The New York Times headline says they were recruiting for jihad. How’s that again? Recruiting for a benign struggle for self-improvement? What will the friends of the Times in the U.S. government say when they see the Gray Lady eschewing their new guidelines and speaking of jihad as if it had something to do with violence?
“France Convicts 7 of Jihad Recruiting,” by Katrin Bennhold for the New York Times, May 15 (thanks to Davida):
PARIS “” A Paris court sentenced seven men to prison terms of up to seven years on Wednesday for helping to send French youths to fight alongside insurgents in Iraq, ending a four-year investigation into a jihadist recruitment ring.
The men “” five French, one Algerian and one Moroccan “” were tried on charges including criminal association with intent to commit terrorism.
Jean-Julien Xavier-Rolai, the prosecutor, had accused the group of sending about a dozen young Frenchmen to join Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who was killed in an American airstrike in 2006, after funneling them through radical religious establishments in Syria and Egypt.
At a six-day trial in March, most of the men testified that they had either been to Iraq after the 2003 American-led invasion or had planned to go, but they denied having been part of a network that recruited insurgents.
The group’s leader, Farid Benyettou, 27, was given a six-year-sentence. Mr. Benyettou, a former janitor and self-taught preacher, was accused of recruiting fighters from Paris mosques and justifying suicide bombings in private sermons given in his family apartment.
Boubakeur al-Hakim, 24, who had fought in Iraq and was accused of running a way station in Syria for French youths headed for Iraq, was sentenced to seven years. So was Said Abdellah, 39, a Moroccan citizen.
Nacer Eddine Mettai, a 39-year old Algerian national, was ordered jailed for four years for forging passports. Three others “” one who fought in Iraq and two who had been planning to “” were given lighter sentences….
The seven men, including three young French Muslims who died fighting against American forces in Iraq, were members of what has become known as the “19th Arrondissement cell,” named after the working-class, heavily immigrant Paris neighborhood where most of them lived. The cell had been under surveillance for at least a year before the seven men were arrested in early 2005….