Pride of Lions, Part 6

Part 5 ended with this:

Keep in mind that when hostilities began in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the lawful authorities were compelled by the international community to not intervene.

The story was repeated in Kosovo.

The precedent has been set.

Now France, a nuclear-armed permanent member of the UN Security Council... how far from civil war?

To consider this question, we now review excerpts from French trial opens into suspected recruiting ring for Iraqi insurgency from March 19, 2008, which was linked via a recent post at Islam in Europe, entitled Paris: al-Qaeda Iraq recruiting network trial:

PARIS: Seven men went on trial Wednesday in Paris for suspected involvement in an al-Qaida-linked network that recruited young French men on the streets of Paris and sent them to fight in Iraq's insurgency.

The men have been accused of "criminal conspiracy with a terrorist organization," a broad charge often used in terror-related cases in France, and they face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty. Three are still in custody; the other four were offered freedom while the probe continued.

The trial dealt with mostly procedural issues as it opened. It is scheduled to end March 28.

The network, one of several that recruited in France by targeting Muslim youths, was dismantled in 2005. Judicial officials believe this particular network sent about 10 people to Iraq, at least three of whom died there.

The case has added resonance because authorities fear extremists from Europe could return from Iraq with deadly skills that could be used to sow terror on the continent.

Part 5 addressed civil unrest in France from late last year. French police faced rioters who opened fire on them and attacked them, inflicting serious injuries on French police officers. One of them was quoted making the following statement:

"It felt like they were out to kill us," said one of the officers in Villiers-le-Bel last week. "We knew that there were weapons in the suburbs, but they have never been turned against us like that. The kids were shooting at us at close range, loading and reloading their weapons. I've never seen anything like it."

Perhaps we can now understand what may be happening in France; as we understand from the current article, it is possible at least some of the rioters had combat experience from Iraq. If so, then French police face not merely rioting immigrant youth, but an actual militarized terrorist threat - one with combat experience!

Skipping down two paragraphs in French trial opens into suspected recruiting ring for Iraqi insurgency, the article continues:

Authorities believe the group's ringleader was Farid Benyettou, a 26-year-old described by officials as a Salafist, holding to a strict interpretation of Islam, who preached extremist views to youths in his neighborhood in the 19th district of Paris.

Benyettou apparently gained credibility as a Muslim radical through his brother-in-law, Youcef Zemmouri, a convicted member of an Algerian insurgency movement who was arrested before the 1998 World Cup in France.

France has had extensive ties with former colony Algeria, which is just across the Mediterranean. Furthermore, unrest in Algeria with an Islamic extremist flavor has certainly been an issue, to say the least.

We now review other material to gain some historical perspective on the situation in France. We begin with Al Qaeda Builds a Euro Army February 25, 2004:

Warnings of al Qaeda's continuing threat came Tuesday, February 24, from Washington and London as well as one of its top leaders. Addressing the Senate intelligence committee, CIA director George Tenet spoke of the spread of al Qaeda's radical agenda to local groups who now threaten the United States and are capable of 9/11 scale attacks.

British interior secretary David Blunkett, announcing new stringent measures to combat terror, said a terrorist attack on Britain was "inevitable."

Pointing up these statements, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri gave not one but two signs that his group was still after "Crusader" blood. Two recorded audiotapes reached the rival Arab TV stations, al Jazeera and al Arabiya. In one he threatened the United States with fresh attacks; the other condemned the French for banning the headscarf for Muslim schoolgirls. The Egyptian terrorist chief declared that the claim by US president George W. Bush that two-thirds of al Qaeda’s leadership has been crushed was untrue.

His assertion had been confirmed previously by the preliminary findings of a joint defense department-CIA inquiry ordered by the US President.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources in Washington, al Qaeda's backbone and that of its partner, al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad are intact and fully operational. The Egyptian half of al Qaeda in particular has led a charmed existence. Since America's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, only two senior Jihad operatives have been killed and not a single active member captured. The team found this discovery alarming enough to rush to Bush and warn him: "We have a gap in our intelligence the size of a big black hole."

Of course, readers of my blog would immediately and correctly surmise that I suspect not incompetence or "a gap in intelligence" but deliberate treason in Washington; this, after all, is what the Sibel Edmonds case is about.

Even more disquietingly, al Qaeda is discovered to be recruiting manpower in Europe at a brisk pace in a push into the continent personally advocated by Osama bin Laden. The Saudi-born terrorist has thus gained the upper hand in a debate within his organization's top leadership over its next focal arena. Bin Laden urged fostering the war on the "far enemy" (Europe) as against concentrating the movement's fury on the "near enemy" (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, South Asia).

Might this by why so many Saudis support Al Qaeda? Perhaps they are paying protection money, hoping that in view of their generous donations to terrorists, they will be last on the list of takfir to be wiped out?

The European arena, often neglected by American counter-terrorism agencies, is showing a dangerous dynamism. Data assembled for a preliminary assessment show al Qaeda in the process of evolving from terrorist networks and cells into a professional fighting force with military features.

According to French counter-intelligence, al Qaeda has recruited in France alone between 35,000 and 45,000 men and is organizing them into military-style units. They meet regularly for training in the use of weapons and explosives, combat tactics and indoctrination and are controlled from local and district command centers under the organization’s national French command.

Maybe that French judge, Jean de Maillard, that we quoted in Part 5 was right when he warned that France should prepare for civil war.

Maybe it's not just France?

In Germany, Al Qaeda has recruited 25,000 to 30,000 men. The British domestic intelligence agency MI5 estimates 10,000 faithful have joined up in Britain, providing Blunkett with more than ample cause for concern.

Al Qaeda is a lot less active in Italy where counter-terrorist agencies hunt its cells to earth relentlessly. Moreover, al Qaeda does not need an important foothold in Italy because it already maintains a thriving presence next door in the Balkan countries of Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia, from which weapons, money and false documents are easily secreted to its European bases.

It was our leader in the War on Terror, President George W. "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists" Bush who gave the terrorists those bases in the Balkans - building on the work of the Clinton Administration, which was, according to ethnic Albanian sources previously quoted, the instigation of the then-First Lady.

And let's not forget the role of Senator John McCain - who was playing from the same sheet of music in this orchestra.

Why?

Rather than provide links, I will let you research Clinton's and McCain's role in the situation in the Balkans.

Concluding Al Qaeda Builds a Euro Army:

But unknown numbers are enlisting in Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Sweden and Norway.

Recruitment across Europe continues apace and in greater secrecy than ever as a result of a switch to new recruiting techniques and appeal to fresh target-populations for building the Euro army. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's counter-terrorism sources, the authors of the interim report found that al Qaeda, intent on beating surveillance and penetration by intelligence services, no longer selects combatants at its usual hunting grounds in mosques, Islamic culture centers and Muslim immigrant neighborhoods. Instead, native Europeans freshly converted to Islam are targeted.

The new campaign is styled "the white recruitment drive" or "coffee shop conscription". Operational cells and recruiting agents patronize ordinary cafes on the high streets of Europe's major cities where they blend into the crowds. The new conscripts defy identification by European intelligence services because their Islamic lives are lived completely underground. There is therefore no way of finding their addresses telephone numbers. Unit-level meetings or training sessions, attended by 30 or 40 men, may take place under cover of social activity such as a holiday camp in a remote part of Europe. Tracking them down is getting harder as bin Laden’s new Euro army expands at the rate of tens of thousands and when "white" recruits may already form some 25 percent of the total.

The use of "lily whites" - people that the authorities wouldn't think might be tied to Islamic terrorism until the terrorist attack actually occurs.

Sort of makes you wonder....

In the most recent of another as-yet unfinished series I am working on - in a post entitled Out of Context, Part 3 - we learn of Terry Nichols' links with Ramzi Yousef, Islamic terrorist bomb-maker-extraordinaire. It was shortly after returning from the Philippines - specifically from the same town that Ramzi Yousef was in - that Nichols, together with Timothy McVeigh, was able to make such a devastating (?) bomb:

There is no doubt, however, that Nichols and Yousef were both in Cebu City in December and January prior to the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

(Out of Context, Part 1, Out of Context, Part 2.)

In fact, the Oklahoma City attack resembled the World Trade Center attacks in a myriad of ways, but that's another story - or is it the same story?

And now Al Qaeda is raising armies in Europe, including young jihadis from ethnic groups, many of whom have combat experience in Iraq (and presumably in Afghanistan, too?), and including "lily whites".

Makes you wonder what might be up in France... Report: 'Lily Whites' Recruited to Carry Out OKC Bombing, or the French version thereof, n'est-ce pas?

Stay tuned to Stop Islamic Conquest as Pride of Lions continues and Out of Context resumes.