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Palestinian militants demonstrate behind a poster of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah (Insight)
Who has been telling you ad nauseum that it isn't all about Al-Qaeda? That's right: Jihad Watch. Now hear it from the great Ralph de Toledano in Insight, with thanks to EPG:
To read the public prints - or the blasts that come from the Defense Department - the leaders of international Islamic terrorism are al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. But is this factually correct, or have we been gulled by astute propaganda? True, the disaster at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and other depredations were the work of al-Qaeda. But why has Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage stated that Hezbollah, not al-Qaeda, "may well be the A-team of international terrorism"?The evidence is incontrovertible that this is an understatement. Rachel Ehrenfeld's Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed And How to Stop It brings together chapter and verse from the public record to make an overwhelming case. What is significant is that this record has been so signally ignored. Consider that in March 2003 Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah could threaten: "When the Marines were in Beirut, we screamed, 'Death to America!' Today, when the region is being filled with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, 'Death to America!' is still, and will always be,our slogan."
Yet the Arabist wing of the State Department insists that Hezbollah's target is only Israel and that its threat to America is "insignificant." Intelligence assessments, firsthand reportage and think-tank studies are all at hand. Hezbollah operates worldwide, with an annual budget estimated at $500 million. The intifida, launched in collaboration with Yasser Arafat, and its terrorist attacks on Israel from Lebanon, are but one of Hezbollah's activities.
Founded in 1982, Hezbollah pulled together smaller terrorist groups and operates under a variety of names. Its program calls for the destruction of the United States, Israel and any government standing in its way; worldwide resumption of the Holocaust; and the liberation of "occupied Arab lands" such as Jordan and Morocco. Its camps in Lebanon's Beka valley have trained al-Qaeda terrorists, Chechen rebels, the Medellin drug cartel, Hamas, the Japanese Red Army, Muslim "insurgents" in the Balkans, and the Irish Republican Army. It has organized "cultural" and "religious" groups worldwide - actually for recruitment and fund raising - in the United States.
Hezbollah has more than 5,000 trained terrorists in Lebanon and Syria alone, armed with some 10,000 missiles, tanks and antiaircraft artillery, according to European Union intelligence sources. In addition, Hezbollah has another 15,000 to 20,000 members in the United States, Latin America, Europe and East Asia. Its TV station broadcasts its death-to-America message to an estimated 10 million Muslims. And its leaders have the affection of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Hezbollah's operational budget is $500 million. Its reserves reportedly are greater than bin Laden's fortune or what he collected from the Saudi royal family. Since 9/11, less and less comes from Arab governments. Ditto from Islamic "charitable" organizations - a result of U.S. restrictions on financial transfers and the USA PATRIOT Act.One example of how Hezbollah works: Its operatives bought with cash thousands of cartons of cigarettes from tobacco companies in North Carolina. The tax in that state is 5 cents. The cigarettes were smuggled to Michigan, where the tax is 70 cents per pack, and sold illegally at less than the regular price. Until Hezbollah operatives, led by Muhammed Yussef Hammoud, were apprehended and convicted, they had made many millions for Hezbollah. This money buys radar, mine-detection devices, laser range finders, naval equipment and other supplies hardly needed for Hezbollah's terrorist war against Israel.
Hezbollah also has been involved in merchandise counterfeiting, forging driver's licenses and green cards, and looting Social Security funds. The loss so far to financial institutions in credit-card fraud alone has been more than $17 million. The U.S. Treasury Department in 2002 seized some $16 million in currency and cashier's checks that were being sent illegally to Lebanon. Hezbollah coordinates the traffic of drug-smuggling networks, facilitating operations for cash on the barrelhead.
Under Imad Mugniyah, Hezbollah's external security head, the group has been involved in the Balkan fighting, an area that serves as the route for 40 percent of the heroin trade in the United States and 80 percent to Europe. With al-Qaeda, it is a dominant factor in the Latin American drug trade. And it has set up terrorist-training and teen-age indoctrination camps in the Latin American jungles - as well as "making fortunes" in the forgery of passports, counterfeiting, trafficking in human beings, smuggling stolen vehicles, and running export/import businesses with Indian and Hong Kong traders.
While al-Qaeda licks its wounds, with many of its leaders captured or killed, Hezbollah is actively taking over the business of destroying America and the West. But who would have known this from listening to the TV news?
Posted by Robert at March 8, 2004 11:06 AM
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Mughniyah and Nasrallah are emerging as the successors of Arafat in Palestine. Not a good news.
http://www.maarivintl.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=4106
Posted by: joaquin at March 8, 2004 12:13 PMMore bio on Mughniyah (Mughnieh):
Robert Baer mentions in his book "See no evil" he found out Mughniyah orchestrated the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, including 17 Americans, 7 of whom were CIA officers. The Clinton administration had closed this file long before and was not interested in punishing the culprits.
The FBI does not mention the embassy bombing but indicted Mughniyah for his role in planning and participation in the June 14, 1985, hijacking of a commercial airliner which resulted in the assault on various passengers and crew members, and the murder of one U.S. citizen.
This lovely chap is still free and willing. According to the Maariv article from last week, "Two Iranian organizations are at the top of the command hierarchy that controls Palestinian terrorism: the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guard. Beneath them are Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and Imad Mughnieh, his deputy for the military affairs. Mughnieh heads a special group, “The Organization for Internal Operations” that is responsible for all activities in Israel and the territories."
I pray for Israel. I also pray for a Bush victory.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/DailyNews/pt_cia_agent_020117.html
http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/terrorists/termugniyah.htm
Posted by: joaquin at March 8, 2004 12:41 PMdoes your praying for israel = no state for the palistinian people?
Posted by: joseph at March 8, 2004 1:01 PMWhe article notes that Hezbollah enjoys the "affection of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan." Annan knows nothing about Islam, but the U.N. is full of Muslim agents, sympathisers, and fellow travellers. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the figuree of Edward J. Mortimer, the Chief Speech Writer and "Senior Adviser" to Kofi Annan. He is a former British journalist, most known for his dispatch back to the English Spectator when the Shah fell, and Khomeini arrived in Teheran: "It is quite the most glorious morning in the history of mankind" -- he began his report, borrowing the words of Charles James Fox to declare, to his English readers, just what a wonderful moment this day was. Now Khomeini's hatred of Infidels was well-known; he had been spouting the most vicious material since 1942; his books had been published in Arabic, Farsi, and some in French. Mortimer must have known what Khomeini was all about, but Mortimer has always had a soft spot, a very soft spot, for Islam. And as for Israel, he has always detested it -- it was Mortimer who thought so much of a vicious anti-Israel screed that attempted to "prove" that the Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis (when in fact they were desperately trying to rouse the Western world without much success, especially in the U.S. before it entered the war). That book, by one Lonnie Brenner, was re-printed with an introduction by --- none other than Edward J. Mortimer. That he writes Kofi Annan's speeches, and therefore molds Kofi Annan's words and thoughts, is a scandal. He is an agent of the world-wide Jihad, in the sense that in making Annan deplore "Islamophobia' (a code-word for all those who attempt to point out the central tenets of Islam, and its unwavering and aggressive hostility to all non-Muslims, demonstrated through 1350 years of Muslim history), and in otherwise not only "expressing" Annan's thoughts but in molding those "thoughts" in the first place, he promotes a world-view that allows the Jihad to continue without major resistance, and certainly none at the U.N., that ludicrous kangaroo-court that in the last thirty-five years has become as ineffectual and even dangerous as was the League of Nations in the 1930s.
One hopes that Congress, in deciding whether to keep funding the U.N., demands an investigation of Mortimer and of the very large Muslim contingent (and the non-Muslim islamisants) in the U.N. bureaucracy. Since the non-Muslim world is now under assault by Muslim believers (not all of them participate, but a great many do, and even more must support what, after all, is based not on some "perversion" of Islam but ono a mainstream and orthodox reading of Qur'an, hadith, and sira), it must treat the Muslim infiltration of the U.N. the way the U.S. once treated the K.G.B. infiltration of the U.N., or for that matter, in the late 1930s and war years, the infiltration of various international organizations by the agents of Nazi Germany.
Forget about Annan; in tracking down the real protectors of Hezbollah, Hamas, Laskar Jihad, Jaish-e-Mohammad, etc. etc. (fill up the page, printer!) look for the Edward Mortimers of this world.
Posted by: Hugh at March 8, 2004 1:05 PMI'm summoning my fellow writers on Jihad Watch....Joeyseph the admitted athiest liberal is back for another education
Posted by: D C Watson at March 8, 2004 1:11 PMI missed him.. really I did...
Posted by: Wild Hare at March 8, 2004 1:23 PMJoey that is Palestine check your spelling. Also so you know there NEVER was a state of Palestine. so I would have to say yes NO STATE FOR THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE... sorry such is life.
Posted by: Wild Hare at March 8, 2004 1:27 PMHey Joseph is it true you are an athiest? If so you should know that athiesim is strictly prohibited under Islamic law. Your "choice" as an athiest would be Islam or the sword.
Have fun "choosing."
Posted by: Susan at March 8, 2004 1:33 PMHe's just on here to be an irritant. Like Athlete's foot or Jock itch....this is Joey Itch....spray some wisdom, reality, and sensibility on him and he goes away for a while.
D.C.
Posted by: D C Watson at March 8, 2004 1:36 PMThe Palestinians already have a state. It's called Jordan.
Posted by: zorkmidden at March 8, 2004 3:32 PMJoey, there is an Islamic state coming to your tolerant Euroneighborhood. Its called caliphate, and I bet you see its future leaders every day on the street. Enjoy.
Posted by: basil at March 8, 2004 3:38 PMHUGH- Good post. I always enjoy reading your enlightened and informed history lessons.
JOEY - You have your state, Jordan, and the West Bank, but you aren't satisfied. You want it all - that means the whole world, the Caliphate. You insist on calling all of us that disagree with you racist and hatemongers. By the way, Islam is NOT a race. It's a political, philosphical, and theological TOTALITARIAN system, an idea that is not compatible with life in the West. It is totalitarian because it governs every aspect of life from conception to grave, every thought, every deed. Nothing is left to individual choice but the propsect of pain and death.
We speak our minds and tell it like we see it because we want to continue living under our own system. Muslims that come here can join our system, or return to where there's is in effect. There you can abuse each other to your hearts' content. It's a shame that such abuse is tolerated. In total peace. Excuse me as peace and toleration in the West obviously doesn't mean the same as toleration in Islam.
Posted by: epg at March 8, 2004 4:22 PM
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