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Click here to view the embedded video.

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Update 5: CNN says they failed to join some Islamic schools:

“They went to the madrassa [a Muslim school] of Jaish-e-Mohammad where they informed them about their desire for jihad. However, the management of the madrassa refused to keep them, and advised them to go to Jamat-ud-Dawa Lahore. Interestingly, the Jamat also refused to keep them as they could not provide a surety. Thus, they came along with their friend Umar Farooq to Sargodha,” the report said.

Source

Update 4: New York Times confirms arrests?

SARGODHA, Pakistan — Five young Muslim American men arrested here Wednesday were on their way to the heart of the Taliban sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas with the intention of training to fight against American troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani police authorities said Thursday.

The men, a tight circle of friends in their late teens and their 20s from the Washington suburbs, had been in contact through YouTube with a Pakistani militant with links to Al Qaeda before arriving in Pakistan on Nov. 30, said the Pakistani officials, who had firsthand knowledge of the case.

….

The police identified the others arrested in Sargodha as Ramy Zamzam, 22, a dental student of Egyptian background at Howard University, who was described as a sort of “ringleader”; Waqar Khan, of Pakistani background, who was reported to have family connections in Karachi; Ahmad A. Mini, 20, born in Eritirea; and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18, a native Ethiopian.

Source

Update 3: The owners of the Facebook group dedicated to the brothers closed it down saying: “We have decided with careful consideration to close the group out of respect for the family members of our brothers.”

Update 2: Message from CAIR below.

Update 1: Apparently, the New York Times (via AP) is reporting that a farewell video was made by the brothers.
____

There was a lot of news and rumors spreading on Facebook of 5 brothers in the Washington DC area gone missing the past few days. Looks like they were in Pakistan and may have been arrested.

According to the Pakistani News:

SARGODHA: An Anti Organized-crime Cell raided a house situated in Aziz Bhatti Town of Sargodha and arrested five foreign nationals.

DPO Sargodha Dr. Usman Anwar told Geo News that the police raided the house of Khalid Farooqi, an activist of banned outfit Jaish-e-Muhammad, and arrested five foreign nationals from there.

The arrested foreigners include 2 Yemenis, 1 Egyptian, 1 Swedish and 1 US-born Pakistani.

The DPO told that these people had been living in Sargodha since Nov 30 and it was quite a possibility that they were engaged in acts of terrorism.

Initial investigations have identified them as Ahmed Abdullah, Waqar Hassan Khan, Eman Hassan, Yasir and Rami Zamzam.

Security agencies have initiated further investigations in this regard.

According to the AP:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistani police say they have detained five U.S. citizens in a raid on a house in the east of the country.
Police officer Tahir Gujjar declined to say why the men were arrested Wednesday in the town of Sargodha.
He says three of the men are Americans of Pakistani descent, one is of Egyptian descent and the other is of Yemeni heritage.
He says they are being interrogated by senior police officers.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman said officials there were aware of the reported arrests, but had no more information.

Of course it’s on FOX news.

More sources:
Another local DC news article.

I actually knew one of the brothers and the others I’ve seen around. Shocking and strange, but then again the Pakistani government is just obeying the command of their owners in America.

Message from CAIR:

CAIR: Muslim Community Assists FBI in Finding 5 Missing Youth

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 12/9/09) — The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) will hold a news conference later today in Washington, D.C., at which it will outline how the Muslim community assisted the FBI in resolving the case of five Muslim young men from Virginia who left the country recently under mysterious circumstances.

WHAT: CAIR News Conference on Case of 5 Missing Youth
WHEN: Wednesday, December 9, 4 p.m. (Eastern)
WHERE: CAIR’s Capitol Hill Headquarters, 453 New Jersey Avenue, S.E., Washington, D.C.
CONTACT: CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com

“The Muslim community has taken the lead in bringing this case to the attention of law enforcement authorities and will offer ongoing cooperation with the FBI as the investigation moves forward,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad.

The parents of the missing young people and local Muslim leaders recently informed CAIR of the disappearances. CAIR immediately informed the FBI and, along with the families and Muslim community leaders, has been working to assist the agency as the investigation moved forward. The families were also assisted in obtaining legal representation to make sure their constitutional rights were protected.

At today’s news conference, CAIR officials and other Muslim leaders will outline the sequence of events in the case, urge anyone aware of the missing group’s activities to come forward and warn against the dangers of adopting or promoting extremist religious views.

CAIR is America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

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Few would deny that Muslims too are victims of Islamist terror. But a new study by the Combating Terrorism Center in the US has shown that an overwhelming majority of al-Qaida victims are, in fact, co-religionists.

In the battle against unbelievers, can one also kill Muslims? Even the terror network al-Qaida is troubled by this question.

A leading al-Qaida ideologue for the terror network, Abu Yahya al-Libi, has developed his own theologically-based theory of collateral damage that allows militants to kill Muslims when it is unavoidable.

Even the Iraqi affiliates of Osama bin Laden’s terror group, who are known to be particularly bloodthirsty, claim that they too consider this question. For instance, in a message claiming responsibility for an August attack in Baghdad, the group wished those Sunnis injured in the “operation” a speedy recovery and expressed their hope that those killed would be accepted by God as “martyrs.”

But even as such apologetic communiqués from al-Qaida show the terror network stylizing itself as a defender of the true faith wrestling with religious concepts, they also make it look as though any dead Muslims are regretful but isolated cases. The facts, though, tell a different story.

Between 2004 and 2008, for example, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. And even though these attacks include terrorist incidents in the West — in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 — only 12 percent of those killed (371 deaths) were Westerners.

New Report Shows Many More Muslims Killed Than Non-Muslims

It is, of course, no surprise that al-Qaida kills more Muslims than non-Muslims — particularly for people in the Islamic world. But a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the United States’ Military Academy at West Point in New York — which has gathered together these and other relevant figures in one report (“Deadly Vanguards: A Study Of al-Qaida’s Violence Against Muslims “), spells out the discrepancy in black and white.

The authors of the study admit that their report likely omits a number of Muslim victims. But that was the price of their rigorous methodology, used in an effort to avoid accusations of partisanship.

The researchers only counted the attacks for which al-Qaida claimed responsibility, thus preventing accusations that they were seeking to make al-Qaida look even worse than it is. Still, it is well known that al-Qaida does not claim responsibility for every attack perpetrated, meaning that many victims are likely left out of the report. Furthermore, the researchers only included attacks reported on by the Arab media and relied on the numbers they reported — out of a conviction that the Arab media is more highly regarded in the Muslim world than the Western media. That, though, is not always the case.

Blurred Figures And Inexact Categories Are Problematic

The greatest potential for inaccuracy in the report, however, is the placing of victims into only one of two categories: Western or non-Western. The assumption being that Western would also mean non-Muslim and vice versa. The problems with such a system of categorization are myriad. Not all those living in the Muslim world are Muslim: In Iraq, al-Qaida has launched attacks against Kurds, Yazidi and Christians. Secondly, a lot of the Muslim victims are actually — and deliberately — Shiites. A Sunni group, al-Qaida considers the Shiites to be unbelievers.

Unfortunately news reports don’t tend to differentiate between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, explains Scott Helfstein, one of the writers of the report. This is also the reason for the non-Western and Western categories. “It is easy for journalists to count nationality but they rarely, if ever, identify religion,” Helfstein writes in reply to e-mailed questions from SPIEGEL ONLINE. The report’s writers were well aware of the problem. “But we were not able to find a way around it,” Helfstein notes.

Indeed, the report’s authors confront the shortcomings of their methodology head on. In one passage, they remove attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan from their calculations altogether, resulting in the share of Westerners killed in al-Qaida attacks rising to a much more significant 39 percent. If one removes the Madrid and London attacks from the statistics, though, the share of murdered Westerners drops back down to 13 percent.

Perhaps more significantly, if one only examines attacks in 2007 and disregards those having been perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the share of non-Westerners killed by al-Qaida rises to 99 percent. In 2008, it was 96 percent.

Non-Westerners 38 Times More Likely To Be Killed

Put another way, between 2006 and 2008, non-Westerners were 38 times more likely to be killed by an al-Qaida attack than Westerners.

“Since al-Qaida has limited capability to strike against its Western enemies, the group maintains its relevance by attacking countries with Muslim majorities,” the study concludes.

The conclusions reached by Helfstein and his co-authors are hardly world changing. They are valuable nonetheless, in that they provide a numerical foundation to the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim al-Qaida victims.

Still, critics will no doubt point out that the study comes from the CTC, an organization that is part of an American military school. In recent years, the CTC has released a number of excellent studies on terrorism. But because it is actually supplying arguments, backed by scientific research, for the fight against terrorism to decision makers, politicians and military personnel in the US, it cannot be considered strictly neutral. That also applies to this case, especially since a number of American officials have recently begun stressing the point that al-Qaida is particularly violent toward Muslims and can now rely on solid data to back up their argument.

This perceived lack of neutrality doesn’t change the fact that the fundamental findings of the report are correct and meaningful. The authors conclude that if they compare statistics for the years from 1995 to 2003 (excluding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US as a solitary event), they find that al-Qaida is becoming more violent and “increasingly indiscriminate” in its attacks.

Just how big a problem this discrepancy between Muslim and non-Muslim victims will become for al-Qaida remains to be seen. Even prior to the report’s release, however, it had become a subject of intense debate within the Jihadist seen — with more and more ideologues coming to the conclusion that al-Qaida’s fight on behalf of the downtrodden Muslims isn’t worth it.

Source

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Jon Stewart should become a CNN news anchor.

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Health insurance giant Aetna is planning to force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it seeks to raise additional revenue to meet profit expectations.

In a third-quarter earnings conference call in late October, officials at Aetna announced that in an effort to improve on a less-than-anticipated profit margin in 2009, they would be raising prices on their consumers in 2010. The insurance giant predicted that the company would subsequently lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members next year from its national account as well as another 300,000 from smaller group accounts

Looks like there is another terrorist entity right here in America.

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Who’s going to BestBuy this weekend?

UPDATE: “Merry Christmas” BestBUY TV AD

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Click here to view the embedded video.

FreeTarek.com

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Doctors in Iraq‘s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja’s over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

A group of Iraqi and British officials, including the former Iraqi minister for women’s affairs, Dr Nawal Majeed a-Sammarai, and the British doctors David Halpin and Chris Burns-Cox, have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war – including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

Read more here.

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May Allah protect the innocent.

Look’s like Pakistan is acting like the American criminals of Abu Ghraib.

This is not how the Prophet (saas) treated prisoners even if they are prisoners. If they are innocent then they are cowards and deserve to be reprimanded. If they are prisoners then you respect them. You bring them food and keep them healthy. Actions like this from the Pakistani army will only increase the violence. I pray these cowards lose their position in the army.

From Sahih al Bukhari:

Narrated Jabir bin ‘Abdullah: When it was the day (of the battle) of Badr, prisoners of war were brought including Al-Abbas who was undressed. The Prophet looked for a shirt for him. It was found that the shirt of ‘Abdullah bin Ubai would do, so the Prophet let him wear it. That was the reason why the Prophet took off and gave his own shirt to ‘Abdullah. (The narrator adds, “He had done the Prophet some favor for which the Prophet liked to reward him.”) (Book #52, Hadith #252)

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