"A cesspit of Islamists"

England is "a cesspit of Islamists", according to the Nobel prizewinning author Wole Soyinka.

See also: US: Britain is an al-Qaeda hub

US: Britain is an Al Qaeda hub

A recent U.S. intelligence assessment points to the high level of support for Al Qaeda among Britain's Muslims and expresses concern that the U.K. now presents a major security threat to the West. Con Coughlin in the Telegraph has the details.

Danish cartoon axe attack

In a second New Year terror-related incident in a Nordic country, the 74-year-old graphic artist Kurt Westergaard, who authored one of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in 2005, was attacked in his home on Friday night by a Somali intruder armed with an axe and a knife, but managed to take refuge in a secure room and activate an alarm which summoned police, the AP reports.  According to the BBC, the attacker was shot and wounded by police. 

Links to Danish press sources:

Politiken

Jyllands-Posten

Ekstra Bladet

Berlingske Tidende

Gates of Vienna has posted translated excerpts from Danish press reports.

See also: Espoo mall shootings

Discovering why Russia backs al-Qaeda - 2

On her blog, Kejda Gjermani explores some more connections. (via LGF)

See also: Discovering why Russia backs al-Qaeda

Discovering why Russia backs al-Qaeda

At LGF, a further report on a prolonged dispute between U.S. web sites throws light on the Internet activity of pro-Putin and pro-Serb nationalist lobbyists who seek to exploit the Western public's fears of terrorism in order to gain credibility for their views.

As an LGF commenter points out, perhaps one of the most succinct analyses of this phenomenon was given by a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet KGB, who in 2007 wrote, among other things:

Americans generally believe that Russia is afraid of Islamic terrorism as much as the U.S.A. They are reminded of the war in Chechnya, the hostage crisis at the Beslan School in 2004 and at the Moscow Theater in 2002, and of the apartment house blasts in Moscow in 1999, where over 200 people were killed. It is clear that Russians are also targets of terrorism today.

But in all these events, the participation of the FSB, Federal Security Service, inheritor to the KGB, is also clear. Their involvement in the Moscow blasts has been proven by lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin, a former FSB Colonel. For this he was illegally imprisoned, and is now suffering torture and deprivation of medical assistance, from which he is not likely to survive.

A key distinction between Russian and American attitudes towards Islamic terrorism is that while for America terrorism is largely seen as an exterior menace, Russia uses terrorism as an object as a tool of the state for manipulation in and outside the home country. Islamic terrorism is only part of the world of terrorism. Long before Islamic terrorism became a global threat, the KGB had used terrorism to facilitate the victory of world Communism.

The world without America

Commenting on Jamie Glazov's recent FrontPage interview with Ahmed Zakayev, JR Nyquist writes:

According to Zakayev, al Qaeda is “a global provocation, designed to clash the Islamic world with the Western world, thus weakening both sides as much as possible. Those who capitalize on that are Russia, China and their allies in the totalitarian camp.” Zakayev is almost certainly correct.

....

For those who curse the United States and Israel, who embrace various conspiracy theories, I offer this caveat. Do you want Russia and China to dominate the world? Would you trust the heirs of Mao Zedong and the disciples of Felix Dzerzhinsky to keep the peace, to maintain freedom, to further global prosperity? Do you want the legacy of Ivan the Terrible and the first Ch’in Emperor?

Urban Guerrillas

Senior French police officials are warning that armed "urban guerrillas" are taking part in the current wave of violence.

Terror Threat in UK

Today MI5's Jonathan Evans will brief British members of parliament on the current security situation and terror threat in the UK, as part of the parliamentary inquiry into the subject. The BBC notes that particular emphasis will be given to railway security, with the announcement that "from next year there will be new security barriers, vehicle exclusion zones and blast resistant buildings, and rail travellers face having their luggage screened at large stations."

Recently, Evans pointed out that in Britain children as young as 15 are being recruited for terrorist-related activity by al-Qaeda, and that resources that could be devoted to counter-terrorism are instead being used to protect the UK against spying by Russia, China and others, as espionage by these countries is now at Cold War levels.

The Terror Link

The head of Britain's MI5 has now pointed to the linkage that many people have observed here in the UK during recent months. Via the BBC:

There are at least 2,000 people in the UK who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism, the head of MI5 has said.

Jonathan Evans said there had been a rise of 400 since November 2006.

He said children as young as 15 were being recruited for terrorist-related activity by al-Qaeda.

Resources that could be devoted to counter-terrorism were instead being used to protect the UK against spying by Russia, China and others, he added.

There had been "no decrease" in the number of Russian covert intelligence officers operating in the UK since the end of the Cold War, Mr Evans said in a speech in Manchester.

Sarkozy on War and Diplomacy

In his first major foreign policy speech, made at the Fifteenth Ambassadors' Conference back on August 27, France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy created shockwaves when he said that an Iran with nuclear weapons was unacceptable, and warned that Iran could be attacked militarily if it didn't meet its international obligations to curb its nuclear program. What many commmentators seemed to ignore at the time is that these remarks were made within the context of a speech that was devoted almost exclusively to the possibilities and imperatives of the diplomatic resolution of crises throughout the globe - in particular the confrontation beween the West and radical Islam. The speech needs to be read in that light, for it is an important contribution to the debate. And it doesn't underestimate the gravity of the threat:

There's no point in waffling: this confrontation is being called for by extremist groups such as al-Qaida that dream of establishing a caliphate from Indonesia to Nigeria, rejecting all openness, all modernity, every hint of diversity. If these forces were to achieve their sinister objective, it is certain that the twenty-first century would be even worse than the last one, itself marked by merciless confrontation between ideologies.

Single Entity

J.R. Nyquist, on the workings of what Anna Politkovskaya called the "single entity" that is composed of the Russian presidential secretariat and the FSB:

An important book has been published on all these machinations. It is titled Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, by Alex Goldfarb with Marina Litvinenko. One of the most important passages in the book, for Americans, is the passage where Akhmed Zakayev explains the origins of the Second Chechen War: “We wanted to build a secular, democratic, pro-Western Muslim state, something along the lines of Turkey,” Zakayev is quoted as saying. But Russian-speaking Arabs flooded into Chechnya with Russian visas. “They were all experienced fighters,” he said, “but they had nothing to do with … the American-trained jihadists that fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were all Arabs who spoke Russian, the old KGB cadre from the Middle East. And we knew that their money came not from Saudi Arabia, but from Moscow.”

That is important information coming from an exiled Chechen leader. The civil war in Chechnya was a staged provocation, organized by the FSB and the presidential administration in Moscow. Vladimir Putin, in fact, was a leading organizer who profited from this operation. The Arab terrorists in Dagestan and Chechnya caused his appointment as prime minister, triggering a war to facilitate his subsequent elevation to the Russian presidency. The political maneuvers and conspiracies involved in the elevation of Putin, as detailed by Goldfarb, are must reading. For the first time, testimony from several sources is put together to form a larger, coherent picture of FSB (KGB) strategy involving the use of controlled Islamic terrorism.

(via Mark Pettifor.
NB - J.R. Nyquist has a newly redesigned website at this link)

Professionals

In the wake of the failed London bomb attacks, the BBC describes how al-Qaeda has been trying for more than a decade to “shame” Muslim professionals (lawyers, scientists, doctors) into becoming more involved in violent jihad.

BBC home affairs editor Mark Easton says one al-Qaeda video features doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri - number two to Osama Bin Laden - who left Cairo medical school with a master's degree in surgery.

And a suicide bomber who killed 22 US soldiers and civilians in Iraq in December 2005 was named as a student from a Saudi medical school.

(via Jihad Watch)