ISIS Archives - Village Magazine

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ISIS in Ireland and France

by Marianne Lecach 1 July, 2018 0 Comments

Not a season has passed since 2015 without a terrorist attack from ISIS or Al-Qaeda in France. Interventions in the Middle East, perceived discrimination against Arabs including ghettoisation and stringent or doctrinaire secularisation are the primary reasons for the attacks, though many have also been random, typically ‘franchised’ retrospectively from ISIS. Ireland is no model of racial tolerance and has not been generous in accepting refugees from conflicts in the Middle-East, including Syria. 1400 members of the Irish Defence Forces operate in Syria, Lebanon and Morocco on Peace Support Operations with the UN. Although Ireland has not participated in the war against terrorism in the Middle East, it is not impossible that one day it would suffer an attack. It is believed there are around 150 radicalised Muslims living in Ireland and that there are terrorists supporting ISIS financially from Ireland. For example, an electrician in his twenties named Hassan Bal was arrested in Waterford after confessing he had financed ISIS. He gave 400 in October 2015 in a city in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Stevo Maksimovic who was apparently supporting the terrorist group. Bal was jailed for 20 years. Last year, two men from Morocco and Algeria were arrested in Dublin suspected of assisting the financing of ISIS but the Garda didn’t have enough evidence to jail them and they were later released. It is understood the Garda Special Detective Unit was conducting several surveillance operations on people suspected of supporting terrorism in Ireland. Also in 2017, Humza Ali – a bricklayer from Birmingham – tried to travel to Syria via a Dublin-Istanbul flight. Turkey refused him entry. He went back to England where he had been before he had travelled to Ireland by boat and ferry. The man and one of his accomplices, Ali Akbar Zeb, had been sharing photos and videos on WhatsApp to promote the terrorist group. It is believed they were training for an attack. Last year, an Irish woman named ‘Sister Aaliya’, from Limerick who had become radicalised to Islam, claimed she had heard ISIS terrorists talking about running a 2.8m fund from Dublin. The men linked to this financing were planning a terrorist attack in the capital. Assistant Garda Commissioner Michael O’Sullivan revealed last month that the Garda has been ordered to use barriers on busy streets like Grafton Street in Dublin. He claimed to be worried about people coming back to Ireland after having travelled to Syria or Iraq in support of ISIS. Security specialist Dr Tom Clonan thinks terrorist attacks are possible in Ireland. He told Village that, according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in London, there were “40 Irish passport-holders who have gone to engage in jihad in the Middle-East”. The reason why Islamists do not attack on the soil of Ireland, he says, is because Muslims are integrated in this society. The Defence Forces are ready to deploy 500 soldiers if terrorists attack. However, civilians inevitably get killed before any police intervention. Even though France has long been on high alert, there are continuing fatalities. The state of Emergency declared there following the November 2015 Paris attacks only expired, after five extensions, in November 2017. In Ireland the state of emergency only expired after peace in Northern Ireland in 1995, and the Emergency Powers Act still allows internment, the juryless Special Criminal Court and draconian provisions for detention. However these are measures frmo a different era and with a different focus. It is believed our information technology and architecture; and our security and intelligence systems are over 20 years out of date. Two years ago, the association of Garda Sergeants said the Garda was not equipped or trained to deal with the terror threat here. The best way to avoid terrorism, according to Tom Clonan, is to stop interfering and bombing the Middle-East. “Muslims have been treated so badly since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the war in Syria. It is a major cause of radicalisation because people are suffering.” ISIS attacks are sadly frequent in France, the European focus for ISIS. 11 terrorist attacks, starting with Charlie Hebdo, have been committed since 2015 alone – resulting in 245 dead. 17 attacks have failed and 50 were foiled. 9 cases out of 11 targeted French police. Certainly Ireland has not been affected by terrorist attacks. However, the truth is that nobody knows the percentage chance that situation might change. After the murder of an Irish tourist in Tunisia three years ago, Tom Clonan thinks Ireland should have raised its terror threat level from Moderate to Substantial, the level before Severe and Critical. The 2017 Stockholm attack shows neutrality and non-interventionism are not definitive shields against attack, even if Ireland were not facilitating US troop and ordnance movements through Shannon. Clonan changed his mind after Stockholm: “Now terrorist attacks in Ireland are a distinct possibility”. Marianne Lecach

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Gross Neglect: MI5's fatal waste of resources

by Joseph de Búrca 29 June, 2017 0 Comments

I have spoken to Fred Holroyd from time to time. Holroyd worked with the British army and MI6 in Ireland, 1973-75, and has written a book about his experience ‘War without Honour’. Incredibly, British spies are still meddling with his post. Holroyd has furnished me with a photograph of an envelope he received from me. It contained an academic book about the origins of the Troubles, something that interests Holroyd. To protect the book from damage, it was placed inside a bubblewrap cover and then slipped inside an ordinary white envelope. Somewhere along the line someone pierced both layers of the package with what was undoubtedly a micro camera wand to see what dangers to the Realm lurked inside. The misuse of precious resources Moreover spendthrift paranoia like this and the decades-long Special Branch monitoring of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott compromises scarce resources. Since Theresa May became home secretary in 2010 total police numbers in england and wales have fallen by 46,700 or 19.5%. In contrast to this, the overall budget of the Single Intelligence account – which covers expenditure on MI5, MI6 and the government monitoring service GCHQ – rose to £2.63bn in 2015 up from £2.48bn in 2014; in 2010, it stood at £2bn. As a result of these cutbacks, armed troops had to be placed under the con- trol of the police after the Manchester suicide bomb atrocity. Meanwhile, MI5 is making excuses for its failure. One of these is that it is overwhelmed and under resourced. A fact shouted from the rooftops is that it requires 30 officers to place a single suspect under surveillance 24/7. Since there are approximately 3,000 such threats, it would require 90,000 surveillance officers to watch them all. Yet, despite this MI5 is still able to find resources to interfere with Holroyd’s post; photograph its content; compile reports and send them to whatever departments analyses them. After this MI5 probably liaises with MI6 which in turn contacts its spies in Dublin to find out more about the threat posed by the sinister forces who sent a history book from Dublin. Holroyd’s phone is probably also monitored. Since he is scrutinised daily, a fair estimation is that 10 working hours are consumed daily. Why? The surveillance of Holroyd intensified after the pressure to reinvestigate the Kincora Boys Home scandal grew to the point where the Hart Inquiry into child abuse in NI was established. Holroyd’s handwritten notes from his time in NI confirm that he had been told that Loyalist politicians were visiting Kincora for sexual purposes. If Holroyd’s post is being surveilled, other Kincora whistleblowers who have featured in recent editions of Village such as Brian Gemmell and Colin Wallace are probably being scrutinised too; not to mention Kincora survivors such as Richard Kerr and Clint Massey. If only 30 individuals are being monitored, that means about 300 man hours are being consumed daily. This is only part of MI5 and MI6’s misuse of time, energy and gold. They have both had to prepare for the Hart Inquiry and the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual abuse (IICSA) in London. Their only interest was to maintain the cover-up of their sordid role in a swathe of child sex abuse blackmail scandals. Officers would have had to talk to serving and retired officers to get a full picture of what went on; trawl through records; cull embarrassing documents; liaise with Home office and Foreign office officials and pull the wool over the eyes of senior politicians; engage with lawyers; consider PR and propaganda initiatives; and last but not least: coach their witnesses to lie to these inquiries. Tens of thousands of man hours must have been spent, and this will continue to be the case as the IICSA looks like it will last another decade. An avoidable massacre There is no doubt that the Manchester massacre could have been avoided. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has stated that the bomber was “known” to the security services “up to a point”. His mother told them that he had been radicalised. Two of his friends called the police hotline in 2012 and warned that he believed that “being a suicide bomber was okay” and that he was “supporting terrorism”. He also made trips to Libya and, it now appears, Syria. In addition to wasting time on Holroyd et al, MI5 has a lamentable record of eavesdropping on trade unionists and other civil rights groups. one of those placed under the microscope was that well-known threat to the realm, Jeremy Corbyn. It’s anyone’s guess how much of this nonsense is still going on at the expense of British taxpayers while Isis terrorists gambol back-and-forth from the Middle east. The present Director-General of MI5 is Andrew Parker. He believes that MI5 is an honourable organisation. We will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that all the recent child-abuse skulduggery has taken place behind his back. Will someone now please tell him that he should redeploy his troops from Holroyd et al to Isis terrorists. The politics of the pirouette The demons unleashed by Britain’s destruction of Libya loom large in the story of the Manchester bomber. He had a Libyan background and was trained by Isis in Libya and/or Syria. Going back a few years, MI6 (which is responsible for overseas intelligence activity) failed to predict what was likely to happen in Libya when David Cameron was considering bombing Colonel Gadaffi’s forces in support of the rebels. It certainly didn’t impress this likelihood on him with sufficient force to prevent the bombing of Libya by the RAF. Chaos and civil war engulfed the country and created a haven for Isis. Overall, recent British-Libyan history defies belief. Gaddafi furnished the IRA with arms, his agents had planted a bomb on an airliner which exploded over Lockerbie and shot a police officer dead outside the Libyan embassy in London. On the other side of the fence, the US and UK plot against Gaddafi and on one

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Re-Ligion!

by Frank Armstrong 3 April, 2016 0 Comments

Michel A aq (1910-1989) was the principal ideologue of the pan-Arabist Ba’ath Socialist party which still rules Syria, as it previously did Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Although born Christian, he believed Islam to be proof of Arab genius and allegedly converted before his death in Baghdad. The Arabs were a motley collection of illiterate warring tribes inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula until the Prophet Muhammed (570-632 CE) and his successors built an enduring empire with extraordinary speed. The early Muslims were not only successful warriors conquering territory from Spain to Persia but also projected a ‘soft’ power allowing them to convert subjugated peoples. The era brought great advances in philosophy, art and mathematics and was marked by a tolerance unknown in Christendom. The Qu’ran itself was the first book written in Arabic, and according to the historian Albert Hourani Muslims believe Arabic is revealed in it; it certainly ushered in a great era of literacy. It is perhaps unsurprising that contemporary Arabic political movements have expressed themselves in the idiom of Islam however diverse that inheritance is. Furthermore the failures of Arab nationalism especially under Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) appeared to make Political Islam the answer to the project of throwing off the economic and cultural shackles of imperialism, and confronting Israel. The brutalisation of the Middle East through internal repression and outside intervention has shaped the emergence of ISIS, but its unsophisticated ideology has an historical trajectory. Likewise Christianity has had a lasting influence on the idea of Irishness: first because Christianity’s arrival in Ireland brought with it literacy (Ogham script hardly qualifies) that generated a seismic cultural awakening; second, and another source of pride, Irish Christians performed vital missions in restoring Christianity to Britain and other parts of Europe; third, the Reformation in Britain occurred simultaneously with its second wave of colonisation of Ireland, creating an effective method of creating a ruling caste; fourth, the decline of the Gaelic language left Catholicism as the most obvious point of cultural differentiation between the Irish and English. Thus in George Moore’s novel ‘The Lake’ Father Moran opines: “Religion in Ireland was another form of love of country and if Catholics were intolerant to every form of heresy, it was because they instinctively felt that the questioning of any dogma would mean some slight subsidence from the idea of nationality that held the people together”. He continues: “Like the ancient Jews, the Irish believed that the faith of their forefathers could bring them into their ultimate inheritance”. Moore himself eventually renounced Catholicism, just like the main character in the novel Father Gogarty who says: “my moral ideas were not my own. They were borrowed from others and badly assimilated”. Gogarty bemoans the Church’s attitude to women, recalling how “at Maynooth the tradition was always to despise women”. Well before Irish independence in 1922 the Catholic Church held a firm hold over Irish society especially in the crucial sphere of education. Maynooth was estab- lished in 1795 and Irish primary education had become increasingly denominational by the end of the nineteenth century. To some extent this suited the British administration as it recognised the Church as a force of conservatism that would protect private property against social revolutionaries. James Joyce also violently repudiated Catholicism. He wrote to Nora Barnacle in 1904: “Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently … Now I make war upon it by what I write and say and do. I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond”. In ‘Portrait’ he resolves: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile and cunning”. It took artists of the stature of Joyce and Moore to escape their Catholic upbringings. Unfortunately most of the revolutionary generation rapidly conformed and thereby stamped out the pluralism, feminism and even vegetarianism that animated the more free-thinking period before hostilities began. One of the most powerful ministers in the first government, Kevin O’Higgins, remarked: “we were probably the most conservative-minded revolutionaries that ever put through a revolution”. That it should have been an ‘Easter Rising’ that kicked off the affair is revealing. There was an obtuse connection drawn between the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the blood sacrifice and emergence of an Irish nation state. Remarkably, in the wake of the Rising such illustrious revolutionaries as Roger Casement, Countess Marckievicz and James Connolly converted to Catholicism. The Civil War between two children squabbling over the spoils of a new state imported no relevance for the relationship with the Church. Observers were already noting the “sombre bodyguard of priests” surrounding de Valera as he ascended political platforms in the early 1920s; and the first Cumann na nGaedheal administration (1922-32) alienated many erst- while progressive supporters, including WB Yeats, by bringing in a ban against divorce in 1925. We now know that the Catholic Church was virtually untouchable in its position of power in Ireland until the 1990s when the staggering effect of sexual repression and a culture of impunity became apparent. The same-sex marriage referendum last year affirmed that the once vice-like grip was no more: only Roscommon voted against the proposal, despite the Church’s opposition. It remains firmly entrenched in education but such is the prevailing distrust for priests in particular that this situation is unlikely to endure much longer. Moreover, Irish people are no longer drawn to the priest’s house or convent as they were in droves. The Church simply does not have the personnel to project its message any longer. Of course there are residual defenders of Catholic conservatism in the Iona Institute and the broader Pro-Life movement. But the abuse scandals seem to have changed most Irish people’s outlook and the Pro-Life movement now looks