Militant Islam Monitor > Satire > CAIR: Council of Anti American Islamic Radicals demands Fox's 24 show be replaced by the Islamic 1924
CAIR: Council of Anti American Islamic Radicals demands Fox's 24 show be replaced by the Islamic 1924
Life imitates Art: "24" v.s. 'A Hijacker Next Door' & "The Khadrs - Canada's First Family of Terror "
January 12, 2005
Council of Anti American Islamic Radicals
Press Release
CAIR demands that Fox's 24 show be replaced by the Islamic 1924
Washington DC (1/12/05)
The Council of Anti American Islamic Radicals is urging all Muslims to write to
Fox broadcasting to show their outrage at the new series 24 which portrays
Muslims as vicious terrorists who try to blend into American life just
just like the 9/11 hijackers did, while planning to murder thousands of innocent
Americans and turn the US into a Khalifate (1924) under the rule of Sharia law.
CAIR Executive director Nihil A. Wad stated that :
"The portrayal of Muslim terrorists in 24 is highly inccurate . They are not wearing kufis, don't observe shari'a law, and should be screaming Allahu Akhbar! when they kill their victims. The Muslim mother in 24 is not wearing a headscarf and is dressed in pants which is a further insult to Muslim sensibilities. The infidel girlfriend who was poisoned should have been beheaded or stoned to death according to Islamic law."
CAIR spokeswoman Rabid Am Mad explained that :
"Muslim terrorists in America who plan to wage Jihad do not sit around a
breakfast nook eating cereal by themselves before launching a major strike.
Muslims are very hospitable and would have invited the neighbors to celebrate. Americans should recall that one of the 9/11 hijackers held a party for the neighborhood children in his
Florida home and served them Happy Meals just before sending his wife and kids
back to Saudi Arabia and flying a plane into the World Trade Center."
CAIR FL director Adolf Ali whined that:
"The idea that a Jihad warrior would falter in his mission when a American
infidel kisses them is an insult to Muslims everywhere.
We demand that Fox TV apologise for making the Muslim teenager in the film
look like a Mama's boy with an Oedipal complex.
The depiction of a terrorist mastermind's son chewing bubble gum and toting a walkman
instead of a rifle is also an affront to all piece loving Muslims ."
CAIR communications director Ibrahim Pooper complained that;
"The show includes the showing of an internet videotape of the kidnapped US secretary of defense surrounded by masked men who plan to kill him for 'crimes against humanity ' but does not mention Palestine or Iraq. This is an oversight which must be rectified immediately.
The Jewish controlled Fox TV must take 24 off the air immediately and replace it with the Arab hit television series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion- in order to educate the American public about who the real enemies of Islam are."
Pooper also stressed the crucial role that CAIR and Muslims must continue to play in Homeland Security issues and called for the immediate release of several CAIR employees who are now jailed on terrorism charges.
CAIR is America's largest Saudi funded Muslim civil rights groups serving as front for Hamas and was named as a defendant in a 9/11 terror lawsuit. CAIR's mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam by killing or converting infidels and spreading the message of Muslim tolerance and diversity .
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CAIR 'Aktion' Alert calls for Muslims to call Fox to protest
http://www.cair-net.org/default.asp?Page=articleView&id=212&theType=AA
MUSLIM GROUP DECRIES TERROR DEPICTION
Richard Huff, Edmonton Journal, 1/9/05
http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/index.html
The first new episode this season of Fox's 24 has yet to hit the screen and
already the network has offended a Muslim group.
After viewing a portion of the first episode included on a DVD in
Entertainment Weekly, officials from the Council on American-Islamic
Relations expressed dismay at the depiction of a Muslim family.
"At first I was shocked," organization spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed told the
New York Daily News. "In this particular case, they show an American-Muslim
family and they portray them as terrorists..."
"What we will accomplish today will change the world," the father tells the
son over breakfast. "We are fortunate that our family has been chosen to do
this."
Ahmed said the scene "casts a cloud of suspicion over every American-Muslim
family out there."
A Fox spokesman said the company had no comment.
Ahmed acknowledged the possibility that in the remaining half of the first
episode -- which was not on the promotional DVD -- the storyline could have
indicated this was not a typical family
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MIM: Not a typical family ?
A baby in a bomb belt is regarded as a cause for hilarity while a babe in a bikini is the epitome of apostasy.
Left: A photo from a family album found in Hebron in which a baby was dressed up as a suicide bomber replete with bomb belt, 'sticks of dynamite' and martyr's bandana. When interviewed the baby's family said the child had been dressed up at a party "as a joke". http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/06/28/baby.photo/
Right: Muslims were outraged when this photo of Miss Afghanistan was published . Although she was an American citizen who had been in the US since 1996 appeals were made for Hamid Karzai to revoke her Afghani citizenship and she was threatened with arrest for if she returned to the country. http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2003-10/27/article10.shtml
Islamic Purity Test
http://www.sacredcowburgers.com/side_orders/
Which babe offends you the most?
Click on the picture to take the test but read the Sacred Cow Burgers website disclaimer first:
http://www.sacredcowburgers.com/beef/
This site is a Political-Correctness-Free Zone. If we have somehow offended you...well, tough buttons. We didn't take the name "Sacred Cow Burgers" to appeal to anyone's oh-so-delicate sensitivities. Unless you're living in Iran, North Korea, Red China, Massachussetts, New Jersey, California, or some other totalitarian state, ain't nobody holding a gun to your head to make you visit this site. You may have a right to be offended, but that doesn't mean you have a right to be taken seriously. If you don't like it, begone vile hominid!
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MIM: The same Muslims in Egypt who were probably dancing in the streets after the WTC attacks, were outraged by an American movie made in Egypt which had a scene which depicted one of the characters fleeing in horror after encountering the filth of an Egyptian bathroom.
From Dr.Frank's What's It blog
http://www.doktorfrank.com/archives/002490.html
Here's a fascinating run-down of Egyptian pop culture's love-hate relationship with America, Western values, and good old fashioned common decency. It seems like it's mostly "hate" in all three categories: the mini-series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion ("Horseman without a Horse") is a dead giveaway, as is the hit song "I Love Amr Moussa, I hate Israel." Not to mention this:
A hit comedy made in Egypt last year, "Saidi at the American University," is about an ignorant peasant coming to the big city. Featuring the comic star Mohamed Heneidi, the film pits simple, honest, Egyptian values against the arrogant, decadent values of the West, represented by the American University in Cairo. In the film, the peasant's values prevail after being tempted by Western style clothes and the free market claptrap of a U.S.-passport-carrying professor. In the culminating scene, there is a moment, always cheered by audiences, when Heneidi's character rebels and burns an Israeli flag, jumping on it and giving a Nazi-style salute.
Like I said, mostly hate. But there is also the occasional voice of reason, even when Egyptian pride is at stake. The article reports on an official debate over whether the government should censor the film "The Mummy Returns:"
There were serious objections, and the film was nearly rejected because of a scene in which Brendan Fraser flees an Egyptian bathroom because it is so dirty.Archaeologist Hawass was there and defended freedom of expression. "First," he recalls arguing, "our bathrooms are dirty, and we should clean them."...
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MIM: Islamonline, a glossy internet version of ' Der Sturmer' blames the depiction of Muslims as terrorists on 'the Jewish media' (aka Murdoch) and is outraged at the approval shown for what they infer is the program's bid to present the 'true nature' of Islam.
http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2005-01/10/article02.shtml
By Adam Wild
WASHINGTON, January 10 (IslamOnline.net) – The Fox network premiered on Sunday, January 10, the first episode of the action drama "24", which in its fourth season features "Muslim terrorists" plotting attacks inside the US.
It portrays a Walkman-toting, bubble-gum-chewing Muslim teenager fighting with his conservative father about dating an American girl and talking on the phone, in a disguised effort to conceal their true "terrorist" nature.
The young man is also seen helping his parents mastermind a plot to kill as many Americans by launching an attack on a commuter train.
On the breakfast table, the father tells his young son: "What we will accomplish today will change the world. We are fortunate that our family has been chosen to do this."
"Yes, father," the son replies.
The US secretary of state is also seen taken hostage by the "Muslim terrorists."
The drama climaxes with the defense secretary shown on an Internet video tape like those coming out of US-occupied Iraq.
The series, which earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding drama in each of its first three seasons, is named 24 because the action on the show occurs in "real-time."
Each season covers the events of one day in the life of agent Jack Bauer and his colleagues at the Counter Terrorist Unit in Los Angeles.
Every episode in a season covers the events of one hour in that day (hence 24 episodes per season).
The drama is produced by the Fox Broadcasting Company, a television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of billionaire Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
News Corporation is one of the world's largest and most influential media corporations whose production of motion pictures and television programming are broadcast in 35 television networks in the US.
Murdoch is generally regarded as the most politically influential media proprietor in the world, and is regularly courted by politicians in the United States, Britain and Australia, according to the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
Muslim Anger
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) had on December 30, hit out at the new drama.
"The way the episode depicts Muslims creates an atmosphere in which many
Americans look at all Muslims as suspects in the war on terror. It's very dangerous and very disturbing," said CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed.
"They are taking everyday American Muslim families and making them suspects;
they're making it seem like families are co-conspirators in this terrorist
plot," she added.
A recent nation-wide poll, conducted by the Cornell University, showed that at least 44 percent of the Americans backs curbing Muslims' civil rights and monitoring their places of worship.
A May 2004 report released by the US Senate Office Of Research concluded that Arab Americans and the Muslim community in the US have taken the brunt of the Patriot Act and other federal powers applied in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Welcome
The drama was, however, hailed by Jewish groups and lobbyists as a bid to reveal Muslims' "true nature."
Jewish writer Daniel Pipes wrote in the Israeli Jerusalem Post and the American New York Post hoping Fox would not bow to Muslim objections on the series.
Bypassing the Senate, US President George Bush appointed in 2003 Pipes to the board of the US Institute of Peace, a government-funded think-tank which concentrates on foreign policy.
As a frequent commentator, Pipes has warned that America's Muslims were the enemy within and called for unrestricted racial profiling and monitoring of Muslims in the military, wrote the Guardian.
He claimed Muslim American government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps "need to be watched for connections to terrorism."
Pipes also alleged that "mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples."
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MIM: Life imitates Art
CAIR doth protest too much
This newspaper report of how the hijackers lived among us could have been the basis for the 24 script. Most jarring is the account of how 9/11 hijacker Abdulaziz Alomari rented a $1.4000 a month home in a suburban Florida neighborhood, and invited the neighbors for a pizza and Happy Meal party before sending his wife and children home to Saudi Arabia. Alomari's wife told the guests that ' where she came from it was customary to throw a party before moving' - to leave nice memories '. A week later her husband and Mohammed Atta crashed Flight 11 into the World Trade Center.
'You Never Imagine' A Hijacker Next Door
by Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post
September 16, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A38026-2001Sep15¬Found=true
They were smart, technically proficient, and ambitious in their own peculiar way. They were comfortable with the Internet and the modern modes of business travel. They were the kind of people who could have succeeded in America if they hadn't wanted to destroy it.
Theirs was a soft, subtle presence in this country for many months, in some cases years. They didn't blend in, exactly, but they stayed out of trouble. One suspected ringleader, Mohamed Atta, got a ticket in April for driving without a license, and failed to show up for his court hearing, but police never followed up on a bench warrant for his arrest. Other than that his only slip-up came a couple of years ago in Germany, when he failed to return three rented videos ("Ace Ventura," "Vampires" and "Storm of the Century") and the movie rental company turned to a collection agency.
These conspirators didn't creep into the country in the dark of night. They were welcomed in daylight. At least some, if not all, arrived legally, with visas, though two were later put on a government "watch list" of suspected terrorists. One graduated from a prestigious flight school in Daytona Beach, Fla. They played by the rules well enough to obtain, in some cases, Social Security numbers, driver's licenses and frequent-flier accounts.
They tended to pay for things with wads of cash. At times they could be standoffish, and made people nervous. Neighbors sometimes had an uncomfortable feeling -- why didn't they talk more? Why did this man claim to have no home phone number? Why were these people holding meetings so late at night?
Even so, as the names of the suspected hijackers have been made public, you don't hear people saying they saw it coming. No one says, "We always thought that guy was a terrorist."
The failure of this country to detect a massive terrorist conspiracy in its midst -- at its flight schools, at the rental car counters, at the computer console of the Kinko's copy center, boarding commercial jets bound for the West Coast -- may take months to explain fully. Some familiar explanations will surface, from the bungling of intelligence-gathering agencies to the cultural fragmentation of a country where so many people are transient and so few know their neighbors.
But as the details of the conspiracy emerge, it is clear that the terrorists took great pains to conceal their plans and their identities. They listed nearby Mail Boxes Etc. outlets as home addresses. They moved every two or three months. They may have assumed the identities of others. They skittered across the surface of a large and diverse nation with hardly a snag.
They were young men, mostly, the youngest just 20. Some were loners. One told his landlord he hoped to find a Mexican bride; they made good wives, he thought. A few were married, with small children who played with American kids in their neighborhoods. They favored motels and apartments and rented homes in beachfront communities near the flight schools in Florida. Their locations - - Delray Beach, Vero Beach, Daytona Beach -- have been famous for retirees and race cars, never terrorists. At times they landed elsewhere: Phoenix, San Diego. One lived briefly just outside the Beltway, taking English classes and computer training at Tysons Corner.
"To me, they acted like normal human beings, nothing abnormal," said Henry George, who taught two suspected hijackers, Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, in Dade County last year. "They were polite, maybe even shy."
Charles Lisa, who rented apartments to two of the men in South Florida, told the Miami Herald that they were the kind of young men you'd want to take to a baseball game. When they moved out, the landlord asked for a forwarding address. One of the men smiled and said, "I'll send you a postcard."
Without a Single Bullet
It was the most spectacular crime in American history. Although a body count is incomplete, it appears that the casualties in Tuesday's attack may exceed the 4,435 Americans officially listed as having died in combat in the Revolutionary War. The terrorists achieved their goal without firing a single bullet.
They may have used plastic knives and box cutters, the latter of which could have been assembled with razor blades in toiletry kits that passed easily through airport baggage scanners. But the key weapons were airplanes, once considered exotic, even physics- defying, but in the modern world as innocuous and familiar as sparrows. The terrorists turned them into guided missiles.
Fully loaded, ready for takeoff, the American Airlines Boeing 767- 200 jet, serial number 22332, weighed 351,000 pounds. That would be the first bomb. Its fuel tank holds 20,450 gallons of jet fuel, which is similar to kerosene. At ideal conditions it can burn at 3,500 degrees. It's not as volatile as gasoline, but molecule for molecule it packs more punch. A single gallon can produce 125,000 BTUs of energy. What thousands of gallons can do when splashed on a skyscraper and ignited is now common knowledge.
For most Americans, the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon came literally out of the blue. The enemy was invisible and inscrutable. No one claimed responsibility. People asked: Why had they done this? What did they want?
The U.S. government has said the prime suspect in the attack is Osama bin Laden, a radical Saudi multimillionaire who funds a worldwide network of terrorists. If he's responsible, Tuesday's attack is the continuation of a five-year-old war that hadn't fully consumed American attention until Tuesday.
Bin Laden wants to cleanse the Muslim world of Western influences and return it to an idealized state that he believes existed a thousand years ago. He's enraged by American support of Israel and the presence of American soldiers -- infidels -- on his home soil of Saudi Arabia. He declared war on the United States in 1996, and later issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that assures his followers that they will ascend to heaven for killing the enemies of Islam.
Terrorists linked to bin Laden have attacked American military barracks, warships and embassies. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. They have dreamed of increasingly elaborate operations. Bin Laden has said of Westerners, "They violate our land and occupy it and steal the Muslims' possessions, and when faced by resistance, they call it terrorism."
That's the general framework of the conspiracy that led to Tuesday's attack. The Americans surrounding the hijackers, living next door to them, giving them lessons at flight schools, didn't think they were terrorists. The hijackers didn't think so, either.
Dedicated to Their Mission
Many were Saudis. Their names, to American ears, might seem like minor variations on a theme: Alhamzi, Al Suqami, Alghamdi, Alshehri, Alhaznawi, Alnami, Alomari, and so on. The men changed the spelling of their names as they moved from place to place, increasing the difficulty of nailing down the true identities of the conspirators.
Officials believe that some received training in Afghanistan, bin Laden's base of operations. Others, officials suspect, were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a radical Muslim group that's part of bin Laden's network. The officials believe that one conspirator, Khalid al-Midhar, is a Yemeni member of the Islamic Army of Yemen, another bin Laden affiliate.
There's no doubt that they were utterly dedicated to the mission. No one ratted out the group.
Among the 19 hijackers identified by authorities was Mohamed Atta, a globe-trotter, someone who was born in Egypt, received a degree at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany, and most recently lived in the suburban Fort Lauderdale, Fla., community of Coral Springs. Atta is thought to have piloted American Airlines Flight 11, the first to slam into the World Trade Center.
A letter written by Atta, left in his luggage at Boston's Logan Airport, said he planned to kill himself so he could go to heaven as a martyr. It also contained a Saudi passport, an international driver's license, instructional videos for flying Boeing airliners and an Islamic prayer schedule.
Some reports have said the letter was dated 1996, adding to the evidence that the operation was years in the planning. In 1996 Atta was in Hamburg, believed to be a major European center of operations for followers of bin Laden. Atta wrote his university thesis on urban renewal -- how to improve a city. His thesis adviser, Dittmar Machule, described Atta as "a very nice young man: polite, very religious and with a highly developed critical faculty."
In Hamburg he lived with Marwan Al-Shehhi, 11 years his junior. Atta and Al-Shehhi would be largely inseparable for years to come - - until the day they boarded separate planes in Boston and hijacked them to New York City.
The chief federal prosecutor in Hamburg, Kay Nehm, said that Atta and Al-Shehhi had organized a terrorist cell in the city "with the aim of launching spectacular attacks on the institutions of the United States." Neighbors say the men hosted meetings late at night. Another man who lived in their apartment, they say, was Ziad Jarrahi, who was aboard the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
After coming to America, Atta and Al-Shehhi diligently pursued flight lessons. They turned first to Huffman Aviation, in Venice, Fla., where they paid a total of $38,000 for lessons. They rented a bedroom in a house nearby and slept in twin beds. Their landlords, Charles and Drucilla Voss, thought the men were arrogant, and could have been tidier. But they detected nothing sinister. "I just could not believe what the FBI confronted us with yesterday morning," said Drucilla Voss. "You could not believe they were in your house."
The men racked up 260 hours of pilot training but still didn't have any experience with something as technologically advanced as a commercial jetliner. They turned to SimCenter Inc., in the Dade County municipality of Opa-locka, which offers training on a Boeing 727 full-motion flight simulator. They took one three-hour course, then came back for another.
The conspirators apparently did their plotting face to face, in meetings late at night at rented homes. Some of the people associated with the group may still be at large. Authorities are looking for Amer Kamfar, who lived in Vero Beach with his wife and four children. He has an FAA license, with extensive qualifications as a pilot, flight engineer and mechanic. Neighbor Hank Habora said about two or three weeks ago Kamfar left Vero Beach in a hurry.
"They took all their stuff and put it out by the trash: clothes, furniture, pots and pans," he said.
There was one pronounced link between the conspirators and the rest of American society: Their children. They did not have to participate in the jihad. In Vero Beach, Lisa Dubose's 6-year-old son was best buddies with the son of a man named Abdulaziz Alomari -- who later boarded American Airlines Flight 11 with Atta.
The adult Alomaris didn't socialize much. A wave now and again. They spent time with another Muslim family -- clannish behavior that the American neighbors assumed was normal. Theirs was a nice home, rented for $1,400 a month.
The only problem with the Alomaris were the late-night meetings. Next-door neighbor Betty Egger said that as many as a dozen cars would be parked outside, some on her own lawn. It rattled her to see car headlights flashing through her windows at 2 in the morning.
Alomari told his landlord in August that the family would soon be moving back home, to Saudi Arabia. Then, just before Labor Day, something unusual happened: The Alomaris threw a party for all the neighborhood children. "They invited all the kids, even ones they'd never seen before," said neighbor Andrew Krease.
They served pizza and Happy Meals. Where they come from, Alomari's wife told the neighbors, it is customary to throw a party before moving -- to leave nice memories.
Across the country, the hijackers kept a similarly low profile. Two, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar, lived at one point in Lemon Grove, a quiet residential neighborhood just east of San Diego, renting rooms from Abdussattar Shaikh, a retired English professor at San Diego State University and co-founder of San Diego's Islamic Center. The FBI identified Alhamzi and Al-Midhar as two of the five hijackers who crashed American Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Tuesday.
"They seemed like nice, normal people," neighbor Denise Adair said. "You never imagine that you have a hijacker living next door."
Another suspected hijacker, Hani Hanjour, believed to have been the pilot on the plane that hit the Pentagon, appears to have lived in Arizona for the past five years and received pilot training at CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., according to company official T. Gerald Chilton Jr. For three months in 1996 and in December 1997, Hanjour received private instruction to become a pilot of a single-engine aircraft.
But Hanjour, Chilton said, "never completed the course. He was not believed proficient enough to obtain a license." Then, he said, Hanjour called last year to get more training, this time on multi-engine planes. He was turned down.
"He just wasn't a good student with the dedication we see in U.S. Air Force pilots that train there or European airline pilots," Chilton said. "Not that he was rude or impolite. He was just described as a difficult student."
Many details of the plan remain unknown, but its execution began no later than Aug. 25, when the hijackers began buying plane tickets. In many cases they used Internet travel agencies, such as Travelocity.com. Money was apparently no object. Two of the men paid $4,500 each for one-way first-class tickets on United Airlines Flight 175 -- putting them close to the cockpit.
Why they picked Sept. 11 is unknown. Possibly they selected it because it was a Tuesday, a light day for cross-country travel. Fewer passengers would mean easier crowd control. The technology- savvy terrorists could easily have shopped for less-crowded flights by examining the airline Web sites.
On Aug. 26, Marwan Al-Shehhi and another man checked into the Panther Motel in Deerfield Beach, Fla., Room 12. They paid $500 in advance. The motel's owners, Diane and Richard Surma, noticed that the men didn't go to the beach, but rather preferred to spend their time around the motel's small swimming pool. A third man visited often. The impression they made was, as always, fairly innocuous: "They were very neat and very polite," said Richard Surma.
One day, the owners noticed that the men had used a towel to cover a picture of a woman in their room. The model wore a dress that exposed one of her shoulders.
When the men left on Sept. 9, Richard Surma looked through the trash. He found illustrated books on martial arts -- karate and jujitsu. There was a German-English dictionary and a box-cutter knife. There were FAA air traffic maps. And finally there were flight training textbooks, including information on flying Boeing passenger jets.
Last Friday night Atta, Al-Shehhi and a third man spent hours drinking and playing video games at Shuckums, a Hollywood, Fla., sports bar. Atta played video Trivial Pursuit and blackjack with great determination. "He looked nervous," manager Tony Amos said. "He kept putting dollars in and he was really focused."
Al-Shehhi and the other man had about five drinks each, he said - - Captain Morgan rum and Coke, and Stolichnaya vodka and orange juice. At one point they argued. "There were a lot of hand gestures and Al-Shehhi was definitely upset," Amos said.
The bartender feared that Al-Shehhi might leave without paying his $48 tab. The manager intervened, asking if there was a problem. Al-Shehhi, glaring, pulled out a wad of cash and said: "There is no money issue. I am an airline pilot."
The terrorists appear to have put greatest emphasis on Flight 11. Multiple hijackers on that plane had flight training. They also went out of their way to bypass security at Logan Airport. Officials believe that Atta and Alomari rented a car in Boston, drove to Portland, Maine, and took a room Monday night at the Comfort Inn south of town. They then flew on a short flight Tuesday morning from Portland to Boston, changing to Flight 11. By going through security at the small airport in Portland -- at the groggy hour of 5:44 a.m. -- they avoided the tougher security checkpoint in Boston.
Roger Quirion and Vincent Meisner, making business trips to the West Coast, flew with Atta and Alomari on that first flight Tuesday. "They were joined at the hip," recalled Quirion. The two men struck him as clean-cut, wearing slacks, dress shoes and causal shirts, and carrying dark shoulder bags. Their hair was closely cropped. They had no facial hair. In short, they looked like typical businessmen. Unmenacing.
One of the hijackers took a seat in the fourth row. As Meisner passed to take the seat behind him, his luggage bumped the suspected hijacker's shoulder.
"Excuse me," Meisner said.
The man merely hunkered lower, putting his head down.
Meisner thought, "Well, he hasn't had his coffee yet, so I'll leave him alone."
When Atta and Alomari boarded Flight 11 in Boston they sat in the eighth row, across the aisle from David Angell, producer of the TV show "Frasier." Elsewhere on the plane were three more hijackers.
What happened in the coming minutes and hours on the four hijacked planes is still being pieced together, the forensic evidence largely obliterated. Cell phone accounts from passengers indicate that, on some planes at least, the hijackers stabbed members of the crew. Cockpit doors are supposed to be locked, but they are too flimsy to be much of an obstacle to determined men.
What's certain is that they had trained for this moment. They lacked the skills of real airline pilots, but they knew what they would see in the cockpit, what the console would look like, how it would feel to grab the control yoke of a jetliner. Atta and Al- Shehhi had spent most of their time on that flight simulator in Opa-locka working on one thing in particular: turning.
They didn't have to know how to land.
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MIM: Despite the fact that everything in 24 could be based on real life it appears that FOX, in a display of abject dhimmitude, was intimidated by the Saudi funded Wahabist group CAIR into airing spots showing 'nice Muslims' because as a spokeswoman melodramatically put it :"it (seeing Muslims as terrorists on 24) can bring real life consequences to Muslims and their lives here".
One need only read the article above to see the "real life" consequences which Muslims groups like those of CAIR, whose organisation is a defendant in a 9/11 terror lawsuit,have brought to Americans and their lives here....
MIM: Instead of Muslims writing to complain about 24 Americans should be writing to FOX TV urging them not to cave in to pressure from CAIR.
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MIM: Not only does life imitate art - it becomes the basis for a 3 figure film deal. In this case the one Khadr son who claims he is not involved in terrorism has just signed a contract for the movie rights to the story of his life as a member of what Dr. Daniel Pipes calls " The Khadrs, Canada' first Family of Terrorism "
Here are the first and latest excerpts from his blog on the continuing saga:
The complete story can be read at: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/303
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The Khadrs, Canada's First Family of Terrorism, in the News I recently wrote in "[The Khadrs:] Canada's First Family of Terrorism" about an Egyptian immigrant family to Canada, six of whose members (father, mother, three sons, daughter) either engage in terrorism or actively support it. But the story hardly ended a few weeks ago, and I shall here provide updates as the news of their actions filters in.
Maha Elsamnah may have taken her then-14-year-old son Omar from Canada to Pakistan in 2001 and enrolled him for Al-Qaeda training but today she returned with another teenage son, Abdul Karim, from Pakistan to Canada. "The teen flashed a peace sign as his wheelchair was guided past a throng of reporters," the Canadian Press informs us. The Globe and Mail today quotes Khadr family members saying that if Abdul Karim is ever going to walk properly again, it will through the efforts of the Canadian health-care system. To mark the occasion of their return, the Globe and Mail quotes Elsamnah insisting just a month ago that Al-Qaeda-sponsored training camps were the best place for her children. "Would you like me to raise my child in Canada to be, by the time he's 12 or 13 years old, to be on drugs or having some homosexual relationship? Is it better?" (April 9, 2004)
Jan. 11, 2005 update: Abdurahman Khadr, the "good" son, has sold the film rights to his life, reports the National Post's Michael Friscolanti, for a sum that could reach US$500,000 by the time his story reaches the big screen (which could happen as early as 2006). In contrast, Daily Variety says the deal is worth "mid- to high-six figures." The producers hope Johnny Depp will star in the lead role. Vincent Newman, president of Vincent Newman Entertainment, who bought the rights called it "a classic black sheep story—a story about the rebel of the family." The National Post article points out some of the many contradictions in Abdurahman Khadr's story that the moviemakers will have to sort out; but, given that Khadr has reserved himself the right to help develop the screenplay, it appears it will follow the storyline that makes him look best. Khadr, however, won't be able to do so while basking in Hollywood's rays, being denied a passport (on which, see the May 15, 2004 update above) and having for now to stay in Canada.
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5466248
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December 23, 2004 An American Married to al-Qaida By BRIAN ROSS and DAVID SCOTT, ABCNews.com (Dec. 23) - A California woman reveals to ABC News that she unknowingly married a Muslim extremist who helped set up what authorities say was one of the first al-Qaida sleeper cells out of their Orange County apartment complex.
Saraah Olson says she watched as her then-husband, Hisham Diab, and his group transformed local teen Adam Gadahn into an America-hating fanatic who she says is the masked man who promised in an al-Qaida video message released in Pakistan late October that the "streets of America will run red with blood." "I was just a stepping stone to a green card," Olson said. "I married a terrorist. I married somebody who did not like America, who didn't like Americans." Gadahn, who met Olson's former husband at a local mosque, was "fresh meat," she said. "Someone they could control. Not only that, he's very unassuming-looking, he can do a lot of their tasks." The voice, gestures and rhetoric of the video's "Azzam the American" were all familiar to Olson, especially the phrase "red with blood," which was one of the group's favorite sayings, she said. And over the course of three years, Olson said, some of Osama bin Laden's top deputies would stay with her and her husband, including blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who would later go to prison for life for his role in organizing terrorist plots against the United States. Olson said she repeatedly tried to notify the FBI of her husband's suspicious activities, but that she was never taken seriously. "I'm in hell," Olson remembers thinking after she recognized Abdel-Rahman in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. "I have entered the bowels of hell and I'm going to be here forever. And I've only been married seven months. I've got a terrorist in my house." The FBI said in a statement that counterterrorism is their top priority. "Whenever we receive credible information pertaining to terrorist threats against the United States, the FBI acts immediately to thoroughly pursue all such leads," the statement read. Federal authorities say the couple's neighbor Khalil Deek, considered a major al-Qaida figure, ran the Orange County sleeper cell operation. "I was the wife," Olson now says. "So it looked like a typical guy married to an American girl with the little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in tow." Blinded by Love But when she first met Diab 13 years ago, while working at a local university issuing foreign student visas, she thought the then-32-year-old Diab had more honorable intentions. "I really loved him," she said. "I was 22 years old and I was in love." Diab introduced himself as an Egyptian national who had overstayed his visa and needed to switch visas, said Olson. She then explained that the school's program was not applicable to him, that he could not switch visas. "He seemed fine with it," Olson said. "He left. No problems. Came back the next day, 'Will you go out with me?'" In just a few months, they were married and settled in an apartment complex in Anaheim. Olson and her 4-year-old son from another relationship, Ryan, both converted to Islam. The honeymoon was short-lived, however. First, she said Diab insisted she wear the hijab, a head scarf worn by certain devout Muslim women, and conform to other strict Islamic customs. "You have to listen to me and I am God," she said Diab told her. "Follow the rules." Olson's son Ryan, now a teenager, says he was beaten almost daily when he did poorly in the Arabic lessons he was forced to take. "I mispronounced something and that set him off," the college freshman said. "And I remember he clasped both his hands together and just hauled off and hit me right square in the back. I remember the wind, you know, getting knocked out of me, crying out." Ryan said Diab's cell tried to recruit him into their group and he would be brought to small meetings where the men would rail and plot against America. "He wanted me to be just as extreme as he was you know, hate America, anything that his little group didn't like," he said. "I just can't really say I ever believed it. I just went along, just nodded my head." And Saraah Olson admits she played a role in drawing up the papers for a fake charity, called Charity Without Borders, that the cell used to funnel money overseas. The organization would not be discovered or shut down until after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was an act of desperation, Olson said. "I'm not proud of it. Not proud of it at all," she said. "I just knew that I lived in hell and I wanted out. And if helping him do whatever it was that he was doing meant that I wouldn't get hit, I was willing to do it at that point." Falling Into al-Qaida's Web? Olson's story is confirmed in detail by the imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, Haitham Bundakji. He said Diab and others in the cell were disruptive troublemakers who caused the most harm by recruiting innocent others, especially Gadahn. "And I blame myself and my people for not embracing him (Gadahn) and not making more efforts to gain him," Bundakji said. "He fell in the wrong hands and he became as aggressive as they were." Olson explained why she now feels it is the time to come forward. "Because it's the right thing to do," she said. "These are dangerous people and a lot of people were hurt." 12-23-04 | ||||
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