Blacks recruited for terror by al-Qaida

Al-Qaida is aggressively recruiting black Americans for suicide operations against the homeland, say FBI analysts who have reviewed recent videotaped messages from the terror group's leaders.

A speech released May 5 by Osama bin Laden's deputy confirms earlier fears that African-Americans are the No. 1 recruiting target for the next generation of attacks. Al-Qaida has been trying to lower its Arab profile to reduce the odds that its terror cells will be subjected to security scrutiny.

"Federal and local law enforcement authorities should be aware that al-Qaida terrorists may not appear Arab," warns a recent Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by WND. "Non-Arab al-Qaida operatives could find it easier to avoid unwanted scrutiny since they may not fit typical profiles."

In the latest message, al-Qaida No. 2 Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri clearly seeks to sow political and racial discontent among African-Americans. He makes frequent references to what he calls the "martyr" Malcolm X, and says "I want blacks in America to know that we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind."

Zawahiri encourages African-Americans to follow the example of Malcolm X, a.k.a. al-Hajj Malik al-Shabaaz, who he says was not afraid to sacrifice his life to fight American "oppression."

According to a transcript of the hour-long screed, Zawahiri said this is "the culture which the struggler and martyr Malcom X (may Allah have mercy upon him) fought against when he told his repressed black brothers in America, 'If you're not ready to die for it, take the word "freedom" out of your vocabulary.'"

"Freedom is something that you have to do for yourself," he quotes Malcolm X as as saying. "The price of freedom is death."

Zawahiri, again citing the teachings of Malcolm X, suggests that black Muslims who do not rise up against America are no better than "house slaves."

It's the first time al-Qaida has identified Malcolm X as a fellow Islamic "struggler and martyr," analysts say.

"Zawahiri's focus on race relations may be benefiting from the input of a U.S. citizen named Adam Yahiye Gadahn – a.k.a Azaam al-Amriki – who is a senior member of al-Qaida's media committee," said former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, now an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank specializing in national security.

"Indeed," he added, "the deftness and political timeliness of Zawahiri's statements suggest that al-Qaida may have more than a single American advising it."

Last year, in another nearly hour-long videotaped speech, al-Qaida propaganda chief Gadahn invited blacks to convert to Islam and take revenge against a nation that enslaved their ancestors.

Gadahn, a white convert from California thought to be operating out of al-Qaida's new base in Pakistan, slammed his native America, which he said "shamelessly brought us lynch laws, Jim Crow, and a death row where only convicts of certain races are sent."

In courting African-Americans, he also encouraged them to forsake Christianity, which he claims whites have used as an excuse to abuse blacks.

"Islam rejects the Judeo-Christian doctrines concerning Eve and Ham, which the West has used to justify all manner of abuse and ill treatment of women and blacks," Gadahn said. "Islam is for everyone."

Gadahn, who is wanted by the FBI for treason, also claims that America "enslaved Africa."

Islamic terrorism analysts point out that al-Qaida's racial history lessons conveniently leave out the fact that Arab Muslim slave traders sold Africans into bondage.

"The Arab is the true master of the African," said Bill Warner, director of the Center for Study of Political Islam. "Blacks like to imagine Islam is their counterweight to white power, not that Islam has ruled them for 1,400 years."

Blacks account for the largest share of Muslims in America. A great many of them are converts to Islam. And remarkably, the religion is flourishing among African-Americans since 9/11. Analysts fear the trend plays right into bin Laden's hands.

Black converts say Islam has more in common with their African heritage than Christianity. In fact, black Muslim leaders often refer to such conversions as "reversions," claiming black "reverts" are merely returning to the Islamic faith prominent among their African forebears who were forced into slavery.

"You have African-American men seeking liberation," explained black Muslim leader Eric Erfan Vickers, "and many see Christianity as a white man's religion that continues to oppress."

Vickers, a convert to Islam, does not consider al-Qaida a terrorism group. "They are involved in a resistance movement," he contended.

Prisons have already proven to be a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaida, spawning the likes of shoebomber Richard Reid and alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla.

Christian prison chaplains say Islam is so popular with inmates they are having a hard time competing with Muslim chaplains for their souls. Blacks are being converted by the cell block. The FBI worries blacks could be the next face of terror in America.

Since 9/11, the agency has already disrupted several homegrown terror plots involving black Muslim converts, including: A group of black Muslim converts in Miami who allegedly conspired to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago (some had rap sheets).

A Chicago black Muslim, Derrick Shareef, who allegedly plotted to blow up a local shopping mall.

A black U.S. soldier, Hassan Abujihaad, who allegedly fed terrorists classified information about U.S. battleship movements in the Strait of Hormuz.

Black ex-con Muslims in Torrance, Calif., who allegedly planned to attack military recruiting stations and synagogues in the state. The plot was initially hatched in prison. Still, some analysts doubt al-Qaida's pitch will resonate in today's black community beyond a handful of malcontents. They point out that African-Americans are no longer held back by institutional racism, and are growing wealthier as evidenced by the expanding black middle class.

Indeed, Zawahiri does not paint a very enticing picture in describing the sacrifices required along the path of jihad, especially for those used to the material comforts of America.

"If we continue to aspire to nothing more than diplomas, positions, salaries, pensions and the raising of our children, there will be nothing but humiliation in store for us, our children and our grandchildren," he argued. "If, on the other hand, we are happy with killing, captivity, emigration, losing one's spouse, orphanage, and losing one's wealth, homeland and beloved in the path of Allah, then with Allah's help, no power on the face of the earth can defeat us."

Zawahiri in his latest speech also made fresh threats about coming attacks on America.

He warns that a new "squadron of martyrdom-seekers" is lined up behind "hundreds" of new leaders who are following in the footsteps of captured 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

"They shall achieve more than he achieved," Zawahiri vowed. "The Americans shall pay dearly."

He says American voters had a chance to fire Bush in the last presidential election for invading Iraq, but they chose instead to reelect him. He suggests they forfeited their chance for protection from terrorism, and deserve punishment.

"The Americans deserve what they're getting," he said. "They chose this liar two times, so let them pay the price for their choice."

Gadahn has said "the streets of America shall run red with blood," later singling out Los Angeles as a target of attack.

They may be Muslim converts to Islam, but they were Americans first, and Americans do not make good suicide bombers.

Don’t be too sure. This cult can twist the mind in the most satanic manner:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1656041,00.html

From Belgian cul-de-sac to suicide bomber in Iraq

· Troubled life of woman who converted to Islam
· Mother grieves for ‘brainwashed’ daughter

Nicholas Watt in Monceau-sur-Sambre
Friday December 2, 2005
The Guardian

Liliane Degauque was in tears as she walked across the small patch of grass to the house of her closest friend. “I have lost my daughter and now I have no more children,” Mme Degauque whispered. It was with those words she confirmed that Europe’s first woman suicide bomber was the former rebellious child who used to play outside her front door.
Hardly anyone in the tight-knit community of Monceau-sur-Sambre, on the outskirts of Charleroi, was surprised to hear that “la kamikaze Belge” was Mme Degauque’s daughter, Muriel, 38.

After a troubled upbringing in the quiet postwar cul-de-sac of L’Avenue de l’Europe, with immaculately tended front lawns and elaborate net curtains, Muriel converted to Islam when she married a man of north African origin. Relations soon became strained with her parents who believe their daughter was “brainwashed” by her husband.

Muriel Degauque’s life came to an end just over three weeks ago on a roadside in Baquba, north of Baghdad, when she blew herself up in an attack on an Iraqi police patrol on November 9. Five policemen were killed outright and a sixth officer and four civilians were seriously injured.

It took a few hours for Myriam - as she called herself after her second marriage to Hissam Goris - to earn her grisly place in the history books. Unlike most volunteers, who are killed the moment they detonate the explosives strapped to their bodies, she took some time to die from her severe injuries. Hours later, her husband, a Belgian of Moroccan origin, was killed by US security forces in Iraq.

As Muriel’s life slipped away next to a large crater created by her bomb, security forces uncovered a treasure trove of documents which eventually led Belgian police to knock on her parents’ front door at 6.00am on Wednesday. Her passport, which featured a striking image of a European woman, told the security forces that insurgents in Iraq had succeeded in recruiting a new type of suicide bomber. Travel papers showed that Muriel and her husband had travelled from Belgium to Iraq overland by car from Turkey.

Her parents were told nothing for three weeks because Belgian and French police used the information gleaned from the documents to mount surveillance operations on groups which allegedly sent the couple to Iraq. In the early hours of Wednesday morning police in Brussels, Charleroi, Antwerp and Paris launched a series of raids and arrested 15 people who allegedly recruited suicide bombers for the insurgents in Iraq.

Hours after the raids, police in Charleroi - a bleak former industrial town south of Brussels - delivered the news to Muriel’s parents. But they had already guessed the worst. Mme Degauque, who last spoke to her daughter in Syria a month ago, told the Gazette newspaper: “I had a bad feeling when I heard the news on Tuesday night. When they rang the doorbell I immediately told police investigators they were coming about my daughter. They were surprised.”

After a difficult upbringing, in which their daughter frequently ran away, Liliane and her husband Jean watched as she grew apart from her family who still live in the same small terrace house. During a spell as an assistant in a baker’s in Charleroi, Muriel met and married a man of Turkish origin whose parents were part of the large influx to the local mines in the 1960s. After the marriage fell apart, she lived with another man of north African origin, who is alleged to have influenced her radical Islamist beliefs. Three years ago she married Hissam Goris who took his new wife to Morocco, though they were careful to return home so they would not lose unemployment benefits. The couple eventually settled in in the rundown area around the Gare du Midi in Brussels where many Muslims live.

Muriel’s parents spoke of the cultural gulf which strained relations on the rare occasions that their daughter was driven to their house by her husband in his Mercedes, which raised eyebrows in the quiet cul-de-sac where he was known to be unemployed. “Muriel became more Muslim than a Muslim,” her mother told Le Parisien newspaper. “When she first converted she wore a simple veil. But with her last husband she wore a [head to toe] chador.”

Eventually relations became impossible. “When we saw them they imposed their own rules,” her mother told La Derniere Heure newspaper. “We would be at home but my husband had to eat in the kitchen with Hissam while the women stayed in the sitting room. The last time we saw them we told them we had had enough of them trying to indoctrinate us.”

Mme Degauque, who lost her son in a motorbike accident 18 years ago, has painful memories of her daughter who had refused to visit her in hospital. “I don’t have time for that,” her daughter said.

A few miles from the L’Avenue de l’Europe and Mme Degauque’s brick house, Fadel Abdallah, imam of Arrahama de Marchienne mosque, looks at a picture of Muriel on the front page of the local paper. He paused and said: “Is she a Muslim? Allah says that if you kill, it is like killing the whole world.”

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