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Man shot by cop, FBI agent in Roslindale was working to set up ISIS 'martyrdom operations cell' in US, feds say
By adamg on Thu, 04/21/2016 - 9:30pm
A new indictment against two men allegedly working with Usaamah Rahim on a plot to behead Americans when he was was shot to death in the parking lot of the Washington Street CVS last June charges them with "conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries," which could leave them behind bars for life if convicted.
Rahim had just walked to a bus stop outside the CVS when a Boston police officer and an FBI agent approached him; authorities say he took out a large knife and was going after the two when they fatally shot him.
Rahim, who lived in an apartment nearby on Blue Ledge Drive, was already under 24-hour surveillance by a state and federal terrorism task force.
David Daoud Wright, of Everett, and Rahim's nephew, and Nicholas Alexander Rovinski, of Warwick, RI, were arrested not long after on charges that the three of them wanted to kill prominent Islamophobe Pamela Geller, but then switched to a plan to kill some Boston cops because getting down to New York to attack Geller would have been too much bother.
According to the US Attorney's office:
The superseding indictment alleges that, beginning in at least February 2015, Wright began discussing ISIL’s call to kill non-believers in the United States with Rahim and Rovinski and they began plotting and recruiting members for their “martyrdom” operation. In March 2015, Wright drafted organizational documents for a “Martyrdom Operations Cell” and conducted Internet search queries about firearms, the effectiveness of tranquilizers on human subjects and the establishment of secret militias in the United States. Simultaneously, Rahim was communicating with ISIL members overseas, including Junaid Hussain. On Aug. 24, 2015, Hussain was killed in an airstrike in Raqqah, Syria.
As alleged in the indictment, beginning in or about May 2015, Hussain allegedly communicated directly with Rahim. Rahim in turn communicated Hussain’s instructions to Wright, with regard to the murder of an individual residing in New York. Wright, Rovinski and Rahim each allegedly conspired to commit attacks and kill persons inside the United States on behalf of ISIL. In preparation for their attack, Rovinski conducted research on weapons that could be used to behead their victims. Since being arrested, Rovinski has sought to continue their planned attacks and has written letters to Wright from prison discussing ways to take down the U.S. government and decapitate non-believers.
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
Truthers
Remember when this terrorist's family said he was innocent and was on the phone with a family member while being confronted by police? Also the family claimed the terrorist begged the police to not harm him before he was shot? The truth was he was not speaking to family on the phone and lunged at the cops? That flat out lie was a total bait and hook for Truthers and fellow anti American haters alike. People need to think about things before jumping to conclusions that the cops gunned him down for no reason.
As the case with the attacks
As the case with the attacks in San Bernardino and Brussels, the Muslim community has been entirely quiet and turning a blind eye to terrorist plots; choosing silence over doing the right thing. The exact reasons for this may be unknown but is troubling nonetheless.
-Pew Research (2011): 21% of Muslim-Americans (600,000 persons) say there is a significant amount of support for Islamic extremism in their community. In a poll commissioned by the Center for Security Policy, more than half (51%) of Muslims in America believe that they should have "the choice of being governed according to Sharia" law. Nearly a quarter believe that "it is legitimate to use violence to punish those who give offense to Islam," and nearly one fifth of Muslim respondents said that the use of violence in the U.S. is justified in order to make sharia the law of the land in this country.
the Muslim community has been
Kinda like when a life long, southie townie kills a grandmother and its silence from the life long southie residents.
Yah just like it, I mean
Yah just like it, I mean southie townie's are committing jihad all over the world...
No,
not like that at all.
Wow, that's a special kind of
Wow, that's a special kind of stupid you got going there.
CSP has been described as "not very highly respected"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Security_Policy
As for the Pew Center polling, I'll use myself as an example. I can consistently find 21 other Vietnamese-Americans out of 100 who will say there is significant support in our community for armed resistance against "the Communist regime of Vietnam", aka Vietnam. That significant support is all grandpas, and it hasn't come to anything. It doesn't mean that there are 400,000 Vietnamese-Americans training and arming up to invade Vietnam.
That's a leap
Wrong there, bucko.
From the Council on American-Islamic Relations, 12/2/2015:
“We condemn this horrific and revolting attack and offer our heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of all those killed or injured....The Muslim community stands shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Americans in repudiating any twisted mindset that would claim to justify such sickening acts of violence.”
From the Islamic Center of the Redlands, 12/3/15:
"[We are]saddened and shocked by the recent shooting in San Bernardino ... and prays for the victims and their family members....The center and its members offer their deepest condolences to those affected by this tragedy and we stand with our fellow Americans in this difficult time," the statement said, adding that it was planning an interfaith candlelight vigil for the victims.
And, of course, you're ignoring the nearly quarter of a million dollars raised by Muslims United for San Bernardino to help the families of the victims.
I could keep going, but it's really up to you to back up your allegations.
To your other point, I can say without exaggeration that every time I visit family in the more conservative corners of Louisiana and North Carolina, I am reminded how many people I know and even love who have f***ed up, extreme ideas about what can be justified in the name of Christianity. Pew hasn't asked me about them, yet.
However, I'd have to be stupid not to realize that I'm more likely to be killed by an extreme christian than an extreme muslim-- my PCP is in the same building as an OB-GYN practice that provides abortions. People who are predisposed to overlook christian violence easily forget that 5 days before San Bernardino, a christian extremist shot 12 people in Colorado, killing three.
As I recall, the controversy
As I recall, the controversy surrounding his death had less to do with the cops having reason to gun him down and more to do with the specific timing and placement of the confrontation which was initiated by the police. He was under 24 hour surveillance and the police had time to choose the circumstances of his arrest. He was known to be armed and motivated yet the police chose to initiate contact in a public space by only a few cops armed only with firearms in a way which seemed as if it had been engineered to precipitate a desired outcome. It could have easily turned out differently if there were more cops who were better prepared and equipped with non-lethal means.
Funny how people were
Funny how people were critical when this happened of the authorities shooting this machete-wielding man.
"wanted to kill prominent Islamophobe Pamela Geller"
Well they kinda proved her fears correct and discredited the made up word "Islamophobe."
Lots of words in American English are "made up",
which is to say that they are relatively recent coinages. Shakespeare did not know the word "luminescence". Your great-grandfather never knew the word "blog". Our language also is adept at absorbing words from other languages. You can't claim that "banjo" is a made-up word merely because it originated in a Bantu dialect. That catholicity is one of the things that make English great, among the reasons it has become the lingua franca of diplomacy, science and technology.
We're not France: we have no equivalent of an Académie française ruling on what is and isn't standard English. Usage prevalent enough to be understood by a fair amount of the English-speaking populace is all you need for a word to go from being "made up" or foreign to being a regular old word.
"Islamophobe", a late-90s coinage, is clearly one of the words, helped by the fact that the Greek suffix -phobe is widely used in a host of other words to mean "person holding an irrational fear of [preceding noun]".
You may choose to believe that irrational fear of Muslims and Islam is a made-up thing, but pretending the word representing it isn't legitimate reflects a poor understanding of American English.
Give me a break, JB
Islamaphobia literally means "fear" of Islam, but that's been changed recently to slander anyone who points out anything negative about it.
For example, if I said some spiders are very venomous- would you consider me an arachnophobe?
A phobia is an *irrational* fear, so Islamophobia is
an irrational fear of Muslims and Islam. You know, the kind that says because of the San Bernadino attacks, we should close our borders wholesale to 1.6 billion people, because they all must be terrorists who are intent on converting America to Sharia law.
Pretty sure that kid in South Carolina who was trying to start a race war by murdering a bunch of churchgoers was a Christian. When do we start deporting those people?
"[The definition of Islamophobia has] been changed recently to slander anyone who points out anything negative about it."
Says who? Sounds to me like you just don't like the idea that some people's fear of Islam might correctly be characterized as irrational.
Pamela Geller being afraid of the Muslim nutbag who threatened to kill her? Rational. Tarring an entire religion with the jihadist brush? That's pathological. (She's also full of loony conspiracy theories: Ground Zero Mosque, anyone?)
Geller is just another bomb-tossing right-wing court jester, like that horsey-faced blonde with the Adam's apple; both make their living stoking the irrational fears and hatreds of stupid people. So, yeah, she's a screeching Islamophobe.
Sorry, Willis: you don't get to redefine the word to fit your political prejudices.
I didn't say there aren't
I didn't say there aren't people with irrational fears, there certainly are. But there's a difference between people who say banish all Muslims and people who point out there are problems in the Muslim community that need to be addressed. Lumping them into one category is a flagrant way to try to dismiss the rational ones
My points were about the word "Islamophobe".
Some anon was calling it a "made-up word", which it clearly is not.
You appear to be arguing against its use because, "Hey, it's not a phobia if the threat is real." But a phobia is not the same thing as a simple fear: it is an irrational, pathological fear. People with a common-sense fear of venomous spiders avoid them. Arachnophobes are so terrified that they go to extreme lengths that normal people would not consider rational.
The analogy with Pamela Geller is that she has a common-sense fear of being killed by a Muslim extremist who threatened to kill her. She is an Islamophobe because she applies that same fear in a completely irrational way to hundreds of millions of Muslims.
She's clearly a crank: a birther, thinks Obama is a secret Muslim, has uttered a hundred other hateful, insane natterings. I tend to doubt that she has a genuine pathology; the simpler explanation is that she has discovered that stoking Islamophobia is a lucrative racket with which to siphon money out of right-wing marks. She's a hustler, a con woman, a carnival barker.
From Andrew McCarthy:
From Andrew McCarthy:
[Using the term "Islamphobia"] beats trying to refute the irrefutable nexus between Islamic scripture, sharia supremacism, and jihadist terror. It beats trying to rationalize the sheer idiocy of a policy, their policy, that idealizes Islam as the irenic monolith they would like it to be, rather than the complex of competing and contradictory convictions it is. Of the latter, the most dynamic is the conviction that Islam is an alternative civilization determined to conquer the West by force, by political pressure, by cultural aggression, and by exploiting Western civil liberties (liberties that are forbidden in the sharia societies Islamists would impose).
It is simply, undeniably, a fact that some Muslim mosques and surrounding communities are hotbeds of Islamic supremacism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that holds that Muslims must struggle against non-believers — by force and by all other means –- until Allah’s law (sharia) is established throughout the world.
From the Koran:
Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor Hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the People of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya(tax on non-muslims) with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
There are modernist Muslims who embrace the Western Enlightenment and reject the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam — Islam for them truly is a faith rather than a totalitarian political ideology.
Fundamentalists see Islam as a civilization alternative to the West, and their ultimate loyalty is to a global Islamic state, not the Western state they happen to be living in.
The Old Testament says you can own slaves
and beat them severely, as long as you don't knock them out of commission for more than a couple of days. And it forbids tattoos.
The question is how many adherents are fundamentalist enough to follow these practices? Do you write off all members of any religion because a few of them are wacky enough to observe their sacred religious text to the very letter of every word?
Islamophobes see this level of extremism in the face of every Muslim. That is an irrational fear, a phobia, and it must not be confused with the common-sense fear of the minority of extremists in every religion. That includes not rounding up all Christians because of the guy who thought the Bible was telling him to shoot up a Planned Parenthood because of the "baby parts".
Treasonist christians are a bigger national security threat
There are FAR MORE dangerous extremist christians running around explicitly tied to radical religious organizations with a stated mission of overturning the secular republic our nation was founded upon and replacing it with a religious theocracy ruled by evangelical christian principals. These nutters have seats in congress, platforms on TV, radio and conservative media and one of them is running for the GOP presidential nomination.
It is simply, undeniably, a fact that Christian extremists with sedition and treason in their mind are a threat to the West and our proud accomplishments related to secular governance and civic society.
See how easy it is to turn your simple minded arguments around?
We need to think and react and protect ourselves from nutters coming from ALL walks of life and and not just the ones belonging to groups that are easy to demonize