Following a dramatic deterioration in official diplomatic channels between the US and Saudi Arabia when over the weekend the Saudis threatened the U.S. with dumping billions in Treasuries if Congress were to pass a bill probing into their alleged support of Sept 11 terrorists in the aftermath of last weekend's 60 Minutes report on the classified "28 pages" from the Septemeber 11 commission, moments ago the Obama administration made a stunning admission, when for the first time it revealed on the record that the Saudis were the original source of funding for Al Qaeda.

As Politico reports, Obama's deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, while speaking to David Axelrod in Monday's edition of "The Axe Files" podcast said that the government of Saudi Arabia had paid "insufficient attention" to money that was being funneled into terror groups and fueled the rise of Al Qaeda when he was asked about the validity of the accusation that the Saudi government was complicit in sponsoring terrorism.

Deputy National Security Adviser For Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes

At first, he tried to tone down what amount to the first official admission of Saudi involvement in September 11, saying "I think that it’s complicated in the sense that, it’s not that it was Saudi government policy to support Al Qaeda, but there were a number of very wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia who would contribute, sometimes directly, to extremist groups. Sometimes to charities that were kind of, ended up being ways to launder money to these groups."

But moments later the truth came out when he said "So a lot of the money, the seed money if you will, for what became Al Qaeda, came out of Saudi Arabia," he added.

And then the punchline came out when Axelrod asked if "that happen without the government’s awareness?" To which Rhodes responded that he doesn’t believe the government was “actively trying to prevent that from happening."

In other words, the Saudi government knew that "a number of very wealthy Saudi individuals" were funneling funds into what would become the organization blamed for the attack on the twin towers.

As Politico adds, "the remarks from Rhodes come as Obama prepares to head to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and confront the strained relations between the two allies. The Saudis are still fuming over an Atlantic magazine article that described Obama's frustrations with Saudi Arabia's religious ideology, its treatment of women and its rivalry with Iran. Obama also suggested in the piece that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states are "free riders" who rely too much on the U.S. military."

Friction has also been created by a push from relatives of people who died on 9/11 and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to allow U.S. courts to hold the Saudi government responsible if it is found to have played a role in the 2001 attack.

Deceased Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud presents Barack Obama with the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit

The conversation turned even more awkward when Axelrod, who as Obama's former senior advisor, knows very well of Saudi involvement with both Al Qaeda and Sept 11, pushed Rhodes on at-times awkward dynamic between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, asking, "How do you explain that to Americans, that, you know, on the one hand we call them an ally on the other hand they have these deep roots in these extremist elements?"

"I would stop short of saying that there was any willful government intention from Saudi Arabia to support Al Qaeda,” Rhodes said. “I think the difficult thing that Americans need to understand is we forge these relationships with governments because we have some shared interest with them.”

In other words, the state which even the U.S. government admits is behind Al Qaeda gets a pass because "we have some shared interest with them" - a shared interest that is clearly over and beyond revealing the government's role in the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Rhodes added that for a long time the main interest was oil and security which meant that the U.S. was “slow to pay attention to that [connection to extremist groups] because the way the relationship was set up was we just kind of thought about security and oil and didn’t kind of go that other layer down.”

But now that the U.S. has its own shale industry which incidentally is being crushed due to Saudi overproduction policy, the shared interest no longer exists.

And yet, as White House spokesman Josh Earnest reported earlier, Obama is still refusing to pass the one Bill that could finally reveal just how extensive Saudi involvment truly was in the September 11 attack.

So while we watch in shock as yet another conspiracy theory becomes conspiracy fact, we wonder how much longer will Americans tolerate a president - whether republican or democrat - who puts national interests measured in barrels of oil and avoids exposing rogue foreign billionaire murderers, above the lives of thousands of Americans killed by terrorists funded by this same government.

President Obama at a Sept. 11 ceremony in 2015.

We also wonder if today's dramatic official admission of Saudi involvement in the Sept 11 attacks will not only infuriate even more Americans disenchanted with the fake left-right political divide, but also whether it will be grounds for US bond yields to tick up a few basis points tomorrow if Saudi Arabia finally decide to make good on its threat launch a warning salvo to the Obama administration to end the very "undiplomatic" revelations by selling a few billions in 10 Year bonds.


(ZeroHedge)

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This article first appeared on the Centre on Religion & Geopolitics site.

The Taliban faction said Salahuddin Khorasani was a "martyr." The bomber had blown himself up at a crowded park in Lahore, Pakistan, on March 27, killing 73 people and wounding hundreds.

Most of the victims were Muslims. But as the militant Taliban offshoot Jamaat-ul-Ahrar stated, the attack had been timed for "the eve of the Christian festival Easter."

After the Gulshan-e-Iqbal park blast, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, which also claimed responsibility for two attacks on churches in Lahore in 2015, vowed that more "devastating" assaults would target Christians and other religious minorities in the country.

The great majority of the victims of global extremism are Muslim. However, Christians in Pakistan – less than 2 per cent of the country's population—are singled out by jihadis, alongside other minorities, such as Shia and Ahmadis. In fact, a number of times in the past few months, Islamist extremists have targeted Christian communities across the Middle East and South Asia.

In Yemen, the status of a Catholic priest reportedly kidnapped by ISIS or Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in March remains uncertain. Tom Uzhunnalil went missing after gunmen attacked a care home, killing four Indian nuns, two Yemeni staff members, eight elderly residents and a guard.

ISIS has claimed several attacks on Christians in Bangladesh. Last month, militants affiliated with the group claimed to be behind the murder of a Christian convert, killed for being an "apostate...who changed his religion and became a preacher for the polytheist Christianity."

The group described his death as "a lesson to others." The attack came amid a renewed wave of violence in the country against Shia, Sufi and Ahmadi Muslims, secular bloggers and Hindus. In February, ISIS said it was behind the beheading of a Hindu priest outside his temple.

Christians in the ‘Caliphate’

Christian communities are most at risk in ISIS-held territory in Iraq and Syria, however. The group adheres to an interpretation of sharia law that is hostile to non-Sunni “people of the book,” namely Jews and Christians.

The followers of these Abrahamic faiths are eligible for the jizyah (a protection tax for non-Muslims, or dhimmi). This means that they are legally more privileged than faiths accused of practicing shirk, or polytheism, such as Yezidis and Druze.

In reality this has not protected Christians from ISIS's brutality. According to reportsemerging from the town of al-Qaraytain, which Syrian forces recaptured from ISIS in April, the group killed some 21 Christians for "breaking the terms of their dhimmi contracts." Failure to abide by this “covenant of protection” is sanctioned by expulsion or death. The mass exodus of Christians from Iraq's Nineveh province after the capture of Mosul by ISIS in 2014 was further evidence of this.

In Syria, the closeness of the Christian community to the Assad regime has only helped push jihadi groups to invoke Christianity as an enemy. This has had international implications, with Russia framing its intervention in Syria as a “holy war.”

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church's public affairs department was quoted in 2015 as saying that "the fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it." Meanwhile, Russia's President Vladimir Putin claims that protecting Christians is key to Moscow's foreign policy.

This rhetoric has not been lost on ISIS, which frames the Western intervention in Syria as a Christian “crusade” and “a war on Islam” in its propaganda.

The group's imagery harks back to an era of religious conflict. Much of its propaganda uses medieval chivalric motifs to emphasise the nobility of jihad, with pictures of fighters on horseback, or references to Saladin. The fourth issue of ISIS's English-language magazine,Dabiq, featured the group's infamous black flag flying over St Peter's Basilica in Rome. The title on the cover read: “The Failed Crusade.”

The magazine itself is named after a town in northern Syria, which in Islamic eschatology is one of two possible locations for an epic battle between Christians and Muslims that will signal the end of days. The defeat of “Rome” is a crucial part of the group's apocalyptic worldview. Such references can be found in 48 per cent of jihadi propaganda, according to research by the Centre on Religion & Geopolitics.

Taking security into their own hands

In some areas, Christian communities have taken security into their own hands. The “Babylon Brigade” militia in Iraq claims Christians were left with little choice but to arm themselves in light of ISIS attacks. They present it as their religious duty to protect their co-religionists. Similar “protection groups” have emerged in Syria and Lebanon in response to increasing extremist violence.

Questioning who suffers most from extremist violence is unhelpful. All faiths suffer at the hands of jihadi groups. Nevertheless, they peddle a narrative of inevitable clash between Christians and Muslims, a “war against Islam” by “Christian Crusader” powers.

Milo Comerford is an analyst at the Centre on Religion & Geopolitics.

The settlers carried out violence against Palestinians last year including an assault and an attempt to set fire to a home, Shin Bet said.

They are due to be charged in the coming days.

The group, which included a soldier and two minors, allegedly tried to copy an arson attack that killed three members of a Palestinian family.

The suspects told interrogators they were aware their actions could have led to the loss of life and had been "inspired" by the deadly attack in the West Bank village of Duma, which killed a Palestinian couple and their toddler.

The group also attacked a farmer with rods and tear gas, leaving him injured, Shin Bet said.

The suspects were connected to members of another ring of Jewish extremists who had recently been apprehended and accused of a series of attacks on Palestinian and Christian targets, according to the security agency.

A rights group representing the suspects said their access to lawyers had been limited to pressure them into making confessions.

An Israeli man was charged in January with three counts of murder over the Duma arson case, which was condemned by Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

About 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

(BBC)

ISIS OPERATIVES TO DISGUISE AS BEACH VENDORS TO LAUNCH EUROPE ATTACKS: REPORTS

Speaking to German daily newspaper Bild, a member of the German intelligence services said that French, Spanish and Italian resorts were most vulnerable.

“We could be about to see a new dimension of terror from ISIS,” a member of the German secret services told Bild . “Holiday beaches are hard to protect.”

This new threat from ISIS agents in Europe has similarities to the attack claimed by the radical Islamist group at the Tunisian beach resort of Sousse in June 2015, in which a gunman used a Kalashnikov assault rifle to carry out a mass shooting of 39 people, mostly European tourists.

Bild said that the jihadis could pose as refugees selling ice-cream, soft drinks or t-shirts on popular beach fronts before conducting attacks, or could plant bombs under sunloungers. It said that the intelligence came from a “credible source” in Africa who claimed that ISIS agents had “concrete plans” for major beach attacks.

Seck Pouye, police chief of the Senegalese town of Saly, told Bild that the threat from militants in the ISIS affiliate group Boko Haram is a serious threat to southern Europe due to the ease of travel onto the continent.

“These people travel regularly to Italy and other places with visas and documents,” he said. “They are not illegal because they are viewed as businesspeople and traders. That is what makes them so dangerous.”

Elsewhere, Spanish police arrested a Moroccan national on Tuesday in Palma de Mallorca, a city on the popular Balearic island of Mallorca. He is accused of links to ISIS leadership and for encouraging attacks in Spain and across Europe.

The police said in a statement that the suspect presents “a clear threat to national security” as he had used the Internet to boost ISIS recruitment, send radical Islamists abroad and push others to commit attacks in Spain and across Europe.

The new ISIS threat comes as experts from Europol and NATO warned this week of the group’s aim to use chemical weapons on the continent. Speaking at the annual Security and Counter Terror Expo in London, Jorge Berto Silva, deputy head of counter-extremism for the European Commission, said there is a “justified concern” about chemical or biological attacks being planned by ISIS. Rob Wainwright, the head of the continent’s crime agency Europol, said that the extremist group has “the appetite for the spectacular.”

(Newsweek)