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Home Front: WoT
Central Ohio becomes front line in Hamas-linked CAIR's fight for popular support
2016-11-18
[Jihad Watch] The Columbus, Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is soliciting the public for any perceived instances of Islamic hate, with assurances of support from the local media and city lawmakers.

The appeal comes on the heels of a landslide electoral victory for Donald Trump, whose administration CAIR believes will be "packed with anti-Muslim bigots."
"Anti-Moslem" is CAIR-speak for "non-Moslem."
CAIR Columbus has stated that verbal assaults against Muslims have risen exponentially since Trump became the president-elect.

The allegations of Trump-inspired hate, coordinated and reported directly by CAIR and often without any corresponding police reporting, come as Trump indicates support for a bill that will ostensibly name the Muslim Brotherhood, with which CAIR has been linked, as a terrorist group.

CAIR enjoys the complicity of the city of Columbus in its campaign to highlight Islamophobia. City council members did CAIR’s bidding by passing a resolution condemning Islamophobia.

Even Ohio State University, the pride of Columbus and a huge influence on local politics, has bowed to prevailing trends and added its support to CAIR. When CAIR complained of two incidents in which women wearing head scarves were allegedly threatened on campus, Ohio State President Michael Drake responded by publishing an open letter condemning such assaults. Yet criminal charges were not filed in either case, and it appears that only one of the victims was an actual student at the university.

A virtual immigration nexus exists between Columbus and Somalia that has led to the fact that now the Midwestern town houses the country’s second largest concentration of Somalis. Since then, Columbus has been no stranger to terrorist activity.

CAIR Columbus supporters have expressed outrage over the conviction and imprisonment of local Muslims who in 2002 plotted to bomb a Columbus-area mall. Nuradin Abdi, Iyman Faris, and Christopher Paul are known al-Qaeda operatives who each served time for their participation in plots that targeted a variety of public gathering places around the country and in Ohio.

On February 11, 2016, local Somali Mohamed Barry attacked four people at a Columbus establishment, the Nazareth Restaurant. CBS News and many other media outlets were quick to call the assault a "lone wolf terrorist attack" in an attempt to distinguish Barry from other violent Islamic jihadists. Journalists refused to name a motive for the attacks, even though Barry returned to the restaurant and began attacking customers with a machete after he was told, upon inquiring, that the owner hailed from Israel.

CAIR has been extremely successful in Ohio and elsewhere at dissuading the public from associating Islam with terror attacks. Barry was given the benefit of the doubt by the media regarding his intentions, though the same cannot be said of allegations of attacks initiated by Muslims. These receive the weakest attention and scrutiny from not just the mainstream media, but also from the the highest political office in the land. President Barack Obama urged the nation to show restraint to Muslims following the San Bernardino massacre that killed 14 Americans in December of 2015.
Con't.
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Home Front: WoT
Ohio Mall Terrorism Defendant Deported to Somalia
2012-11-21
[Shabelle] A Somali immigrant who federal prosecutors say plotted to attack an Ohio shopping mall has been deported to Somalia.

Nuradin Abdi completed his prison sentence in August and was in federal custody in Louisiana while final preparations were made to return him to Somalia.
I wouldn't have wasted a lot of time on 'preparations'...
Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Monday confirmed the deportation.

Abdi's sister, Kaltun Karani, says the family is happy that Abdi is a free man.

The Justice Department accused Abdi of suggesting a plan to shoot up an unidentified Columbus shopping mall during an August 2002 meeting at a coffee shop with two friends, both of whom were later convicted of terrorism charges.

Early reports indicated the threat might also have included bombing a mall.
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Terror Networks
Connecting thread: Ohio terrorist ties to al-Qaida operative revealed
2010-04-13
It's Ay Pee, so here's the summary:

Christopher Paul, of Columbus, Ohio, had connections to

o Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi, Al Qaeda recruiter, met with him in Afghanistan in 1992, in Germany in 1998, and requested advice by fax in 1997 about where to send wannabe jihadis for training. Three of the men Mr. Salahi sent to Afghanistan were future 9/11 hijackers (Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Marwan al Shehhi). The fourth was Ramzi Binalshibh, who helped coordinate the 9/11 attack.

o Mr. Paul also met with Moroccan Karim Mehdi in Germany in 1993 and in 1997 or 1998, who was also connected (how incestuous this all is!) to Binalshibh and Jarrah, sentenced to French prison for plotting a terror attack against the French island of Reunion.

o Mr. Paul, part of a cell of three men based in Columbus, was the last of them to plead guilty to charges of plotting terror attacks. He was sentenced to twenty years. Co-conspirator Nuradin Abdi pled guilty to plotting to blow up an Ohio shopping mall; co-conspirator Iyman Faris pled guilty to a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Home Front: WoT
Terror-Funded MSA at Ohio State
2008-04-28
By Patrick Poole

February 20, 2006 proved to be an eventful day for the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at The Ohio State University. Not only did that date mark the conclusion of their weekend-long “Leaders of Tomorrow” conference, but that was also the day that their conference sponsor, Kindhearts, was raided by federal law enforcement and closed by order of the Department of the Treasury for financing terrorism, freezing its assets.

According to the US government, Kindhearts, which was established following the closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, was not only engaged in providing millions for HAMAS in Lebanon and the West Bank, it had hired as a fundraising specialist the man identified by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal as the designated HAMAS bag man in the US, Mohammed El-Mezain. (For additional background on Kindhearts and its multiple connections to the international terrorism finance network, see Joe Kaufman’s FrontPage article, “The Black Hearts of Kindhearts”)

Kindhearts, however, was not the only terror-connected sponsor of the OSU MSA conference. Also supporting the MSA’s conference was its local parent organization, Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab, known affectionately in the Central Ohio area as “Masjid Al-Qaeda”. The mosque nearby the OSU campus was home to the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the US since 9/11, with two former members – Iyman Faris and Nuradin Abdi – already convicted and serving prison terms for their participation, and another cell member – Christopher Paul – currently awaiting trial.

The third identified sponsor of the MSA conference, Ilmquest Productions, is the media arm of the Al-Maghrib Institute (profiled last year here at FrontPage, “Jihad U”). Ilmquest not only publishes and markets DVDs and CDs of Al-Maghrib “scholars”, but also a long-line of other extremist speakers, including Bilal Philips, Khalid Yasin, and Yemeni Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi.

As noted recently here at FrontPage, the Ohio State MSA is no stranger to controversy. Three months after 9/11, the Associated Press reported that the OSU MSA was under federal investigation for its MSA News email list that regularly published news releases by a whole host of Islamic terrorist organizations, and also for encouraging readers to purchase videos from a terrorist support website:

— Ohio State University's Muslim Student Association produces and distributes MSA NEWS, which publicizes events featuring controversial speakers and has included news releases from terrorist groups such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations Americans are forbidden to support or finance, and the Islamic Salvation Front, a fundamentalist political party banned in Algeria.

— During last year's Ramadan fast, MSA-NEWS urged campus groups to purchase a videotape called The Martyrs of Bosnia and show it to Muslim-only gatherings. The video was sold by London-based Azzam Productions, which featured articles on its Web site like "Taliban: Allah's Blessing on Afghanistan," and solicited funds there for the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. The site, and a related German site, were shut down by the British and German governments as part of their Sept. 11 response.

Two years later, the OSU MSA played a critical role in hosting the Third National Conference on Palestinian Solidarity, whose keynote speaker was none other than now-convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader and former University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian.

And more recently, the OSU MSA jointly sponsored an event to counter last October’s Islamofascism Awareness Week featuring notorious wife-beating advocate and Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi, “Interfaith Relations – A Muslim Perspective”. The event was paid for by the university through student fees. As I reported here at FrontPage, “Fatwa Fraud”, Badawi was one of the featured speakers and an honored guest last July at a terrorist confab in Doha, Qatar honoring HAMAS spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi and attended by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal.

College students and administrators would do well to consider that Islamic terrorism and extremism are not phenomena distant and far removed from American college campuses (even though Ohio State professor John Mueller contends there is no threat from Islamic terrorists).

In fact, Islamic terrorism and extremism might be closer than they would ever realize – as close as the nearest Muslim Student Association.
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Home Front: WoT
Somali man gets 10-year sentence in Columbus mall plot
2007-11-28
Nuradin Abdi's plan to blow up a Columbus shopping mall was no more than an idle threat, spoken in frustration, his attorney said yesterday. But federal prosecutors said those words were a small part of the case against Abdi, who was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison for conspiring to support terrorists.

Abdi, 35, was arrested four years ago today and will receive credit for serving that time in the Franklin County jail. He will spend the remaining six years of his sentence in federal prison and then be deported to his native Somalia. The sentence, imposed by U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, was in keeping with a plea bargain reached in July, when Abdi pleaded guilty to one of four counts against him.

Defense lawyer Mahir Sherif told the court that Abdi, who lived on the North Side and worked at a cell-phone business, was frustrated by the U.S. military action in Afghanistan when he met with two co-conspirators at an Upper Arlington coffee shop in August 2002 and mentioned bombing a shopping mall. "He made the statement, but did he really intend to follow through? No, he did not," Sherif said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robyn Jones Hahnert countered by saying the case against Abdi was "much bigger in scope than one isolated comment at the Caribou Coffee shop."

In his guilty plea, Abdi admitted he lied to immigration officials in 1999 to receive a travel document that he used in an unsuccessful effort to visit a camp in Ethiopia for what prosecutors called "military-style training in preparation for violent jihad."

The government said Abdi befriended Iyman Faris and Christopher Paul, both of whom met with him at the coffee shop. Faris, a Pakistani immigrant linked to a terrorist plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, pleaded guilty in May 2003 to providing material support for al-Qaida. Paul, a Worthington native, was charged in April with plotting to bomb European tourist resorts. He is scheduled for trial in January 2009. Prosecutors said Abdi admitted conspiring with Faris and Paul to support foreign terrorists, even supplying Paul with credit-card numbers stolen from cell-phone customers to help fund the activities.

Abdi's attorney said his client wanted the court to know that he "does not hate America" and that the principles of his Islamic faith include opposition to violence. He said Abdi wanted to apologize to Muslims "all over the world who may suffer indirectly from the consequences of his actions."

Fred Alverson, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office, said the government continues to investigate the possibility that the terrorist cell was larger than the three local men charged so far. "Other people are being looked at," he said.
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Home Front: WoT
Columbus area man held as al Qaida bomb suspect
2007-04-12
A North Side man joined al-Qaida and tried to help the terrorist group blow up U.S. government buildings abroad and European resorts frequented by Americans, a federal indictment released yesterday in Columbus says.

Christopher Paul, 43, who shared an apartment with convicted terrorist Iyman Faris, is charged with conspiring to support terrorists, conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and providing support to terrorists.

Paul was one of three Columbus men that federal authorities had been investigating. Faris, who shared an apartment with Paul at 676 Riverview Dr., is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for plotting to topple the Brooklyn Bridge. Nuradin Abdi is awaiting trial, charged with plotting to blow up a Columbus-area mall.

The indictment released yesterday says Paul trained in weapons and other explosives during trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan, tried to recruit people for a "violent jihad," and met with al-Qaida members with personal connections to Osama bin Laden. The indictment by the federal grand jury described Paul as a man so eager to fight that he told an al-Qaida member that he would continue to plan violence even if the group scaled back its military operations.

It further says that Paul had traveled abroad as early as 1990 to receive terrorist training. Paul "offered himself to persons in Pakistan and Afghanistan associated with al-Qaida as an individual dedicated to committing violent jihad." While in Pakistan he met a former pilot of bin Laden's and became friends with Khalifah LNU, an al-Qaida member who was responsible for logistics at the group's training camps in Afghanistan. He received weapons training while there.

In April 1998, Paul went hiking with "several co-conspirators" in Burr Oak State Park in Glouster, Ohio, about 78 miles southeast of Columbus. They were training, the indictment states. Later, the indictment charges that from 1999 to 2000, Paul planned to bomb European tourist resorts that Americans frequent. He also plotted against governmental facilities such as embassies and U.S. military bases in Europe. While there, he trained fellow conspirators to use explosives.

At his home in Columbus, authorities found a night-vision scope, laser range-finder and "military survival knife." Subsequent searches found things like books and manuals on how to make explosives and improvised booby traps. Officials also found a letter to Paul's parents, in which he said he would be "on the front lines" and it explained how they could get information on "jihad." Family members would not comment about the arrest last night.
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Home Front: WoT
More on the busted Columbus plot
2005-08-25
Nuradin Abdi is back in court, accused of plotting to blowup a Columbus shopping mall.

Investigators say he made statements that connected him to the alleged terrorist plot. His lawyer is trying to get those statements thrown out before his trial in September.

Thursday, 10TV learned more about this alleged attempt to blowup a Columbus shopping mall and about the suspect who the government claims admitted to trying to carry out the terrorist attack.

Thursday morning, Abdi was escorted under heavy guard to the federal courthouse. He's accused of supplying material to a known terrorist group, specifically al-Qaeda, and associating with convicted terrorist Iyman Faris.

His attorney says the government didn't have probable cause to arrest Abdi and charged the government with misconduct in an attempt to get him to confess.

Thursday morning an FBI agent testified Abdi told Faris, "We need to get an AK-47 and shoot up a mall."

The government has not released which mall that was but they believed the alleged plot was supposed to take place the day after Thanksgiving, the busiest shopping day of the year.

Abdi's attorney says his client only confessed to the crime after the government broke him down and, "turned him into a madman."
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Africa: Horn
Ogaden rebels offer to hang it up
2005-07-19
A separatist group on Tuesday offered to open peace talks with the government in an effort to end a low-level conflict in the lawless Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia. The Ogaden National Liberation Front,
... one of the biggies...
which wants an independent state for ethnic Somalis who are the majority in the region,
... because nothing works quite as well as an independent state for ethnic Somalis...
issued a statement saying it wanted talks in a neutral country and with an international mediator. Ethiopia's government would "respond positively" provided the rebels lay down their arms, according to a statement released by the foreign affairs ministry. The development comes after Prime Minister Meles Zenawi exchanged letters with Ogaden's community and clan elders in a bid to secure peace in the impoverished, desert-like region. The Muslim rebels have fought for the secession of the Ogaden region, an area the size of Britain and with four million people, since the early 1990s. It makes occasional hit and run attacks against government troops.
... then returns to its camps, where its members congratulate each other on their heroism, then return to seething...
United States forces have helped Ethiopian troops in anti-terror training in Ogaden, which has a long porous border with anarchic Somalia. Last year, United States justice officials said Somali refugee Nuradin Abdi received military-style training in Ogaden before joining admitted al-Qaeda member Iyman Faris in Columbus, Ohio, in a foiled plot to blow up an unspecified shopping mall.
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Home Front: WoT
Lawyer: Terror suspect's rights violated
2005-06-14
COLUMBUS, Ohio, June 13 (UPI) -- A lawyer for a Somali asylum-seeker has asked a federal judge to bar prosecutors from using statements his client made to the FBI after his arrest in Ohio. Lawyer Maher Sherif told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch that the entire case against Nuradin Abdi comes from the defendant.
After Abdi's arrest, Attorney General John Ashcroft said publicly that he had planned to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus. But the formal charges include lying to federal authorities about an alleged 1999 visit to a terrorist training camp in Ethiopia and immigration violations. According to Sherif, the FBI held Abdi for several days in 2003 without telling him he was a suspect or notifying him of his rights and obtained an arrest warrant only after he had made incriminating statements. Sherif has also asked to have the trial moved out of Ohio because of the government's mall claim.
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Home Front: WoT
WND: Schumer Demands better Mall security
2004-06-24
EFL
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D.-N.Y., says the government’s indictment of Nuradin Abdi for plotting with al-Qaida to bomb shopping malls, coupled with recently uncovered documents showing the March 11 Madrid train bombers also planned to attack Parquesur, a large suburban shopping center there, are "clear proof" the U.S. is not doing enough to protect the nation’s shopping malls from terror attacks.
-snip-
"More and more evidence is mounting that if they want to attack again, they’ll do it someplace closer to home like a shopping center. We’ve gone all-out to shore up air security, and now we have to catch up with mall security as well."

According to a press statement, Schumer’s proposal includes:
1. Installing high-tech radiation detectors at malls in high-risk areas like New York.

2. Building a new generation of portable detectors and accelerating research into low-cost chemical agent detectors.

3. Creating evacuation plans for shopping centers.
However, when New York’s WABC-TV interviewed shoppers Sunday on the mall fear-factor, most didn’t sound too worried. "I’m aware that it’s a problem," J. Grier told WABC. "I feel very confident that we’re not any more safe than we were prior to 9-11; in fact I think we’re in greater jeopardy and I can’t let it stop me because life goes on."

"Ya know there hasn’t been anything happening in a while around here and I think people have sort of put it out of their mind. I feel safe," offered shopper Bruce Heron.

Schumer reportedly wants to spend about $1 billion on his plan.

After the Madrid attacks in March, Schumer says, he asked Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Commerce Secretary Don Evans to find a way to expedite development of devices that can detect traces of explosives, biological weapons and chemical weapons, without requiring that individual shoppers be screened. "One thing the 9/11 Commission showed us this week is just how detailed al-Qaida’s detailed plans to attack us were. The terrorists are smart enough to hit us where we strongest, not where we are weak. That means we have to move on mall security, and do it now," Schumer said.
I think we’ll do OK here in Fort Wayne, without beefed up CBR defense at the mall. I would appreciate it if Schumer would protect the Spencer’s on his own dime. Personally, I demand beefed up security at barber shops, automotive parts stores and Blockbusters.
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Home Front: WoT
Ludicrous US Asylum Policy Opens Door to Moslem Terrorists
2004-06-17
From Town Hall, an article by Michelle Malkin
Do you know how the alleged "shopping-mall" bomber entered our country? He didn’t cross the border illegally. He didn’t sneak in on a ship. He came through the front door at America’s invitation. Nuradin M. Abdi, who was indicted last week for plotting with al Qaeda to blow up an Ohio shopping mall, flew here from Somalia and received bogus "refugee" status in 1999, according to authorities. Prosecutors allege that Abdi then fraudulently obtained a refugee travel document, which he used to fly to Ethiopia for jihad training. After returning, Abdi blended back into the American landscape along with tens of thousands of other refugees from a country known to be a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. Columbus, Abdi’s home base, is home to more than 30,000 Somalis -- the second-largest Somali community in the United States, after Minneapolis.

The Somali-al Qaeda connection is well-established. .... Not every Somalian refugee or asylum-seeker is a terrorist, of course. But the system for screening out the well-meaning from the menaces is completely overwhelmed. Claims of "credible fear of persecution" are almost impossible to document but are rarely rejected. Federal homeland security officials are unable to detain asylum-seekers for background checks without the civil liberties brigade screaming "racial profiling." And there is still a woeful shortage of detention space -- just 2,000 beds nationwide -- to hold those with suspect claims. As a result, thousands of refugees and asylum-seekers who have made flimsy claims of persecution are let loose. As the Department of Justice’s inspector general reported, 97 percent of all asylum-seekers from any country who were released from immigration custody were never found again and deported.

Abdi’s case cannot be viewed in isolation. At least three other high-profile Islamic militants that we know of exploited the asylum system over the past decade:
* Ramzi Yousef landed at New York City’s JFK airport from Pakistan and flashed an Iraqi passport without a visa to inspectors. He was briefly detained for illegal entry and fingerprinted, but was allowed to remain in the country after invoking the magic words "political asylum." The then-INS released him because it didn’t have enough space in its detention facility. Yousef headed to Jersey City to plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

* Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb-builder, entered the U.S. illegally through Canada in 1996 and 1997. He claimed political asylum based on alleged persecution by Israelis, was released on a reduced $5,000 bond posted by a man who was himself an illegal alien, and then skipped his asylum hearing after calling his attorney and lying about his whereabouts. In June 1997, after his lawyer withdrew Mezer’s asylum claim, a federal immigration judge ordered Mezer to leave the country on a "voluntary departure order." Mezer ignored the useless piece of paper. He joined a New York City bombing plot before being arrested in July 1997 after a roommate tipped off local police.

* Mir Aimal Kansi, convicted in 1997 of capital murder and nine other charges stemming from his January 1993 shooting spree outside the CIA headquarters in McLean, Va., also exploited our insane asylum laxity. Despite his history as a known Pakistani militant who had participated in anti-American demonstrations abroad, Kansi received a business visa in 1991. After arrival, he claimed political asylum based on his ethnic minority status in Pakistan. While his asylum application was pending, he obtained a driver’s license and an AK-47, murdered two CIA agents, and wounded three others. ...
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Home Front: WoT
More terror arrests to come in Ohio
2004-06-16
High-ranking officials said the arrest of a Columbus terror suspect won’t be the last in Ohio’s capital city, NewsChannel 4’s Elenora Andrews reported. The FBI and Ohio’s terrorism task force say they are still tracking terror in the city. A key federal official told NewsChannel 4, "There is more to come" in Columbus, Andrews reported.

Ohio’s top law enforcement officials said the arrest of Nuradin Abdi (pictured, left), 32, who was accused of planning to blow up a Columbus-area shopping mall, should serve as a wake-up call. "Understand that we are at war with terrorism, we are at war with an enemy that has no flag, and we are at war with an enemy that has no uniform," said Ohio State Highway Patrol Col. Paul McClellan said. Federal officials said the public might not have noticed anything unusual about Abdi, and his family said people shouldn’t. But high-ranking FBI officials told NewsChannel 4 that surveillance and evidence seized from Abdi, including cell phones and computers, show otherwise. On Tuesday, the FBI told NewsChannel 4 that agents previously contacted some Columbus-area shopping malls. Key federal officials also said the government expects to make another arrest in connection to terrorism, Andrews reported.
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