DAILY ALERT

In-Depth Issues:

Sunni Islamist Websites in Iraq Claim Iran/Al-Qaeda Contacts Months Before 9/11 (MEMRI)
    In early October 2006, Sunni Islamist websites affiliated with the jihad groups in Iraq posted what they claimed was a top-secret Iranian document dated May 2001, indicating contacts between top al-Qaeda figures and the highest echelons of the Iranian intelligence apparatus, which is part of the office of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
    The document, signed by the head of Khamenei's intelligence apparatus, Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri, includes statements by Khamenei regarding the importance of the Iranian and Muslim struggle against the U.S. and Israel, which "constitutes the primary goal" of the Iranian regime. It also mentions the need to tighten Iran's cooperation with "the fighters of al-Qaeda and Hizballah."
    Contacts between the Iranian regime and top al-Qaeda operatives were exposed in a February 2003 report in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, in an interview with Hamid Reza Zakeri, a senior official in Iran's Revolutionary Guards who had defected to the West.

British Al-Qaeda Terrorist Planned to Hit Subway Stations, Hotels - Sean O'Neill and Adam Fresco (Times-UK)
    The Savoy hotel, Waterloo station, the Heathrow Express, and a Tube train under the Thames were on a hitlist of targets drawn up by a British al-Qaeda terrorist, a court was told Monday.
    Dhiren Barot admitted planning "back-to-back" attacks on London which he hoped would emulate the Madrid train bombings that killed hundreds of commuters in March 2004.
    Two projects, to build a radioactive "dirty bomb" and to pack stretch limousines with gas cylinders and explosives and detonate them in car parks beneath buildings, appeared to be close to fruition when discovered in summer 2004.

Egyptian Convicted in Madrid Bombing (AP/CNN)
    An Egyptian wanted in connection with the 2004 Madrid train bombings was convicted on Monday on international terrorism charges in Italy and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
    The court in Milan convicted Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, 35, and Yahi Ragheh, 23, who prosecutors said was preparing to be a suicide bomber.

Palestinian Women Face Rising Domestic Violence - Steven Erlanger (New York Times)
    Discriminatory laws and traditional practices combine to perpetuate violence against women by their family members and intimate partners in the Palestinian territories, according to a report issued Tuesday by Human Rights Watch.
    See also Violence Against Palestinian Women and Girls (Human Rights Watch)

"Israel Life Sciences Road Show" Opens (Washington Post)
    The Israel Life Sciences Road Show came to Herndon, VA, Monday, where 13 Israeli companies presented their pharmaceutical products and medical devices to key players in the U.S. life sciences and biotech community.
    The tour, which is also stopping in Boston, New York, and northern New Jersey this week, is aimed at forging relationships between Israeli manufacturers and U.S. venture capital investors and biomedical companies.
    The Fairfax County (VA) Economic Development Authority has opened an office in Tel Aviv.

News Resources - Israel and the Mideast:

Global Commentary and Think-Tank Analysis (Best of U.S., UK, and Israel):

Observations:

Hot for Martyrdom - Michael Coren (National Post-Canada)

• Dr. Tawfik Hamid is a medical doctor, author, and activist who once was a member of Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group"), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden's videos.
• He's determined to tell a complacent North America what he knows about fundamentalist Muslim imperialism. "Yes, 'imperialism,'" he tells me. "The deliberate and determined expansion of militant Islam and its attempt to triumph not only in the Islamic world but in Europe and North America. Pure ideology. Muslim terrorists kill and slaughter not because of what they experience but because of what they believe."
• He is now 45 years old, and has had many years to reflect on why he was willing to die and kill for his religion. "The first thing you have to understand is that it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with poverty or lack of education," he says. "I was from a middle-class family and my parents were not religious. Hardly anyone in the movement at university came from a background that was different from mine. I've heard this poverty nonsense time and time again from Western apologists for Islam, most of them not Muslim by the way."
• The extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from Saudi Arabia to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia.
• "We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme, and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed, and Jews called pigs and monkeys."
• "I can tell you what it is not about. Not about Israel, not about Iraq, not about Afghanistan. They are mere excuses. Algerian Muslim fundamentalists murdered 150,000 other Algerian Muslims, sometimes slitting the throats of children in front of their parents. Are you seriously telling me that this was because of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians or American foreign policy?"
• "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."