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Lebanon: Islamic jihadists planning to target Christians with jihad/martyrdom suicide attacks

Feb 19, 2014 11:28 am By Robert Spencer

LebaneseChristiansShhh! “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims and possibly generate suspicion and even fear of people who practice piously the religion of Islam.” — Bishop Robert McManus of Worcester, February 8, 2013

“PLO Official: Al-Qaeda To Target Lebanese Christians,” by Jamie Dettmer for the Daily Beast, February 7 (thanks to AINA):

Foreign jihadists are recruiting among Lebanon’s Palestinian camps and plan to start targeting Lebanese Christians with suicide bombings, according to a former top PLO official.

Al-Qaeda-affiliate jihadists are redoubling their recruitment in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and are likely to try to further fan sectarian tensions in the country by targeting Lebanese Christians in a suicide bombing campaign that until now has focused on Shia Muslims, warns a top Palestinian official.

Mahmoud Abdul-Hamid Issa, the former top security official for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, says the camps are at “boiling point”, including Ain el-Hilweh, a refugee camp an hour south of Beirut and the largest for Palestinian families that fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israel war.

Known as el-Lino, the 44-year-old Issa says Ain el-Hilweh, which contains 17 armed Palestinian and Islamist factions, is inching towards full-blown fighting. He has been urging the PLO leadership to take a stronger line in the dozen Palestinian camps in Lebanon and uproot jihadists, warning that inaction will risk Lebanese army intervention and a major crisis in relations between Palestinians and the Lebanese. More than 200,000 Palestinians live in the camps and a further 200,000 are spread out across Lebanon.

The Palestinians themselves administer the camps, which have played significant roles in the history and politics of violence in Lebanon, having been used in the past by extremist groups. What plays out in the camps can often aggravate ideological and sectarian splits in Lebanon—and, in turn, rifts among the Lebanese can roil the settlements.

“The situation is very tense and very dangerous,” Issa says, speaking over coffee in his spotless office furnished with black leather chairs on a side street in the teeming camp. The only wall decoration was a large photograph of Yasser Arafat, no stranger to turmoil in Lebanon.

Leather-clad, AK-47-wielding gunmen protect Issa’s small compound and pedestrians are scrutinized as they walk in adjacent pot-holed lanes. In December, Issa was wounded in an assassination attempt in Ain el-Hilweh by jihadists that left one of his bodyguards dead. The bomber, who died in the attack, was an Egyptian. The assassination attempt took place at the funeral of Mohammad al-Saadi, a PLO official who was shot dead along with two companions days earlier outside the camp.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Issa, a father of five young children, including a newborn, says the tensions in Ain el-Hilweh won’t stay under control for long, despite mediation efforts between the camp’s armed factions, and between the PLO and rival Hamas, and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s militant Shia movement. “All the leaders are worried and we are trying to contain fallout from the jihadists’ bombing campaign,” he says.

According to Issa, jihadists “manipulate cleverly the schism between Sunnis and Shia in their recruitment.”

“There are between to 200 to 300 fighters now in Ain el-Hilweh, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese but there are a few Iraqis and Yemenis among them,” he says. Most of them live in one quadrant in the camp, which is close to the southern seaport of Sidon, although there is a pocket of jihadists elsewhere in an area mostly dominated by Fatah, the most powerful faction within the PLO.

The jihadists are members of a variety of groups—including homegrown ones such as Fatah al-Islam and Jund al-Sham—but all are increasingly “coming under the sway” of the Lebanese wing of Jabhat al-Nusra, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate, he says. He names the most important jihadist commander in the camp as Tawfiq Taha, a 52-year-old who is wanted by Lebanese authorities in connection with several bombings including attacks in 2007 and 2008 on UN peacekeepers. Taha owns a house that backs on to Issa’s compound, although he reportedly now lives elsewhere in Ain el-Hilweh.

“I have good information they will start turning their attention to Lebanese Christians and start bombing their districts,” Issa says….

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Filed Under: Al-Qaeda, Lebanon, Muslim persecution of Christians Tagged With: featured


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Comments

  1. Lookmann says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 11:40 am

    There’s no place for others in ‘muslim’ lands (where they are 50% or more). It is always ‘either you convert or die’.

    F…… morons and their ‘religion’.

  2. Charli Main says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 12:22 pm

    Lebanese Christians, raped, brutalised and butchered by the Muslim invaders of their country for the last 1400 years.
    Their churches and holy places defiled and desecrated by being turned into Mosques by the Meccan vermin since 636 AD

  3. Veracious_one says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 1:03 pm

    Muslims planning more death, destruction, and civil chaos…who would have thunk it?

  4. Walter Sieruk says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 2:05 pm

    On the subject of suicide/homocide bombing it needs be restated that much of this is based of the Islamic doctrine from the Quran of some kind of a lust filled paradise with many virgins in it for the Muslim who dies in the jihad for the cause of Islam, Sura 44:54. 55:56. 78:31. Of such false teachers as the imams and mullahs who brainwash this Quranic doctrine of a lust filled place with many virgins into the hearts and minds of other young men. Such false teachers as theses Islamic clerics are explained about in the Bible . Which reads in Second Peter 2:18. “For they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lust of the flesh…” Furthermore, many a times a jihadist on his death recording talks about “the wedding with the virgins” that he will have after he becomes of “martyr.” Such a belief Jesus would denounce as being based on false teaching. For Jesus taught “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures ,nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry or are given in marriage, but are as the angles in heaven.” Matthew 22:29.30. In contrast to the Islamic pipedream of the jihadist in the Quranic story/doctrine of a place with virgins, Christians have the reality of Second Peter 1:16. Which reads “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ..” [KJV]

  5. Gary Woods says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 3:09 pm

    Back arouind 2007 the Canadian Arab Federation ( close ties to CAIR-canada) rep was on a radio show and declared that 80% or more muslims and Arabs support Hizballah in Lebanon. Seems that even since THAT comment alone the gutless weasel Politicians refuse to order the Police to enforce canada’s Hate-Laws when it’s Imam’s or Arab muslims spewing hate and calling for jihad and terrorism in canada. Blazing Cat Fur has a video of a Palestinian telling jews if they don’t leave occupied lands they will be shot dead. This July 1st we will once again see the Pro-hamas groups march in the PRIDE parade as the Police stand by and condone this homophobic group that has yet to denouce hamas murdering gays in gaza. Such a fun bunch of guys those islamist losers wanting to sanction pedophilia in canada.

  6. RCCA says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 3:18 pm

    Apparently they can’t figure out any other options to improve their lives, just killing. The only choice is who to kill.

  7. Defcon 4 says

    Feb 19, 2014 at 3:48 pm

    Islam: it’s a just a few extrrrrrrremists giving a peaceful religion a bad name.

  8. gravenimage says

    Feb 20, 2014 at 9:03 pm

    Lebanon: Islamic jihadists planning to target Christians with jihad/martyrdom suicide attacks
    …………………………………

    And some of those Christians have just fled the genocide in neighboring Syria—and some of them had previously fled Iraq for the comparative safety of Syria. Are we seeing a pattern here? Of course we are.

    More:

    Al-Qaeda-affiliate jihadists are redoubling their recruitment in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and are likely to try to further fan sectarian tensions in the country by targeting Lebanese Christians in a suicide bombing campaign that until now has focused on Shia Muslims…
    …………………………………

    In other words, these pious Muslims are going to take some time off from slaughtering their coreligionists in order to butcher some Infidels…

    More:

    Mahmoud Abdul-Hamid Issa, the former top security official for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Lebanon, says the camps are at “boiling point”, including Ain el-Hilweh, a refugee camp an hour south of Beirut and the largest for Palestinian families that fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israel war.
    …………………………………

    Why are these moronic “Palestinians” still living in “refugee camps” sixty-six years later? Because that’s how their fellow Arab Muslims like it.

    More:

    Known as el-Lino, the 44-year-old Issa says Ain el-Hilweh, which contains 17 armed Palestinian and Islamist factions, is inching towards full-blown fighting…
    …………………………………

    Here’s a supposed “refugee camp” with *17* separate Jihad groups operating. That’s a lot of savagery.

    More:

    The Palestinians themselves administer the camps, which have played significant roles in the history and politics of violence in Lebanon…
    …………………………………

    Yes—it was these groups that started the horrific attack on Lebanese Christians—usually characterized as a “civil war”—in 1971.

    And now they want to start again…

  9. dumbledoresarmy says

    Feb 20, 2014 at 10:01 pm

    The book to read to get an idea of what happened when the ‘Palestinian’ Arab Muslims made hijra into then-majority-Christian Lebanon, and boosted the Muslim population to the point where it felt strong enough to unloose the Jihad, is Brigitte Gabriel’s “Because They Hate”.

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