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September 10, 2006

UK: Radical Islam And The Paintball Jihad

Paintball sessions have been popular in Britain for 18 years. When they first arrived on the scene, they seemed to be favoured almost exclusively by members of sales teams and advertising executives. Now any idiot, and not just media idiots, can take part. Running around woods commando-style and shooting one's workmates in the back appeals to a primordial instinct, the same instinct that makes kids play cowboys and indians. For the majority it is harmless fun, for executives in the corporate world it is about work ethics and strategy, and shooting colleagues in the back. But for some, it is an essential part of jihad training.

Today, the Sunday Times reports on how one group of Muslims in Britain, connected to the extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir, are fully exploiting the similarity of paintball to commando training.

Last weekend, the Sunday Times' Muslim journalists Abul Taher and Ali Hussain went to the Delta Force paintball park near Congleton, Cheshire in northern England, where sessions last four hours. And here they watched ten youths of Indian sub-continent origin, aged from teens to twenties, running around the woods in blue overalls, firing paintballs at each other.

The youths were addressed by an older imam, 34-year old Ashraf Bader. who gave them pep talks at intervals. He said Osama bin Laden was a "brother" and spoke of the duty of every Muslim to reestablish the Caliphate - the pan national Muslim body which dispensed international Islamic justice. The last Caliphate, that of the Ottoman Empire, was dissolved in 1924 by Turkish troops under Kemal Attaturk.

The activity session was run by the Cheetham Hill Youth Forum, a Manchester-based community organisation.

When questioned by the Muslim group, the reporters were told that the group was from Hizb ut-Tahrir, and one offered to get in contact to tell them about another group called the East London Youth Forum. Members of this outward bound group do paintballing and hiking and other activities.

Hanif Qadir, a Muslim leader associated with the Waltham Forest Islamic Association said that the East London Youth Forum was merely a front name for the Hizb ut-Tahrir.

On August 29, Serge F. Kovaleski reported in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune of his encounters with the East London Youth Forum. Kovaleski wrote about how a 19-year old youth, Ali Zafar, was questioned in June by members of the group. They asked him of his views about the Iraqi war.

Zafar said: "They ask you about Iraq or Lebanon and then they go on about stuff like the caliphate and that things are not the way they should be. They will tell you to come to a meeting and that they will get you on the right path."

Zafar shunned the group, suspicious that it was a Hizb ut-Tahrir front organisation. The group actively promotes its paintball sessions, and also claims to do work with Muslims on drug abuse. Another extremist group, the Saviour/Saved Sect, used to actively recruit young Muslims with drug problems, as these were already divorced from their families, and ripe to be primed for extremism. It is perhaps no coincidence that the spiritual leader of the now-banned Saviour/Saved sect was Omar Bakri Mohammed. He was also the first leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain.

Anthony Glees, director of the Brunel University Center for Intelligence and Security Studies said of the East London Youth Forum: "These groups are essentially Islamist cults, hidden communities, open only to 'believers' who exist within open communities."

Kovaleski quoted 29-year old Mohammed Khodabocus, a founding member of the group, who said that the Forum endorsed the ideology of Hizb ut-Tahrir, but claimed that the group was not connected to it and was apolitical.

25-year old Shiraz Maher belonged to Hizb ut-Tahrir in Leeds for a couple of years, before leaving in early 2005. He said: "They engage in social welfare projects, to tackle issues like Muslim underachievement in schools, and to be seen as providing for people the way Western, godless governments cannot. It gives them social legitimacy and a foothold in the community. In some respects, they do a lot of good by helping to get people off drugs and things, but they radicalize them in other ways."

Though they have contempt for democracy, Hizb ut-Tahrir nonetheless try to influence policy. They were behind the campaign fronted by Luton schoolgirl Shabina Begum to force a school to allow her to wear the all-enveloping jilbab. Begum's lawyer, by irony had been Cherie Blair, wife of premier Tony, who has said he wants Hizb ut-Tahrir to be banned.

Running around woods and shooting your mates seems like an innocent past-time, but for some Muslim leaders it was regarded as an essential part of jihad training. For the American born and Saudi-influenced 42-year old Ali al-Timimi, his paintball sessions in the woods near Fredericksburg in Fairfax County, Virginia, which took place in 2000 and 2001, were an essential part of jihad training.

Timimi was convicted on April 26, 2005 of soliciting others to wage war against the US, and so far, 11 members of the so-called "Virginia Jihad" have been convicted. Timimi was so convinced of the jihadi value of paintballing that Ali Asad Chandia, one of his followers, exported 50,000 paintballs to Pakistan, to be used by terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayba.

Hizb ut-Tahrir are widely said to be against violence, though most members actively support suicide bombings in Israel.

One branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir appears to be actively involved in a plot to kill German civilians.

We wrote earlier of the two bombs which were found in trains in Germany. These bombs, disguised in suitcases, contained propane canisters and timers. On Monday 31 July they were found on two trains, one bound for Dortmund, West Germany, and the other train heading to Koblenz. At first the German media questioned if the bombs were hoax or not, until August 19, when a Lebanese student, Yussef Mohammed al-Hajdib, was arrested at Kiel station.

Since then, it has been suggested that Hizb ut-Tahrir were behind the bombs, and the devices were not intended as hoaxes. On Friday, August 25, a second German suspect, identified as Fadi A S, was arrested in Konstanz, Germany.

By this time, two other suspects had been arrested in, Lebanon, in connection with the bomb plot, and the link with Hizb ut-Tahrir was being established.

20 year old Jihad Hamad had turned himself into police in Tripoli, Lebanon, on Thursday, 24 August, and admitted that he had carried a suitcase onto one of the German trains, but claimed he did not know its contents. The following day, a 24-year old, born in Akkar, northern Lebanon and identified only as KHD, was arrested in Lebanon.

A Lebanese security source claimed that one of the suspects arrested in Lebanon used to go under the codename "Hamza" and he transported Kurds from Syria into Lebanon. This man is known to be a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

On Thursday, August 31, following the arrest of a third suspect in connection with the train bomb plot, Hizb ut-Tahrir announced that it had no connection with either the three suspects arrested in Lebanon nor the two suspects arrested in Germany.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in most Muslim countries, with the exception of UAE, Lebanon and Yemen. It is banned in Germany, and also Russia and all the Central Asian states where the Soviets had influence. Even in Pakistan, the heartland of extremist forms of Islam, the group is considered such a threat to stability that it is banned.

Founded in Jerusalem, 1953 by Sheikh Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, the group has branches around the world. In Indonesia, it is connected with campaigns to close churches and brutalise Christians, and in Bangladesh, it organised demonstrations against the Danish cartoons, where their members called for the death of the cartoonists responsible for depicting the so-called prophet Mohammed, blatantly contradicting their claim to be against violence.

In Denmark, the blatantly anti-semitic representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Fadi Abdullatif, was jailed last month for suggesting that Western leaders who stood in the way of people going to fight as insurgents in Iraq should be "eliminated". So much for policies of non-violence.

In Kyrgyzstan, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir are linked with terror activities, and in Australia the group has distributed leaflets glorifying terrorist atrocities overseas where Muslims had "inflicted the most humiliating lesson on supposed superpowers".

In Britain, as a result of its vicious campaigns of physical intimidation, particularly against women students who do not wear the hijab or Muslim headscarf, Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in university campuses. In the 1990s, the group regularly made death threats against gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. So much for policies of non-violence.

Serge F. Kovaleski quoted from terror researcher David Capitanchik, who is an honorary lecturer at Aberdeen University. Capitanchik says that Hizb ut-Tahrir and the now-disbanded group Al Muhajiroun operate covertly, using various front groups which have seemingly benign names.

He listed the Debate Society, the Muslim Women's Cultural Forum, the Islamic Society, the One Nation Society, the Millennium Society, the Pakistan Society and the 1924 Committee. Capitanchik said: "The point of the front groups is to appear more acceptable. But once people get a sense of what they are about, they disappear and reappear with different names and structures."

It is perhaps no coincidence that this tactic was used by Al Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir. As well as being the first leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed was also the founder of Al Muhajiroun. And when Al Muhajiroun was disbanded, there arose two new groups, the Saviour Sect and Al Ghurabaa. The Saviour Sect soon changed its name when pressure from police investigators became too hot. All three groups, Al Muhajiroun, Al Ghurabaa and the Saved/Saviour Sect, comprised exactly the same core membership.

One of the main activists in these three groups is Anjem Choudary, who justifies the killing of people who insult the prophet, as he demonstrated on February 3 when he organised a demonstration against the Danish cartoons, where placards called for the beheading of "those who insult Islam". On July 5 he defended Muslim suicide bombers.

And following in the guidance of his mentor Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, Choudary made sure that he had a contingency plan. When the UK government banned his group Al Ghurabaa and also the Saved/Saviour Sect in July, it did not matter to the members of these groups, as Choudary had set up a new organisation, called Ahl ul-Sunnah Wa al-Jamma.

And David Capitanchik is right about Hizb ut-Tahrir using the same tactic. Even though Hizb ut-Tahrir is officially banned in British universities, it nonetheless campaigns on campuses, but under a different name, calling itself the benign sounding Stop Islamophobia.

Last year, Hizb ut-Tahrir played games with the Quakers, the Society of Friends. They hired out meeting rooms at the Friends' House in Euston, north London, employing the benign-sounding name "Salsa Bill's Publishing House". With the bookings in place, Hizb ut-Tahrir then produced leaflets announcing the event, which was to be entitled "Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the Vision of the Caliphate".

But Hizb ut-Tahrir's track record of deviancy and dishonesty is something that makes it hard for the lumbering mechanisms of government to deal with. If a group has so many front groups, and its spokespeople are compulsive liars and deceivers, legislating against one named group will not stop their activities. It is like striking off a hydra's head. With one head removed, two more will spring up.

The currently legal organisation of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Britain exploits its front groups and the unwitting members of the multiculti community to its fullest advantage. Taji Mustapha, a spokesman for official Hizb ut-Tahrir, says that the paintballing groups Cheetham Hill Youth Forum and the East London Youth Forum are not linked to it. He told the Sunday Times: "Cheetham Hill Youth Forum is not a front for HT. If HT is doing something illegal, then I'll deal with it."

Even Salfist Muslims in Britain find Hizb ut-Tahrir too uncompromising and devious to accept them. Serge F. Kovaleski quoted Abu Khadeejah, a lecturer at the Salafi Institute in Birmingham, who said: "We put the theological texts back in their proper place. What these people are doing is beyond the pale."

So if you see groups of young Muslim engaged in healthy outdoor activities, such as those which apparently took place in the grounds of the Jameah Islamiyah school in East Sussex, take note. Two of the London bombers, Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan went on a white-water rafting trip in Bala, Wales, as part of their mental preparement for jihad. Within less than three months they had blown themselves up on July 7, 2005. 52 people died on 7/7.

Innocent activities such as paintballing, when carried out by potential jihadists, lose their innocence and fun. And no group which proclaims itself as "helping young Muslims" should automatically be trusted, or given assistance by multiculturalist local councils, until a thorough investigation by police is undertaken.

The beast of radical Islam is prowling. It is a shape-shifter. And while it stalks the land in its multiple disguises, democracy and our way of life are not safe.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at September 10, 2006 2:43 PM

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Posted by: Daniela at April 10, 2008 12:37 PM

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