"Protesters"...or Terrorists?

You may have heard that the Lebanese, under a 30-year occupation by Syria, have recently started agitating for their freedom.

Here's an interesting slant on the beginings of reprisals, from (of course) al-Reuters:

Pro-Syrian Protest Set to Underline Lebanese Rift
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Pro-Syrian protesters will take to the streets of Beirut on Tuesday in a show of strength highlighting deep divisions in Lebanon over Syria's role in the country.

Oh, so it's just another "protest", apparently by other legitimate Lebanese voices, just crying out to be heard? Is that it? Just more free expression to be proud of? And a delicious complication for Bush, no doubt?

Tuesday's protest, called by the Shi'ite Muslim Hizbollah group and its allies to show support for Damascus and oppose what they call Western meddling, was widely expected to attract a large turnout. Shi'ites form Lebanon's largest religious sect.

Oh, the "protesters" are Hezbollah! What a surprise!

Hizbollah (Party of God) warned of mayhem if Syrian troops were to leave Lebanon, where the 1975-90 civil war ended with a fragile balance between the country's diverse main religious groups. Lebanon is due to hold a general election by May.

Set up by Iran's Revolutionary Guard in 1982, Hizbollah is the only Lebanese faction to keep its guns.

Oh, so they're armed foreign agents, with a monopoly on armaments, and their making threats. Just like regular democratic "protesters". That's why the headline doesn't say Terrorists, it says "Protesters", because we wouldn't want to be passing any judgments now, would we? That would be WRONG!

Washington says it is a terrorist group.

Now why would nasty old Washington say such a thing? Maybe because Hezbollah, an arm of Iran, prior to 9/11 had the distinction of the one terror group in the world that had killed more Americans than any other, by far? Including, in an act that should have been taken as war, the murder of 241 Marines

Hezbollah has active cells here in the United States.

These enemy agents are welcomed into our country by an apparent open borders policy, where they immediately engage in organized criminal enterprises such as credit card fraud and cigarette smuggling to raise millions of dollars for Hezbollah's terror masters.

Using obviously phony visas and multiple, bigamous fake marriages, they obtain residency status, even when known to be criminals previously expelled. An excerpt from an infuriating story of incompetence at Daniel Pipes:

Mohamad Youssef Hammoud, an 18-year-old Shiite Muslim from Lebanon, arrived at New York's Kennedy Airport on June 6, 1992. He had come, accompanied by two close male relatives, from Caracas, Venezuela, where each of them had plunked down $200 for a counterfeit U.S. visa. American border guards caught the fraud...The U.S. government also responded in character, just as it would many times over the next eight years: It allowed them into the country.
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Once settled, the Lebanese suspects began a minor crime wave. They relied on fraudulent Social Security numbers, passed bad checks, used stolen credit cards, passed stolen goods via mail drops, and engaged in forgery. One gang member, known for his ability to take on multiple identities, used so many false names that he had to pull a book out of a friend's safe and study it before going to the bank. He also became a specialist in "busting out" of credit cards-making half a million dollars since 1995 by getting a high credit limit, charging on it to the maximum, then disappearing without paying it off.
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These are not just crooks, but a whole subculture steeped in criminality.
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[I]f not for alert local officers piecing suspicious activities into a pattern, the scam would still be going on. The INS showed itself to be hapless, not seeing through one fake marriage after another, losing records, and allowing deportees to disappear without a trace. The State Department proved susceptible to bribery. The FBI knew nothing until late in the game. This is frequently the pattern: In at least five cases over the past 15 years, the local cop with eyes open was the key to stopping a major terrorist action. And while lucky breaks are very welcome, it is dismaying to see national institutions caught off guard.

Why was here here?

Hammoud came here not as an immigrant, to become American-but as a missionary, to bring Hezbollah's message into enemy territory.
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In a bitter and ironic development little noted by Americans, many recent immigrants arrive, as Martin Peretz puts it, "not with the immigrant's psychological one-way ticket, not with the immigrant's love for America, but with a peculiar immigrant's hatred of America."

How do we know?

Information about Hammoud is available in a powerful and detailed 85-page federal affidavit filed in late July in the U.S. District Court in Charlotte, North Carolina, based on the reports of six cooperating witnesses and five secret informants, physical surveillance, financial records, and much else. Hammoud, it seems, received military training in Hezbollah camps in Lebanon and boasts of being "well-connected" to Hezbollah leaders.

What did he do?

By early 1995, the smuggling operation was in place. The Hezbollahis bought tens of thousands of cigarette cartons at North Carolina's many tobacco outlets, loaded these into rental vans, made a quick round trip to Detroit, and returned the van. In the period 1996-99, Hammoud alone bought nearly $300,000 worth of cigarettes on ten credit cards.
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Starting in 1996, they also sent large sums to Hezbollah. No estimate is available for the total amount transferred, but the affidavit charges Hammoud and four others with smuggling currency and indicates that just one suspect, Ali Hussein Darwiche, sent over $1 million.

Also, law enforcement observed a preparation for violence. Associates of the suspects built up an arsenal, including a fully automatic AK-47-style assault rifle, with which they, along with Hammoud, regularly practiced-in what a witness described as "paramilitary-style training" in a remote shooting range east of Charlotte.

How was he caught? Dumb luck:

But the cigarette scam was too obvious, especially as the smugglers kept getting arrested for driving offenses, and having large numbers of cigarettes (121,500, 436,500, 1,412,400) and dollars ($17,000, $45,922) confiscated. By 1996, the authorities figured out what was going on. A slew of local, state, and federal agents investigated, and made further discoveries.

Finally, on July 21 of this year, about 250 law-enforcement officers swooped down on the group, arresting 17 in the Charlotte area and one in Michigan. Eleven are Lebanese Muslims, seven are the American citizens who took money for phony marriages.

What have we learned?

This case opens an important window on the small but worrisome subculture of Islamist immigrants who despise America even while living in it, who flout its laws and actively aid its enemies. The information from Charlotte prompts several reflections:

First, it confirms the inaccuracy of Islamist whining about American bias against Muslims...Immigration and law-enforcement authorities were excessively lenient; note how Hammoud kept beating the system.

Second, the Charlotte case again confirms that Islamist money is flowing from North America to the Middle East, not the other way around...How many more Charlotte-like webs are out there?

Third, the Lebanese suspects showed a contempt toward the U.S. that bordered on the bizarre. Though acting on behalf of a devoutly Muslim organization, they felt entitled to break American laws at whim, without taking even elementary precautions.

Even after arrest, they remained arrogantly unconcerned; according to the Charlotte Observer, at their court hearing, the defendants "smiled, laughed and made jokes. They asked which of their homes, cars and bank accounts had been seized by the government." This nihilism, quite common among uneducated Islamist immigrants, portends trouble.

They're laughing at us, like we're a bunch of chumps.

And we are.

How's it feel to be a chump, o defender of open borders and the "rights" of every non-American to invade this country?

It's more important to yell "racism!" and "profiling!" then to defend against this wave of barbarians.

The communists once said the capitalists would sell them the rope with which they'd be hanged; today we're handing over for free the knife with which the jihadists of the Party of Allah! will slit our throats.

Why anyone from any country at war with us (i.e. most Islamic countries) gets a visa at all is beyond me. It's as if citizens of Japan and Germany were let to visit the USA as tourists, free to move anywhere, during WW2!

The concept then would have been unthinkable.

Because it is literally insane.

By the way, "Islamist" isn't a "race". It's a belief-system. If we can't make discriminating judgments about people based on compatibility of world-view, we might as well surrender right now.