Brights News Feed

Amid heightened, “critical” level terror alerts across the UK, the Daily Mail (which the Brights News Feed does not necessarily condone as a good source of objective news) today carries an article (“I was a fanatic, I know their thinking”) with a self-proclaimed “former extremist recruiter”, Hassan Butt.

I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

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Schools across France have received several thousand unsolicited copies of an “atlas” which advocates Islamic creationism theories, according to the Education Ministry. Stuff.co.nz says:

The lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation by Harun Yahya, a shadowy figure who runs a large Islamic publishing operation from Istanbul, was sent to schools and universities over the past 10 days. The Turkish original of the 768-page book, which rejects evolution, first appeared in Turkey late last year when it was also sent unsolicited to schools. It sees Charles Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest” as the root of many of today’s ills, including modern terrorism.

The large-format, lavishly illustrated book, is meant to show that current animal species look exactly like the fossils of their ancestors. It appears to have been mailed from Turkey and Germany to schools all around France, a project of Harun Yahya, otherwise known as the Islamic teacher Adnan Oktar.

The Atlas of Creation puts an Islamic twist on criticism of the theory of evolution, a cause usually associated with conservative Christians in the United States.

“I have received a report from the American side chronicling the targets and list of damage,” said Somali presidential chief of staff, Abdirizak Hassan, today. “One of the items they were claiming was that Fazul Abdullah Mohammed is dead.”

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed was the chief suspect in the planning of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania which killed 225 people, and a number of other terrorist activities.

In a series of air strikes undertaken since Sunday, and ongoing (Retuers), the Somali transitional government claims the US forces have eliminated numerous Islamic Courts fighters, on the run from government and Ethiopian ground troops. A successful strike against Fazul Abdullah Mohammed represents closure on two fronts for the US military, as the air strikes are the first overt US military action in Somalia since the devastating failed mission in 1993 that was immortalised in the book and film Black Hawk Down.

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Controversial right-wing British National Party (the BNP) gets into trouble every so often, because although it claims that its policies are not motivated by racism, its members keep getting filmed making racist remarks, charged with incitement to hatred, and (as reported previously on the Brights News Feed) found with a large stash of chemical explosives. (That trial, by the way — which continues to lie beneath the scan of mainstream media — will hear a plea on Monday, and the trial begins proper on February 12th, see NUJ New Media.)

Now a man from Swindon has pleaded guilty in an attempt to firebomb a mosque on which he had already dawbed racist graffiti. Mark Bulman made the attack in August, and when the Molotov cocktail failed to explode inside the empty building, he turned himself into police, knowing that his fingerprints would be found on the bomb. The police found him near the building, wielding an improvised weapon, in fear of the “enemy”.

Not only did the botched bombing result in his arrest, and not only did the police find his house full of racist material, and not only is he a member of the BNP, and not only did he also act as spokesman for the Swindon branch of the BNP, but, speaking on the conviction of a man who made a previous attempt to burn down the very same mosque, Bulman himself — in his capacity as BNP spokesman — said, “We just want to say that justice has been done and he deserves to be locked up for this attack on the Muslim community.”

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After days of increased hostility — including exchange of rockets and artillery fire which claimed dozens of lives and injured hundreds — between Islamist militias and forces loyal to the transitional Somali government, tanks from majority-Christian Ethiopia yesterday rolled into Somalia’s Baidoa region, according to witnesses. (Ethiopia has so far denied this, possibly because they have previously promised to publicize any decision to officially go to war with the Islamists.) Their mission would be to defend the fragile seat of the internationally-recognised, UN-backed, secular Somali government, which holds sway only over a relatively small area around the city of Baidoa, against redoubled threat from the Union of Islamic Courts and their militia.

Somali forces defending the UN-backed government

The Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) control Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and most of the south of the country. Yesterday they issued threats that the militias were preparing to take Baidoa (Toronoto Star), desipte earlier claiming that they were at war with Ethiopia and not the transitional government (Al Jazeera). Ethiopian reinforcements pose a formidable block to the ambition of the Islamist militias, but a UN report states that arms in support of the UIC are continuing to roll in from Eritrea and Yemen, who back the Islamic Courts, and may yet send their own forces to officially stand alongside the militia. This would reignite war across the Horn of Africa, especially between old enemies Ethiopia and Eritrea. Meanwhile the UN has called for calm, but while the fighting continues, aid is still failing to reach thousands of people whose lives are threatened by flood and famine (News24.com).

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The so-called “Islamic Iraqi state”, an alias of terror group “Al-Qaeda in Iraq”, - today published a statement online denouncing Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) for his widely publicised visit to Turkey, saying:

This visit of the pope has the aim of preparing a Crusade against Muslim countries following the failure of Crusade heads such as Bush, Blair, Berlusconi and Howard to extinguish the flame of Islam lit by Muslim brothers in Turkey.

The pope’s trip is aimed, they say, at “cancelling Islamic tradition and cutting Islamic roots … to send them [Turkey] into the arms of the European Union and stop the Islamic wave.”

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This story is actually over two weeks old. None of the UK’s national papers or television news sources have covered it except for one belated “News in Brief” mention.

And yet it involves the police recovering from two private properties:

• a massive haul of explosive chemicals (the “largest amount of explosive chemicals of its type” ever seized in the UK)
• 22 bomb-making components
• at least one rocket launcher
• and a nuclear or biological protective suit

And this was all found in the homes of an election candidate for the British National Party and a co-accused fellow party member!

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CNN’s Breaking News e-mail service has reported that a U.S. Federal Judge has ruled warrantless wiretaps to be unconstitutional, and ordered them to be immediately discontinued. Many legal scholars and civil rights activists have protested the wiretaps on the basis that they violate the fourth amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees protection against searches without due process.

Warrantless wiretaps were a controversial provision of the Patriot Act, intended to help federal authorities identify terrorists by listening in on overseas phone calls. In a January, 2006 legal memorandum, the U.S. Justice Department said “The NSA activities are supported by the President’s well-recognized inherent constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and sole organ for the Nation in foreign affairs to conduct warrantless surveillance of enemy forces for intelligence purposes to detect and disrupt armed attacks on the United States.”

I was in central London yesterday when the news trickled in about overnight police raids on dozens of homes, aimed at preventing a “mass murder” plot to simultaneously destroy up to ten trans-Atlantic airliners (BBC: “‘Airlines terror plot’ disrupted“, Reuters: “Trans-Atlantic airliner bombings were “days away”“.)

By 9AM the Underground featured plenty of signs printed especially for the occasion, stating that long flight delays were expected and new emergency checking-in procedures would be at place in all London airports and that travellers were advised to re-pack such that all hand luggage could be stowed in the hold. (There were very few exceptions to this: only essential medication, tampons, spectacles without cases, were allowed. Nothing in boxes or opaque bags, no liquids whatsoever. If all liquids are to be deemed potentially unsafe in large enough quantities, will taking a hand luggage onboard planes become permanently barred?) The tannoys began to announce that “all non-essential” travel to London airports should be reconsidered. Read the rest of this entry »