ABC Credits Net Posse with Tracking Jihadists

by Maggie at Maggie's Notebook

ABC News is crediting the "net posse" that helped track and report the activities of Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose). Our friends at JawaReport, QuothTheRaven and the YouTube Smackdown Corps are rightly credited for their ongoing counterterrorism tracking - even though ABC also refers to these patriot sites as 'net vigilantes.' Oh, well, words are cheap for the lame MSM.

Jihad Jane (Colleen LaRose)

The JawaReport's Rusty Shackleford said this in an interview with ABC News:

 Shackleford, a pen name, says he is a libertarian college professor who created the blog JawaReport in 2004 after he was enraged that Iraqi Islamists had beheaded an American named Nick Berg.

It was my way of venting. But mostly it was about countering violent Islamist propaganda, specifically the videos that were being produced by al Qaeda in Iraq and other Salaafist jihadists fighting our troops," he said.

Shackleford said his goal from the beginning was combating violent Islamist material and support on the Web.

I'm a blogger, but also an activist against violent Islamism. One of the things we do is try to pressure Webhosts to remove Websites that belong to terrorist organizations. An example of this would be the dozen or so times we've successfully had the Taliban's website removed. The websites sometimes pop back up, sometimes not," Shackleford said.

Shackleford and other contributors to JawaReport and sites like it noticed YouTube had become a hug for videos and comments in support of violent extremism and attacks against the West and it's allies, leading to the creation of the YouTube Smackdown.

Shackleford said the groups identify videos in support of violent Islamism and pressure the Web site to take them down, "as they would child pornography or other obscene material."

According to the Quoth the Raven blog, since the "smackdown" movement began in 2007, users have had over 31,000 videos removed from YouTube, and 695 users suspended. They say LaRose was one of those suspended.

Drop by The Jawa Report and leave a nice comment.

Read the complete story here.

More on Jihad Jane:
Colleen LaRose is Jihad Jane aka Fatime Larose - Indicted on Charges of Terrorism

U.S. Treasury Funds Hamas

by Maggie @ Maggie's Notebook

If you have any doubt of this administration's Muslim sympathies, you can lose that right now. The U.S. Treasury has allowed the terrorist organization, Hamas, to begin receiving funds from around the world, by removing all names of Hamas terrorists from the International terror list, except one, Musa Abu Marzouk. This was an unnecessary action, as an international lawsuit to stop this was a considered possibility.

The original report came from Arutz Sheva, an Israeli online news site. So far, blogs are hot on the story, but a search of Google News reveals no main stream media, anywhere, reporting. Thanks to Infidels are Cool for the heads up.

You might remember that Barack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, printed Marzouk's Palestinian manifesto in his Sunday church bulletin on July 10, 2007. Marzouk was arrested at JFK airport in July 1995, and eventually evicted from the country. He is an American-educated Ph.D. with many aliases, among them: Moussa Abu Marzouk, Musa Abu Marzuq, and Musa Abu Marzook. He is believed to be operating out of Damascus, but was born in Gaza. Marzouk's terrorist connections are so obvious even Tim Geithner could not remove his name. How many American taxpayer dollars are streaming to Hamas bank accounts?

Here's the Israeli media's report. I hope you will read it all:

(IsraelNN.com) The United States Treasury has taken all but one member of Hamas off the international list of terrorists, thus enabling funds from the European Union to enter Hamas-controlled Gaza.

It is an open secret that large sums of money from the EU flow into Gaza in the guise of humanitarian aid and salaries for officials, but are actually funneled into the coffers of Hamas, which controls Gaza with an iron grip. This method of transferring funds into terrorists' hands could have been blocked by an international lawsuit, but according to journalist Avi Tarango, the United States Treasury has made this impossible by removing all but one Hamas man – Deputy Chairman of the Political Bureau, Musa Abu Marzouk – from the list of international terrorists.

The updated terrorist list, published last week, takes up 443 pages. However, according to Tarango, who went over the list, none of the tens of thousands of people who form Hamas is mentioned – other than Abu Marzuk, who resides in Damascus. The terrorist list is meant for distribution in the world banking system, where the transfer of funds to anyone on the list is prohibited.

Cleared for Funding
Abu Marzouk is listed as having been born in Gaza on February 9, 1951, and as bearing an Egyptian passport with the number 92/664. “While branches of Hamas appear in the list under different names, such as 'The Students of Ayash,' 'The Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza,' 'The Iz A-Din El-Kassam Battalions,' the rest of Hamas's men do not appear on the list at all,” Tarango said.

"Musa Abu-Marzouk's presence on the list means that whoever tries to transfer money to him personally will be rejected by the world banking system and be accused of funding terrorism, but the transfer of funds to any other Hamas man will not arouse suspicion,” he explained.

According to published reports and other sources, the journalist said, the EU sends millions of Euros every month to cover the salaries of 77,000 employees of the Palestinian Authority and about 70,000 recipients of welfare aid in Gaza.

 “EU laws define Hamas as a terror organization and therefore the EU people need to verify on a name-by-name basis that none of the people receiving salaries and support is a terrorist,” Tarango said. “This is done by the EU's cash transfer mechanism, PEGASE, which verifies that none of the recipients of salaries are members of Hamas's police force or activists of the military wing of Hamas, by comparing the names as received from the PA treasury department with the list of international terror activists. However, since the newly-updated list contains no Hamas officials except for Marzouk, the European check will find nothing and the funds for Gaza salaries will be transferred in whole to the Gaza banks.” 

Others talking about the US Treasury and Gaza/Hamas:

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report
Creeping Sharia
Weasel Zippers

Related:
Jeremiah Wright Publishes CAIR Founder's Manifesto