Showing posts with label British Islamists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Islamists. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Monday, October 27, 2014
Thursday, February 21, 2013
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: It would have been the most devastating terrorist attack on British soil leaving hundreds dead – and by al-Qaeda inspired but “home-grown” Islamic fanatics.
Up to eight suicide bombers carrying backpacks rammed with explosives and armed with guns were to carry out a horrifying blend of the 7/7 and Mumbai atrocities.
The jihadi gang planned to walk in to crowded, public places shooting indiscriminately before simultaneously detonating their terrible homemade payloads killing hundreds on their wake.
Although no firm target was settled on, the 2012 Olympics may have been one along with soldiers based in this country.
They even boasted about "hitting" David Cameron, his friends and other non – believers in the "land of Satan".
The plot was the most significant since the plans to blow up transatlantic aeroplanes with liquid bombs in 2006 and is likely to have led to the largest loss of life from a terror attack on UK shores. » | Tom Whitehead, Security Editor | Thursday, February 21, 2013
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Suicide bomb gang guilty of plotting 'worst ever terror attack in Britain': The ringleaders of an al-Qaeda backed British jihadi group have been found guilty of plotting the worst terror attack on UK soil. » | Tom Whitehead | Thursday, February 21, 2013
BBC: Police: Birmingham terror trio 'wanted this to be their 9/11' – Three Birmingham men convicted of planning a campaign of terrorist attacks in the UK "wanted it to be their 9/11", according to police. ¶ Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale said all three had set out "to cause some serious harm". ¶ Irfan Naseer, 31, Irfan Khalid, 27, and Ashik Ali, 27 were found guilty at Woolwich Crown Court of planning to set off up to eight bombs in rucksacks and possibly detonate bombs on timers. (+ BBC video) » | Thursday, February 21, 2013
Monday, February 04, 2013
Sunday, July 29, 2012
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The Foreign Office is investigating reports that British citizens are among Islamist fighters who kidnapped a British photographer and his Dutch colleague in northern Syria.
John Cantlie and Dutchman Jeroen Oerlemans were held by the group for a week after they accidentally came across their camp while crossing the border from south east Turkey to report on the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
During their time in captivity they were threatened with death unless they converted to Islam, and both were shot and slightly wounded when they attempted to flee barefoot. They were freed on Thursday night after a group of Free Syrian Army soldiers turned up the camp and angrily demanded that they be released.
Mr Cantlie has not yet spoken of his ordeal, but Mr Oerlemans told Dutch media that some of the gang, which is reported to have been between 30 and 100 strong, had "Birmingham accents".
A source close to the incident told The Sunday Telegraph that there possibly at least six men with British-sounding voices, including one with a heavy south London accent. Read on and comment » | Colin Freeman, Antakya | Saturday, July 28, 2012
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: Islam4UK, the Islamist group which provoked outrage with its plan to march through Wootton Bassett will be banned under counter-terrorism laws, Home Secretary Alan Johnson has announced.
The order will come into effect on Thursday and make it a criminal offence to be a member, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Mr Johnson said the group had tried to escape proscription simply by changing its name.
He said the order would apply to the group's other names, including Al Muhajiroun.
"I have today laid an order which will proscribe Al Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a number of the other names the organisation goes by," he said.
"It is already proscribed under two other names - Al Ghurabaa and The Saved Sect. >>> | Tuesday, January 12, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH – BLOGS: Islam4UK has been banned. It is now an illegal organisation membership of which is prohibited under anti-terrorisim law. Its spokesman, Anjem Choudary was quick to issue a statement denouncing this move by the Home Secretary as an outrage against democratic freedom – presumably this is the same democratic freedom which his organisation openly professes to loathe. Read further & comment >>> Janet Daley | Tuesday, January 12, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: To what extent does Anjem Choudary represent the Muslim population? : Who represents whom within Muslim communities, indeed any community, is contested ground, writes Jamie Bartlett. >>> Jamie Bartlett | Thursday, January 07, 2010
Monday, November 16, 2009
THE INDEPENDENT: A generation of British Islamists have been trained in Afghanistan to fight a global jihad. But now some of those would-be extremists have had a change of heart. Johann Hari finds out what made them give up the fight
Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".
In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.
The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.
The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.
But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.
But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.
Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again. >>> Johann Hari | Monday, November 16, 2009
Sunday, July 05, 2009
THE SUNDAY TIMES: British militants are pushing for the overthrow of the Pakistani state. Followers of the fundamentalist group Hizb ut-Tahrir have called for a “bloodless military coup” in Islamabad and the creation of the caliphate in which strict Islamic laws would be rigorously enforced.
Members of the group, which describes itself as the Liberation party in Britain but is banned in Pakistan, revealed last week that it had targeted the country as a base from which to spread Islamic rule across the world.
The Sunday Times has obtained the names of a dozen British Hizb ut-Tahrir activists based in Lahore and Karachi, or commuting between Britain and Pakistan. There are believed to be many more.
Tayyib Muqeem, an English teacher from Stoke-on-Trent, said he had moved to Lahore to convert Pakistanis to the movement.
At Lahore’s Superior College, where Muqeem has set up a Hizb ut-Tahrir student group, he said the organisation’s aim was to subject Muslim and western countries to Islamic rule under sharia law, “by force” if necessary.
In a caliphate, “every woman would have to cover up” and stoning to death for adultery and the chopping off of thieves’ hands would be the law, he said.
He added that Islamic rule would be spread through “indoctrination” and by “military means” if non-Muslim countries refused to bow to it. “Waging war” would be part of the caliphate’s foreign policy. >>> Nicola Smith in Lahore | July 04, 2009
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