Al-Qaeda-linked rebels apologise after cutting off head of wrong person

Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham militants say sorry for decapitating a fellow extremist rather than enemy 

Militant Islamist rebels in Syria linked to al-Qaeda have asked for "understanding and forgiveness" for cutting off and putting on display the wrong man's head.

In a public appearance filmed and posted online, members of Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, one brandishing a knife, held up a bearded head before a crowd in Aleppo. They triumphantly described the execution of what they said was a member of an Iraqi Shia militia fighting for President Bashar al-Assad.

But the head was recognised from the video as originally belonging to a member of Ahrar al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist rebel group that often fights alongside ISIS though it does not share its al-Qaeda ideology.

After inquiries, an ISIS spokesman admitted he was Mohammed Fares, an Ahrar commander reported missing some days ago. This could not be independently confirmed, but in an earlier video of a speech by Mr Fares he bears a close resemblance to the severed head in the later video.

The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, which monitors deaths in the Syrian conflict, and several activists on social media said that ISIS fighters misunderstood comments Mr Fares made referring to the Imams Ali and Hussein, the founding fathers of Shiism.

An ISIS spokesman, Omar al-Qahtani, confirmed that Mr Fares had been injured and, thinking he had been captured by members of a Shia militia against which he was fighting, asked them to kill him in terms misunderstood by the ISIS members in fact taking him to hospital.

It is thought he was wounded in the battle for Base 80, a military zone being fought over near Aleppo.

In explaining the error Mr al-Qahtani made reference to a story in which Mohammed said Allah would forgive a man who killed a believer in error.

The mistake, of a sort commonly cited as an argument against the death penalty around the world, is indicative of the chaos within rebel ranks, particularly since the rise of ISIS over the summer. Several other Islamist groups have formed alliances without its participation, but it continues to exercise control over large areas of northern Syria.

Its ferocity has given rise to an exodus of moderate and secular activists, and brought to an end an uneasy truce between the Free Syrian Army and Kurdish militias, the most prominent of which has in the last month taken on ISIS and driven them out of a number of towns in the north-east.

Meanwhile, Mr Assad's forces have used the internal rifts in their enemies' ranks to make progress on a drive south-east of Aleppo. This week, a group of Islamist rebels put out an appeal for a mass mobilisation against the advance, while there are repeated rumours that major Islamist militias which do not support al-Qaeda are about to declare a common front.

Mr Qahtani said the incident would be investigated by the appropriate judicial authorities.

The telegraph 

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First robbed of their books, now robbed of their history

 Times of Israel have been writing about,  an exhibition has now opened at the National Archives building in Washington D.C. featuring the highlights of a collection of 2,700 Jewish documents.

These documents were miraculously discovered, rescued from a waterlogged Baghdad basement in 2003, shipped to the US and painstakingly restored. They call it the Iraqi-Jewish Geniza: school records, prayer books, precious Bibles, letters, official documents - a unique record of an extinct community. However, controversy stalks the archive: it was stolen by the dictator Saddam Hussein and seized from its Jewish owners. Its return to Iraq would be tantamount to returning looted artworks to the Nazis.

Pleading in the New York Times for the archive not to be sent back to Iraq, Cynthia Kaplan Shamash begins by describing the 1941 Farhud, "the forgotten pogrom of the Holocaust". The murder of over a hundred Jews, seven years before the establishment of Israel, caused Iraqi Jews to conclude that they had no future in the country.

Cynthia's family, however, stayed in Iraq on until the 1970s. She was eight years old when an officer accused her of being a spy. Her doll was taken apart to see if it contained a bugging device. She still has the doll. In their desperation to escape Iraq's anti-Jewish human rights abuses, the family had to leave behind almost all their other possessions. The archive represents essential "lost luggage": it reconnects them with the life they left behind.

In December, a historian called Orit Bashkin is scheduled to give a talk as part of a programme of events associated with the National Archives exhibit. Ms Bashkin is the ‘new kid on the block’ in the field of the history of the Jews of Iraq. Her book “New Babylonians“, “chronicles the lives of these Jews, their urban Arab culture, and their hopes for a democratic nation-state. It studies their ideas about Judaism, Islam, secularism, modernity, and reform, focusing on Iraqi Jews who internalized narratives of Arab and Iraqi nationalisms and on those who turned to communism in the 1940s.”

The blurb on the book jacket of “New Babylonians” continues:

”The ultimate displacement of this community was not the result of perpetual persecution on the part of their Iraqi compatriots, but rather the outcome of misguided state policies during the late 1940s and early 1950s. From a dominant mood of coexistence, friendship and partnership, the impossibility of Arab-Jewish coexistence became the prevailing narrative of the region.”

Let’s run that again, Ms Bashkin.

‘Late 1940s and 1950s’ implies that the Iraqis reacted to the establishment of the state of Israel by making their Jews suffer. Ms Bashkin makes these ‘misguided’ policies sound incoherent, bumbling, almost accidental. Until the late 1940s. Bashkin views Iraqi Jews as ‘patriots’ building the new independent state of Iraq – or seeking a universalist solution in Communism – until Zionism tore their relationships with their Muslim partners asunder.

After the vast majority of Iraqi Jews had voted with their feet, joining the airlift to Israel, how does Orit Bashkin explain why Iraq continued its ‘misguided policies’ against the few thousand Jews, including Cynthia Shamash and her family, who remained behind? From the mid-1960s, these Jews were forced to carry special ID papers, were not allowed to travel or leave the country, had their bank accounts frozen and their telephones cut off. Such was the anti-Jewish campaign of terror unleashed by Saddam Hussein and his thugs, that the Jews were compelled to risk arrest by escaping the country. If this is not ‘perpetual persecution’, what is?

By pegging the start of the Jews’ troubles to the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bashkin downplays the deleterious effects of the 1941 Farhud.The rising influence of Nazism in 1930s, resulting in the sacking of hundreds of Jewish public servants, quotas and restrictions and a deadly antisemitic cocktail of propaganda and incitement culminating in the 1941 pogrom, hardly feature in Ms Bashkin’s book. For her, the Farhud was most notable for the numbers of Muslims who saved the lives of Jews from the raging mob, demonstrating age-old friendship and shared coexistence.

In reality, the Jews of Iraq had a sense of foreboding about their place in an independent Iraq as soon as the British had marched into Iraq after the defeat of the Ottomans in World War l. Between 1918 and 1921 a delegation of Baghdad Jewish notables visited Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner, on three occasions. They requested British nationality, fearful of what Arab rule might bring. This significant episode barely rates a mention in Bashkin’s book.

There persists a real disconnect between how individuals such as Cynthia Shamash experience events and how academics, in their ivory towers, interpret them. As evidenced by a recent conference at the Yale Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Ms Bashkin is not alone, but one of a new crop of rising young stars in the field of Middle Eastern Studies. These scholars emphasise the points of connection between Arab and Jews, while erasing from the historical record, or glossing over, politically-incorrect human rights abuses. Some are eagerly redefining the identity of Jews in Arab countries as ‘hyphenated’ Arab-Jews, conflicted by the Arab-Israeli dispute, itself an aberration after centuries of peaceful coexistence. So desperate are post-modern academics to believe in the pre-Zionist ‘dominant mood of coexistence and friendship’ between Jews and Arabs, that they are willing to give ideological, Nazi-inspired, Arab Muslim antisemitism a free pass.

Thus, while the National Archives exhibit presents the West with a stark reminder of how Iraqi Jews were robbed of their books, they are simultaneously being robbed of their history. And the culprits in this case, are not the thugs of a despotic Middle Eastern regime, but our very own, mild-mannered academics.

blogs.timesofisrael.com

The Danger In Our Midst

Is it because there are verses in the Qu'ran that can be, and have been, used to justify violence against non-Muslims? If this is the situation, then it is time for us to lift our heads out of the sand, and understand that the enemy is within.

The past week has been bloodier than usual in the Muslim world. Three major attacks in different parts of the world -- Iraq, Pakistan and Kenya -- have one thing in common: they were pre-meditated terror attacks on civilians executed in a wanton manner as part of an armed jihad.

On the attack in Kenya at Nairobi's Westgate Mall, Kenya's President Uhunu Kenyatta made a clear statement: "We shall hunt down the perpetrators wherever they run to. We shall get to them and we shall punish them for this heinous crime. We have overcome terrorist attacks before. We will defeat them again. They want to cause fear and despondency in our country, but we will not be cowed." Then, referring to Somalia's al-Shabab terrorists who claimed responsibility for the assault, he added, "Terrorism is a philosophy of cowards."

For those of us sitting in North America in the wake of such carnage, Kenyatta's words resonate well: he addressed the problem head-on. We look for support to the leader of the free world, the U.S., because the OIC [Organization of Islamic Cooperation] has let us down by giving priority to their own agenda on Islamophobia in the West and remaining silent when Muslims indulge in wanton terrorism -- in fact, they object to use of the word "terrorist" attached to Muslims. It seems, however, that the free world has a soft stance on terrorism. The only bold statement made a while ago was, "we have destroyed Al-Qaeda." Then why is the U.S. continuing to arm it in Syria?

We have become somewhat immune to the games being played while innocent lives are lost. One of the games is the instant knee-jerk reaction of the apologists and conspiracy theorists. How much more bloodshed and carnage do we have to see and endure before we wake up to the reality that something dangerous has taken root in the heart of the Muslims who kill in the name of faith?

There were two other suicide bombings this week. One in Baghdad and the other in Pakistan where a church was bombed.

What is surprising and baffling is that even today we cannot come to terms with the evidence that we have a serious problem within our ranks.

In Pakistan, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), considered to be one of the world's largest intelligence agencies, has not contained the violence unleashed upon Pakistan's minorities. According to some recent reports, there is a special squad, financed by petrodollars and sanctioned by the authorities, created exactly for the purpose of killing minorities -- and this is seemingly why nobody to date has been brought to justice. Recently there have also been massive jailbreaks, freeing hundreds of terrorists.

Further, it is rumoured that many shipments of U.S. arms, on their way from Karachi harbor to Afghanistan, have gone missing. Ironically, both the escaped terrorists and the arms surfaced in Syria.

So now, my co-religionists, there are some pressing questions we must ask because our faith as practiced today doesn't embrace humanity, modernity, music, arts or literature. What we have to see is whether the reformists, academics and scholars can pull this faith into the 21^st century to co-exist with others, or will the militant swords cut the hands that hold the pen?

Furthermore, why is it that, when there is even a single death in the "conflict in the Middle East," Pakistanis will beat their chests, run out on the street, and rally with slogans against the USA and Israel -- but do not come out into the streets when their own countrymen massacre entire families of Christians and destroy churches?

And why is it that there is no voice from the pulpit, and the Sunni majority does not even bat an eyelash about the death squads against Shias and the persecution of Ahmedis?

Is it because "Cyber Mullahs," "Hadeeth Hurlers" and "Qu'ran Thumpers" are invoking their interpretation of the Qu'ran, and insisting that armed jihad is valid and needed today while we say it is time to make it obsolete?

Is it because there are verses in the Qu'ran that can be, and have been, used to justify violence against non-Muslims?

If this is the situation, then it is time for us to lift our heads out of the sand, and understand that the enemy is within.

Platitudes about Islam being a faith of peace are not credible anymore. Islam is only as good as the way its followers practice it; and if they have created killing fields in the name of Islam, then Islam will be recognized by the silence of those who did not speak out when their faith was being massacred to massacre humanity.

by Raheel Raza

Now the liberal British system & BBC has the British Army in its sights

The liberal media & British legal system now has the British Army in its sights. 

The BBC, which never misses the opportunity to try to vilify honourable men, while at the same time worrying so terribly about the so- called 'human rights' of terrorists & murdrers - this 'very British corporation is now gleefully reporting an enquiry that accuse British soldiers of wrong doing in Iraq. 

A "very angry" sergeant fired bullets into the bodies of Iraqis who were still "twitching" after a gun battle, the Al-Sweady inquiry has heard. 

So reports the BBC

The actual enquiry also heard that a soldier stamped on the head of a dead Iraqi and other British Soldiers attacked detainees.

The inquiry heard soldiers did not agree with his version of events and even some Iraqis denied this took place. 

The inquiry is examining claims, denied by the Ministry of Defence, that UK troops mistreated and killed detainees after the 2004 "Battle of Danny Boy".

It seeks investigate the events surrounding the deaths of approx 20 Iraqi men and is concerned with a battle during the Iraq war which is named after a British army checkpoint near the town of Majar al-Kabir in Iraq.

Lawyers acting for several Iraqi clients claim some were taken alive and mistreated or unlawfully killed at Camp Abu Naji and Shaibah Logistics Base.

Well they would wouldn't they? Being as they're making handsome sums out of vilifying honourable men.

The enquiry the alleged incident took place in the aftermath of a clash, which began when a British "rover" group was ambushed and set upon as it travelled to Camp Abu Naji.

A British Army sergeant allegedly "put a full magazine of bullets into two Iraqi bodies that had been 'twitching' and he also fired into the bodies of the other dead gunmen in the ditch".

No mention of course in the BBC report that this occurred after a heavy battle, where tensions were high, the soldiers had been under the pressure of battle & as stated by wittnesses, the serverly wounded Iraqis 'were certainly going to die anyway' 

Also no mention that in many cases during and after the Iraq invasion in 2003, wounded Iraqis had suddenly fired at troops or were even known to blow  themselves up as British or American troops came to help.

The inquiry was also told that - in a separate incident in a derelict building after the battle - two British soldiers were seen hitting and kicking a detainee.

Oh didums 

Rightly stated by soldiers who were in the battle, "Everyone was upset about the whole scenario of British soldiers being ambushed and attacked not by Iraqi soldiers , but by those they were in Iraq to assist and who days before had smiled and waved at them"

The Al-Sweady inquiry - set up in 2010 - at the British tax payers expense, is named after one of the Iraqi men, 19-year-old Hamid al-Sweady, who is allegedly to have been 'unlawfully' killed while being held following the battle.

Three years passed between the setting up of the inquiry and its opening as staff, including retired detectives, trawled through as many as 12,000 documents.

Evidence from Iraqi witnesses was heard from March-July.

The inquiry has so far cost the British tax payer more than £19m so far and is due to report back by the end of 2014. 

It would be interesting to see if the BBC ever reports any enquiries into the be-heading of US & UK service personnel and civilian contractors, not just into the killers but more the inaction of the British and American authorities at the time. 

It would also be interesting to see the BBC reporting an enquiry into the murder and corruption attributed to the 'so-called' government of Iraq?

But we at this blog are used to seeing the British media and indeed the whole British system appeasing the enemies of the free world while at the same time rubbishing the name of good and brave people. 

Gaza and The West Bank are regular targets for the British as well as western media to home in on and as with this case above, these little grey busybodies always seem to take on the side of the rioters, terrorists and hate mongers in that battle ground of the war on terror. 

Some of these 'journalists' and 'officials' should try doing the job soldiers do ON THEIR BEHALF then then might think twice before they put pen to paper -

But then don't hold you're breath the British legal system pays good money to appease evil while betraying good.