A total of ten people are under investigation as a result of the operation.

ANd what will happen to these islamists when found guilty? will they deport them???

the evenings after the day's official sermons were finished.

Mosques that are found to be used for terrorists actions should be taken down.

Posted by: ZenaWarriorPrincess at December 2, 2008 4:57 PM

The great thing about Italy wrt to terrorism is that they're as far ahead of the game as Israel because they had so much political terrorism in the late 60s and early 70s. There were a good 15 years there when people stopped putting their money in banks, stopped hanging out at the piazza, and took trains a rarely as possible out of fear of terrorism. Plus they don't give terrorists much room to move. No new mosques. Decent surveillance. And anyone who employs or harbors illegals has their assets seized and gets prosecuted. Oh, and they don't recognize Islam as a religion. Viva l'Italia.

Posted by: jdamn at December 2, 2008 5:03 PM

Police also seized the Peace Cultural Centre in the village of Macherio, where Ilhami worked as a preacher.
....................

The "Peace Cultural Centre"? Good God, what gall. It reminds me of the murderous aliens in "Mars Attacks", chasing people around with lethal ray guns while intoning, via the Martian Translator Device: We come in peace! We come in peace!

Posted by: gravenimage at December 2, 2008 5:27 PM

Peace Cultural Centre is right up there with Religion of Peace, no?

Both are Orwellian.

Posted by: Vee at December 2, 2008 6:24 PM

"According to investigators, small groups of fundamentalists met at the centre in the evenings after the day's official sermons were finished."

A mosque is not a church. The West should treat them the same as it would a Nazi Party headquarters.

Posted by: tanstaafl at December 2, 2008 6:57 PM

Hopefully, the Italians have the balls, unlike too many Americans - and certainly unlike the suicidal British- not to be squeamish about getting their terrorist wet during interrogations.

Posted by: FM at December 2, 2008 7:16 PM

Meanwhile, the journalist and writer Magdi Allam, a vice-director of the Corriere della Sera, and a frequent guest on Italian political shows (on the government-owned RAI), has just announced the formation of a new party. It is called, in Italian, Protagonisti per un Europa Cristiana. This translates unfortunately into English, for the word "protagonista," while commonly used in Italian, is dramaturgic in its connotations in English. Think of "major actors" in the implied battle for a "Christian Europe." By that Magdi Allam has said -- I saw him on Italian television last night, saying it -- that his movement will be laic, and will be open to Jews, Christians, atheists, even disaffected Muslims, atheists. But it will be try to create a party, or political force, that will try to bring Europeans back to their senses both about what Magdi Cristiano Allam called last night "the Judeo-Christian roots" of European civilization, and about the menace of Islam.

Here's a bit on Magdi Allam's new venture:

"Israel's right to exist basic tenet of new Italian party

Dec. 1, 2008

Lisa Palmieri-Billig, Jpost correspondent, Rome , THE JERUSALEM POST

Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born Italian journalist and writer of Muslim origin who was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI last Easter, said Sunday that he has founded a political party that will run in next summer's European Parliament elections.

Allam said his "Protagonists for Christian Europe" party would work to defend Europe's Christian values, which he sees as being threatened by secularism and moral relativism.

While the name of the new party conveys an impression of a rightist, traditionalist front, beneath the surfaces lies the authentic Magdi Allam - the Magdi Allam who was honored two years ago by Israel, and in the US by the American Jewish Committee, for his book, Viva Israele! ("Long live Israel").

"Israel's right to exist" is a basic tenet of Allam's political ideology that derives from his belief in the religious principle of "the sacredness of life."

The 56-year-old says that even the current violence in India is the result of total disregard for these principles.

Another pillar of Allam's program is "the historic truth of the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe" which assimilated "all that is positive and constructive" in Greek, Roman, secular and Liberal thought.

According to Allam, two destructive forces now threaten European civilization.

One is an absence of ethical values in a "savage capitalism that ignores human rights, paradoxically emulating today's Communist China."

The other is, quite straightforwardly, Islam - which he defines as a "religion of violence."

Alongside Islam he places Europeans' "Islamically correct" behavior, nihilism, and multiculturalism, as expressed by the cultural relativism of values that should, instead, be absolute.

"I am against Islam, but not against Muslims" he is quick to add. "I want no war of civilizations, but rather to build a society where all human rights, including the freedom of religion, are respected."

Allam criticized a Vatican document issued jointly by Catholic and Muslim participants in an interreligious summit in Rome last November 9. The document recognizes Muhammad as "an illuminated prophet."

"How can we call Muhammad illuminated when his hands were soaked in the blood of 700 Jewish males slain in the year 627," Allam asks. "And since Islam considers the Koran, which incites to violence, the Word of God, how can we place hopes in a reformed, moderate Islam?"

Allam's stance is close to that of Benedict XVI, who recently stated that there should be "dialogue between cultures" but "there can be no dialogue between religions."

Above all, Allam warns that Europe's well-intentioned overtures to Islam (citing as an example, the UK's legitimizing of Shariah courts) are turning Europe into an ideological vacuum that can be filled by whichever group bargains most loudly.

Wherever he moves, Allam is surrounded by security guards because of repeated death threats against him by radical Islamist groups. But this is something he takes in his stride. "Fear for my life has never conditioned my moral choices," he says."

Posted by: Hugh at December 2, 2008 9:08 PM

When will the whining about moslems being singled out begin?
They get blamed for everything they do.

Posted by: interestinconundrum at December 2, 2008 9:26 PM

God bless Magdi Cristiano Allam. May his party live up to expectations. May his insights and warnings - like those of his fellow apostate-defectors, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Patrick Sookhdeo and Ibn Warraq (to name just a few of the better known ones) - be heeded and acted upon.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at December 2, 2008 9:29 PM

tanstaafl

I saw what you saw -" According to investigators, small groups of fundamentalists met at the centre in the evenings after the day's official sermons were finished."

Anyone here feel like laying bets on just exactly what proportion of mosques, all over the non-Muslim countries, are playing exactly the same double game...with the full knowhow of the daytime congregation and imams?

50 %?

80 %

All of them?

Think of the two Undercover Mosque programs.

Then think of that other program 'I, Muslim', made in the Czech Republic,

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/010493.php

http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2006/Art/0302/news2.php

in which the Muslims smiled prettily and mouthed peaceful platitudes when they knew they were being filmed - then the mask ripped off, and the demons of hate and supremacism came snarling out, the moment they thought they were unobserved by kafir and could speak freely?

Here's part of the Prague Post article:

"Ovečka [the maker of the film] says that any xenophobia the documentary created was not the result of anything he did.

"It's like this: During official shooting they [the Muslims] were peaceful, nice," he says.

"Hidden camera footage showed something else — aversion, hatred toward Europe, the entire world, and a mild attitude toward terrorism."

Bug the lot of them, every last mosque, 24 hours of the day, seven days a week.

And watch them like hawks. Any mosque that has regular activity between 9 pm and 6 am - lots of males of military age going in and out - should be automatically suspect.

And any and every mosque, or Islamic centre, or whatever they call it, that is shown to have had members or imams involved in any part of a spectrum of suspect activities ranging from the illegal (e.g. solemnizing polygynous and underage 'marriages') and criminal (e.g. identity fraud, fraud simple) through to active and explicit jihad incitement and plotting, gets shut down, and bulldozed flat, and its imam deported on a one way trip.

Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at December 2, 2008 9:43 PM

...and its imam deported on a one way trip."

That is, after a thorough body-cavity search for weapons and explosives, blueprints, cell phone contact numbers, and no less than 100 hours of sleepless, frigid-temperature questioning by insightful and clever interrogators.

Posted by: No More Ham, Ed at December 2, 2008 10:57 PM

Dumbldoresarmy, it's more like 99% of them, but maybe not full-time. 99% of the mosques in Western Europe and North America are owned and run by the Ihkwan and funded by the Saudis. They may lay low at times for fear of being surveilled or to make overtures to new reverts, but looking for a 'moderate' mosque on either continent is like looking for a 'moderate' MSA/U. Bulldoze the lot of them. Forget the surveillance.

Posted by: jdamn at December 3, 2008 4:46 AM