The Al-Qaeda-ISM Terror Connection - Opinion

Most people have short memories, but here's something that calls for remembering: last year, Front Page Magazine ran an article about links between the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the London bombings on 7/7 that left 52 dead and hundreds wounded.

Now comes new evidence of a link between the ISM and Al-Qaeda.

Evidence back then showed that the explosives used in the London subway attacks were found by British and Israeli intelligence officials to be remarkably similar to those used in a 2003 bombing of the Mike's Place bar in Israel. Related to this, Israel National News.com reported also that British and Israeli intelligence reports showed that one of the terrorists involved had a British passport, arrived in Israel on February 19, 2003, and stayed for only one day. During his stay, he may have met with Asif Hanif and Omar Sharif. Both of these men, with the assistance of Hamas, would later become suicide bombers. Hanif and Sharif traveled from Britain to Israel under the auspices of the ISM's Alternative Tourism Group, the precursor to the ISM. Both terrorists told Israeli border police they were entering for purposes of Alternative Tourism and met with the ISM in Gaza at a memorial for Rachel Corrie where they "had tea."

The ISM's long-term goal, as a communist-anarchist movement, is to first dismantle Israel as a capitalist democratic state for the PLO Islamists and their pan-Arab cause; and then to bring the "revolution" back here to the United States to do the same at home on our border with Mexico. Plans are already being made with other subversive groups in the United States to do this. Groups such as La Voz De Aztlan, a Marxist irredentist group, plan on joining up with Palestinian and Arab-Muslim students and their anarchist-communist allies on US campuses to bring the same activities to our border with Mexico as are seen in the West Bank attacks on the security fence.

Now comes new evidence of a link between the ISM and Al-Qaeda.

Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraq, 45, considered by the CIA as of one of Osama Bin-Laden's most talented operations officers, was just captured and should be a boon to US intelligence in the War on Terror. People now say he represents the link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al-Qaeda, thus justifying our presence in Iraq. But people have yet to see the link to the International Solidarity Movement.

Al-Hadi is an Iraqi and uses the nom de guerre "Abu Abdallah" (father of Abdallah) in a style usually used by Palestinian terrorists. Being Iraqi, Abu Abdullah is part of the Ba'ath party in Iraq, among the closest allies of the PLO and Hamas. However, Abu Abdullah was captured crossing into Iraq from Iran. Recent intelligence reports have remarked on how the Sunnis who make up Hamas in Gaza are now getting money, weapons and training from Iran's Shiiite-majority state to be used against Israel. For anyone claiming Al-Qaeda has nothing to do with Iraq or 9/11, the Iranian-Al-Qaeda connection is now obvious. But according to an interview I had with a former Iraqi national police sergeant who is now exiled in the United States, the Iraqi police were always hamstrung in

Both terrorists... met with the ISM in Gaza.

arresting many Ba'athists who broke the law, even for murder or robbery, because they also clandestinely belonged to Al-Qaeda. According to the former Iraqi police officer, that included members of Iraq's national police as well.

The Pentagon has reported that Abu Abdullah was responsible for managing Al-Qaeda's affairs and possibly even focusing on operations outside Iraq against Western targets. Interrogated by US forces, he has now been credited with the first direct Al-Qaeda suicide attack on Israeli soil - an attack that the ISM was linked to. That attack, on Mike's Place in Tel Aviv, is now alleged to have been carried out on direct orders from Osama Bin-Laden, according to the information obtained from Abu Abdullah. Three Israelis were killed in the attack and sixty people were wounded.

Al-Hadi recruited the two British Muslims of Pakistani origin at the notoriously Wahhabist Finsbury Park Mosque in London. They entered the Holy Land through Jordan, using Ghandoni's Alternative Tourism as an excuse, and then proceeded directly to a meeting with ISM leaders just before their attack. Both terrorists were English-speaking and had EU passports.

Since the explosives used in London on 7/7 could be linked to the ISM through the Mike's Place bombing, the involvement of Al-Qaeda also infers how ISM quarters may have been the place where the terrorists picked up those explosives prior to the Tel Aviv attack, since the terrorists would have been unable to smuggle explosives in through Jordan prior to meeting "for tea" with ISM activists. Israeli intelligence reports showed the two killers only met with the ISM, an organization that has consistently called terrorist attacks "legitimate resistance." To this day, no one knows for certain who gave them their bomb or where they received instructions on their target for attack; however, it is clear they met with the ISM and now those same two terrorists are known to be linked inextricably to Al-Qaeda by way of Abu Abdullah.

Sharif failed to detonate his bomb belt after Hanif exploded himself in the busy bar, a hangout for Americans in Tel Aviv. After fleeing the scene, Sharif was found later floating face down in the Mediterranean. Palestinian terrorists do not murder their own kind who fail on suicide missions, knowing that the Israelis have no death penalty and that in the future they may even be released from prison in negotiations or prisoner swaps. As

Al-Hadi recruited the two British Muslims.

mentioned, Western intelligence agencies feel the capture and information from Abu Abdullah show the international terrorism network is not made up of just disparate groups with myriad goals. Al-Qaeda and Bin-Laden can now be linked to Hamas and the PLO. The fact that Sharif, a British national, may have known too much about the ISM and Al-Qaeda being behind his attack may have prompted Hamas to liquidate him not just to conceal the Al-Qaeda link, but the link to the ISM, as well. There was simply too much to lose, because had the connection to the ISM been established it might have led to the demise of the network of the terrorist-support movement found on so many campuses throughout the USA and most of Europe.

Homeland Security needs to take an even deeper look into the ISM and discover whether Abu Abdullah himself ever had contacts with ISM leadership in the USA or Europe during his operational activities for Bin-Laden.

Opinion	Tevet 11, 5769 / January 7, '09