Saudi clerics attack Shi'ites, Hezbollah

RIYADH, June 1 (Reuters) - Clerics in Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia attacked minority Shi'ites in a statement on Sunday saying Lebanon's Hezbollah was posturing against Israel to hide an anti-Sunni agenda.

The Saudi government and religious establishment has watched with alarm as the Lebanese Shi'ite group's popularity rose in the Arab world since forcing Israel to withdraw in south Lebanon in 2000 and surviving an Israeli military onslaught in 2006.

Although most Arabs are Sunni Muslims, Hezbollah is generally popular in the region. Saudi Arabia sees the group, which is funded by Shi'ite Iran, as an extension of Iranian power.

"Many Muslims have been fooled by the Shi'ites' claims to be championing Islam and challenging the Jews and Americans and Hezbollah's claims in Lebanon," the statement distributed on Islamic websites said.

"Those who believe their claims have not realized the reality of the infidel bases of their faith ... It was the rejectionist Shi'ites who began the practice of visiting graves and building shrines," it said, citing a major concern of Saudi Arabia's particular brand of Islam, often termed Wahhabism.

"They (Shi'ites) humiliate Sunnis whenever they have the chance, in Iran and Iraq. They are destabilizing Muslim countries as happened during pilgrimage and in Yemen."

Some members of a Shi'ite sect in north Yemen, to the south of Saudi Arabia, are locked in rebellion there. Iranian pilgrims making political statements have often clashed with Saudi authorities during the haj pilgrimage.

Hezbollah and its allies won a bigger seat in government after street fighting broke out between government and opposition militias last month, further alarming Riyadh.

The statement was signed by 22 clerics including the leading independent religious scholars Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak and Abdullah bin Jabreen.

The Grand Mufti, who represents the government's position, was not a signatory but he was quoted in the media during last month's fighting in Lebanon saying groups who raise the banner of Islam were exposing the country to the danger of Israeli reprisals, but he did not specify Hezbollah by name
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Commentary: "infidel bases of their faith". There we go, here is the pure Wahabi view of Shia Islam.

Al-Qaeda 'declares war on Hezbollah'

Press TV reports:

Al-Qaeda has reportedly called on its operatives to go to Lebanon and defend what it called the "Sunni community of the country".

The report came while some Arab media outlets described the current clashes in Lebanon as a fight between Sunni and Shia communities.

In an interviews with Sunni clerics with links to Saad Hariri's pro-government bloc, Al-Arabiya TV network described the ongoing clashes as a sectarian strife.

Sheikh Ali al-Jozo, Mufti of the Jebel region, who is well known for his harsh stance against Hezbollah told the TV network that the clashes are a battle between Lebanon's Shia and Sunni communities and called on Arab leaders to prevent "Iran's influence in the country."

The TV network reported that al-Qaeda on all of its websites urged its operatives to defend the Sunni community of Lebanon.

The reports came while in interviews with NBN and al-Manar TV stations on Thursday, a number of Sunni clerics said that the clashes are not a sectarian strife and many Sunni Muslims in Lebanon support Hezbollah.

The War Empire Forgot

by Nebojsa Malic The September morning six years ago that saw three hijacked jetliners slam into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has often been called "the day everything changed." What really changed was Americans’ skepticism of their own government – a fact that has been abused ever since. The man from Crawford who campaigned on the promise of a "more humble foreign policy" and against Clintonian "nation-building" quickly became Emperor George, launching two foreign wars in rapid succession and asserting the right to attack anyone, anywhere, for any reason. The rest of the world was either "with us or against us," and the same stark choice was given to the American people. All of this was justified by a perpetual "war on terrorism." That war, it turned out, was against many things – but terrorism was not one of them. These Are Not The Jihadists You Are Looking For Once it was established that Islamic militants were behind 9/11, many analysts believed that Emperor Bush would start paying attention to the Balkans. The presence of mujahedin – "holy warriors" engaged in jihad for Islam – in Bosnia has been one of the best-known secrets of the 1992-95 war. Not only did the regime of Islamic fundamentalist Alija Izetbegovic welcome thousands of "Afghans" and other jihadist volunteers, it established domestic mujahedin units and encouraged the foreigners to settle in Bosnia after the war. Izetbegovic’s government also designated all Bosnian Muslim soldiers who died in the war as shaheed, "martyrs for the faith." The U.S. not only knew about this, but also actively aided the Bosnian regime, turning a blind eye to illegal arms shipments from Iran. Several Clinton administration officials got a slap on the wrist during the 1996 Congressional investigations, but nothing more. Bush’s "War on terror" never came to Bosnia, though. Evidence of terrorist activities, connections, training camps, financing and recruitment was handled quietly, swept under a rug, or simply ignored. In August 2005, Bosnian Muslim weekly Slobodna Bosna quoted Jacques-Paul Klein, a senior U.S. official in Bosnia, "as having confirmed to the Security Council that Islamic terrorists were active in Bosnia, but added that it was good they were concentrated in one place, because ‘the rest of the world would be safe.’" Emboldened by this neglect, the radical Islamist elements in Bosnia have grown stronger over time. Last month, U.S. deputy viceroy Raffi Gregorian met with a hailstorm of protest from the Muslim community for even suggesting there were terrorist sympathizers in Bosnia. Meanwhile, Bosnian Muslim "political scientists" have developed a new definition of terrorism, according to which Islamic terrorism cannot – and therefore, does not – exist! Keys To Understanding Jihad Two recently published books argue that Bosnia – and the Balkans in general – is crucial to understanding modern jihad. Similar works in the past – Evan Kohlmann’s Al-Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe was published in 2004 – met with wall of silence, and the mainstream media is certainly treating John R. Schindler’s Unholy Terror and Chris Deliso’s The Coming Balkan Caliphate the same way. Schindler used to be an NSA analyst and counterintelligence officer, and now teaches at the Naval War College. His Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qaeda and the Rise of the Global Jihad argues that Bosnia "played the same role for al-Qaeda in the 1990s that Afghanistan did in the 1980s," providing a training ground for a generation of jihadists. Deliso, who runs Balkanalysis.com and has been a columnist for Antiwar.com as well, goes beyond al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorism, examining the penetration of radical Islam throughout the Balkans, from Bosnia and Kosovo, the Serbian province of Raska, as well as Bulgaria and Macedonia. His work also quotes testimonies from UN and NATO insiders, showing that the West has deliberately turned a blind eye to Islamic activities in the Balkans, as Muslim radical have been considered allies against the evil Serbs. This perception of Islamic radicals as allies of the U.S. in the geopolitical sense cannot be stressed enough. Recall that Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, boasted of his brilliant idea to support a fanatical Islamic movement in Afghanistan in the 1970s as a way to hurt the Soviet Union. Afghanistan did hurt the Soviets, but it also gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. U.S. policy in the Balkans – on the surface absurd and arbitrary – begins making a twisted sort of sense if Bosnia and Kosovo are seen as the modern Afghanistan, and Serbs as the surrogate Russians… Further food for thought along these lines can be found in "The Bosnian Connection" by UK journalist Brendan O’Neill, which argues that both modern liberal imperialism and al-Qaeda’s jihad were forged in the fires of Bosnia, with each side manipulating the facts of the war to bolster their own narrative. This explains both why liberal-imperialists like Tom Lantos (D-Ca.) believe they can purchase the friendship of the Muslim world by holding forth Bosnia and Kosovo as examples where America "saved Muslims from genocide," and why the jihadists just don’t care. Interventionists in the West, knowing little or nothing about Islam, assumed the Islamic world would react to their support of Izetbegovic and the KLA as they would have reacted. Instead, Islamic militants saw Bosnia and Kosovo as instances of the "Crusaders" standing idly by while Muslims were slaughtered wholesale – an idea, ironically enough, bolstered by the hysterical propaganda and "advocacy journalism" of mainstream news outlets in the West. The 'War' at Home Even as Emperor Bush and his supporters have argued that "we’re fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here," jihad has already arrived on American shores. Last week, the Salt Lake City police closed their investigation of Sulejman Talovic’s February 2007 rampage, without establishing a motive for the attack. The Deseret Morning News quoted Chris Burbank, SLC police chief, as saying that the motive "may have died" with Talovic. This is the same Burbank who said, back in February, that he had ruled out jihad as the motive, considered that notion "hate speech," and intended to fire anyone who dared investigate along those lines. On Valentine’s Day, Talovic shot nine people at the Trolley Square mall, five of them fatally, before getting killed by an off-duty police officer that happened to be on the scene. As soon as it was established that the shooter was a Bosnian Muslim refugee, the media went into overdrive – while information about the victims was virtually nonexistent, Talovic himself was subject of many three-handkerchief pieces about his suffering at the hands of evil Serbs in Bosnia, fully exploiting the fact that his family passed through Srebrenica (in 1993) on its way to the US. This Stockholm syndrome went so far that citizens of Salt Lake City took up donations for Talovic’s family, which paid for Talovic to be flown to Bosnia and buried in a splendid Islamic ceremony. Detective Burbank’s determination to see no jihad was rewarded with a promotion. The massacre was ruled a "mystery" – to anyone who refuses to see the obvious, anyway. In May 2007, six men were arrested in a FBI sting on charges of plotting a terror attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey. Four of them were ethnic Albanians – a fact that emerged only after several days of media obfuscation, in which they were called "Yugoslavs" or even "Serbian citizens." One of the suspects was a member of the KLA, while the other three were illegal immigrants from western Macedonia. These are all examples of non-Arab terrorists, the "white al-Qaeda" of which Balkans sources have warned for years. But because such facts do not fit the official narrative – namely, that Muslims (Bosnian, Albanian, etc.) are solely the innocent victims of evil Serbs – the warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Self-Deception Could the reason for this be what Chris Deliso says is "Serbian lobby’s tendency to sensationalize and even provide false information incriminating the Albanians"? A handful of blogs that wax hyperbolic does not a lobby make, though. And either way, the Serbs’ propensity to see jihad everywhere certainly doesn’t excuse the tendency of Western media to see no jihad at all. In the aftermath of the Fort Dix arrests, a rare voice of protest arose from the Washington Times, where an editorial (no longer accessible online) fired a broadside at American journalists: "But when a fact – ‘Albanian’ – emerges, report it. The public has a right to know. The sanitization of language is at war with the public’s right to an understanding of the facts. […] ‘Yugoslav’ is a sanitizer. […] As long as our news organizations fail to report the facts they know to be true, they are failing to do their job. They should not engage in ‘perception management’." In this day and age this comes across as quaint. The media have done nothing but "perception management," particularly when it came to jihad, or the Balkans.

17 Pakistani Soldiers Killed in Ambush

MIRANSHAH, Pakistan, July 18--Pro-Taliban insurgents ambushed a Pakistani military convoy near the Afghan border on Wednesday, sparking a gun-battle that left at least 17 soldiers and some rebels dead, the army said.

The fighting in the North Waziristan tribal region moved the government one step closer to an all-out war with insurgents in the area, who abandoned a 10-month-old peace treaty with the government on Sunday.

In Wednesday's attack, insurgents fired rockets at the convoy and then opened fire with automatic weapons near the village of Lwara Mundi, chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad Said.

The spokesman said seventeen soldiers were killed and 14 others were injured.

"Some miscreants were also killed in the exchange of fire," Arshad said, adding that security had been stepped up in the region.

The mountainous area where the ambush took place is near where Pakistani forces earlier this year erected the first 35-kilometer stretch of a controversial anti-Taliban fence along the border with Afghanistan.

The attack happened hours after a roadside bomb blast in North Waziristan injured six civilians and a soldier.

Separately a landmine exploded overnight outside the Miranshah home of politician Mohammad Ajmal Khan, who served as federal sports minister in the 1990s, destroying his front gate but causing no casualties, officials said.

A day earlier, a suicide blast in North Waziristan killed three soldiers and a civilian, while another attack in the capital Islamabad killed at least 15 people.

Al-Zawahiri urges revolt against Musharraf

Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has urged Pakistanis to revolt against President Musharraf following the storming of the Lal Mosque.

"I call upon the ulama (Muslim clergy) in Pakistan... Musharraf and his hunting dogs have tarnished your honor in service of the crusaders and the Jews," Zawahiri said in an audiotape posted Thursday on the Internet.

Zawahiri said that he was speaking on the "occasion of the criminal aggression" on the mosque.

"If you do not revolt, Musharraf will annihilate you. Musharraf will not stop until he uproots Islam from Pakistan," he added.

At least 70 gunmen and five soldiers were killed after Pakistan's army launched an attack on the Lal Mosque on Tuesday. Othe sources put the number of deaths as high as 250.

After more than 30 hours of fighting against followers of the gunmen leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who died in crossfire on Tuesday night, troops took control of the site mid-Wednesday.

Can you guess where the Fatah al-Islam roots are?

The Arab extension of Fatah al-Islam

When the battle between the Lebanese army and the Fatah al-Islam militant group broke out on the 20th of May, pro-February 14 (supporters of Siniora and his Imperial bosses - VS) media outlets sought to exploit the incident and link the militant group to Syria, overlooking the diversity in the nationalities of its members.

Sultan Abul Aynain, the secretary of PLO factions said in an interview with the Sharq al-Awsat daily that the number of Saudis killed with Fatah al-Islam had reached 23, adding that they were all buried in mass graves inside the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, north of Lebanon. Abul Aynain also said that 20 other Saudis were still fighting against the Lebanese army in the camp. The PLO official's information crossed with what the Saudi daily Al-Hayat published about Saudi members of Fatah al-Islam, even if their numbers did not match the number given by Abul Aynain. Furthermore, burial ceremonies, during the last week of June, for dozens of people in the camp were delayed upon requests by Saudi Arabia and Tunis to retrieve their dead nationals. In a televised interview, the Minister of Defense in the unconstitutional government Elias el-Murr confirmed that Fatah al-Islam organization is linked to Al-Qaeda. El-Murr had earlier said that Fatah al-Islam was responsible for the Ain Alak bombing in Mount Lebanon, which killed 3 people and injured many others. He added that the group that carried out the attack comprised four Syrians and three Saudis, including Abdullah Bishi, the man whose repatriation was requested by Saudi Arabia.

The Lebanese government agreed to repatriate Bishi, however the approval of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud is still needed. Saudi Interior Minister Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz also called on the Lebanese government to repatriate Saudis still in Lebanese custody, among them is Fahed Meghames, the head of the Barr Elias cell, where three booby trapped cars and arms caches were found.
Moreover, three Saudis were among five gunmen killed in clashes with the Lebanese army in the town of Kalamoun, north of Lebanon last week. The two others were a Lebanese and an Iraqi.

Before the battle of Nahr el-Bared broke out, Syrian authorities killed on the 10th of last May four Fatah al-Islam gunmen on their way to Iraq, indicating that Lebanon was being used as a springboard for militants to the outside on the one hand and a resting place for the returning militants. Prior to this, the US Council of National Intelligence warned in February 2006 against the return of those militants saying they would become the new Arab Afghans in Lebanon. Accordingly, Fatah al-Islam is an organization that comprises members from various Arab nationalities, not to mention Bengali and Chechen members.

However the February 14 ruling bloc still insists on linking this organization to Syrian intelligence services, without proof or convincing facts. According to the Lebanon News Agency, eight Saudi cadres in Fatah al-Islam have been taken out of Lebanon; one of them is a financier who has close ties with Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, the head of the Saudi National Security Council.

Salafi killers murder Shia and Sunni leaders

Iran Daily reports that a suicide bomber apparently targeting a meeting of US-allied Sunni sheikhs penetrated layers of security and blew himself up in a hotel lobby on Monday, killing four tribal leaders and at least eight others, police reported. The sheikhs were associated with the Anbar Salvation Council, which had taken up arms to help drive extremists of Al-Qaeda in Iraq from the western province of Anbar, AP reported. The attack was among five suicide and other bombings Monday that killed at least 45 people across Iraq.

The BBC reports that a Shia cleric known for his stance against Wahhabism, a strict version of Sunni Islam, has been killed in the south-western Iranian city of Ahwaz. Reports said Hojjat ol-Eslam Hesham Seymari was shot dead in his home at night by two men claiming to know him. Wahhabism is practised throughout the Arabian Peninsula, most notably by the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. Ahwaz, home to a large community of ethnic minority Arabs, has seen much anti-government tension since 2005. Iran has publicly hanged 10 men convicted of taking part in a series of deadly bombings in the city last year, which were blamed on Arab separatists allegedly backed by the UK. The separatists have accused Iran's Persian majority of discrimination. Reporting Hojjat ol-Eslam Seymari's death on Tuesday, the hardline Iranian newspaper Keyhan described the cleric as a "skilful speaker who brought awareness to the youth about deviating movements, especially Wahhabism". Hojjat ol-Eslam Seymari supervised 20 mosques and "stood against the Wahhabis' investment and strong onslaught in the city of Ahvaz", the paper added. The representative of Iran's Supreme Leader in Khuzestan Province said the cleric had been martyred "at the hands of the mercenaries of Satan". "Our enemies should know that his martyrdom will guide the nation, keep alive the values and principles of the exalted Muslim faith," Mohammad Ali Jazayeri said in a statement.

It is significant that the Salafi Resistance is willing to simultaneously fight on two fronts against both the Sunnis opposed to Al-Qaeda and against the Shia. Even more significant is the fact that the Iranians accuse the Salafis of being backed by the UK while, at the same time, the Sunnis killed in Anbar are described as "allied to the US".

Which is Oceania fighting again? Eastasia or Eurasia?!