Note: As far as I can discover, this arrest has been censored by all the mainstream British media. RH
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/london-police-took-20-min-to-respond-to-muslim-attack-but-arrest-85-year-old-british-woman-for-islamophobia-immediately/
London Police Took 20 Min to Respond to Muslim Beheading, But Quickly Arrest 85-Year-Old British Woman for Islamophobia
Priorities, priorities. Witnesses claim it took London police 20 minutes to show up and stop the two Muslim killers. The official police narrative is something like 9 minutes for the unarmed police and 14 minutes for the armed police (those crazy Americans with their guns everywhere, really.)
But when it comes to something truly serious, like protecting Muslims from elderly British women, then the coppers were on the case.
“An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers. As worshippers gathered outside the venue, a woman at a nearby bus stop shouted: “go back to your own country”.
The arrested woman, from the Maidstone Road area of Chatham , was taken away by officers at about 1.45pm and is now in police custody. A Kent Police spokesman said: “An 85 year old woman from Chatham was arrested on suspicion of a public order offence.”
This woman survived WW2 and presumably learned all the wrong lessons about resisting fascism. But if she had been a Muslim beheading a British soldier, she could have just strolled away while the police took 20 minutes to come around.
And the same police that could not be bothered, when it came to protecting Muslims from angry Britons shouting things, then no expense was spared and no time wasted.
An extra 1,200 police officers were deployed on the streets of London after an impromptu English Defence League protest descended into violence in Woolwich, south-east London , following Wednesday’s terrorist attack.
EDL leader Tommy Rob in son, was among a group of around 250 men, who gathered in Woolwich near the scene of the terror attack, chanting anti-Islamic slogans.
Mr Rob in son told supporters: “They’re chopping our soldiers’ heads off. This is Islam. That’s what we’ve seen today.”
He added: “They’ve cut one of our Army’s heads off on the streets of London . Our next generation are being taught through schools that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s not. It never has been. What you saw today is Islam.
Well that’s a crisis. People are speaking the truth. Can’t have that.
If two Muslims butcher a soldier in broad daylight, the police will one day show up. But if 250 men chant that this sort of butchery represents Islam, then 1,200 officers have to be sent in to keep the peace. And by peace, we mean Islam.
In Bristol two men were detained following allegedly racist messages that appeared on Twitter following the terrorist murder. A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said two men aged 22 and 23 were being questioned over the incident.
He said: “The men were arrested under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred. They are currently in custody. Our enquiries into these comments continue.”
If the authorities had been similarly motivated to take in Muslims who incite racial and religious hated in the name of Islam, the attack in London would never have happened.
But why bother learning any lessons? Just shoot the messenger.
The spokesman added: “These comments were directed against a section of our community. Comments such as these are completely unacceptable and only cause more harm to our community in Bristol . “People should stop and think about what they say on social media before making statements as the consequences could be serious.”
Yes, do stop and think. You wouldn’t want to end up in jail for asking why the authorities are ignoring Muslim terrorism.They’ll Take Sweden | FrontPage Magazine
Monday, May 27, 2013
Priorities, priorities. Witnesses claim it took London police 20 minutes to show up and stop the two Muslim killers. The official police narrative is something like 9 minutes for the unarmed police and 14 minutes for the armed police (those crazy Americans with their guns everywhere, really.)
But when it comes to something truly serious, like protecting Muslims from elderly British women, then the coppers were on the case.
“An 85-year-old woman has this afternoon been arrested after abuse was hurled at Muslims outside Gillingham Mosque. The pensioner was handcuffed and taken away in a van by officers attending the Canterbury Street mosque for Friday prayers. As worshippers gathered outside the venue, a woman at a nearby bus stop shouted: “go back to your own country”.
The arrested woman, from the Maidstone Road area of Chatham , was taken away by officers at about 1.45pm and is now in police custody. A Kent Police spokesman said: “An 85 year old woman from Chatham was arrested on suspicion of a public order offence.”
This woman survived WW2 and presumably learned all the wrong lessons about resisting fascism. But if she had been a Muslim beheading a British soldier, she could have just strolled away while the police took 20 minutes to come around.
And the same police that could not be bothered, when it came to protecting Muslims from angry Britons shouting things, then no expense was spared and no time wasted.
An extra 1,200 police officers were deployed on the streets of London after an impromptu English Defence League protest descended into violence in Woolwich, south-east London , following Wednesday’s terrorist attack.
EDL leader Tommy Rob in son, was among a group of around 250 men, who gathered in Woolwich near the scene of the terror attack, chanting anti-Islamic slogans.
Mr Rob in son told supporters: “They’re chopping our soldiers’ heads off. This is Islam. That’s what we’ve seen today.”
He added: “They’ve cut one of our Army’s heads off on the streets of London . Our next generation are being taught through schools that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s not. It never has been. What you saw today is Islam.
Well that’s a crisis. People are speaking the truth. Can’t have that.
If two Muslims butcher a soldier in broad daylight, the police will one day show up. But if 250 men chant that this sort of butchery represents Islam, then 1,200 officers have to be sent in to keep the peace. And by peace, we mean Islam.
In Bristol two men were detained following allegedly racist messages that appeared on Twitter following the terrorist murder. A spokesman for Avon and Somerset Police said two men aged 22 and 23 were being questioned over the incident.
He said: “The men were arrested under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting racial or religious hatred. They are currently in custody. Our enquiries into these comments continue.”
If the authorities had been similarly motivated to take in Muslims who incite racial and religious hated in the name of Islam, the attack in London would never have happened.
But why bother learning any lessons? Just shoot the messenger.
The spokesman added: “These comments were directed against a section of our community. Comments such as these are completely unacceptable and only cause more harm to our community in Bristol . “People should stop and think about what they say on social media before making statements as the consequences could be serious.”
Yes, do stop and think. You wouldn’t want to end up in jail for asking why the authorities are ignoring Muslim terrorism.They’ll Take Sweden | FrontPage Magazine
Monday, May 27, 2013
They’ll Take Sweden
May 27, 2013 By 
Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.
Of all the reports I looked at, the one that most effectively epitomized the asinine, mendacious approach of the Western media to this latest nightmare was a piece from Reuters that had no fewer than eight names attached to it. I would strongly recommend that you read the whole thing; in fact, I would suggest that it be taught in future history courses as a prime example of the high level of duplicity of which the early twenty-first-century Western media were capable when confronted with raw displays of Islamic power on their own turf. Credited to Niklas Pollard and Philip O’Connor, with “additional reporting” by Johan Ahlander, Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin, and Simon Johnson, writing by Alistair Scrutton, and editing by Janet McBride, the Reuters piece was headlined “Sweden riots expose ugly side of” – no, not of “European immigration policies” or “Islam,” of course, but of the “Nordic model.”
Yes, it’s all the fault of the “Nordic model”: the roots of the Stockholm unrest, Reuters (and virtually every other major Western news organization that deigned to report on the disturbances) would have us believe, lay “in segregation, neglect and poverty,” in years of “fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins.” And so on. Which means, I suppose, that 9/11 revealed the flaws of the American model, and the car-burnings in French suburbs reflect the weaknesses of the Gallic model, and the explosions in Madrid were all about the failings of the Spanish model, and the savage murder of Lee Rigby in London last week…well, you get the idea.
The dispatch from Reuters suggested that Sweden’s “lowered taxes” (which are still absurdly high) and “reduced state benefits” (which are still staggeringly bounteous) are responsible for rising economical inequality and segregation, and thus for the pandemonium in the streets. An Ethiopian-born woman interviewed by Reuters maintained that Swedish kids won’t play with her daughter “because she’s dark.” (There was no mention, needless to say, of the real problem in an increasing number of Scandinavian schools, namely the systematic harassment, and worse, of ethnic Swedish kids by their immigrant-group classmates.) On late-night trains from downtown Stockholm to the suburbs, the Reuters team told us, you’ll see “exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs”; an “Asian diplomat” lamented that immigrants in the Swedish capital “are mostly selling hotdogs.”
The point of all this being – what, exactly? That it’s the hard-working holders of low-level jobs who are setting fire to cars and buildings? That it’s legitimate for a newcomer to Sweden to go on the rampage because he’s got to work as a hot-dog vendor? Nowhere was there a hint that the extraordinary history of immigrant success in North America, for example, was written by people who worked themselves up from employment of that very sort. Nowhere, moreover, was there a hint that what counts as poverty in Sweden would be considered remarkable affluence in the hellholes most of these punks’ families hail from. Yes, the Reuters gang acknowledged (fleetingly) Sweden’s generosity to its foreign-born inhabitants, but the implication remained that the free housing and endless handouts somehow just aren’t enough – that the state should find a way to shield them from every variety of professional frustration and personal disappointment, from a failure to land the ideal job to the unspeakable fate of being tired at the end of a long workday.
The boys and girls of Reuters, while taking obvious pains not to give a remotely negative impression of the Stockholm hoodlums, cited without comment hoodlums who pretty much blamed the police for everything that’s happened. “In the beginning it was just a bit of fun,” one of the rioters insisted. “But then when I saw the police charging through here with batons, pushing women and children out of the way and swinging their batons, I got so damned angry.” Yes, if the cops had only left them alone to burn a few cars, it would all have been over by now! Plenty of participants in the nocturnal melees – as well as busybody agitators from the mischievous, rabble-rousing group Megafonen – threw around charges that police officers, in addressing the troublemakers, had used insulting language, including racist words.
Those accusations seem dubious, to say the least, given that the Stockholm police, far from treating the city’s delinquents with the aggression they deserved, seemed determined not to hurt or offend them in the slightest. On Wednesday night, according to the BBC, they didn’t make a single arrest – supposedly because their “priority was to disperse mobs and ensure access to fires for the fire brigade,” but really, one strongly suspects, because of Swedish authorities’ manifest terror of doing anything that might open them up to charges of insensitivity, let alone brutality and – heaven forfend – racism. On Saturday night the number of arrests reached 35, but this was still a drop in the bucket (to be followed, one can pretty safely wager, by 35 slaps on the wrist). “Police can put down these riots in five minutes – if the politicians were to allow them,” a Sweden Democrat politician, Kent Ekeroth, said. Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist agreed: “The police could do so much, [but] have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible.” Though police suspect that all the mayhem is being planned via social media, with Megafonen playing a lead role, they haven’t hauled that group’s leaders in for questioning, but have instead, in good Nordic fashion, tried (so far unsuccessfully) to arrange a “dialogue.”
As it happens, both of the above-quoted comments by Ekeroth and Carlqvist about the straitjacketing of the police appeared at the website of the Russian news organization RT – one of the few major outposts of honesty about the week’s events. Ekeroth also observed that immigrants to Sweden get “welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level…access to public transport, libraries, healthcare….And still they feel that they need to riot.” Carlqvist, for her part, called the riots the work of immigrants who “don’t like Sweden” and don’t “want to integrate,” but who’ve settled in the country “because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing.” Alas, when Sweden’s Parliament discussed the strife on Thursday, Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats was upbraided by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt himself simply for mentioning the plain fact that the whole megillah was started by immigrants. Some of those immigrants, Reinfeldt thundered back, are actually trying to calm the mob. “These are my heroes!” he declared.
On Friday, Friatider recounted remarkably frank comments made by Ulrika By of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in an interview with Timbro, a libertarian think tank. Admitting (as paraphrased by reporter Maria Lindström) that Swedish journalists “don’t report on problems in the multicultural suburbs,” By defended this practice, saying that the media shouldn’t write neutrally about things like the Stockholm riots – or, for that matter, on any other developments that might conceivably be exploited by bigots. “Journalists should strive not to exacerbate xenophobia,” she pronounced, acknowledging that “we opt out of stories and events that can be easily put to xenophobic purposes. We do not quote everything we hear and do not tell about everything we see.” What can one say about someone who’s so proudly honest about systematically lying?
The most stirring piece I ran across – the one that did by far the best job of saying what needed to be said – was an editorial in Saturday’s Jyllands-Posten. (That’s the Danish daily, of course, that’s famous for printing the Muhammed cartoons in 2005 and for standing up to the ensuing turmoil and death threats.) Headlined “The Swedish Lie,” the editorial underscored the fact that the goons in Stockholm aren’t just “youths” – as the euphemism-loving Swedish media would have it – but Muslim bullies, products of a “Middle Eastern culture of violence,” who are “turning their aggression on other people’s property and the public order” in what is “clearly a demonstration of power.”
The editors noted that for years, self-congratulatory members of the Swedish elite have contrasted their country favorably with Denmark, which they smeared as racist for its relatively open immigration debate; the self-delusionary implication was always that Sweden – by virtue of its, well, virtue – was immune to the “conflicts, clashes, criminality, welfare fraud, so-called honor killing, innumerable assaults on women, [and] waves of violence” that plagued the rest of Western Europe. But in fact, the “ruthless macho culture” from which these perpetrators spring “knows no national boundaries,” and thrives especially on situations in which it meets with no significant opposition. And it’s precisely this – as the editors of Jyllands-Posten sagely, devastatingly, and eloquently pointed out – that makes Sweden, more than other nations, “a paradise for the masked men of violence, who, under the cover of night and the media’s complaints of police violence, can see their will realized and, house by house, month by month, gang by gang, show who’s boss, while Sweden sleeps.” It’s time, the editors urged, for Sweden to wake up.
They’re right. But don’t hold your breath. Sweden is sleeping very deeply indeed, and its dreams are far sweeter than the reality to which it refuses to awaken.
May 27, 2013 By Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.
Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.
Of all the reports I looked at, the one that most effectively epitomized the asinine, mendacious approach of the Western media to this latest nightmare was a piece from Reuters that had no fewer than eight names attached to it. I would strongly recommend that you read the whole thing; in fact, I would suggest that it be taught in future history courses as a prime example of the high level of duplicity of which the early twenty-first-century Western media were capable when confronted with raw displays of Islamic power on their own turf. Credited to Niklas Pollard and Philip O’Connor, with “additional reporting” by Johan Ahlander, Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin, and Simon Johnson, writing by Alistair Scrutton, and editing by Janet McBride, the Reuters piece was headlined “Sweden riots expose ugly side of” – no, not of “European immigration policies” or “Islam,” of course, but of the “Nordic model.”
Yes, it’s all the fault of the “Nordic model”: the roots of the Stockholm unrest, Reuters (and virtually every other major Western news organization that deigned to report on the disturbances) would have us believe, lay “in segregation, neglect and poverty,” in years of “fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins.” And so on. Which means, I suppose, that 9/11 revealed the flaws of the American model, and the car-burnings in French suburbs reflect the weaknesses of the Gallic model, and the explosions in Madrid were all about the failings of the Spanish model, and the savage murder of Lee Rigby in London last week…well, you get the idea.
The dispatch from Reuters suggested that Sweden’s “lowered taxes” (which are still absurdly high) and “reduced state benefits” (which are still staggeringly bounteous) are responsible for rising economical inequality and segregation, and thus for the pandemonium in the streets. An Ethiopian-born woman interviewed by Reuters maintained that Swedish kids won’t play with her daughter “because she’s dark.” (There was no mention, needless to say, of the real problem in an increasing number of Scandinavian schools, namely the systematic harassment, and worse, of ethnic Swedish kids by their immigrant-group classmates.) On late-night trains from downtown Stockholm to the suburbs, the Reuters team told us, you’ll see “exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs”; an “Asian diplomat” lamented that immigrants in the Swedish capital “are mostly selling hotdogs.”
The point of all this being – what, exactly? That it’s the hard-working holders of low-level jobs who are setting fire to cars and buildings? That it’s legitimate for a newcomer to Sweden to go on the rampage because he’s got to work as a hot-dog vendor? Nowhere was there a hint that the extraordinary history of immigrant success in North America, for example, was written by people who worked themselves up from employment of that very sort. Nowhere, moreover, was there a hint that what counts as poverty in Sweden would be considered remarkable affluence in the hellholes most of these punks’ families hail from. Yes, the Reuters gang acknowledged (fleetingly) Sweden’s generosity to its foreign-born inhabitants, but the implication remained that the free housing and endless handouts somehow just aren’t enough – that the state should find a way to shield them from every variety of professional frustration and personal disappointment, from a failure to land the ideal job to the unspeakable fate of being tired at the end of a long workday.
The boys and girls of Reuters, while taking obvious pains not to give a remotely negative impression of the Stockholm hoodlums, cited without comment hoodlums who pretty much blamed the police for everything that’s happened. “In the beginning it was just a bit of fun,” one of the rioters insisted. “But then when I saw the police charging through here with batons, pushing women and children out of the way and swinging their batons, I got so damned angry.” Yes, if the cops had only left them alone to burn a few cars, it would all have been over by now! Plenty of participants in the nocturnal melees – as well as busybody agitators from the mischievous, rabble-rousing group Megafonen – threw around charges that police officers, in addressing the troublemakers, had used insulting language, including racist words.
Those accusations seem dubious, to say the least, given that the Stockholm police, far from treating the city’s delinquents with the aggression they deserved, seemed determined not to hurt or offend them in the slightest. On Wednesday night, according to the BBC, they didn’t make a single arrest – supposedly because their “priority was to disperse mobs and ensure access to fires for the fire brigade,” but really, one strongly suspects, because of Swedish authorities’ manifest terror of doing anything that might open them up to charges of insensitivity, let alone brutality and – heaven forfend – racism. On Saturday night the number of arrests reached 35, but this was still a drop in the bucket (to be followed, one can pretty safely wager, by 35 slaps on the wrist). “Police can put down these riots in five minutes – if the politicians were to allow them,” a Sweden Democrat politician, Kent Ekeroth, said. Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist agreed: “The police could do so much, [but] have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible.” Though police suspect that all the mayhem is being planned via social media, with Megafonen playing a lead role, they haven’t hauled that group’s leaders in for questioning, but have instead, in good Nordic fashion, tried (so far unsuccessfully) to arrange a “dialogue.”
As it happens, both of the above-quoted comments by Ekeroth and Carlqvist about the straitjacketing of the police appeared at the website of the Russian news organization RT – one of the few major outposts of honesty about the week’s events. Ekeroth also observed that immigrants to Sweden get “welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level…access to public transport, libraries, healthcare….And still they feel that they need to riot.” Carlqvist, for her part, called the riots the work of immigrants who “don’t like Sweden” and don’t “want to integrate,” but who’ve settled in the country “because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing.” Alas, when Sweden’s Parliament discussed the strife on Thursday, Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats was upbraided by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt himself simply for mentioning the plain fact that the whole megillah was started by immigrants. Some of those immigrants, Reinfeldt thundered back, are actually trying to calm the mob. “These are my heroes!” he declared.
On Friday, Friatider recounted remarkably frank comments made by Ulrika By of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in an interview with Timbro, a libertarian think tank. Admitting (as paraphrased by reporter Maria Lindström) that Swedish journalists “don’t report on problems in the multicultural suburbs,” By defended this practice, saying that the media shouldn’t write neutrally about things like the Stockholm riots – or, for that matter, on any other developments that might conceivably be exploited by bigots. “Journalists should strive not to exacerbate xenophobia,” she pronounced, acknowledging that “we opt out of stories and events that can be easily put to xenophobic purposes. We do not quote everything we hear and do not tell about everything we see.” What can one say about someone who’s so proudly honest about systematically lying?
The most stirring piece I ran across – the one that did by far the best job of saying what needed to be said – was an editorial in Saturday’s Jyllands-Posten. (That’s the Danish daily, of course, that’s famous for printing the Muhammed cartoons in 2005 and for standing up to the ensuing turmoil and death threats.) Headlined “The Swedish Lie,” the editorial underscored the fact that the goons in Stockholm aren’t just “youths” – as the euphemism-loving Swedish media would have it – but Muslim bullies, products of a “Middle Eastern culture of violence,” who are “turning their aggression on other people’s property and the public order” in what is “clearly a demonstration of power.”
The editors noted that for years, self-congratulatory members of the Swedish elite have contrasted their country favorably with Denmark, which they smeared as racist for its relatively open immigration debate; the self-delusionary implication was always that Sweden – by virtue of its, well, virtue – was immune to the “conflicts, clashes, criminality, welfare fraud, so-called honor killing, innumerable assaults on women, [and] waves of violence” that plagued the rest of Western Europe. But in fact, the “ruthless macho culture” from which these perpetrators spring “knows no national boundaries,” and thrives especially on situations in which it meets with no significant opposition. And it’s precisely this – as the editors of Jyllands-Posten sagely, devastatingly, and eloquently pointed out – that makes Sweden, more than other nations, “a paradise for the masked men of violence, who, under the cover of night and the media’s complaints of police violence, can see their will realized and, house by house, month by month, gang by gang, show who’s boss, while Sweden sleeps.” It’s time, the editors urged, for Sweden to wake up.
They’re right. But don’t hold your breath. Sweden is sleeping very deeply indeed, and its dreams are far sweeter than the reality to which it refuses to awaken.
About Bruce Bawer
WND EXCLUSIVE
'Youth rioting' in Sweden? It's the Muslims, stupid
Establishment media avoid identifying culprits
Published: 20 hours ago
The nightly rioting in Stockholm that establishment media ascribes merely to “youths,” is being carried out by Muslim immigrants.
Muslim immigrants in Sweden now total slightly more than 6 percent of the population, providing additional support for the maxim that a Muslim population of 5 percent is a tipping point for political turmoil. In other countries, Muslim immigrants at that point have begun to seek concessions, including, typically, the right to govern themselves by Shariah, or Islamic law.
In Sweden, the Muslim population has doubled in the last 14 years, with Muslims now accounting for over 41 percent of Sweden’s total population growth. The growth reflects not only increasing Islamic immigration but also a disproportionately high birth rate in a nation in which the native birth rate is trending toward zero-growth.
According to European Union statistics, an estimated 574,000 Muslims lived in Sweden in 2012, making up 6.05 percent of the population, compared to 1998, when there were 284,000 Muslims, or 3.21 percent of the total population.
The EU currently estimates that at current rates of growth, the Muslim population will reach 40 percent of the total population in Sweden by 2030.
While Sweden does not keep welfare statistics specifically for Muslims, experts estimate from available government welfare statistics on the foreign-born that somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of Sweden’s welfare payments go to Muslims, with the percentage on the rise.
In Stockholm, the rioting in recent days has centered on Husby, a low-income suburb of Stockholm with some 12,000 residents. Approximately 80 percent are first- or second-generation Muslim immigrants from Turkey, the Middle East and Somalia.
Swedish police estimated that about 200 Muslim youths were responsible for the violence last week that set hundreds of cars and several buildings on fire with Molotov cocktails, including a parking garage fire that forced the evacuation of residents of an adjacent apartment block.
After setting cars on fire, masked Muslim youths waited to pelt with rocks any police responding to calls.
Husby residents claimed the violence was in retaliation for the police shooting death May 13 of a 69-year-old man. The police claim they were acting in self-defense, shooting the man after he attacked police with a machete when they broke down the door to an apartment where the man had locked himself up with the woman.
Several YouTube videos by amateurs show graphically the violence in Husby beginning May 19.
Reports indicate Megafonen, a “youth activist group” funded by the city, planned the Husby riots. Police in riot gear scuffled with Muslim gangs roaming freely in Husby. Some 200 organized Muslim youth rioters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails stood near the burning cars awaiting to pelt with rocks and Molotov cocktails police and fire departments responding.
The Muslim riots in the suburbs outside Stockholm bear a strong resemblance to the Muslim riots that began Oct. 27, 2005, in suburbs outside Paris.
Several common elements between the rioting in France in 2005, and again in 2012, with the rioting currently occurring in Stockholm:
- Unemployed Muslim youth immigrants from welfare families relocated from Africa to Europe begin the riot in early evening by tossing Molotov cocktails to set parked cars on fire;
- The violence is intensified and spread by mobs of Muslim gangs running wild through the suburb streets, spreading to the area in which cars and buildings are torched;
- When police and fire department units respond, the Muslim rioters lie in wait to pelt them with rocks, sticks and Molotov cocktails.
In February, the Economist reported that in Sweden, only 51 percent of non-Europeans have a job, compared with over 84 percent of native Swedes.
“The Nordic countries need to persuade their citizens that they are getting a good return on their taxes,” the Economist noted, “but mass immigration is creating a class of people who are permanently dependent upon the state.”
In Sweden, 26 percent of all prisoners and 50 percent of prisoners serving more than five years are foreigners, the Economist detailed.
Nor is the conflict limited to social-demographic characteristics and economics; it also extends to cultural differences.
“Nordics fervently believe in liberal values, especially sexual equality and freedom of speech, but many of the immigrants come from countries where men and women are segregated and criticizing the prophet Muhammad is a serious offense,” the Economist concluded.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/05/youth-rioting-in-sweden-its-the-muslims-stupid/#RBVp4Kcdj8RhS4z9.99
Stockholm riots leave Sweden's dreams of perfect society up in smoke
A week of disturbances in Sweden's capital has tested the Scandinavian nation's reputation for tolerance, reports Colin Freeman
Photo: REX FEATURES
1:36PM BST 25 May 2013
Like the millions of other ordinary Swedes whom he now sees himself as one of, Mohammed Abbas fears his dream society is now under threat. When he first arrived in Stockholm as refugee from Iran in 1994, the vast Husby council estate where he settled was a mixture of locals and foreigners, a melting pot for what was supposed to be a harmonious, multi-racial paradise.
Two decades on, though, "white flight" has left only one in five of Husby's flats occupied by ethnic Swedes, and many of their immigrant replacements do not seem to share his view that a new life in Sweden is a dream come true. Last week, the neighbourhood erupted into rioting, sparking some of the fiercest urban unrest that Sweden has seen in decades, and a new debate about the success of racial integration.
"In the old days, the neighbourhood was more Swedish and life felt like a dream, but now there are just too many foreigners, and a new generation that has grown up here with just their own culture," he said, gesturing towards the hooded youths milling around in Husby's pedestrianised shopping precinct.
"Also, in Sweden you cannot hit your children to discipline them, and this is a problem for foreign parents. The kids can feel they can cause whatever trouble they want, and the police don't even arrest any of them most of the time."
This weekend, after six consecutive nights of rioting, Mr Mohammed was not the only one questioning the Swedish social model's preference for the carrot over the stick. Many Swedes were left asking why a country that prides itself on a generous welfare state, liberal social attitudes and a welcoming attitude towards immigrants should ever have race riots in the first place.
Up too in smoke has gone the notion that egalitarian Sweden, which has largely avoided the global recession, might be immune from the social problems blighting less affluent parts of Europe.
Sweden's centre-right prime minister, Frederik Reinfeldt, blamed "hooligans" but also talked sympathatically of the difficult "transition period between different cultures". Meanwhile politicians from the Swedish Left, which ruled the country for most of the post-war period, blamed the trouble on social spending cuts introduced by Mr Reinfeldt, whose Moderate Party vowed to trim - though not slash - the welfare budget when he took office in 2006.
But amid the soulsearching last week, perhaps the most telling comment was the one from Kjell Lindgren, the spokesman for Stockholm Police. "We don't know why they are doing this," he said, when asked for a cause for the riots. "There is no answer to it."
Certainly, wandering around Husby last week, it was hard at first glance to see quite what the problem was. Built in the 1970s as part of the "Million Programme" that aimed to give affordable housing for all Swedes, the estate is one of dozens on Stockholm's outskirts that now house mainly immigrant populations, including large numbers from Somalia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, comparisons to the Paris "banlieus", or indeed riot-hit Tottenham or Salford, are limited. Between the rows of clean-looking housing blocks are well-tended flowerbeds and neatly- kept public gardens, and in the shopping precinct, where an ornamental fountain still bubbles away, there are bars, shops, and a smart cafe-bakery that would not look too out of place in an IKEA catalogue. At eight per cent, Husby's joblessness rate is three times the Swedish average, but only slightly higher than that in the UK.
Likewise, although the rioting has been large scale by Swedish standards, seen up close it has less of the ferocity of the 2011 disturbances in Britain. When The Sunday Telegraph visited Husby late on Wednesday night, the highlight was a hit-and-run arson attack on two parked cars. Police were hardly to be seen, and when they did arrive, it was purely to protect the firefighters dealing with the car blaze rather than make arrests.
Instead, teams of well-intentioned volunteers from local community groups and Islamic associations mingled with the crowds of excited onlookers, politely suggesting that they expressed their grievances peacefully.
Among a large group gathered on an overhead walkway was Mohammed Abdu, 27, whose family came to Sweden from Eritrea when he was aged three, and who now works as a security guard. While he condemned the violence as "hooliganism", he claimed that many Husby residents still suffered from discrimination from the police and employers. Besides, he added, living in such a prosperous, advanced country offered no real satisfaction for those so conspicuously at the bottom of the heap.
"It's true that the welfare system here is an example to the rest of the world, so if you fall here you do not fall all the way to the bottom," he said. "But people don't like being dependent on social welfare, and there is hidden racism."
Not so, argued Yusuf Carlos, 32, a construction worker from Palestine. "It is just kids causing this trouble, that is why the police are not doing much about it," he said. "Sweden is fair towards immigrants and it isn't hard to find work, or not before these riots anyway. The problem is that the Swedish people are angry now. They don't know why people here in Husby are doing this, only that they come from this neighbourhood."
Certainly, claims of racism upset many Swedes, who have little colonial history, and whose decision to admit large numbers of Third World migrants from the 1980s onwards was born of no particular political obligation, more just a very Swedish sense of humanitarian duty to the wider world. From the very start, the government also sought to avoid creating a German-style "guest worker" class by promoting immigrants' rights and introducing a plethora of programmes to promote racial integratkion.
Yet despite Swedish language education being offered free to all long-term immigrants, ghettos of foreigners have flourished in recent years. So too have Far Right parties challinging the political class's long-standing pro-immigration consensus, who now command up to 10 per cent of the vote and may increase their share in next year's elections.
"We have tried harder than any other European country to integrate, spending billions on a welfare system that is designed to help jobless immigrants and guarantee them a good quality of life," said Marc Abramsson, leader of the National Democrats Party. "Yet we have areas where there are ethnic groups that just don't identify with Swedish society. They see the police and even the fire brigade as part of the state, and they attack them. We have tried everything, anything, to improve things, but it hasn't worked. It's not about racism, it's just that multi-culturalism doesn't recognise how humans actually function."
Aje Carlbom, a Swedish academic and author of a critical study into Swedish immigration policy, added that despite the increasing appeal of Far Right parties, mainstream Swedish politicians were still reluctant to even ask the kind of questions that the likes of Mr Abramsson was already offering answers to.
"Anyone who wants to regulate immigration is immediately classified as a nationalist, which also implies a racist as well," he said. "It is still almost impossible to debate this question."
Still, some of Husby's younger generation argue that it is unreasonable of Swedes to expect them to be perennially "grateful" for taking them in, even from the dire circumstances in their homelands.
Among them is local youth worker Rami al Khamisi, 25, whose family escaped to Sweden from Saddam Hussein's Iraq back in 1994, smuggling themselves first through Turkey and Russia and then across the Baltic in a fishing boat commandeered by a people smuggler. "I was six years old and the boat was packed with about 60 people," he said. "An old man died, and they threw him in the water because his body was smelling a lot."
That, though, he says, is his only real memory of the hardships of his early life, and as such, he finds it hard to be as thankful as his parents still are to his adopted homeland. "They compare it to Baghdad or Somalia," he said. "But we younger immigrants only really know Sweden, and we just compare our situation to the one around us."
With Stockholm still burning this weekend, though, that may be asking for just a little too much understanding - even in compassionate, generous Sweden.
Telegraph
Stockholm hit by third day of rioting
Rioting spread across Stockholm's suburbs on Wednesday in the third day of unrest to hit the Swedish capital, as Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt blamed the violence on "hooliganism" and appealed for calm.
A burning car in Kista Photo: AFP
2:48PM BST 22 May 2013
Stockholm police began rounding up suspected ringleaders behind the riots, leaving cars and buildings ablaze. The unrest is believed to have been sparked the deadly police shooting last week of an elderly man.
On Tuesday night, gangs of young men set fire to more than 30 cars across the Swedish capital, pelted police and firefighters with stones, and burnt a historic 17th century house to the ground.
"Last night we caught four of them, and hopefully we are going to make some more arrests today, because we recognise who they are," said Kjell Lindgren, a spokesman for the Stockholm police.
The unrest has proven once again that Sweden is not immune from the rioting which swept London in 2011, raising questions over how the country is integrating the immigrants who make up 20 per cent of the population.
The unrest began on Sunday night with protests in Husby against the death of a 69-year old man, who was shot by police in his apartment after approaching them brandishing a knife. Since then it has spread to other outlying districts to the north, west and south of Stockholm.
"It's a disease that spread between suburbs here in Stockholm. It's copycats. We can't yet find any personal links between the riots in different suburbs."
Mr Reinfeldt put the unrest down to a small group of angry young men. "There is a core, as there often is, of young men who believe in using violence and who believe that this use of violence is above our democratic values and above Swedish law," he said.
But community activists blamed high youth unemployment and recent cuts to public services in Husby and the other affected areas.
"This is the kind of reaction when there isn't equality between people, which is the case in Sweden," said Rami al-Khamisi, a law student and founder of Megafonen, a community rights organisation.
Daniel Ghirmai, a municipal nightwatchman in Husby, claimed police had inflamed the situation with a heavy handed response on Sunday night, hitting some people with batons and calling them "monkeys", an accusation Mr Lindgren said he would be "very surprised" if was true.
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: our strategy on terror is a sad shambles
The Satanic deed in Woolwich will not easily lose its power to shock. This was what the perpetrators intended, for why else pause, bloodied hands on a knife, to conduct monologues with onlookers with mobile phone cameras?
Home Secretary Theresa May arrives in Downing Street on Thursday to chair a special Cobra meeting following the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. Photo: TAL COHEN/EPA
The responses of government are important at such times, and the Prime Minister was probably right to hasten back from Paris to take charge.
But charge of what? A portentous-sounding Cobra committee designed to deal with floods, storms and major terrorist incidents, rather than a deep-seated sickness whose manifestations are either the subversion of our way of life or attempts to murder us.
Ministerial sympathies with Drummer Lee Rigby’s family, and horror at the crime, were soon elided with concerns that the Muslim minority might be held responsible for the foul deed committed by ranting, deracinated scum.
As usual, Baroness Warsi was vocal in lecturing us that all Muslims abhorred these deeds, although she does not seem to have asked herself why so few of them report hard evidence of community members going off the rails.
Even a Conservative-led Coalition Government shudders at the mythical echo of the jackboot, although 100 drunken ruffians singing “Rule Britannia” outside a Woolwich pub hardly constitute the subterranean movement of dark Left-liberal imaginings.
Reports state that the two Islamists are products of urban ghettos and a subversive, radicalising mulch that governments of all stripes seem unable to deal with. For using political violence to alter this country’s foreign policy certainly is a form of subversion.
Both men had backgrounds in London’s loathsome gang culture where the “bredas” fight “the feds”, as one Twitter star had it. The older one strayed into the stronger gang represented by the Islamist sect al-Mujaharoun, and had to be relocated to rural Lincolnshire by his Nigerian immigrant parents.
The younger one seems to have been on the run from gang-related violence in which he appeared to be a player rather than a victim.
What, if anything, are the ubiquitous Mayor Johnson and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe doing about this conduit or interface that bridges street gangsterism and street Islamism?
Why have no steps been taken against the slippery former lawyer and fake sheik, Anjem Choudary, the cheap date darling of BBC2’s Newsnight, who might be encouraged to work rather than living on state handouts?
For in easily recovered 2007 photographs there was “Mujahid” Adebolajo looming behind Choudary at demonstrations where placards urged the beheading of British soldiers.
Many of these men have sometimes spent time in prison, where they become further radicalised. This happens a lot nowadays, given the increasing numbers of Muslims inside prisons, where they have access to imams and the like.
Gangs often dominate prisons, and the Islamists are a very powerful gang, offering persuasive simplicities to people whose lives are in a mess.
We’ve been here before, as any number of excellent studies by the Northern Ireland Prison Service showed in the case of the IRA, an earlier armed gang that could dominate any jail with half a dozen fanatics, as mainland British prisons discovered too.
I mention this background since I was involved, in a minor way, in advising the government on revising the Prevent strategy, under which Labour had sought to co-opt non-violent extremists by doling out lots of our money without much discrimination.
Along with prisons, universities and further education colleges were identified as the major areas of concern by the security services, although we were told this de haut en bas, with no opportunities to discuss this plausible working assumption.
That’s how the British state operates, with the curtains firmly closed on the Wizards of Oz inside Thames House or Vauxhall Cross.
What ensued was a sad shambles. If this is how policy is made, God help us.
Neither I nor my colleagues had any personal experience or knowledge of FE colleges. Despite half a dozen requests to visit a few, no such visits occurred, and therefore further education fell off the radar, despite being part of our remit.
Slightly perplexed as to why the relevant minister had palmed the task on to a colleague who talked a good Right-wing game but did little to implement one, we persevered with universities, which we all knew about, especially two young men from the National Union of Students whom I could not fault on this subject.
Universities, and their lobbyists, have done their best to deflect any untoward attention, loftily arguing that “free speech” trumps any responsibility to the wider public who their students (the “underpants bomber” Omar Farouk Abdulmuttalab for one) had tried to blow up in mid-air.
Indeed, the vice-chancellor whose committee absolved UCL of any blame for Abdulmutallab was at it again after he was appointed to review the problem of student radicalisation nationally. He’s a New Zealand human rights lawyer by the way.
Unsurprisingly, we soon alighted on the role of Fosis, the Federation of Islamic Student Societies, in creating a (sexually segregated) space in which young people were being systematically indoctrinated in anti-Semitic, homophobic and anti-Western hatred by visiting Islamic eminences.
Even as we laboured to press this point, a garrulous senior civil servant reported jauntily on her excellent meetings with, yes, you’ve guessed it, the head of Fosis. For in the eyes of the civil servants they were part of the solution rather than the main problem. We were some unwanted irrelevance to that entrenched bureaucratic group think.
Much effort went into ensuring that the final document we submitted on proposals by the same civil servants actually contained our concerns about Fosis, for it seems that, in Whitehall’s Alice-in-Wonderland world, disliked thoughts get lost in the works.
While, to her credit, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, declines to have dealings with Fosis, her junior colleague Baroness Warsi hobnobs with them in the House of Lords, claiming this totalitarian organisation has been “demonised” by the media.
This was not an experience I am anxious to repeat, after realising that advisers are just window dressing for what the civil servants want to do in the first place. The only voice of sanity I encountered was Lord (Alex) Carlile, who had an oversight remit for the general revision of Prevent and who has called for deep police scrutiny of Mr Choudary.
What this problem needs is a laser-like focus on the overriding safety and security of the general public, regardless of how much vested interests — like universities — huff and puff, for we have the whip hand in the form of the money we pay them.
Secondly, we need to revisit the Cold War notion of subversion, so that there are legal penalties for those who would like to destroy our way of life, but who know how to stop short of incitement to murder.
And, finally, there needs to be a multi-agency enforcement of zero tolerance to the swaggering thugs one can see on many London streets so they learn they do not have any separate territory where they make and enforce the rules.
When they go to jail it should be somewhere as far removed from their usual habitat as possible, so that they experience the alienation that many law-abiding people feel in their own environments.
So let’s cut out the foot-dragging ex post facto inquiries, which just fatten up more ghastly lawyers, and the mealy-mouthed talk of “community” sensitivities, and try to do a few things more robustly than has been the case so far – starting with putting Abu Qatada on a plane to Jordan within hours of the next court judgment.
Otherwise we’ll be here again, some time soon.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/402492/MI6-chief-s-chilling-warning-We-can-t-stop-terror-attacks
MI6 chief's chilling warning: We can't stop terror attacks
THE security forces are virtually powerless to stop atrocities like the Woolwich murder, a former MI6 chief admitted.
Published: Sat, May 25, 2013
Two RAF fighters were scrambled to escort a Pakistan airliner to Stansted yesterday
Amid growing fears of copycat attacks and rising community tensions, Richard Barrett said preventing such terror attacks was “incredibly hard”.
As if to illustrate his point, two RAF fighter jets had to be scrambled yesterday to escort a Pakistan airliner to Stansted airport, Essex, after two passengers tried to get into the cockpit. The plane, which had been bound for Manchester, landed safely and two men were arrested.
In Warwickshire, police shut the M6 in both directions near Coventry while a “suspicious vehicle” was investigated.
And London Bridge railway station was closed as police were alerted to a man with an axe. Passengers were allowed back in and services resumed after about half an hour.
David Cameron was warned of the danger of follow-up attacks at a meeting of Cobra, the Government’s emergency committee, as military bases were put on high alert.
Killers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were both known to MI5 but were classed as fringe figures who did not merit full scale monitoring.
MI5 chiefs are facing tough questions about how much was known about the two men and when they were last “on the radar”. But Mr Barrett, ex-head of counter-terrorism at MI6, believes there was little MI5 could have done to prevent the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.
“I think it is incredibly hard to stop,” he said. “When does a person who expresses radical views, who joins a radical group, flip over to be a violent extremist? To find the signals, the red flags as it were, I think is enormously hard.
“I should imagine that these two people themselves probably didn’t have any intention to commit a crime like this until relatively recently before they did it.”
Mr Barrett added: “They must have had some indication that these guys were a problem in order to note their names. But it is one thing to note their names, it is quite another thing to take invasive action to track their movements.”
Lord Blair, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said there were “thousands and thousands of people who listen to Islamic extremists”.
MI5 and MI6 must go after the most dangerous suspects who travel abroad for terrorist training, he said. “The Security Service (MI5) has limited resources. They must prioritise people who are most likely to move from being interested in violent extremism to carrying it out.
“Even if you have the resources to do it, you have to have a very high level of suspicion to put surveillance on them.
“What are you monitoring? Lots of people have very odd views.”
Ministers were quick to defend MI5 from charges of failing to stop the murder of Drummer Rigby, who was pictured by CCTV cameras in his Help for Heroes sweatshirt at a takeaway near Woolwich barracks two days before the attack.
As if to illustrate his point, two RAF fighter jets had to be scrambled yesterday to escort a Pakistan airliner to Stansted airport, Essex, after two passengers tried to get into the cockpit. The plane, which had been bound for Manchester, landed safely and two men were arrested.
In Warwickshire, police shut the M6 in both directions near Coventry while a “suspicious vehicle” was investigated.
And London Bridge railway station was closed as police were alerted to a man with an axe. Passengers were allowed back in and services resumed after about half an hour.
David Cameron was warned of the danger of follow-up attacks at a meeting of Cobra, the Government’s emergency committee, as military bases were put on high alert.
Killers Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale were both known to MI5 but were classed as fringe figures who did not merit full scale monitoring.
MI5 chiefs are facing tough questions about how much was known about the two men and when they were last “on the radar”. But Mr Barrett, ex-head of counter-terrorism at MI6, believes there was little MI5 could have done to prevent the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.
“I think it is incredibly hard to stop,” he said. “When does a person who expresses radical views, who joins a radical group, flip over to be a violent extremist? To find the signals, the red flags as it were, I think is enormously hard.
“I should imagine that these two people themselves probably didn’t have any intention to commit a crime like this until relatively recently before they did it.”
Mr Barrett added: “They must have had some indication that these guys were a problem in order to note their names. But it is one thing to note their names, it is quite another thing to take invasive action to track their movements.”
Lord Blair, former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said there were “thousands and thousands of people who listen to Islamic extremists”.
MI5 and MI6 must go after the most dangerous suspects who travel abroad for terrorist training, he said. “The Security Service (MI5) has limited resources. They must prioritise people who are most likely to move from being interested in violent extremism to carrying it out.
“Even if you have the resources to do it, you have to have a very high level of suspicion to put surveillance on them.
“What are you monitoring? Lots of people have very odd views.”
Ministers were quick to defend MI5 from charges of failing to stop the murder of Drummer Rigby, who was pictured by CCTV cameras in his Help for Heroes sweatshirt at a takeaway near Woolwich barracks two days before the attack.
Brave Lee Rigby was butchered to death on the streets of Woolwich this weekI think it is incredibly hard to stop
Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said: “Peers and MPs will do a thorough investigation in terms of what the security forces knew but I’ve seen experts on security explaining how difficult it is in a free society to be able to control everyone.”
There are believed to be at least 3,000 people on MI5’s database of extremist suspects.
Mr Barrett said the Woolwich killers may not have had the wider links either here or abroad to warrant further attention from MI5.
Adebolajo, 28, and Adebowale, 22, both recent Muslim converts, are under arrest at separate London hospitals. Two women held on Thursday on suspicion of conspiracy were released yesterday. One man remains in custody.
A post mortem examination has failed to establish whether Drummer Rigby was killed by the car driven at him before he was attacked with knives and a meat cleaver.
There are believed to be at least 3,000 people on MI5’s database of extremist suspects.
Mr Barrett said the Woolwich killers may not have had the wider links either here or abroad to warrant further attention from MI5.
Adebolajo, 28, and Adebowale, 22, both recent Muslim converts, are under arrest at separate London hospitals. Two women held on Thursday on suspicion of conspiracy were released yesterday. One man remains in custody.
A post mortem examination has failed to establish whether Drummer Rigby was killed by the car driven at him before he was attacked with knives and a meat cleaver.
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: UK 'took fears over suspected killer lightly’
The British authorities did not take seriously the fact Michael Adebolajo was picked up with suspected terrorists near the Somali border, Kenyan officials claimed tonight.
Adebolajo was detained in Kenya more than two years ago, after allegedly trying to join the al-Shabaab Photo: AFP
A senior official, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Daily Telegraph that British staff dealt “very lightly” with the case of Adebolajo in November 2010 after he was deported.
The man accused of killing Drummer Lee Rigby in cold blood in Woolwich on Wednesday was detained in Kenya more than two years ago, after allegedly trying to join the al-Shabaab terror group in Somalia.
He was picked up with a group of other extremists who the Kenyans had been tracking. Officials say that he was later handed over to British intelligence officers, although that is unconfirmed.
The source said that the British authorities were “very much, fully aware” of the Kenyans’ concerns about the British national’s links to the other suspects.
New evidence last night also raised the possibility of links between Adebolajo and Samantha Lewthwaite, the July 7 2005 “white widow”.
Reports have connected Rogo, who was killed last year, with a Kenyan terror cell that also allegedly included Lewthwaite — the widow of Germaine Lindsay, the July 7 London bomber. Lewthwaite is believed to be a bomb-making instructor in hiding in Kenya, with links to al-Shabaab.
Adebelajo appeared in court with Swaleh Abdul, who two years later married Rogo’s daughter.
The possible links between Adebelajo and known or suspected terrorists based in Kenya will increase pressure on the handling of him by MI5 and the police once he returned to Britain. Somalia was seen as a prime destination for would-be jihadists to head for, because of its lack of governance and as it was a stronghold of al-Shabaab.
Two months earlier, the then head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, warned that Britons were travelling there and that it was “only a matter of time” before we could see terrorism on UK streets. The Kenyan government, after dismissing an account of Mr Adebolajo’s arrest as “a fairy tale”, today acknowledged that it had arrested a man by the name of “Michael Olemindis Ndemolajo”.
“We handed him to British security agents in Kenya and he seems to have found his way to London and mutated to Michael Adebolajo,” said spokesman Muthui Kariuki. “The Kenyan government cannot be held responsible for what happened to him after we handed him to British authorities.”
This contradicts Daily Telegraph investigations that found that the Kenyan security services have records of the suspect’s real name.
The Foreign Office confirmed that a British national was arrested in Kenya in 2010 and was given consular assistance. Live footage of Adebolajo’s court appearance emerged today, in which he is heard to say: “These people are mistreating us and we are innocent, believe me.”
Friends of the Londoner said he has since claimed that he was abused and tortured while in Kenya.
Abu Zuybyr, Adebolajo’s brother-in-law, said: “We [the family] contacted the British Government, and essentially, they refused to do anything, and the Kenyans were saying they were going to kill him — behead him.
“We had clear proof that he was being tortured… violently and sexually.
“It seemed almost as if the British Government were not cooperating in any way with him, or trying to help.
“I would say he’s always been different since then. You could almost say he’s a changed man in certain ways.
“He was a lot quieter and quite bitter towards the fact that he wasn’t getting any help from anyone.
“They did the opposite of what they were doing really.
“If they wanted help, surely they would have given him some support first?”
Adebolajo and his companions were picked up by police on a remote island in the Lamu archipelago.
“They were travelling to Kiunga, which is the boundary between Kenya and Somalia,” Ali Bunu, owner of the guesthouse where the men had stayed, told The Daily Telegraph.
Kiunga is known as an entry point to Somalia for al-Shabaab recruits.
Late on Saturday, a cross-border raid on Kenyan police posts by Somali militants left at least six people dead.
Today, police in the port city of Mombasa shot dead a Muslim cleric accused of possessing explosives and radicalising youths in Kenya and recruiting them into al-Shabaab.
The man reportedly shot and injured two police officers before he was killed.
Kenyan police said that Khalid Ahmed had been a close friend of Rogo, the Muslim cleric who was killed in a drive-by shooting last year
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: Cameron under fire as MI5 terrorism blunders emerge
David Cameron visited MI5 headquarters to thank spies for their work on the Woolwich terror case a day the after murder of Drummer Lee Rigby despite concerns about the failings of security services.
Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha take a drink by a beach during their holiday on the Spanish Island of Ibiza Photo: PA
Both of the men accused of hacking the soldier to death had been monitored by the security services for years, and one of them was allegedly approached with a view to acting as an informant.
Details of Mr Cameron's visit to MI5's headquarters after Drummer Rigby's murder emerged as the Prime Minister flew to Ibiza in Spain over the weekend for a holiday with his family.
Downing Street said he "remains in charge" of Britain as he was pictured relaxing in a cafe by the sea with his wife, Samantha.
A spokesman said has taken a small team of key staff with him so he can be kept informed about the investigation into the murder of Drummer Rigby.
Mr Cameron's visit to MI5's headquarters and decision to go on holiday led to questions about his judgement in the aftermath of the worst terrorist atrocity on British soil since 7/7.
* The family of Drummer Rigby visited the scene of his murder in Woolwich, where both his mother and sister were so overwhelmed by grief that they collapsed on the roadside.
* Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said the attack was not the work of a "lone wolf" as four other men were arrested by police over the weekend in connection with the murder.
* Hate clerics could be barred from appearing on broadcasters such as the BBC under government plans to expand the powers of Ofcom, the watchdog.
* Lord Howard, the former Conservative Home Secretary, suggested Labour and the Tories join forces to push through a "snoopers' charter" against the wishes of the Liberal Democrats.
* Kenyan officials said they arrested one of the suspected killers two years ago with a group of alleged terrorists but British authorities had failed take the matter seriously.
On Thursday Mr Cameron announced that the Intelligence and Security Committee would carry out an independent investigation into what the intelligence services knew about the alleged killers.
After visiting the scene of the murder in Woolwich, he then paid a trip to security services headquarters on Millbank. He thanked staff for the work their work on the investigation and other counter-terrorism successes.
However, a senior Westminster source suggested that it was a mistake to go there so soon after the tragedy and amid concerns about potential intelligence failings.
Michael Adebolajo, 28, had been known to the security services and police for a decade and was arrested six years after violent protests by extremists outside the Old Bailey six years ago.
In November 2010 he was arrested in Kenya after being caught trying to travel to Somalia, allegedly to join the terrorist network Al-Shabaab.
Kenyan authorities say they returned him to British intelligence officers, who failed to take their concerns seriously. The second suspected killer, Michael Adebowale, 22, was also known to police and the intelligence services.
One senior Westminster source suggested the visit was a mistake. He said: “I just wonder what he was going to thank them for. While they [the Security Services] did tremendously well during the Olympics 10 months ago a number of pieces of information have come to light since then. The interesting question is how much David Cameron knew about the potential intelligence failings when he went to see them.”
A source said Mr Cameron's did not "exonerate" the intelligence agencies during his visit to their headquarters.
The source said: "He wanted to thank them for the work they had done both on that particular operation - there had been a lot of people working around the clock - but also more generally.
"The work that they do is obviously highly secretive but the Prime Minister is one of the few people who gets to see the effects of that work.
"The idea that he was either blaming the security services or exonerating them when an investigation into what happened actually hasn't taken place isn't right."
Mr Cameron today travelled to Ibiza, where he is spending a week long holiday in a privately rented villa with his family.
A Downing Street source said: "He is on a week holiday with his kids. He has some office support with him to remain full update in terms of what's going on at home.
"The primary focus now is the investigation which is going on, which is being led by police and security services not by the governments.
"There was a Cobra on Thursday but there aren't any more scheduled in. He remains in charge of the country."
John Mann, a Labour MP, said: "People expect him to be at his desk leading from the front. It is inappropriate that he is away, it suggests that he thinks he can run the country from a beach in Spain.
"Does anyone think Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair would disappear at a time like this?"
Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will take a holiday next weekend while Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has opted for a holiday in Britain over the Bank Holiday.
Telegraph
The Woolwich murder: key questions
The murder of Drummer Lee Rigby raises several pressing security issues
Police arrive at the scene in Woolwich Photo: Julian Simmonds
3:53PM BST 25 May 2013
Could the Government do more to tackle extremism?
Behind all the rhetoric from ministers about how united they are after the shocking events in Woolwich, there has been a long-running dispute inside government about how best to deal with the threat. It has centred on what is known as the Prevent strategy, a programme costing almost £50 million a year that is designed to prevent young men being radicalised and becoming terrorists. It was established by Labour ministers after the attacks in the summer of 2005, but became bogged down in arguments about whether radical groups with anti-western views should be involved if they offered to help. Two years ago Mr Cameron came down decisively on the side of those who argue that there should be no engagement at all with extremists. As a result the programme was overhauled, although the Lib Dems were doubtful about the tougher line. Some ministers and officials have also been particularly weak when it comes to demanding action from universities, where radicalisation often takes place. Following the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, the Government’s entire approach should come under intense scrutiny.
Why are preachers of hate still in the UK?
To the frustration of the Prime Minister, Britain has found it very difficult to take action against those clerics preaching a pro-extremism message, thanks to the courts and human rights legislation. There is no way that the Lib Dems in the Coalition would allow any significant changes to make the jailing or removal of such preachers possible, even though they radicalise their young followers.
Is the terrorism threat growing?
Should Britain be spending more on security and intelligence?
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and the beginning of the latest war in Afghanistan, the last government set about increasing enormously the amount spent to combat the threat from al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups. The overall budget for MI5, the domestic Security Service, MI6, the Intelligence agency that deals with threats from abroad, and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, the surveillance facility) more than doubled from under £1 billion to £2 billion by the time Labour left office. But the new Coalition demanded savings after the 2010 election. Chancellor George Osborne imposed a three year freeze – at £2.1 billion – that finishes in 2015. The result is that in real terms spending will have been reduced by more than 10 per cent. It has been stressed by the bosses of the individual agencies that they were able to absorb the cuts without an impact on their operational effectiveness. Despite this, it does seem bizarre for the Government to have chosen to increase sharply spending on foreign aid while freezing the amount spent on protecting this country. However, recent suggestions that the Chancellor is looking for more savings from MI5 and MI6 have raised concerns among MPs. “He can forget it now. If anything we need to be doing more,” said a prominent Conservative MP. In the light of Woolwich, expect Mr Osborne to be asked to look elsewhere for cuts.
Will the 'snooper’s charter' now be introduced?
The Prime Minister was forced last month to shelve plans for a communications data bill in the Queen’s Speech, after it was vetoed by Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems. The police and MI5 and MI6 say they need more powers to keep track of potential plots. If such a bill had become law it would have compelled internet and phone companies to keep records of all emails, online searches, telephone calls and texts made by customers in case they were needed for investigations. The content itself would have been protected, but the authorities want to be able to track who extremists are in contact with. There is now pressure for the subject to be looked at again. It raises the possibility of the Prime Minister trying to introduce a bill and pass it with the support, potentially, of the Labour front bench. Against him would be an informal coalition of Mr Clegg, worried Labour MPs and some Tory MPs such as David Davis, who are equally concerned about the civil liberties implications.
Telegraph
We must have the courage to confront the preachers of hate
Britain is a tolerant and diverse society. But speech and literature that incite violence and impinge upon the rights of others cannot be tolerated
Flowers and a pair of boots at the scene where Drummer Lee Rigby, of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was murdered in John Wilson Street, Woolwich Photo: EPA
5:25PM BST 25 May 2013
This week we have witnessed scenes in Woolwich that are the stuff of nightmares. The savage murder of Drummer Lee Rigby raises feelings of horror, anger and despair. The nation is in shock.
But have also witnessed inspirational scenes of courage. We should remember Cub Scout leader Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, who jumped off a bus passing the carnage to see if she could use her first-aid skills to help. When she realised that the death was not an accident but deliberate, she confronted the perpetrators and talked to them in the hope of preventing them from attacking anyone else. Equally admirable were the “Angels of Woolwich”, Amanda Donnelly and her daughter Gemini Donnelly-Martin, who stayed with Drummer Rigby while he lay dying. Mrs Donnelly’s son later said: “She only wanted to help the poor guy – she’s a mum. That’s what mums do.”
Now is the time for politicians from all parties and for civil servants to show courage when it comes to dealing with the preachers of hate. Britain is a tolerant and diverse society, and free expression is part of being a democracy. In general, people should feel free to speak their minds and stand up for their beliefs. However, speech and literature that incite violence and impinge upon the rights of others cannot be tolerated. Radical preachers must not be given a public platform to call for death to gay people, soldiers, “infidels” or any other group that their warped ideology leads them to condemn.
In today’s paper, Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, writes words that are very welcome. He says that laws currently exist to ensure that preachers do not incite violence or disorder, and that the police and judiciary should not hold back from using “their powers when the line has been crossed”.
We applaud the sentiment. However, we have already heard plenty of words from politicians on this subject and seen sadly insufficient follow‑through. In the wake of the Woolwich attack, Baroness Warsi, Senior Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Minister for Faith and Communities, condemned all “extremists” and attacked the BBC for giving airtime to “idiots and nutters who speak for no one but themselves”. Yet this is the same Baroness Warsi who, The Sunday Telegraph revealed last month, had addressed an event staged by the controversial Federation of Student Islamic Societies on March 25. The group has hosted numerous extremist speakers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaeda recruiter; Azzam Tamimi, who endorses suicide bombing; and Haitham al-Haddad, who believes that music should be banned. Baroness Warsi told the meeting that extremism was “no more prevalent” at universities than in any other part of the country. This flies in the face of evidence from the anti-extremism group Student Rights that found at least 10 instances of Islamic extremism being promoted on British campuses in April alone.
The work of The Sunday Telegraph’s fearless investigative reporter Andrew Gilligan has exposed some of the sorry failures of administrations past and present. In 2009, he revealed that the Labour government had given £113,411 to Hizb ut-Tahrir – an extremist Islamic group that called for the destruction of the British state – to help finance a chain of schools. Hizb declared openly that its goal was to create an “Islamic personality” in the children it educated, to fight assimilation, and to teach children that “there must be one ruler of the khilafah [caliphate]”.
In 2010, when the new Government had been formed, Mr Gilligan disclosed the contents of leaked documents in which Whitehall civil servants had considered building links with radical groups, believing that such organisations might not lead to violence and could function as a “safety valve” for those tempted by terrorism. One group named was al‑Muhajiroun – despite the fact that it called 9/11 “magnificent” and has had links to one in five people convicted of terrorism in Britain for more than a decade. There is video of one of the Woolwich perpetrators, Michael Adebolajo, at an al‑Muhajiroun protest in 2007.
In spite of these policy weaknesses, the security forces have made progress in tackling extremism and there have doubtless been many successes that we shall never know about, because the violence prevented has never, thankfully, been seen. But we need to be honest about what has gone wrong. Cultural anxieties have meant that recruiting grounds for extremism have been allowed to develop in our mosques, prisons and universities.
It is time we applied the same standard to Islamist groups that promote violence that we would apply to any other lunatic fringe. The authorities need to be bold enough to call religious extremism by its proper name and, as Mr Pickles writes, police and the judiciary must act to deny a platform to those who would spread chaos and bloodshed in our society. That is exactly what ordinary, law-abiding Muslims would want our government to do. They share the outrage and disgust at the dissemination of a false gospel of violent nihilism. They, too, want to see action.
A lesson that we can all take from the Woolwich attack is to imitate the bravery of the women who faced down savagery in order to defend the innocent. If one good thing comes out of this horrific incident, let it be that we all finally have the courage to confront the preachers of hate in our midst.
Telegraph
By standing united, we can isolate the virus of Islamism
Those responsible for the Woolwich atrocity must not be allowed to provoke and divide us, writes Boris Johnson
Photo: ITV NEWS/@dannymckiernan
8:11PM BST 26 May 2013
When the family of Drummer Lee Rigby spoke to the nation last week, we watched in absolute agony. Never has there been such pain and such loss so simply and movingly expressed. They told us of his love of the Army, his pride in his job, his love of his family, and their shock and disbelief at his murder.
Those words wrung the hearts of millions. We owe it to his family, and to his memory, to do everything we can to bring his killers to justice – and to make sure that no more families suffer as they are suffering today.
It is hard to say much about the investigation now under way into the two alleged killers. The law must take its course. What we can do, however, is formulate a general response to that atrocity on the streets of Woolwich. Here are some of the main points.
(1) We must not give the killers the thing they crave above all – the prize of dividing us. They say they want a “war”, or, as others have put it, a “clash of civilisations”. That idea is bunk, and we can show it.
(2) To prevent any such temptation, we must be clear in our heads that there is no sense in blaming Islam, a religion that gives consolation and enrichment to the lives of hundreds of millions of peaceful people.
(4) You cannot hope to solve the problem of Islamism by accepting their invitation to enter into some debate or discussion about British or American foreign policy, even if that were desirable. People who suggest as much are, alas, playing the game of the Islamists. The only realistic option is to try to help immunise the vast, innocent and law-abiding majority of the Muslim population from the virus of extremism, and at the same time to try to stamp out that virus.
(5) It is very important not to exaggerate the plague. It is hard to estimate the number of people who have succumbed to the Islamist virus in this country, and there are various degrees of infection. But the security services would probably put the number in the very low thousands; and when you consider that there are about a million Muslims in London alone, you can see how the reputation of a whole community is at risk of suffering from the actions of a tiny, tiny fraction.
(6) But it is also vital not to be complacent, and to understand that the security services do an extraordinary job of dealing with a problem that has proved tough to eradicate. There remains a hardcore of activists and agitators, many of whom were associated with the now-banned organisation al-Muhajiroun. They cause real difficulties for mosques in London, some of which have had to resort to long and expensive legal actions to keep them out. The vectors of the virus may not even make much physical contact with their targets: since the arrival of the internet, we have had to deal with miserable young people “self-radicalising” – simply by watching sermons and other material on the web.
(7) We need to recognise, loudly and publicly, the good work of the vast majority of Muslim organisations in helping to crush the problem. If they are going to show zero tolerance of Islamism, they need support and encouragement.
(8) We need to keep on with the work of the “Prevent” programme, an initiative aimed at catching the most vulnerable young Muslims, and helping them before they can contract the virus. “Prevent” has recently been reviewed so as to focus its efforts on stopping the bad guys from recruiting, rather than just giving cash, in a general way, to Muslim community groups. But in some London boroughs there is clear and encouraging evidence that these programmes are working – saving young people from the catastrophe of being brainwashed by the Islamists. We need to keep immunising where we can, and we need to stamp out the virus.
(9) People like Abu Qatada should be put on a plane, and those that preach hate and violence must be arrested. The universities need to be much, much tougher in their monitoring of Islamic societies. It is utterly wrong to have segregated meetings in a state-funded centre of learning. If visiting speakers start some Islamist schtick – and seek either to call for or justify violence – then the authorities need to summon the police.
(10) The police need all the assistance they can get. The officers who attended the crime last week showed exemplary coolness and courage, and it is a fine irony that one of the firearms squad who helped to immobilise the alleged killers was a WPC: a fitting rebuttal of the ghastly sexism of the Islamist ideology. I have no idea whether the police would have benefited, in the Woolwich case, from the powers they now seek under the Communication of Data Act. But I have much sympathy with their basic desire to keep up with criminals, and make use of technology that is now instrumental in solving thousands of crimes.
That is how we are going to prevail in this struggle: by keeping our heads, by not falling for the tricks of those who want to provoke us, and by coming down hard when necessary. We know we are going to win, and they know it, too.
Note: The censors are massing in government. They will use any restrictions on Muslims against the likes of the EDL for sure and doubtless increae their grip on the general public who are increasingly fearful of saying anything non-pc.... RH
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: How far is Britain willing to go to prevent modern jihadis?
The choice is not only how hard we fight to protect ourselves, but what we are prepared to sanction in order to pre-empt attack
David Cameron speaking to members of the local community in Woolwich, south-east London. The PM has displayed a sureness of touch, neither hamming it up nor ignoring the passions and pains of the moment Photo: EPA
In Martin Amis’s unfinished novella, The Unknown Known, the terrorist Ayed, plotting in a camp in Waziristan, describes the different sectors engaged in “Strategic Planning”. In “Hut A”, the jihadis dwell at the outer limits of potential horror and atrocity, borrowing Donald Rumsfeld’s famous categorisation of knowledge to describe their grotesque inquiry: “The thinking, here, is pointed-end, cutting-edge. Synergy, maximalisation – these are the kind of concepts that are tossed from cushion to floor mat in Unknown Unknowns.”
They imagine spreading rabies in Central Park, or dynamiting the San Andreas Fault. In a flush of despicable ambition, it is decided that “we’re going to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.” For aficionados of jihadism, the fictional choice of target is instantly significant: it was in Greeley that Saayid Qutb, the Egyptian author of Milestones (1964), the Islamist equivalent of Mein Kampf, turned against America and the West.
Concerned that the novella was a “hostage to fortune”, Amis abandoned the enterprise. But it remains an intriguing cultural artefact, reflecting the (justified) fear after 9/11 that the 21st-century terrorist mind would devise ever more complex and ambitious plans to inflict harm on an ever-greater scale. What 9/11 did not prepare us for is a terrorism tactically capable of moving backwards as well as forwards. The global franchise known as al-Qaeda has suffered many setbacks since the Twin Towers collapsed into rubble amid Hadean clouds of dust and smoke. The theocratic sponsors of terror who rule in Tehran have not quite developed the nuclear weapons that could wipe out Israel. No matter. Those who fight under the jihadi banner – a digital community that stretches around the planet – are more than willing to pick up knives and meat cleavers and butcher a soldier near his barracks.
David Cameron was informed of the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby on Wednesday while he was on his way to dinner with François Hollande. Theresa May briefed him on the first Cobra meeting held in response to the attack, while regular updates were provided by Craig Oliver, his director of communications, and Chris Martin, the PM’s principal private secretary. All were struck by the sheer barbarous simplicity of the killing, its brazen brutality.
When it became clear that both of the suspects, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, had previously crossed MI5’s radar, Cameron took the immediate decision to release that information, fending off the prospective charge of a cover-up by Downing Street or the security service itself. The necessary corollary was the PM’s pep talk to MI5 to let its staff – and the rest of the world – know that they retained his complete confidence.
Naturally, and properly, the case will be fully investigated by the Security and Intelligence Committee. As the legal process churns into life, there are strict parameters to what can be said about the alleged killers. But some general observations can be made.
The first is that the high-value target strategy – the capture or assassination of senior al‑Qaeda figures – has robbed the movement of hierarchy but not of purpose. Jihadism is now, literally, an app, a downloadable mindset that encourages self-starting, DIY terrorism of the most basic sort. Roshonara Choudhry, who stabbed the Labour MP, Stephen Timms, in his surgery in May 2010, had been radicalised by jihadi sermons on the web. To say that Islamist terrorism in 2013 is disaggregated is no more meaningful than saying that Nike or Apple is disaggregated. Globalisation has fostered the emergence of a supranational network, connected by hatred of American and Western “foreign policy”, anti-Semitism and a longing to enforce Sharia and restore the Caliphate. As I have written before, the network plots globally and kills locally. It is active in Mali, Algeria, Yemen, Egypt and anywhere else that has Wi-Fi. And last Wednesday it was active in Woolwich.
For agencies such as MI5, complex plots are often easier to intercept than simpler acts of murderous hatred. The longer there is between the decision to act and the act itself, the better for those charged with maintaining national security. What period of time separates the decision to butcher a soldier in the street with meat cleavers, and the murder itself? In recent months, three separate plots detected and thwarted by the security services have gone to trial – a fact worth remembering amid all the finger-pointing this weekend.
A consistent feature of modern jihadism has also been the versatility of its adherents. The Madrid bombers were book-keepers who wanted to extend their range. Mohammed Sidique Khan, the mastermind of the 7/7 bombers, had been known to MI5, but in a much less prominent role. Paramilitary organisations are based upon rank, roles in the hierarchy fought for and respected; religious fanaticism is a grotesque quest for spiritual elevation, in which the true believer is always seeking to stretch himself and leap to martyrdom or targeted murder. Today’s demonstrator and trouble-causer is tomorrow’s street‑butcher.
National security, like politics, is the art of the possible. The number of people who might, conceivably, move from agitation to acts of violence is very high – far beyond the surveillance capabilities of a normal police service and domestic intelligence agency. Those who are psychiatrically deranged can be sequestered on precisely those grounds. The law allows detention without charge for a strictly limited number of days. There are other constraints that can be imposed upon terror suspects. But all attempts to strengthen these measures are ferociously opposed on the grounds that they infringe civil liberties – witness Nick Clegg’s hostility to government plans to extend monitoring of emails and internet use. Witness, too, the by-election forced by David Davis when he resigned his seat over Labour’s proposal to extend the maximum period of detention without charge.
“When you think about human society in a certain way – i.e., with the sole objective of hurting it – the entire planet resembles a pulsing bullseye.” So says Amis’s narrator, and it is true. The choice is not only how hard we fight to protect ourselves, but how far we are willing to go to pre-empt attack. Each society makes such a choice, but must keep it under constant review. It is to defend that unending debate against the psychosis of certainty that brave men like Drummer Rigby put their lives on the line every day.
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: New bid to muzzle the preachers of hate
A high-level task force is to be set up in a fresh attempt to muzzle Islamist clerics who radicalise young men through extremist preaching.
The Prime Minister is determined to challenge the poisonous narrative of extremist clerics Photo: AFP
11:09PM BST 25 May 2013
David Cameron has ordered the setting up of the new body in the wake of last week's killing of Drummer Lee Rigby in the street in Woolwich, South London.
Made up of senior ministers, police officers, security officials and moderate leaders, the new committee will study a range of options, according to reports.
These inlcude banning extremist clerics from being given public platforms to incite students, prisoners and other followers – and forcing mosque leaders to answer for so-called "preachers of hate."
It was being made clear in Whitehall that the launch of TERFOR (the Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Task Force) should be seen as an overhaul of the government's counter-terrorism strategy in the wake of Drummer Rigby's murder.
A senior Whitehall source said: "The Prime Minister is determined to challenge the poisonous narrative of extremist clerics and confront religious leaders who promote violence. We are looking at the range of powers and current methods of dealing with extremism at its root, as opposed to just tackling criminal violent extremism.
Sources said, however, that there must be no question of restricting freedom of speech. Any moves to do so would quickly bring Mr Cameron and other Conservative ministers into conflict with their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats.
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: British soldier's death was more than 'lone wolf' attack
The murder of a British soldier on the streets of London was not a "lone wolf" attack, the Home Secretary has said.
Woolwich murder suspect Michael Adebolajo, 2nd right, in the dock in Kenya in 2010.
On Saturday night a further three men, aged 21, 24 and 28, were arrested in south-east London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.
Police used Tasers to detain two of them and are searching four addresses.
Asked about growing indications that the attacks involved more than a "lone wolf", the Home Secretary said: "I think the indications, all the indications, would be for that.
"I can't go into details of the case, for obvious reasons its an ongoing investigation.
"There were some further arrests last night, some further searches have taken place. The police and the security service are working very hard in relation to this case.
She told the BBC's Andrew Marr show that thousands of people are "potentially" at risk of being radicalised in the UK.
She suggested there may be a lower limit for imposing banning orders on extremists.
She said: "We do need to look, for example, at the question of whether perhaps we need to have banning orders to ban organisations that don't meet the threshold for proscription."
Mrs May defended the "excellent" work of the security and intelligence agencies in the face of claims mistakes were made in the handling of the two suspects, identified as Michael Adebolajo, 28, and Michael Oluwatobi Adebowale, 22, who were known MI5.
A childhood friend of Adebolajo has also claimed that the suspect was approached by MI5 six months ago and asked if he would work for the security service.
Yesterday, it emerged that one of the alleged killers of Drummer Lee Rigby appeared in court in Kenya suspected of leading a group of Islamists trying to join terrorists in Somalia.
The Sunday Telegraph has disclosed that Michael Adebolajo was held by police close to the Somali border with a band of "radicalised" Muslim youths who wanted to join the notorious al-Shabaab group.
He was deported to Britain after he appeared in court in Mombasa in November 2010.
Two months previously the head of MI5 had warned that Britons were training in Somalia and it was "only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those who are today fighting alongside al-Shabaab". It also emerged that the other suspect in the soldier’s murder, Michael Adebowale, 22, was detained by police in London two months ago after shopkeepers complained about a group of Muslim activists.
The disclosures raise further questions about the monitoring by the security services of Adebowale and Adebolajo, 28, whom sources have said was known to MI5 but not assessed as a "threat to life".
In other developments:
ÞOn Saturday night a further three men, aged 21, 24 and 28, were arrested in south-east London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. Police used Tasers to detain two of them and were searching four addresses.
ÞCalls were made for Anjem Choudary, the leader of the al-Muhajiroun group to which Adebolajo has been closely linked, to be subject to a Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measure, the successor to control orders;
ÞEric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, uses an article in The Sunday Telegraph to warn public bodies, including the police and judges, that it is time for them to bring the full weight of the law to bear on extremists and not be hampered by political correctness;
ÞA leading historian who was a member of a Whitehall panel intended to tackle extremist Muslim preaching at universities told how officials opened a "dialogue" with a body that seemed to endorse aspects of extremism;
ÞIn what was feared to be a copycat attack in Paris, a uniformed soldier was knifed in the throat by a man said to be "bearded and of North African origin", who was on the run on Saturday night. The soldier was badly hurt in the attack, which police were treating as a terrorist incident;
ÞThe father of Damilola Taylor, the boy murdered in 2000 in south-east London, told how he had mentored Adebowale before the former gang member turned to radical Islam.
A report on MI5 and MI6’s knowledge of and assessment of the two suspects will be given this week to MPs on the parliamentary committee that scrutinises the security services.
The Sunday Telegraph has established that Adebolajo was arrested by Kenyan authorities in the coastal town of Lamu, before being taken to Mombasa, where he was detained. He appeared in court in late November 2010 alongside other alleged Islamists.
He and the others, who were said to age from 18 to 22, were remanded to a local police station. A court report at the time said he was a "Nigerian who had a British passport" and spelt his name incorrectly. Sources in the country confirmed his identity yesterday and said Adebolajo was subsequently deported. He later complained that he had been mistreated.
Adebolajo is understood to have said in court that he wanted access to legal services and to talk to the British Ambassador to Kenya. He also complained that the police said he was a Christian, when he was a converted Muslim.
"He was very arrogant, he was restrained and handcuffed very well," the source said. "We deported him back to the UK. When he was back in the UK he complained about us, that we tortured him. The British embassy in Nairobi wrote to us about the complaint, we told them that we did not torture him. I do not know if the letter arrived but that was what we wrote to them."
According to newspaper reports at the time, the group boarded a speedboat from Lamu Island to the village of Kizingitini before their arrest. Police suspected Adebolajo of masterminding a plan for the youths to join al-Shabaab in Somalia. Pamphlets connected with al-Shabaab were recovered during the police operation.
The other youths who appeared with Adebolajo said they were recruited from a mosque in Mombasa by a radical imam. While in Lamu, they spent time at an isolated madrassa. Lamu, 68 miles from the Somali border, is considered the key crossing point to the country and is a major area of operations for Kenyan security forces.
The case raises questions about why Adebolajo was not put under greater surveillance or even prosecuted after his deportation from Kenya. Under the Terrorism Act 2006, it is an offence to travel or intend to travel overseas to commit acts of terrorism or take part in terrorist training.
Evidence from the Kenyan authorities could have been used to prosecute Adebolajo.
Several Britons have been convicted of similar offences, including the white Muslim convert Richard Dart and his co-defendants earlier this year. They admitted planning to travel to Pakistan to seek terrorist training, and had discussed attacking the military-supporting town of Royal Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire.
Kenyan police believe that Jermaine Grant, a Briton who is on trial in Mombasa on charges of possessing explosives and planning an attack in the port city, has links to al-Shabaab. Grant’s alleged accomplice Samantha Lewthwaite, the widow of the 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay, is on the run after slipping a police dragnet. Some reports suggest she may have crossed the border into Somalia.
Jonathan Evans, the then head of MI5, warned in September 2010 that a "significant number of UK residents" were training with al-Shabaab. At the time security services said Somalia was the most significant destination for foreign jihadis. The Foreign Office said of Adebolajo’s arrest and deportation: "We do not comment on individual cases."
The arrest of the other suspect, Adebowale, two months ago in London, followed complaints from shopkeepers about the activities of extremist Muslims, sources said.
More details of his life were disclosed by Damilola Taylor’s father, Richard, who recalled how he tried to mentor the suspect when he was younger.
Mr Taylor is Nigerian-born while both suspects are of Nigerian descent. He said: "He [Adebowale] was a young lovable boy, quiet. Suddenly I started hearing that he’s getting involved in issues around gangs and drugs and I was not very happy with that. I’m terribly shocked."
The murder of Drummer Rigby has caused concern on several levels across Whitehall, highlighting apparent failures to rein in extremist preaching and the radicalisation of young Muslim men. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph today, Mr Pickles urges politicians, judges and the public sector to take a robust line against extremists.
"Our laws are there to ensure preachers of hate are not given a licence to incite violence or public disorder," he writes. "And the police and judiciary should use their powers when the line has been crossed."
He urges members of the public not to "stand idly by" and for broadcasters not to give fanatics the oxygen of publicity. Local authorities should not give taxpayers’ money to organisations that promote segregation or shelter extremists, he adds.
A senior academic who advised the Government on combating Muslim extremism in British universities today condemns the showpiece counter-terrorism strategy as a "sad shambles".
Professor Michael Burleigh, a research fellow in modern history and the history of terrorism at Buckingham University, was invited to take part in a Home Office and Department for Business advisory group two years ago, which helped update the £63 million-a-year "Prevent" strategy.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph today, Prof Burleigh says civil servants in charge of the "entrenched bureaucracy" worked to undermine the experts and even met with one Islamic group that he regarded as "the main problem".
Prevent was set up under the Labour government in 2005 after the London bombings of July 7. After the last general election, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, commissioned a review because she regarded it as highly flawed, and was critical of the higher education sector’s "complacency" in dealing with the Islamists on campus. She later admitted that Prevent had handed taxpayers’ money to hard-line Muslim groups that promote extremist views.
One senior counter-terrorism source said: "Would a university allow someone to speak on campus if they were advocating the best way to be a paedophile or an armed robber? No, they would not. But they allow speakers who advocate terrorism."
Greenwich University last night began an investigation into radicalism on its premises after confirming that the older suspect had been a student there.
Research by Student Rights, a group set up to tackle extremism on campus, found that radical Islamist preachers addressed students at 200 official events in the 12 months to March 2013, including at Greenwich.
In February its Islamic society invited Dr Khalid Fikry, who has given speeches in which he appears to suggest that Shia Muslims believe "raping a Sunni woman is a matter that pleases Allah" and stated that "Shia are one of the worst and greatest enemies of our Ummah (community) nowadays". Most recently he spoke at the University of Westminster’s Islamic Society.
University Islamic societies are grouped under the umbrella of the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (Fosis). It has hosted extremist speakers including Azzam Tamimi, who supports the Palestinian group Hamas and has spoken in support of martyrdom, and Haitham al-Haddad, who believes that music is a "prohibited and fake message of love and peace". Fosis has been criticised by Mrs May and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, for its failure to "fully challenge terrorist and extremist ideology".
Its chairman, Omar Ali, said last night: "There has been no investigation or inquiry that has identified a link between the activities of Islamic Societies and acts of terrorism. There’s no evidence to suggest there is more extremism on university campuses than in any other sector of society."
The murder in Woolwich, south-east London, has led to calls for internet companies to take down extremist material from the web, but those were rejected by Google. Speaking at the Telegraph Hay Festival yesterday, Eric Schmidt, its executive chairman, said the company had no plans to change its policy.
"We cannot prima facie identify it and take it down. It establishes censorship as a slippery slope; where do we stop?" he said.
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: Tories and Labour should join forces push through 'snoopers' charter'
The Conservatives should form an alliance with Labour to push through a "snoopers' charter" against the wishes of the Liberal Democrats, the former Home Secretary Lord Howard has said.
Earlier this month Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg blocked the Home Secretary's plans for a communications bill that would have given police and security services access to records of individuals' internet use.
Labour former Home Secretary Alan Johnson said today he was "absolutely passionately" a supporter of reforms and suggested it was a resigning issue for Theresa May if she could not get the changes into law by 2015.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said she that the bill was "essential". She said: "I have made my view very clear.
She said: "I have always been clear that access to communications data is essential for law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies.There is a reducing capability in relation to access to communications data."
Lord Howard suggested that the Conservatives and Labour should work together. He said: "Many figures in the Labour party have actually expressed support for that Bill – people like John Reid, Lord Reid, and I think that Bill is really very important.
“The Labour party will support it in the national interest, I think that bill could be an important element in helping to protect people from attacks of this kind and if it is possible to pass it through
Parliament in the national interest by Conservative and Labour votes I think that is something that should be explored.”
It comes as it emerged the Deputy Prime Minister was warned that blocking the bill could come back to haunt him just days before the murder of soldier Lee Rigby.
Liberal Democrat Lord Carlile, who until 2011 was the independent reviewer of government anti-terror laws, said he was "shocked" at Mr Clegg's "political" decision.
Lord Carlile told Murnaghan on Sky News: "We don't know whether if that bill had been enacted two years ago it would have prevented this incident.
"What we can certainly say is that it might have done and what we can absolutely say for certain is that if the communications data bill, with the safegaurds that were agreed in the last session of parliament, was introduced then it would be very likely to prevent some attacks of this kind in the future."
He added: "The reason it was vetoed, as Nick Clegg the leader of my party knows very well, was purely political because of demands from inside the Liberal Democrats."
Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes said there is "no evidence at all" that the communications bill could have prevent the Woolwich atrocity.
He the programme: "The evidence base isn't as clear as I think he would argue it is."
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: Why did BBC give hate preacher 'oxygen of publicity', Home Secretary asks
The Home Secretry has questioned why the BBC allowed radical cleric Anjem Choudary to broadcast his "disgusting" views on Newsnight.
Theresa May said people were right to complain about Mr Choudary's appearance on Newsnight, during which he repeatedly refused to condemn the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.
Mrs May said: "I think Anjem Choudary has disgusting views and I think it is right that we look at how those views are being presented and I think there were many people who did indeed say 'What is the BBC doing interviewing Anjem Choudary?"
Her comments come after Baroness Warsi, a leading minister, condemned the amount of coverage given to Choudary and other militant Islamists on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 News.
The BBC was criticised for offering the radical preacher a slot on last night’s Newsnight programme on BBC2, in a decision branded ‘idiotic’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘insensitive’.
The corporation has earlier released footage of Michael Adebolajo standing behind Choudary at a 2007 demonstration.
"The heartening thing in the midst of all this tragedy is that the British Muslim community has, with a unified, unreserved voice, condemned the killing and pledged support for our armed forces.
"This is a real maturing of the community which has taken years of painstaking work and frank discussions behind closed doors.
"This time everyone has stepped up to the mark. Yet here broadcasters are undoing all this by giving a platform to one appalling man who represents nobody. I am really angry."
Choudary, former head of banned Islamist organisation Al Muhajiroun, was behind the planned protest march in 2010 through Royal Wootton Bassett, the town where dead British soldiers were repatriated, theDaily Mail reported.
He has been accused of radicalising Adebolajo, who wielded a meat cleaver in the attack on Drummer Lee Rigby, in the mid-2000s.
Defence Secretary Jim Murphy said on Twitter: "Banned from France but welcome on Newsnight. A mistake of the BBC to invite Anjem Choudary onto the telly tonight."
Among others criticising the BBC's decision to give the preacher airtime was Sadiq Khan, Labour’s Shadow Justice Secretary, who told LBC radio that the Choudary was an "offensive and obnoxious media tart" with no followers.
Choudary also appeared on the BBC’s rolling news channel and has been on ITV News, as well as on Channel 4's news.
Channel 4 had also previously given Choudary and another Islamist called Abu Nusaybah their own slot on the broadcaster's 4thought.tv, a two-minute opinion show that airs immediately after its nightly news bulletin.
The decision by the broadcaster to hand over its airwaves to both men had sparked anger from moderate Muslims.
Telegraph
Woolwich attack: Calls for Anjem Choudary to be placed under a new terror control order
Calls were growing last night for Anjem Choudary, the radical Islamist accused of brainwashing one of the Woolwich murder suspects, to be placed under a new terror control order.
Calls for Anjem Choudary to be placed under a new terror control order are growing. Photo: REUTERS
7:50AM BST 26 May 2013
It is estimated that one in five terrorists convicted in Britain over the past decade were either members of or linked to al-Muhajiroun, the extremist group founded by Choudary and the exiled preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed.
Choudary, 46, and a lawyer by training, has never been convicted of any offence, much to the frustration of British authorities.
But the revelation last week that al-Muhajiroun had played a large part in radicalising Michael Adebolajo, 28, who is accused of murdering a soldier outside Woolwich Barracks, has renewed pressure on the Home Office to find a way of dealing with Choudary.
Omar Bakri, a Syrian-born cleric, left Britain in the wake of comments made after the July 7 attack on London in 2005 and has been refused permission to come back. He now lives in exile in Lebanon.
But Choudary was born in Britain and went, ironically, to Mulgrave Primary School. It is beside the road where Lee Rigby, the soldier, was murdered.
Mark Reckless, a Conservative member of the home affairs select committee, said: “If there is clear evidence of him [Choudary] encouraging terrorism or inciting violence then the Home Secretary may want to consider if he’s a fit person to be subject to the TPim regime.”
The TPim regime is less restrictive than the control orders it replaced and which fell foul of human rights legislation.
Last week, Choudary refused to condemn the killings while Omar Bakri, speaking from Lebanon, praised the killers’ “courage” in standing and waiting for police to arrive at the scene rather than fleeing.
Choudary was radicalised in the 1990s. He was a medical student at Southampton University – known to friends as Andy – but failed his first year due to excessive partying.
It has been claimed that in those days, he drank, womanised and took drugs. He switched to law but became embittered when a City law firm turned him down for a well-paid job.
He began attending mosque and his path crossed with Omar Bakri and another radical preacher Abu Hamza, who ran Finsbury Park mosque.
Since those days he has been inseparable from Omar Bakri. He drafted Omar Bakri’s resignation letter from Hizb ut-Tahrir, another radical Islamist organisation, and they established al-Muhajiroun.
The group was based at first in the basement of Finsbury Park mosque before moving to offices on a retail park in Tottenham, London. Omar Bakri became known as the “Tottenham Ayatollah” but not taken seriously until the 9/11 attacks.
The group espouses a hardline version of Islam, whose ambition is to see sharia law imposed in the UK.
Al-Muhajiroun was finally banned in 2010. Choudary had in the meantime set up other groups such as the Saved Sect and run a website Islam4UK, which has also been shut down. But efforts to strangulate al-Muhajiroun and its offshoots are difficult in an internet age.
On Friday, Omar Bakri was preaching to his followers in an internet chatroom. He even briefly discussed the case of the murdered soldier. The chatroom can be followed by anybody signing up to it.
Affiliates of al-Muhajiroun have gone on to be implicated in terrorism. One of Choudary’s proteges Richard Dart, 30, a white British convert, was jailed for six years last month for plotting to attack soldiers in Royal Wootton Bassett.
Another former al-Muhajiroun associate Omar Khyam was jailed for life in 2007 for leading the “fertiliser bomb” plot targeting London nightclubs. In March 2007, Abdul Muhid, a al-Muhajiroun stalwart, was convicted of soliciting murder during Danish embassy anti-cartoon protests. In April 2008, he was convicted of fundraising for terrorism.
Last week, Lord Carlile, the Government’s former reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, called for an investigation into Choudary over his connections to Michael Adebolajo. Yesterday, Choudary said he had not been approached by police investigating the Woolwich murder.
On 25/05/2013 14:22, The Legal Project wrote:
U.S. Praises Sharia Censorship
by Deborah Weiss
May 24, 2013
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The United States is silent as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) passes its most recent UN Resolution that unravels global consensus to support freedom of speech.From 1999-2010, the OIC succeeded in passing its "defamations of religions" resolutions, which ostensibly would protect Islam from all criticism, including true statements of fact. Though the name of the resolutions indicated that it would pertain to all religions equally, in the OIC's interpretation, it applied to Islam only.Realizing the clash that this concept holds with that of free expression, the US State Department urged the OIC to produce an alternative resolution which would address the OIC's concerns about "Islamophobia" and still protect free speech.Accordingly, in March 2011, the OIC introduced the now infamous Resolution 16/18 to combat intolerance based on religion or belief, purportedly proposed as a replacement for the defamation of religions resolution. It garnered wide-spread support and Western states touted it as a victory for free speech. They believed that its focus marked a landmark shift from suppression of speech critical of religions to combating discrimination and violence against individuals based on their religious beliefs.Over time it became clear that the OIC retained its long term goal to protect Islam from "defamation" and indeed to criminalize all speech that shed a negative light on Islam or Muslims. Resolution 16/18 turned out to be a tactical move by the OIC to bring the West one step closer toward realizing its goal of achieving global blasphemy laws, by using language more palatable to the West, and open to interpretation.Against this backdrop the US held the first conference to "implement" Resolution 16/18, the process now known as the "Istanbul Process."Unfortunately, America's concern for the protection of free speech seems to have gotten lost as its focus moved closer to the OIC's positions, and an emphasis was placed on protecting Muslims in the West from "Islamophobia."Some circles including free speech advocates, national security experts, and those concerned about the Persecuted Church, have beaten the drum against Resolution 16/18 and the continuation of the Istanbul Process. Their efforts have been to no avail as the Istanbul Process continues.However, while awareness of the perils of Resolution 16/18 is on the increase, news on ResolutionA/HRC/22/L.40 has gone virtually unreported. It retains the same title as Resolution 16/18, but has glaringly dangerous amendments.To focus on just one, it asserts that "terrorism…cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization or ethnic group." This is obviously problematic. The lumping together of these categories implies a false equation of immutable characteristics such as nationality and ethnicity with those that are subject to choice such as religion or belief.Religions and belief systems come in all stripes. To preclude the possibility that any of them might be ideologically associated with terrorism leads to a position based on an unexplored assumption rather than a conclusion based on fact. Indeed, the assertion condemns the mere exploration of the facts a priori, a notion which is not only illogical but dangerous.After 9/11 and the multitude of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam, one ought to be able to raise legitimate questions about Jihadi ideology without being labeled a bigot. Government has an obligation to determine the motivational ideology of terrorism even if even if it turns out to be an interpretation of a religion.The government should not get into the business of ascertaining what is or is not proper theological interpretations of any religion. But a distinction has to be made between those who are truly practicing a religion as the word is understood in the West, versus those who are implementing a subversive political ideology cloaked in the language of religion.Anyone who has conducted a good faith investigation knows that there is such a phenomenon as "Islamic terrorism." Only those in denial can claim otherwise. Truth should never constitute prohibited speech, no matter how ugly reality might be.The condemnation of honest discussion on this important matter, along with other disturbing speech restrictive clauses in Resolution L.40, demonstrates the unraveling of the "consensus" by nation states to promote freedom of expression. Those who follow the OIC closely know that its allegiance to this concept was folly from the onset. One need only take a cursory glance at the OIC countries to determine the disingenuousness of this portention, as many OIC countries fine, jail and even execute the exercise of speech deemed blasphemous to Islam. For those less informed, nothing more than the language embodied in Resolution L.40 is needed to realize that the OIC's commitment to free speech is a sham.Subsequent to passage of Resolution L.40, the EU representative to the UN expressed unabashed concernover the erosion of international consensus to support free speech. He insisted that the EU will continue to uphold the ideas pertaining to the protection of minorities, but will oppose any efforts to undermine the right to free expression, including discussion of Islamic terrorism.The US representative stated no such concern. She failed to make a principled statement on America's position regarding freedom of speech. Instead, she lavished praise on the OIC for maintaining a "consensus" on Resolution 16/18 for three consecutive years.The Obama Administration has erroneously characterized the Fort Hood attack as mere "workplace violence"; has cleansed from its national security and counterterrorism lexicon any reference to Islamic terrorism, hasblamed the Benghazi attacks on the an "anti-Islam video" and has taken a lead role in the Istanbul Process, promising to use "peer pressure and shaming" against American citizens who speak out on these issues in a way that the Administration finds disagreeable.Therefore, it should have come as no surprise when after the Boston bombings, during a time of trial, tribulation and grief, the President's address emphasized that people should prioritize America's value of diversity. No doubt that this diversity of ideas includes the motivational ideology of Islamic terrorism, even though acknowledgment of its existence is now verbotenThis text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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Telegraph
Two charged with endangering jet
Two men have been charged with endangering an aircraft after a passenger jet was diverted mid-flight, police said.
Officers boarded Pakistan International Airlines flight PK709 and removed the men from the plane. Photo: ALAMY
Taxi driver Tayyab Subhani, 30, and restaurant worker Mohammed Safdar, 41, both from Nelson in Lancashire, will appear in court on Monday, Essex Police said.
The charges are in connection with an incident on Friday involving a Pakistan International Airways airliner at Stansted Airport.
An RAF Typhoon jet was scrambled to escort the Boeing 777 flight to Manchester over UK airspace before it was diverted to the Essex airport, where it landed at 2.15pm.
The flight had left Lahore at 9.35am local time and was thought to have been carrying 297 passengers.
Officers boarded Pakistan International Airlines flight PK709 and removed the men from the plane.
According to one of the passengers, the aircraft's cabin crew said two men had repeatedly tried to get into the cockpit.
The very same plane on the very same flight – from Lahore to Manchester – had previously been diverted to Stansted on September 7 2011 due to a bomb scare.
Essex Police said the men would remain in custody ahead of their court appearance.
They will remain in police custody until their court appearance.May 26, 2013
French Soldier Stabbed In The Neck In Paris, Police Seeking Man Of North African Origin
By LORI HINNANT 05/25/13 05:36 PM ET EDT 
the throat in a busy commercial district outside Paris on Saturday, and the government said it was trying to determine if there were any links to the brutal killing of a British soldier by suspected Islamic extremists.
French President Francois Hollande said the identity of the attacker, who escaped, was unknown and cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the assault on the uniformed soldier in the La Defense shopping area. The life of the 23-year-old soldier was not in danger, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.
On Wednesday, British soldier Lee Rigby, 25, was viciously stabbed on a London street in broad daylight in a suspected terrorist attack that has raised fears of potential copycat strikes.
The French soldier was on a group patrol as part of a national protection program when he was attacked from behind, prosecutor Robert Gelli told Europe 1 radio. The assailant did not say a word, Gelli said.
"There are elements – the sudden violence of the attack – that could lead one to believe there might be a comparison with what happened in London," Interior Minister Manuel Valls told France 2 television. "But at this point, honestly, let us be prudent."
Rigby was attacked while walking outside the Royal Artillery Barracks in the Woolwich area of south London.
The gruesome scene was recorded on witnesses' cellphones, and a video emerged in which one of the two suspects – his hands bloodied – boasted of their exploits and warned of more violence as the soldier lay on the ground. Holding bloody knives and a meat cleaver, the suspects waited for police, who shot them in the legs, witnesses said.
In the video, one of the suspects declared, "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you ... We must fight them as they fight us."
Two Muslim hard-liners have identified that suspect as Michael Adebolajo, a Christian who converted to Islam and attended several London demonstrations organized by banned British radical group al-Muhajiroun.
French security forces have been on heightened alert since their country launched a military intervention in the African nation of Mali in January to regain territory seized by Islamic radicals. British Prime Minister David Cameron was himself in Paris meeting with Hollande when he first received word of the London attack.
Last year, three French paratroopers were killed by a man police described as a French-born Islamic extremist who then went on to strike a Jewish school in the south of France, killing four more people.
___
Associated Press Writer Sylvia Hui in London contributed to this report.
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