The criticism of Saleh’s bona fides as a partner in the War on Terror has merit. His government has a history of cutting deals with Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has prospered under it. In February 2006, 23 members of Al-Qaeda, including participants in the 2000 U.S.S. Cole bombing and the 2003 Riyadh bombings, carried out a very suspicious escape from a high-security prison. Those that were captured were pardoned as long as they promised not to return to a life of terrorism. In February 2009, Saleh’s regime released 170 members of Al-Qaeda after they made a similar pledge. The Arab press reported in November 2009 on the presence of at least two Al-Qaeda camps in Abyan Province, one of which was recently opened, that went untouched.
Al-Qaeda may be a threat to Saleh, but it’s a useful threat for him. His use of Al-Qaeda to justify his rule is part of a pattern that other Arab tyrants use. Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi repeatedly claimed that the popular uprising against him was orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden and that the enemy fighters were on hallucinogenic pills that Al-Qaeda put in their coffee. Most recently, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has used the fear of an Islamist takeover to his advantage. One of his advisors claims that Muslim Brotherhood theologian Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi inspired the uprising against his regime, and when he released 260 political prisoners to try to appease the protesters, all but 14 were Islamists.
Many of his secular opponents remain in prison, on house arrest or silenced through other means, because Assad cannot allow their voices to be heard. A secular opposition leader named Riad al-Turk says that Assad is “using the threat of the Islamists taking over and arguing that our people are not yet qualified to practice democracy.” This has been a long-standing practice of the Assad regime, which has sometimes allowed anti-American Islamist protests to take place while forbidding secular, pro-democracy ones. In February 2006, the Assad regime organized riots in reaction to the publication of the Mohammed cartoons, as part of this strategy. A secret document released by WikiLeaks cites a source saying that the objective was to say “we are the only thing standing between you and the Islamist hordes.”
The West has legitimate concerns about how Al-Qaeda and Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood will be able to exploit the instability in the Middle East. A window of opportunity has opened for them. At the same time, tyrants like Saleh and Assad use this threat to justify their own rule even though they have fostered the growth of these organizations. The West must be aware of how well-organized Islamist forces can fill a power vacuum, but must also be aware of how tyrants view this as a problem worth having.
Alqaeda is just a scarecrow to get funds from USA ,Europeans and Gulf countries and this farce is one of the plots of yemeni president in order to clinch power.
This is a confusing story. Salah is an ally and should not be abandoned as Obama is planning to do. If an Islamist A-Q Government arises in one of these dictatorships you are going to see state sponsored terrorism.
States can sponsor all the terrorism they want, but if we didn’t have millions of Muhammadans already living in this country with thousands of mosques and madrassas, they couldn’t hit us. Indeed, the only reason they can hit us today is because we have millions of Muhammadans living in our country, if we had zero Muhammadans living in this country, on the other had, there would be zero terrorist attacks.
Moreover, the reason they haven’t hit us again since 9/11 isn’t because Bush doubled the size of the federal government ostensibly to protect the homeland but in reality to create a false sense of security so that we can continue accommodating mass Muhammadan immigration with all of its excess baggage. They haven’t hit us again because if they hit us too much and too often the American citizens will get wise and demand that Muhammadan immigration be banned and reversed.
Muhammadans can never hope to conquer the West via terrorism because they are far and away too backwards and weak. However, through stealth and deceptive non-violent jihad, specifically via demographic conquest, they can conquer the West.
As a matter of fact, Muhammadans don’t immigrate to the West to assimilate and integrate but instead to eventually subjugate and dominate. Indeed, if you look at every place in the West where mass Muhammadan immigration has taken place, it is obvious that the majority of Muhammadans have refused to assimilate and integrate and have formed Muhammadan no-go zones ruled by sharia as parallel societies and in direct contravention to the laws of the states in which they reside.
Al Qaeda has been in yemen for 20 years so this is News? what you should be asking is how much political power is Al Qaeda wheeling in Yemen and how much is obama helping Al Qaeda?
We know that the CIA Boys and others had some dealing with our KID Bin Laden in the 1980′s and manybe into the 1990′s?
Let's see if i got this right!!!
If you cross the north korean border Illegally you get 12 years hard labor.
If you cross the iranian border Illegally you are detained indefinitely.
If you cross the afghan border Illegally, you get shot.
If you cross the saudi arabian border Illegally you will be jailed.
If you cross the chinese border Illegally you may never be heard from again.
If you cross the venezuelan border Illegally you will be branded a spy and your fate will be sealed.
If you cross the cuban border illegally you will be thrown into political prison to rot.
If you cross the U.S. Border illegally you get:
A job, a drivers license,
Social security card, welfare,
Food stamps, credit cards,
Subsidized rent or a loan to buy a house,
Free education, free health care,
A lobbyist in washington billions of dollars worth of public documents printed in your language
The right to carry your country's flag while you
Protest that you don't get enough respect
And, in many instances, you can vote.
I just wanted to make sure i had a firm grasp on the situation !!!
I think we have become way too obsessed with AQ and with terrorism for our own good. The stealth and deceptive non-violent jihad that takes place for the most part below the level of the public’s scrutiny presents a far greater threat to our freedom and well being than the violent variety that we erroneously mislabel as terrorism. For instance, AQ couldn’t perpetrate terrorist attacks inside America if there weren’t already millions of Muhammadans and thousands of mosques and madrassas already present in America to provide them cover.
How did they get here in the first place? They got here via the stealth and deceptive non-violent means of jihad that Robert Spencer has called demographic conquest. Indeed, demographic conquest presents a far greater threat to our freedom and well being than a bunch of terrorists playing jihad in failed Islamic states.
Personally, I could care less if Afghanistan or Yemen becomes terrorist sanctuaries because if we were honest about Islam, we’d have to admit that the entire Islamic world is a de facto terrorist factory and sanctuary. Furthermore, without millions of Muhammadans already living here in the West, there isn’t a damn thing they could do to harm us in our homeland. Sure they could hit us abroad, but they can do that now anyway.
Does anyone really believe that the 9/11 terrorist attacks would have been possible if millions of Muhammadans and thousands of mosques and madrassas weren’t already present in America to provide the 9/11 terrorists, really jihadis, cover?
In any event, the last thing we should be doing is wasting our young American’s lives chasing hydra-headed terrorists in far away Islamic countries while trying to win the hearts and minds of Muhammadans who are obligated, per the texts and tenets of Islam, to hate our kafir infidel unbeliever guts no matter what. If we must deploy our military at all, then lets do something practical like targeting the source of the money that funds it, and if we want to protect the homeland from Islamic terrorist attacks, let’s ban and reverse Muhammadan immigration, which really is demographic conquest, a form of stealth and deceptive non-violent jihad, instead of growing the government to give us a false sense of security so that we can continue accommodating mass Muhammadan immigration with all of its excess baggage. Growing the government is never the solution for anything much less protecting the homeland from Islamic terrorist attacks.
I don’t care if we triple the size of the federal government to protect the homeland from Islamic terrorist attacks, as long as we have millions of Muhammadans living in our country and within our midst, they can hit us at will. They haven’t hit us again since 9/11 because Bush doubled the size of the federal government to give us a false sense of security or because the Obama administration is diligent in stopping terrorist attacks, they haven’t hit us again because if they hit us too often and too much the public will get wise and demand that Muhammadan immigration, really demographic conquest, be banned and reverse, and if we take that step to ban and reverse Muhammadan immigration, other countries will also soon follow suit.