Arms caches found in mosques in Europe

France to Shut Down 100 to 160 Mosques; War-grade Weapons Found in Some

NewAmerican,

10 February, 2016

George W. Bush and others have often emphasized that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Others view Islam as a "religion of the sword," and they include traditionalist-minded Muslims and mosques. This is evident after the French government recently raided Muslim houses of worship in the country and found “one third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are normally seized in a year,” as Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve put it.

The mosques implicated themselves “because they are run illegally without proper licenses, they preach hatred, or use takfiri speech," Hassan El Alaoui, one of France’s chief imams, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday; “takfiri” speech is that which levels accusations of apostasy at other Muslims. El Alaoui also reported that the government will shut down between 100 and 160 mosques, approximately five percent of the nation’s 2,600 total. In addition, authorities searched 2,235 Muslim businesses and homes and arrested 232 individuals.

In the wake of the November 13 Paris jihadist attacks that killed 130 people, however, it was the hardware found that was especially alarming. Writes Christine Niles at ChurchMilitant.com:

[S]everal of these [100-plus] mosques have been raided, revealing a "staggering" number of weapons and ammunition. Sunday, authorities conducted a raid on a mosque in Lagny-sur-Marne, 18 miles east of Paris, and uncovered 334 weapons and a large quantity of 7.62mm Kalashnikov ammunition, along with ISIS propaganda videos.

Police also turned up recordings of chants "glorifying the martyrs of jihad linked to the terrorist organization Jabhat al-Nusra," the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. The chants were found among teaching materials for youth in a madrassa, or private religious school for boys, connected to the mosque.

Although this story has not been widely reported, it should further fuel debate about the nature of Islam and the effects of wide-scale Muslim migration into the West. This has been a major topic recently, with presidential contender Donald Trump suggesting that Muslim immigration should be suspended until we can “figure out what's going on.”

And with the West being awash in relativism — and its correlative religious-equivalence doctrine, stating that all religions are morally equal — broaching this topic brings accusations of bigotry and “Islamophobia.” But Truth doesn’t bend to political correctness, and there’s certainly something “going on.” Consider, for instance, a German study released in 2010 and which involved 45,000 young people. It found that while increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent, increasing religiosity among Muslim ones actually made them more violent.

And anecdotes to this effect abound. The Daily Telegraph reports today about 18-year-old Australian convert to Islam Alo-Bridget Namoa, who is allegedly now a supporter of Da’esh (ISIS), prays five times daily to Allah, and has said referring to herself and her Muslim husband, “I want to do an Islamic Bonnie and Clyde on the kaffir” (non-Muslim). The Daily Mail told the story yesterday of 33-year-old U.S. Army deserter and Muslim convert Daniel Seth Franey of Montesano, Washington, “who called Osama bin Laden 'a beautiful man,' made pro-Islamic State statements and called for the death of American troops,” the paper related. Then there was convert “John T. Booker Jr., 21, an American citizen also known as Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, …who vowed to ‘bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep’ [and] pleaded guilty Wednesday to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas,” wrote CNN Feb. 4. And just two days before that, the Associated Press reported that North Carolina convert Justin Nojan Sullivan, 19, had “killed his neighbor and stole the man's money so he could buy an assault rifle to carry out an Islamic State-inspired shooting at a concert or club”; Sullivan believed he could murder 1,000 people in his attack. Critics have dubbed these happenings “Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” and nary a week goes by — and maybe not even a day — without an instance of one occurring.

But while this phenomenon can seem sudden, it’s not new. As Professor Thomas F. Madden, chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, wrote in his 2002 essay “The Real History of the Crusades”:

While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered.

Some Muslims readily acknowledge this, too. Also just yesterday, we learned of Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, who was convicted by an Indonesian court of conspiring with Da’esh and setting up a Jihadist training camp; writes the Deccan Chronicle of his statements in his own defense, “‘I hope judges understand that my deed of helping training camp in Aceh was my religious obligation,’ Bashir told the court. ‘I’m guilty according to the government law, but what I did is correct according to Islam.’” And then there’s what was reported just the day before. Quoting The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Jihad Watch related, “In a December 15 lecture about ISIS at the American University in Beirut, Abdel Bari Atwan, former editor-in-chief of ‘Al-Quds Al-Arabi’ and the current editor-in-chief of ‘Al-Rai Al-Youm’ rejected common claims that the savagery of ISIS is alien to Islam, presenting examples of similar conduct from Islamic history. Atwan said that the West faces two options: to contain ISIS or to destroy it.”

Of course, some may say the West has cultivated the worst of both worlds: disrupting the Mideast with misguided military endeavors while not containing Da’esh. And considering how Christendom is admitting countless thousands of impossible-to-vet Muslim migrants, these critics may ask, “How does it make sense for the West to send soldiers to fight in the Middle East if we’re going to bring the Middle East to the West?”

Unfortunately, what’s really “going on” isn’t hard to figure out: Awash in relativism, multiculturalism, and diversity doctrine, a morally confused Occident is facilitating “the soft Islamic conquest of the West,” as Muslim refugee Dr. Mudar Zahran put it last October. What Muslims “couldn’t do in the last 20 years,” he explained, “now the West is doing for us for free — and even paying for it.”

And pay for it we will.

June 29, 2016

The weapons arsenal was discovered during a top secret raid by a SWAT team in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Local politician Ismail Tipi revealed details of the raid and warned of “the danger of fundamentalists”.

The weapons were found in a cold room of a greengrocer near a mosque.

The state is the most populous state in Germany with nearly 18million people in the area, which includes Dusseldorf.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/684623/Islamist-extremists-hide-huge-stockpile-of-weapons-near-German-mosque

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/weapons-cache-seized-during-raid-on-mosque-7jvdttrm0x0?fbclid=IwAR3vgKHEoMzQs-b4sde7b3lhANAOaHfY73p04JosYKo-o__Xlh7oPgSIcCU

Policeseize weapons in mosque raid

Anti-terrorist police who burst into the Finsbury Park mosque in north London early yesterday found weapons including a stun gun and hundreds of suspected forged or stolen passports, identity and credit cards.

They also found a CS gas canister and a blank-firing imitation firearm at the building, which security forces believe has been used as a haven and base for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

About 150 Metropolitan police officers, many in body armour and supported by a helicopter and specialist firearms teams in surrounding streets, used a battering ram as they stormed the building at around 2am.

They met no resistance. Seven men - five Algerians, a Somalian and an Albanian - were arrested under the Terrorism Act as officers searched for several suspects and evidence of what they believed was an operation to provide terrorist groups with false identity papers and travel documents.

Sheikh Abu Hamza, the radical Muslim cleric who has been closely associated with the mosque since 1996, was not there at the time and has not been arrested.

The mosque remained under police control last night as searches continued. The raid marked a dramatic shift in the response of police and security services to the threat posed by al-Qa'eda and other Islamic extremists.

It was ordered by Scotland Yard after evidence mounted of links between men staying in "offices" in the mosque and an alleged terrorist network uncovered by police following the discovery of traces of the poison ricin in a flat in Wood Green, north London.

The Government is believed to have been told in advance about the raid on such a highly sensitive target as a place of Muslim worship.

Police received unqualified backing from David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, who said at the weekend that they should take "whatever steps are necessary" to track down foreign terrorists.

"This operation has my complete support," he said. "As I made clear yesterday and repeatedly in recent weeks, we must take firm action to investigate and, if necessary, deal with any potential threat to public safety without fear or favour."

The Met, which was accused of "institutional racism" after the Stephen Lawrence case, calculated that, in the current atmosphere of concern over terrorism, it could carry out the raid without prior consultation with "lay race advisers".

However, it stressed that it had avoided encroaching on areas of the mosque set aside for prayer.

There was criticism from a number of Muslim voices, but Yard chiefs hope that the evidence they have found will persuade critics that the raid was justified.

One of the men arrested is seen as a "significant" member of a terrorist network linked to the Wood Green raid and last week's police operation in Manchester.

As officers examined seized documents and computers, the Yard justified the raid.

It said: "Evidence gathered during recent counter-terrorist investigations in London and elsewhere has uncovered links between the premises and suspected terrorist activity.

"Such evidence has made this operation absolutely necessary. The operation was not against the mosque itself or the many people who go there on a regular basis to pray.

"It was aimed specifically at individuals who have been supporting or engaging in suspected terrorist activity from within the building.

"We believe that these premises have played a role in the recruitment of suspected terrorists and in supporting their activity both here and abroad."

Police sources denied that the raid was a direct response to the death last week of Det Con Stephen Oake during an anti-terrorist operation in Manchester linked to the Wood Green find.

But the sources conceded that the ricin and the Manchester events had created a "window of opportunity" for the raid, which became "necessary and inevitable" once the terrorist links emerged.

The seven men arrested at the mosque are aged between 22 and 48 and are believed by police to have been living there.

They were being closely questioned as officers tried to establish their true identities, nationalities and immigration status.

Police believe that Islamic terrorist groups in Britain are heavily dominated by Algerians, most of them asylum seekers.

Sheikh Hamza described the raid as "silly, heavy-handed, Rambo-like and unnecessary".

He said: "Our doors have never been closed to the police. Every now and then we have meetings with the police in the area. We made it very clear to them that whenever they wanted to come and reassure the public they could come straight away without an appointment."

Hamza also claimed that the raid was retaliation against the Algerian community for the death of Det Con Oake.

"I was anticipating the raid," he said. "It serves Tony Blair because he is under so much pressure over war with Iraq and it serves the purposes of the police by saying to the people, 'We lost a police officer; we are going to retaliate somehow.' '

There was also criticism from Muslims opposed to Hamza. Dr Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, the leader of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain and a staunch critic of Hamza, said he was "appalled" by the raid.

"The police should have approached the trustees of the mosque. Having a helicopter and 150 police officers is just not right. It could have been done in a more decent way.

"This sort of action will make people more suspicious of Muslims and increase Islamophobia. It will also offend the wider Muslim community."

A spokesman for the Muslim Welfare House, where worshippers were directed after the closure of the mosque, condemned "all forms of terrorism" and said that he was "deeply concerned" about police methods.

"Religious places of worship such as mosques, synagogues, churches and temples are sacred and should be treated as such," he said.

"This type of act can only serve to undermine good community relations and fuel an Islamophobic backlash on the places of worship and on innocent people."