drums to stop?"
"No! No!" They respond, horrified. "Drums must not stop!"
"Why?"
"Because then comes -- bass solo!"
Yrs
R
The tapes do not lie....
So Tarik Shah was a Jazz Musician and Martial Arts Expert.As a Devotee of Ella Fitzgerald apologise for 'murdering ' her songs.
IT'S ONLY A JIHADI MOON
HEAD HACKER BOOGIE
SLASH-SLASH-SLASH YOUR BUBBLE GUM
A TISKET,A TASKET[ANOTHER HEAD IN THE BASKET]
WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE A WALK INFIDEL[SUMP'N GOOD'LL COME FROM THAT]
BASIN STREET BOMBS...
why are so many new islamic converts involved in crime in their previous "lives"? islam seems to attract some really deranged and dangerous people. richard reid shoe bomber, some of those fort dix guys had convictions.
now that the ceasefire has happened in ireland, i think we may see many ex terrorists joining with jihadist groups to continue their blood addiction.
Hmmm. Bass-player jokes.
I'm glad that the undercover agent didn't ask Shah if he knew how to get to Carnegie Hall.
These guys are part of no nation and should be treated as such.
We should load them onto planes and ships and let them off at the beach somewhere in SOWdi Barbaria.
Then they can be among "brothers".
jihadwatch writes:
... unmentionable ...
This time you've really gone too far! What have you
guys got against bass players?
For an interesting, Middle Eastern sounding bass
solo, check out Don Thompson's solo on Take Five off
of "The Paul Desmond Quartet Live". That's a great
bass solo. Thompson is also on John Handy's Live at
Monterey set. I don't know if he ever ripped
anyone's throat out though.
TARIQ SHAH to MOHAMAD IBRAHIM SHNEWER: “I could be joking and cutting their throats in the next second. It’s a strategy.”
But he was such a nice boy! Always laughing, never had a bad word for anyone. He loved this country!
(But that was just a strategy.)
music - halal or haram?
music - halal or haram?
“I could be joking and cutting their throats in the next second. It’s a strategy.”
-- quoting Mr. Shah in the article above
This is not a sentiment unique to him. It is part of the training, a part of which many are proud. For it means that someone has truly mastered - to smile, and smile, when there is murder in your heart -- the art of deception. And deception is central to Islam. How else could numerically much smaller, and civilizationally much poorer and more primitive, Arabs have conquered such vast territories, populated by more numerous, and much more advanced, Christians and Jews, and Zoroastrians, and then later Buddhists and Hindus, if not by often having recourse to "deception"? How often did Muhammad deceive his enemies? What was Al-Hudaibiyya if not a grand deception, the treaty with the Meccans that, as Majid Khadduri and so many others have noted, is the basis for all subsequent Muslim treaty-making with Infidels?
Deception, deception, deception. And Americans, possibly the most naive people in the world -- just look at any college or high school yearbook, at those hopeful, smiling, never-had-to-confront-evil-or-endure-real-hardship faces, of young Americans. They are not prepared. Life has not prepared them. Their parents have not prepared them. Their studies have not prepared them.
They need to make up for lost time. This website, and a half-dozen others, are a good place to start. Then books -- "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance" and "Why I Am Not a Muslim" and "The Dhimmi" and "The Truth About Muhammad" and "The Legacy of Jihad" and "Islam and Dhimmitude" and "Infidel" and a dozen others.
Do you love your children? Do you want them to understand the world, the world that is rushing towards them? Give them these books. Show them these websites. And spread the word.
Spiked sheep dog collars for all ...or get these wolfs out of our country now!
“You really want to learn how to rip somebody’s throat out?” Tarik Shah asked
Not until recently.
freedomschool: "'You really want to learn how to rip somebody’s throat out?' Tarik Shah asked. Not until recently."
Yeah, baby!!!
This deception thing is mind-bending. It is really, really nasty.
However: there is hope. With regard to taqiyya, kitman, and the rest, and the terrible conundrum this poses to non-Muslims dealing with smiling Muslims who may have murder in their hearts: have you heard of Gladwell's book Blink? Two of his 'case studies' are relevant to our present predicament. In the first he relates the work of two psychologists working in marriage counselling (I think one of the two was a Jew - John Gottman). They developed a capacity to predict very quickly, from observing a short interchange, whether a marriage would survive or fail. It turned out that the key indicator was - contempt. No matter what else was going on, if one or both people in a relationship exhibited contempt for the other the relationship was doomed. This suggested to me that we should take very, very seriously the contempt which radiates from so many Muslim theological and political leaders - contempt for Jews, contempt for all non-Muslims. It should be seen as the powerful danger signal that it is. Their laughter is the laughter of contempt, not the laughter of shared joy.
Gladwell also describes the work of two other people, also psychologists - Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. Ekman's thesis is simple: that the human face, in the end, does not lie. We can control our faces to a huge extent, but if we hate, or fear, or despise or are deceiving our interlocutor those underlying agendas will seep out and show on our faces, even if only for a moment. (Every grandmother knows this!).
The face has its own 'language', anatomically and neurologically based, and completely cross-cultural. The account of how Ekman reached this conclusion and compiled a veritable 'dictionary' of the language of the face, is compelling. The practical examples include Kim Philby and Bill Clinton - liars who were 'read' as liars by the Ekman team. Gladwell refers to Ekman's book - "Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics and Marriage". Someone should get in touch with Ekman; tell him about taqiyya and kitman and propose the ultimate challenge, that he or some of his students should devote some critical and clinical attention to observing and analysing extended video clips of, say, Yasser Arafat and Nasser (historic known examples), then Ahmadinejad at the UN, bin Laden, Nasrallah, Haniyeh, Abbas, Israel's Arab MKs - and any number of the Islamic spin masters currently active in the west., e.g. Tariq Ramadan. Because if Ekman is right, then his work could be invaluable for diplomacy, police, defence forces and surveillance. We don't have to be able to 'read' ALL the expressions - we just have to be able to spot that telltale 'flicker' when contempt/ hate/ pleasure in deceiving/ desire to kill slip out from under the smiling mask.
Many people take a lifetime unconsciously learning to 'read' others. Many dhimmi peoples probably had these skills in order to survive (Ekman says that abused kids are often good at reading unspoken clues). I know of at least two instances where ordinary people unconsciously 'read' a terrorist - a Canadian matron who prevented a would-be terrorist from getting on board the Vancouver ferry, because he 'felt' wrong; and an immigration officer who blocked a man who would otherwise have been part of the 9/11 terror crew (the officer just knew that the man 'felt' all wrong). But it would sure save time if Ekman has indeed set out what we need to know, in a form that intelligent people can consciously learn. (I know that historically some societies such as the Chinese have tried to codify the reading of faces; I am sure that it happens at a semi-conscious level in every bazaar and every intelligence service - but Ekman's work is uniquely encyclopedic and scientific).
Y'know what gives me the willies? One of the guys was 'an emergency room doctor'. He would know a thousand ways to kill without ever being spotted. Makes one wonder - which hospital was he employed in? Which emergency room was he 'serving' in - and, just perhaps, what the survival rate was in that particular place?
Something has been nagging at me: recently in Australia an Indian doctor called Jayant Patel, who had been struck off the list in America, managed to kill an extraordinary number of patients by unnecessary and downright murderous surgeries, before finally being picked up on (he skipped the country and is I think in hiding in India).
I CANNOT find out whether he was Muslim or Hindu - can any Indian posters here, tell me whether a name like Jayant Patel is recognisably Hindu or Muslim? I've seen in various places people with the surname Patel who definitely were Muslims.
But if he were Muslim...then perhaps his string of murders were his own personal jihad.
dumbledoresarmy
Thanks for posting the above. I'm glad you brought this up.
"Because if Ekman is right, then his work could be invaluable for diplomacy, police, defence forces and surveillance. We don't have to be able to 'read' ALL the expressions - we just have to be able to spot that telltale 'flicker' when contempt/ hate/ pleasure in deceiving/ desire to kill slip out from under the smiling mask."
Three times now I have spotted that "dark look"- it's really chilling. Paula Zahn interviewing CAIR head Ibrahim Hooper, a (I can't remember his name) mosque leader chased down and confronted in a parking lot, and a Fox correspondent interviewing an imam of one of the largest mosques in America. Now I wish I had written down the names and situations. I certainly will from now on.
And I'll look into Ekman and his work. Thanks again.
"Westerners “have been killing Muslims on a consistent basis for almost 200 years.”
Damn those Israelis!!!
i thought patel was a hindu name...it doesn't mean that this guy isn't muslim in this case.