Use children as troops, says Muslim preacher



Sydney's most influential radical Muslim cleric has been caught on film calling Jews pigs and urging children to die for Allah. Firebrand Sheik Feiz Mohammed, head of the Global Islamic Youth Centre in Liverpool, delivered the hateful rants on a collection of DVDs called the Death Series being sold in Australia and overseas. "Today many parents, they prevent their children from attending lessons. Why? They fear that they might create a place in the their hearts, the love, just a bit of the love, of sacrificing their lives for Allah," Sheik Feiz says in the video. "We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid (holy warrior). Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom."

An Australian citizen born in Sydney who has spent the past year living in Lebanon, Sheik Feiz was exposed this week in a British documentary Undercover Mosque. Investigators found Sheik Feiz's DVDs being sold by children in the carpark of the Green Lane Mosque in Birmingham and other Islamic bookshops. The entire set can be bought online for $150.

"The peak, the pinnacle, the crest, the highest point, the pivot, the summit of Islam is jihad," he declares in the film, before denouncing "kaffirs" (non-Muslims). "Kaffir is the worst word ever written, a sign of infidelity, disbelief, filth, a sign of dirt." In an excerpt from a video lecture series called Signs of the Hour, Sheik Feiz then ridicules Jews as pigs.

Sheik Feiz - who just two weeks ago said he felt like an "alien" in his own country - leads about 4000 followers through his Global Islamic Youth Centre in Sydney's southwest. He also accused Australian authorities of being over-zealous in their approach to clerics like him. "There are no sheiks preaching chaos there. No one is telling people to raise arms against the Australian community," he said. Sheik Feiz left for Lebanon just before the arrest of 23 men in Sydney and Melbourne in November 2005.

Source





Gun laws don't stop Muslim gangs

From the waistband of his blue jeans, the Sydney underworld figure pulls out a black handgun and dumps it on the kitchen table in front of me. With his other hand he produces a thick wad of bank notes from his jacket pocket. The $5000 he places next to the 9mm Glock pistol, he assures me, is enough to buy another one. "I can get you a handgun in five days. If you want an automatic weapon like a AK47 (Kalashnikov assault rifle) it will take a little longer and cost twice as much. How many do you want?"

Faisal, not his real name, is linked to a feared Sydney crime gang that has been caught up in a deadly feud with a rival gang, which has allegedly left at least four people dead and numerous others shot in the legs - a classic underworld warning tactic known as "kneecapping". It is the same criminal gang that is alleged to have bought seven rocket launchers stolen from the army and then allegedly onsold five of them to Sydney terror suspect Mohammad Elomar. Allegations have been made about how the seven rocket launchers - which can penetrate concrete and obliterate vehicles - fell into the hands of Sydney's underworld and ultimately an alleged terror cell.

An insight into the murky world of arms dealing in Sydney came last week when alleged dealer Taha Abdulrahman, 28, appeared in court charged with arranging the sale of the rocket launchers to gang leader Adnan Darwiche, who is now in jail. Documents tendered to the court state for the first time the alleged interconnections between suspected terror cells and the criminal underworld - including how Sydney man Mohammed Touma was an alleged associate of Darwiche, while his brother Mazen Touma was an alleged member of the terror cell along with Elomar.

I arranged to speak to Faisal in a house in Sydney's western suburbs, to talk about the hundreds of shooting incidents that have rocked Sydney in the past few years and to gauge the availability of guns and weaponry on the streets. He is unequivocal about the ease with which firearms can be purchased. Get the cash and it's a just a matter of days while the underworld connections receive the guns from their suppliers. "It is a matter of ordering what you want and then waiting," Faisal says.

Police statistics appear to bear this out. Last year, there were 3500 illegal guns seized across NSW. Everything is on offer from pistols and the highly prized Glocks, which are easy to conceal and can unload 17 rounds in a matter of seconds, to Uzi machine guns and hand grenades. The anti-tank missiles stolen from the Australian army were bought for about $15,000 each. "Crime figures have access to weapons, but they are mainly second-hand and they get them by dealing among themselves," says Detective Superintendent Ken McKay, the commander of the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad. The MEOCS was set up to investigate crime in Sydney's southwest, the suburbs of which have been dubbed Australia's deadliest because of the spate of drive-by shootings and murders.

Its predecessor, Taskforce Gain, had made more than 1300 arrests, including 12 for murder and attempted murder and 178 for firearms offences. Many of the offences were committed in Lakemba, Greenacre, Condell Park, Punchbowl and Auburn, the suburbs that stretch around the Arab heartland of Sydney. It is in these so-called badlands that the suspected terror cell allegedly bought five rocket launchers from Darwiche.

Michael Kennedy, a former NSW police officer turned academic specialising in Middle Eastern crime gangs, says terrorism and organised crime have overlapped around the world, particularly with the Irish Republican Army and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. "But most of the time the overlap relates to entrepreneurial activity by terrorist groups and organised crime networks. The gangsters to make money and the terrorist groups to raise funds," Kennedy says.

Police have recovered only one of the rocket launchers. The others allegedly bought by Elomar, who police say joked he was going to blow up NSW Parliament or Lucas Heights, have not been located. Police have been searching forest and bushland around Sydney to locate the weapons as well as a stash of firearms the group is alleged to have obtained.

NSW police began warning about rising violence and the use of increased firepower by criminal gangs as far back as the mid-1980s. By the '90s, the problem was obvious with the growing gang violence involving notorious gangster Danny Karam, who was murdered in 1998 and whose associates have gone on to become members of the Darwiche gang and terrorism suspects. Kennedy says those suspected of involvement in terrorism "had simply decided they don't want to be criminals, they want to be zealots".

In 1999, the then NSW commander of crime agencies, Clive Small, established a firearms trafficking unit to identify the source of the firearms, dealers, supply routes and use. It was the first of its type in Australia, resulting in more than 235 people being arrested and charged with 1100 gun-related offences. Police have also seized 1500 illegal handguns and 3400 longarms (rifles, semi-automatics and machine guns) as well as hand grenades and explosives.

The commander of the NSW Firearms and Regulated Industry Crime Squad, Detective Superintendent John Kerlatec, says gun seizures are down because there "is a shrinking market". Kerlatec says most guns seized were second-hand and were obtained mainly by theft and illegal diversion rather than being imported illegally. The police are now using a system known as Integrated Ballistics Identification System to match the guns to crimes and often find that a firearm used in one shooting will turn up at another, sometimes involving a rival group. Even though serial numbers on the weapons might be removed, police ballistics tests can link the weapon to a shooting crime.

A Sydney underworld gang member who has "rolled" told police they continuously bought and sold pistols and machine guns. His statement reveals how gang members bought pistols, including 9mm Glocks and SKS semi-automatic rifles, and kept them in a number of safe houses around the city. When they wanted to dispose of a hot weapon they would either melt it down or sell it interstate.

As part of a crackdown on guns, the NSW police spent 2003-04 inspecting all licensed gun owners and where they kept their weapons. In NSW, there are 135,000 licensed gun users and 600,000 registered guns. Kerlatec says tighter security has cut theft almost in half. As armed guards are known targets, stricter controls led to a 50 per cent reduction in the number of guards carrying firearms. Investigations by the Australian Crime Commission, the nation's peak law enforcement agency, have also resulted in 1300 guns being seized or quarantined in the 2005-06 year. The ACC used its coercive powers to target firearms brokers, suppliers and dealers. But the ACC's key finding was that Australia needed a sustained and nationally co-ordinated effort targeting the supply of the firearms black market and its brokers.

In the year to September 2006, there were 23 shooting murders in Sydney, and 31 attempted shooting murders according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. In the same period there were 36 other shootings. And Kennedy says gangsters will remain "tooled up". "This is what organised crime does," Kennedy says. "There is no code of conduct. They don't go to uni and do ethics for gangsters ... People are doing what they have do to to survive. If we have a proliferation (of people being armed) it is because there are a lot of people who feel the need to have them."

Faisal naturally blames the authorities for inflaming tensions between rival "crews" by telling each side that the other was responsible for shooting at them. He maintains he is a marked man and he can't appear on the streets of southwest Sydney without a gun for protection. As he conceals the pistol in his jeans, he says he will continue to carry it when he moves around the area. It is the only chance he has to protect himself against being "knocked".

Source





Giving icons the boot: It's not all bleak news for Australian manufacturers

Defending the Blundstone bootmaker's decision to close its Tasmanian factory and move its manufacturing to Thailand and India, company chief executive Steve Gunn made a telling observation. Most people, he said, think Blundstone boots are made overseas already . . . and they don't care. Blundstone boot wearers want value for money more than they want Australian-made boots. This view is as practical as the down-to-earth boots the company makes. And it shows that the millions of dollars spent by government trying to prop up the company and save 300 jobs in Tasmania has been wasted. This is the lesson of globalisation and as China and India continue to expand and free trade agreements are signed throughout the region, it is a tide that cannot be resisted. The subsidies given to Blundstone to limp along would have been better spent retraining its workers to find employment elsewhere.

This is not to say there is no room for manufacturing in Australia. But successful local products are most likely to be either in niche markets or innovative and highly value-added. They are most likely to be knowledge-based such as financial expertise, healthcare and education. Meanwhile, higher dividend and tax payments from the resources boom is underpinning job-creating local service industries such as hospitality and tourism. And while wage pressures from the booming mining sector are squeezing manufacturers, it is not all bad news. Former Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane told a house of representatives standing committee before his retirement last year that business investment had grown at an annual 12 per cent a year for the past three years, even after stripping out the buoyant resource sector. Investment in manu facturing, which Mr Macfarlane said many people assumed had floundered, was in line with the average. It's just that the export of jobs manufacturing low-technology goods such as work boots cannot be resisted and should be seen in a wider context than the loss of yet another "Aussie icon", particularly when it matters least to the people who actually buy, and wear, the boots.

Source





Australia's Climate is not Changing

Statistician Jonathan Lowe looks at the specious reasoning of what was once a scientific body -- the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. I guess the real scientists at the ABM hope that people will disregard the politically safe conclusions that they put their name to and look instead at the actual statistics, as is done below:

Recently, the ABM produced their 2006 weather report as shown here.

They specifically go out to show that "Our Climate is Changing". Well it always does of course, but they specifically mean global warming.

With regards to rainfall they say that

Australia has experienced marked rainfall trends over the last 50 years with declines over southern and eastern Australia and increases across the northwest.

and then continue to say in the next paragraph:

The dry conditions in southern and eastern Australia in 2006 have continued the long-term rainfall deficiencies in many regions, some of which extend back more than five years.

Long term is 5 years? Has rainfall decreased in last 50 years or 5 years?

They conclude that

Aspects of this multi-year drought are highly unusual and unprecedented in many areas. Understanding the role that climate change has played in these anomalies is an area of active research.

Nice conclusion. I guess that global warming only applies to the south east of Australia. So lets check the stats, as given directly from the ABM website:



Sure last year was very light on the rainfall, however it wasn't the lowest. This occurred in 1982. And whilst the last 5 years of rainfall in south eastern Australia have been low, it is not the lowest in the last 100 years. The period of 1940 to 1944 produced 75mm less rainfall in south eastern Australia than 2002 to 2006. But of course we are led to believe that this is the worst drought in 1000 years, isn't that right?

So the ABM suggest that this long term trend of 5 years is highly unusual and unprecedented. A simple analysis of the figures above show that this is far from the truth.

So has, as they claim, south east Australia had significant decreasing trends in rainfall? Statistically speaking unfortunately not (t = 1.29, p = 0.2). So the ABM's final conclusion to prove that our climate is changing with great emphasis on the current drought is, well, not true at all.

Is Australia's Climate Changing? Well not according to rainfall as the ABM suggests. Next up we'll look more closely at temperature around Australia.

Source