
Suspects arrested May 11, 2017, in Minneapolis, allegedly with an arsenal in their car.
The Manchester suicide bomber was reported to authorities repeatedly over a period of five years, as British citizens pointed out his radical activities. Nothing was done.
It mirrors the script of previous jihadists who struck at San Bernardino, Orlando, Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, London, Nice and many other places in the U.S. and Europe over the last three years.
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"We knew of this man," police said, but they were either unwilling or unable to monitor the suspect, let alone arrest him.
Now there are signs that two Muslim men in Minneapolis may be up to their eyeballs in jihadist activity.
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WCCO-TV in Minneapolis reported Thursday there is "growing concern" that the two brothers, 27-year-old Abdullah Alrifahe and 26-year-old Majid Alrifahe, may have been planning an attack.
When they were arrested on May 11, police found an arsenal in their car – a loaded AK-47, another rifle, a handgun, thousands of rounds of ammunition, a drone, a grenade and multiple electronic bomb-making devices.
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Read WND's previous report on two Muslims arrested in Minneapolis with an arsenal in their car.
One of the two brothers has already been released and the other remains in jail on a felony weapons charge, pending a $200,000 bond.
An elderly man described as a Good Samaritan confronted the two men outside a government-subsidized, senior-citizens complex and asked them to stop throwing litter out of their car. The two men approached the Good Samaritan aggressively, called him the "N" word and scared him away. But the man then called police, who found the arsenal. The Good Samaritan, who refuses to give his name out of fear for his safety, is now expressing outrage that the charges aren't more serious.
Watch local TV report on "growing concerns" about Minneapolis brothers caught with arsenal in their car:
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The two men could have been planning an attack or transporting the weapons to a larger stockpile somewhere else. Either way, it's imperative they remain in custody and undergo prolonged interrogation, law-enforcement sources told WND.
Police should demand to know where the men got the weapons, where they were taking them and where they attended mosque while looking into their work, banking and travel history, says Phil Haney, a former Homeland Security officer and co-author of the book "See Something, Say Nothing." The men also should be asked what religious leaders have they studied under, both in person and online, who their contacts were and any other relevant information, he said.
"These guys are connected to a coalition of at least 35 components of ISIS around the world. ISIS is not just in Syria and Iraq, it's a coalition of groups. It's a pledge of loyalty not to ISIS necessarily but the goals of ISIS, which is the establishment of Shariah law as part of the caliphate," Haney told WND.
"Are these guys in Minnesota related to what we saw in Manchester? They sure are, because it's not so much that they know each other personally as it is that they are all part of the overall gravitational force of this global movement to establish Shariah law. That's the common denominator. The gravitational force that underpins all of it."
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Clare Lopez, vice president of research and analysis for the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, said the incident in Minneapolis very well could indicate the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.
Local law enforcement knows that the Minneapolis neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside already functions as a Somali enclave known as "Little Mogadishu," where Shariah prevails, not U.S. constitutional law, or Minnesota law or Minneapolis municipal law.
"It is, in effect, a no-go zone, where local police must be wary for their security if they enter in uniforms or police cruisers," Lopez said. "It is a place that exports jihadist suicide bombers to Islamic terror groups like al-Shabaab and the Islamic State."
Now is the time to act. Police should use the arrests of the two jihadists as a pretext to go in and clean out the neighborhood, Lopez said.
"If Cedar-Riverside is not to become a U.S. version of Muslim-controlled Molenbeek, Brussels, the Parisian banlieux, or Luton, U.K., the writ of U.S. constitutional law must be enforced, firmly and consistently," she said. "To permit any alien hostile legal system – such as Shariah – to govern space within the U.S. is to cede American sovereignty."
The Minneapolis Police Department, Hennepin County Sheriff's Department – backed solidly by the Hennepin District Attorney – have the responsibility to ensure that all Minneapolis residents are protected under the aegis of U.S. law, she said.
The Cedar Riverside community is likely already harboring an Islamic cell, and police likely already have evidence of such. But the problem is political correctness, said Haney.
"It's a network. A network is an established group of individuals that have been operating with resources for a significant amount of time with forethought, intention and planning," he said.
"The government had these folks on its radar, people were seeing something and saying something. This was the U.K.'s San Bernardino, because they knew about them," he added. "People in San Bernardino were concerned, they saw things going on and thought about saying something but they were too afraid. The same thing happened in the U.K., only here they even reported it, and still their government didn't do anything."
Somebody did see something and said something, and nothing was done.
The Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was a son of refugees from Libya, and most of his family still resides in Libya. Like Farook in San Bernardino, he was a hafiz, meaning he'd "memorized the Quran."
Being hafiz is a big deal in the Muslim community. Very few reach this level of Quranic learning.
"How do you become hafiz? You have to go through the training in the local mosque or madrasa and get certified by the imam or whoever is in charge. There is a ceremony. It is not a small thing. You are way above an average Muslim person in the community," he said. "So all this pretense, it's all just that. It's all deception."
Refugee issue must be solved
The other issue is unvetted and unvettable refugees continuing to pour into Europe. The same thing continues to go on in the U.S., with refugees arriving daily from dangerous countries that harbor jihadists – Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan.
Libya, the home base of the Manchester bomber, is one of the countries in President Trump's executive order on visa travel and refugees that is being held up in the courts.
"Therefore, Trump has been right all along and the people that oppose him, they're opposing the very efforts of the people in authority trying to protect us," Haney said. "And if we don't do that we're going to have the same thing done that was done to the people in the U.K. They will turn around and blow up a building full of women and children. This is sick."
Haney said the fear among Western leaders of being called an "Islamophobe" is greater than their fear of the next jihad attack.
Now that the Western world's politicians have seen the forces of the establishment unleashed on Trump because he dared to propose a temporary halt on Muslim immigration, they have been frightened into a corner. They cannot muster the courage to confront the root cause of all jihad attacks, Islam, even as they come under increasing pressure from restive and fearful populations.
"And until that equation changes, everything else is secondary," Haney said. "This will keep happening over and over until the mentality changes. That's what it comes down to. What are you more afraid of? Jihad against your own citizens or being called an Islamophobe by the Muslim groups and their friends in the media?"
Haney says FBI and other law enforcement must be willing to get inside of the Islamic mind to understand why they kill people Western society considers to be "innocent."
It often comes down to the Quranic concept that "fitnah is worse than slaughter," he said.
The Arabic word fitnah means a persecution or an oppression perpetrated on the Muslim community.
To the Islamic mind, the mere existence of non-believers who refuse to submit to the advancement of Islam can be viewed as a fitnah.
"Blowing up little girls at a rock concert is not nearly as bad as the opposition to the advancement of Islam, or the goals of Islam, therefore they don't see that as a crime," he said.
See the various translations of Quran 2:191, which lays out the principle of fitnah.
'The restrainer' has been removed
The final piece in the puzzle causing misery and death in the West is the Arab Spring.
It was the policies of Bush and Obama that "broke open" key countries in the Middle East, starting with Iraq, drawing jihadists to the battlefield.
"The Bible talks about the restrainer being removed," Haney observes. "Saddam, Gadhafi, Assad – these are dictators who were acting as restrainers and now they are removed – and our own government set that in motion. We came, we saw, we killed. They killed Saddam, they killed Gadhafi, we've tried to remove Assad.
"They never looked at it in those countries as a democratic thing or the resurrection of democracy; they looked at it as an opportunity to resurrect the Arab nation, the ummah, and the implementation of Islamic law. That's exactly why the Muslim Brotherhood was founded. It's an Islamic revivalist movement led by the Arabs, which according to the Quran are the best of all people."