Eric Crampton's Library tagged terrorism →  View Popular

Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.

Violent radicals aim to kill Jules Stein Eye Institute researchers who test on animals

The FBI and the Los Angeles Fire Department are investigating an anonymous claim that animal rights extremists placed an unexploded incendiary device found under the car of a prominent UCLA eye doctor last weekend. The incident was similar to one last year in which another UCLA researcher was the intended target.

A gasoline-filled device was discovered Sunday by the car outside the Westside home of Dr. Arthur Rosenbaum, who is chief of pediatric ophthalmology at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute. The device did not ignite despite evidence of an attempt to light it, authorities said Thursday.

An e-mail on Wednesday signed by the Animal Liberation Brigade said the group put the device there to stop experiments on animals in Rosenbaum's laboratory. The message claimed a gallon of fuel was set alight under the vehicle, but authorities said there was no fire.

Rosenbaum, who has worked at UCLA for 35 years, declined to comment Thursday.

According to the National Institutes of Health, his lab received federal funding to, among other things, test tiny implanted electrodes on monkeys to correct severe cross-eyed conditions. UCLA reported that Rosenbaum's team has used only one primate for "vision training" and that the lab meets all federal rules for humane treatment.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said investigators are treating the car incident as a case of "domestic terrorism."

OK. Mr. Wilkins suggests that Canadians should stop griping and get on with it. We should accept that "we live in a post 9/11 world." In the end, we all benefit because the new rules make the border "smarter and more secure." Instead of grumbling, we should get our posteriors over to the passport office for our travel documents. It's no big deal. Indeed, it isn't. That's why it does little to increase security. All the 9/11 terrorists had, or would have been eligible to have, valid passports.

So did the Madrid train-and London subway-bombers. It is fruit pickers and aupairs who have trouble with documentation, not terrorists. The problem with saboteurs isn't that they're undocumented, but that they fly planes into buildings.

It won't make our lives more secure if they do so carrying passports.

Sleuthing: How two New York companies survived and recovered from the terrorist attacks of five years ago

A furor has erupted over an upcoming 9/11 miniseries on ABC-TV, with Bill Clinton and other members of the former president's administration demanding the network cut scenes that question their dedication to pursuing Osama bin Laden.

In a letter to the head of ABC's parent company, senior Clinton staffers call ''The Path to 9/11'' which will air over six hours on Sunday and Monday ''factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate.''

They particularly protest a scene suggesting the Monica Lewinski sex scandal distracted Clinton from taking sufficient action against bin Laden following pre-9/11 al-Qaida strikes on U.S. targets.

“We will not be deterred by the actions of a few fanatic and misguided extremists,” said Norman Abrams, interim chancellor of UCLA, in an ad that will be published today in The Daily Bruin announcing the new steps. “Individuals are entitled to their views on animal research and to mount First Amendment-protected protests. But the kinds of activities engaged in by some animal research opponents have crossed the line of legitimate demonstrations and, in a number of instances, have involved patently criminal behavior,” he wrote.

Among the steps UCLA is taking:

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Exploring legal steps that may be taken against harassment that is not protected by the First Amendment.
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Filing lawsuits against animal rights “ringleaders” who inspire illegal activity.
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Improving security of faculty members’ laboratories and homes, and including the security of professors’ family members in university plans.
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Promoting federal legislation to crack down on the harassment of researchers.
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Offering reward funds for an attempted firebombing of a faculty member’s home.

Jamieson and a second Six Nations spokeswoman, Hazel Hill, said the protesters at the site have discussed completing the houses for some time. They have also been asking native and non-native supporters around the world to send food and money for months.

They set up a Bank of Montreal account to accept cash gifts in June, Hill said.

However, the group's appeal for donations garnered mainstream media attention this week when the request surfaced as a post on an online Six Nations reclamation forum at http://reclamationinfo.com.

The post's author, Kahentinetha Horn, a Mohawk journalist and part-time lecturer at Concordia University in Montreal, said Hill and others at the Caledonia site asked her to distribute the message through her Mohawk Nation News website and through her contacts with First Nations communities around the globe.

The message was sent to several native-run U.S. casinos, MNN subscribers and others, Horn said in a phone interview from her home on the Kahnawake reserve, south of Montreal.

Dario Ringach, an associate neurobiology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, decided this month to give up his research on primates because of pressure put on him, his neighborhood, and his family by the UCLA Primate Freedom Project, which seeks to stop research that harms animals.

Anti-animal research groups are trumpeting Ringach’s move as a victory, while some researchers are worried that it could embolden such groups to use more extreme tactics.

Ringach’s name and home phone number are posted on the Primate Freedom Project’s Web site, and colleagues and UCLA officials said that Ringach was harassed by phone — his office phone number is no longer active — and e-mail, as well as through demonstrations in front of his home.

Left-wing Quebec intellectuals and politicians (Pierre Trudeau being an obvious example) have always enjoyed flirtations with causes that wrap themselves in the mantle of "liberation" from colonialist oppressors -- including their very own home-grown Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), which gave them a frisson of pleasure as it sowed terror throughout Canada in the late '60s with mailbox bombs, kidnappings and a murder. Their cultural and historical sympathy for Arab countries from the francophonie -- Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon -- joined with reflexive anti-Americanism and a fat streak of anti-Semitism that has marbled the intellectual discourse of Quebec throughout its history, has made Quebec the most anti-Israel of the provinces, and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist terrorist sympathizers.

Think about what this would mean if Quebec ever were to become independent, and detached from the leadership of politicians who know the difference between a democracy and a gang of fanatical exterminationists. You can bet that Hezbollah would be off the official terrorism list by Day two of the Republic of Quebec's existence. By Day three, word would go out to the Islamosphere that Quebec was the new "Londonistan," to cite the title of a riveting new book by British journalist Melanie Phillips, chronicling the rise of militant Islam in her country.

Complacent Canadians think it can't happen here. It won't if our political class takes its cue from the principled Stephen Harper rather than the shameless Quebec politicians who led that pro-terrorist rally. Harper needs Quebec votes every bit as much as Messrs. Duceppe and Boisclair if he expects to achieve a majority government in the next federal election, but unlike them, he isn't willing to sell his soul.

The devil is always on the lookout for the moral relativism that signals a latter-day Faust, and it seems he has found some eager recruits amongst Quebec's most prominent spokespeople.

The man suspected of being the mastermind behind a plot to blow up tunnels in New York City graduated from Montreal's Concordia University with a bachelor of commerce in finance in 2002, a university official confirmed Sunday.

Assem Hammoud was an international student at the university from 1995 to 2002. He majored in finance and had a minor in international business, said university spokeswoman Chris Mota.

When it came time to write up the premarital agreement between Zakaria Amara and Nada Farooq, Ms. Farooq briefly considered adding a clause that would allow her to ask for a divorce.

She said that Mr. Amara (now accused of being a leader of the alleged terror plot that led to the arrests of 17 Muslim men early this month) had to aspire to take part in jihad.

"[And] if he ever refuses a clear opportunity to leave for jihad, then i want the choice of divorce," she wrote in one of more than 6,000 Internet postings uncovered by The Globe and Mail.

Wives of four of the central figures arrested last month were among the most active on the website, sharing, among other things, their passion for holy war, disgust at virtually every aspect of non-Muslim society and a hatred of Canada. The posts were made on personal blogs belonging to both Mr. Amara and Ms. Farooq, as well as a semi-private forum founded by Ms. Farooq where dozens of teens in the Meadowvale Secondary School area chatted. The vast majority of the posts were made over a period of about 20 months, mostly in 2004, and the majority of those were made by the group's female members.

On a live TVO Studio 2 debate on Monday, Toronto imam Ali Hindy clearly insinuated that the entire RCMP operation was being conducted to justify the continuing war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He referred to the arrests as "show business" and stated the "show must go on."

During the discussion, Hindy claimed he knew eight of the accused. According to his analysis, the suspects may have been involved in military training to fight a jihad overseas. He went on to say that when young Muslim men come to him asking to go overseas to fight, he discourages them and tells them to fight their jihad "here."

Flabbergasted, host Paula Todd asked him, "Why? What do you mean?" Cornered, he took refuge — like so many Muslim clerics who encourage jihad, take when trapped — in philosophy: "By jihad I mean the inner jihad ..."

Monday night's discussion on TVO was also significant because it is only in non-Muslim institutions that Muslims can debate from adversarial positions.

There is not a single mosque in Canada where Muslims with opposing views can debate anything political, social or theological. The doors of debate are shut by the cement of orthodoxy. Only doublespeak and hypocrisy are allowed to flourish. As long as Muslims can find someone else to blame for our ills, the problem is seen as resolved.

I say, enough is enough. Muslims cannot go on behaving as if everything is normal. We cannot sit still while a fascist cult of Islamic supremacy takes over our mosques.

We cannot afford it any more because we risk losing a generation to the temptation of simple answers to life's challenges; a solution that states that life on Earth is meaningless because it is temporary and therefore not worthy of sustaining, not worthy of enjoying.

I urge Muslims to recognize that a mosque is not the places for politics, it is a place of worship. Imams who peddle politics need to be told to take their politics to the electorate and not to the pulpit.

More arrests are expected on the heels of this weekend's stunning raids that netted 17 terrorism suspects, including five youths, in the Toronto area, Canada's senior lawmakers said Sunday.

Despite the arrests, and police assurances that the threat allegedly posed by this group had been "removed," security officials are still grilling individuals who may be connected, or may have vital information about the alleged plot to bomb targets in Ontario. Reports suggest those targets may have included the Toronto headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the CN Tower, as well as Parliament Hill.

Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else -- Secure Flight and Trusted Traveler included -- is security theater. We would all be a lot safer if, instead, we implemented enhanced baggage security -- both ensuring that a passenger's bags don't fly unless he does, and explosives screening for all baggage -- as well as background checks and increased screening for airport employees.

Then we could take all the money we save and apply it to intelligence, investigation and emergency response. These are security measures that pay dividends regardless of what the terrorists are planning next, whether it's the movie plot threat of the moment, or something entirely different.

Buried in the convoluted 91-page legalese of a recent Federal Communications Commission release on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a proposal with worrisome privacy implications.

In it, the FCC suggests ways to "automatically identify the location" of all VoIP callers with handsets that connect to the telephone network. Those methods include creating an "inventory" of every Wi-Fi access point in the United States, engaging in "mapping and triangulation" of those access points, compiling an "access jack inventory" for wired VoIP users, or even mandating that Net phones include GPS receivers and broadcast their exact latitude and longitude.

The justification for those regulations sounds reasonable enough: to let emergency services identify an Internet caller's location when he or she dials 911. It's part of an ongoing proceeding in which the FCC gave VoIP operators until October to route 911 calls to the geographically appropriate call center.

Even if Bouyeri gets a life sentence -- the probable result given that The Netherlands has no death penalty -- he can still claim a tiny victory, at least for now. Earlier this year, organizers of the Rotterdam Film Festival called off a screening of Submission because of "security concerns" -- the nature of which are not too difficult to imagine. Column Productions, van Gogh's film company, also indicated that it had halted distribution of the film until "further notice." Score one for the murderer.

My experience suggests this sort of censorship goes on all the time. Since 9/11, we in the media have focused abundant criticism on Muslim "extremists" and "Islamists." But there are still large areas of Islam that are no-go. As the editor of these Comment pages, I am constantly in touch with writers who in conversation freely discuss inconsistencies and ahistorical glitches in the Koran, or brutal, misogynistic practices within certain immigrant communities, or the massive statistical overrepresentation of young, Arab males in global terrorism -- but then hastily add, "of course, I could never write about this sort of thing."

Canada's biggest independent brokerage firm, Canaccord Capital Inc., yesterday announced that it would resign its role as a broker to one of Britain's biggest biotech companies after animal rights activists firebombed a car belonging to one of Canaccord's senior executives in London.

Yesterday, the London-based Animal Liberation Front (ALF) announced on its Web site that its members had attacked a vehicle belonging to Mike Kendall, CFO of Canaccord Capital (Europe) Limited last month. Mr. Kendall is based in London.

The group's Web site brags of hundred of "liberation actions," from releasing animals from research facilities to vandalizing the homes of executives with companies linked to animal testing.

On the night of May 26, Mr. Kendall's car alarm seemed to go off spontaneously. When he went to the garage to shut it off, the car burst into flames, a spokesperson for Canaccord in Vancouver said yesterday. Mr. Kendall's family was sleeping above the garage, a Canaccord source based in Toronto said.

Facing an online extortion threat, Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them. If you collect revenue online, you'd better read this.