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| Islamic-terror victim Vicky Hen's July 4 memorial |
From "Los Angeles Airport- top target of terror attacks, lax security, TSA agent arrested" by Julia Davis in Examiner.com
LAX has direct flights to North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East – more direct flights than any other airport in the world.As well as being America's second most populous metropolis, the metro- Los Angeles area (which includes Orange County) is also a center for Muslim activity. The Shura Council claims that there are several hundred thousand Muslims in all four counties of Southern California - Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernadino. Orange County is also a hub of Muslim activism. There resides the influential and powerful Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi- chairman of the The Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, and Director of the Islamic Society of Orange County (and until 2001, President of I.S.N.A.- the Islamic Society of North America). The Council for American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.) has base of operations in SoCal, as does the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
This has made LAX a prime target for terror attacks. Three of the four planes involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were originally headed for Los Angeles. American Airlines Flight 11, and United Airlines Flight 175, were from Logan International Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts, and American Airlines Flight 77 was from Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia.
There is a strong Muslim influence at the University of California at Irvine (U.C.I.) in Orange County, which manifests in a strong Muslim Students Association - a movement which was established by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963. Some MSA / MSU leaders were arrested and found guilty in conspiring to interfere with an invited on-campus address by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren- which resulted in the disbanding of the association for a semester). There is a strong anti-Israel attitude in Orange County's Muslim culture - typified by the anti-Zionist climate on the campus- which presents an annual, Israel-Apartheid Week of public demonstrations, lectures, and exhibits vilifying the Jewish state.
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| Hesham Mohamed Hadayet (photo courtesy BBC) |
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| (Photo courtesy: Paul Parkus via BareNakedIslam) |
El Al Station Chief, Klaus Hackel, retraces the July 4, 2002 Islamic terror attack at LAX's Bradley International Terminal.
Mr. Hackel relates that only for the shooting not commencing until the end of the check-in for El Al's Flight 106 to Toronto and Tel Aviv were more potential victims spared.
Hadayat Belonged to Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s Operational Arm
According to DEBKAfile's Counter-Terror Sources:
"Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 – both from Los Angeles - on the 4th of July at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, is revealed by DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counter-terror sources as a Muslim extremist. During his ten years in the United States, he was a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad who maintained undercover links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. Both are doing time for perpetrating the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.
Hadayat’s murderous attack on El Al flight 106 passengers points back to the Egyptair 990 disaster of 1999, reviving the many questions left open by that earlier, half stifled inquiry, which carefully stepped round any suggestion of terrorism. It also raises the question of how many sleeper cells the Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s primary operational arm, maintains in American cities.
Hadayat struck the El Al ticket line on his 42nd birthday. The initial FBI inquiry found through records of his fingerprints at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issued him with a limousine license, that he was married with at least one child, and had lived in Irvine for the last two years, working on a green card.
Since the attack, the possibility that he arrived in America as a sleeper terrorist must be seriously addressed. US investigators realize he was not a lone operative and are seeking his accomplices in such matters as setting up the hit, providing the guns he carried and intelligence on the security situation at the Tom Bradley terminal.
After the 4th of July attack, in order not to clash directly with the US authorities which refused to identify it as a terrorist assault, El Al and Israeli security spokesmen said that even if the Egyptian gunman was not a proven member of a terrorist group, his crime ranked as an act of terror.
However, Sunday, July 7 the influential Arabic London-based Al Hayat followed the original DEBKAfile disclosure of July 5 - that Hadayat was a member of the Egyptian Jihad Islami - and took it a step further. According to the Arabic paper, the Egyptian gunman met Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, the Jihad Islami chief who is Osama bin Laden’s deputy, twice in California – once in 1995 and again in 1998.
According to DEBKAfile’s sources, it was at that second encounter that Hadayat was told to leave his job with Mercury and given capital to set up his small limousine firm, so as to take advantage of his access to airport facilities and airline personnel contacts, while at the same time shaking off any watchers.
The Al Hayat report places Dr. Zuwahri in California unobserved less than three years before the 9/11 hijacking attacks in America and a year and a half before the Egyptair disaster.
The Hadayat family lives in Cairo. His father, a retired Egyptian army general, and his uncle, a former minister of science, admit that Hesham was a fervent Muslim who did what he could to encourage everyone to read the Koran. They say he was happy in Irvine, California. His neighbors in that Los Angeles suburb tell a different story, that he hated Israelis and Jews and asked one of them to take down the American and US Marine flags put up after 9/11.
From all the foregoing, our counter-terror experts cite Hesham Hadayat as a classical al-Qaeda plant. He was positioned at Los Angeles airport in the early 1990s to bide his time for the right moment to carry out a terrorist attack against an El Al flight. When Hayat’s handlers saw he was under observation, they made him lower profile. His assignment was revised to fit his role as a limousine driver familiar to the Tom Bradley terminal staff and free to move around - namely to shoot down a line of passengers waiting to board an El Al flight.
Although from 1994 or 1995 at the latest, Hadayat was brought to the notice of American security, was under the eye of El Al security, and the Egyptian authorities must have known about him, he was never investigated - even after 9/11. The FBI has admitted he figured on no watch list for terrorists. This left him perfectly free to carry out his mission on behalf of the extremist Islamic organization – all of which raises some hard questions about the way in which the war against terror is carried out in the United States."
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| Vicky Hen's boyfriend Yaron Cohen had planned to propose the next day |
Revisiting 1st Islamic terror in LA at LAX El Al, July 4 '02 - 10 years later
At the 10th annual, memorial gathering to remember the victims and their survivors at LAX, Klaus (Ben-Ami) Hackel, the German-raised, El Al Station Chief at the time of the massacre, remembers Vicky Hen in glowing terms - and with tears.
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| Retired El Al LAX manager Klaus Hackel eulogized Vicky Hen former Muslima, Amani Mustafa, exposed Jew-hatred in Islam |
Ms. Amani Mustafa, a Muslima for the first part her life, told the crowd of several dozen, that Islam inculcates hate and violence against Christians, Jews, and non-Muslim culture through Islamic verses, dogma, and culture, which probably inspired Mr. Hadayet to commit this slaughter. Investigators seeking clues to the motives and methods of the intended massacre at El Al reported that Hadayet had posted a notice on the front-door of his home, "Read the Quran."
Speeches at the memorial from Israeli Consul Danny Gadot, Klaus Hackel- El Al's LAX station manager; Ms. Amani Mustafa- a brave, apostate from Islam, speaking about the Koranic imperatives against Jews and Christians.
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| Vicky's survivors Avi, Rachel and brother Udi Hen |
ABC 7's Miriam Hernandez did call Hadayet's attack an act of terror, but appeared to downplay the role of Islam and terrorism in her story. She mischaracterized that federal investigators only took 2 months to declare the attack "a terrorist attack" tempered his motivations with extenuating frustrations in Hadayet's personal life, never mentioning Muslim or Islam, and while she did mention "According to the FBI, Hedayet wanted to die as a martyr," Ms. Hernandez cut off the phrase as published by CNN's Charles Feldman on Sept 4, '02: "He wanted to be a martyr and take as many people with him as possible." How would attacking the check-in line of El Al civilian passengers earn Egyptian-national Hadayet martyrdom? Egypt has been at peace with Israel since March, 1979. The Second Palestinian Intifada against Israeli civilians was in effect in 2002- was this a domestic American Muslim branch of Palestinian nationalist militantism? The attack came 10-months after Radical Islam's destruction of New York's World Trade Center. No connection? To achieve martyrdom by "taking as many people with him as possible," couldn't he have struck a more densely populated counter in the International Terminal? Why could the NYC attackers achieve martyrdom by killing assorted American "infidels" in the WTC, but in L.A. to be a martyr, Hedayet had to strike El Al?
Ms. Hernandez' ambiguous characterization inferred that Hedayet's motivation to achieve martyrdom was to avenge Israel's military oppression of Palestinian Arabs. If Palestine was an incitement for Hedayet, it was probably moreso as a hub for Islamic dogma to kill Jews. Palestinian TV (both Fatah and Hamas, but also Egyptian religious TV programs) available on satellite and the internet- are rife with government-appointed, clerics damning Judaism and Jews, which encourage the killing of Jewish people to be not just mandated as "the duty" of a good Muslim, but to die in the act of killing a Jew grants the highest reward in heaven. See the many examples on Palestinian Media Watch's page, "Kill Jews for Allah."
Hadayet posted on his front door, "Read the Quran." He might have simply posted the Hamas website poster, "Kill a Jew- Go to Heaven!" teaching that killing a Jew is enough to grant the rewards of Heaven.
The text on Hamas' poster reads, "I will knock on Heaven's doors with the skulls of Jews" - with an axe crashing through the word "Jews."
Omar Abdel Rahman’s arrival in New York in July 1990 lit a fuse to the city’s nascent but already functioning jihadist community. He went to work right away. It was time, the sheikh exhorted his flock in Brooklyn and Jersey City, to stop pretending that the challenge for Muslims lay elsewhere in the world. The challenge lay right here in the United States. This country, he preached, was “the big evil,” the “fiercest enemy of Islam,” and the real power behind not only the Middle East interloper Israel but such secular Islamic governments as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt.Morsi Promises to Free 'Blind Sheik' from U.S. Prison June 29, '12 Wall St. Journal
Next to the murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, his favorite example of an effective jihadist operation was Hizballah’s strike against the United States Marines in Lebanon in 1983. But the main point was this: one way or another, it was time to wage jihad in, and against, America.
Among those listening closely to Abdel Rahman’s words was a thirty-four-year-old Egyptian-born immigrant named Sayyid Nosair. An engineer by education and by trade, Nosair was now working as a maintenance technician at the criminal court in lower Manhattan. More significantly, he was already known in jihadist circles as the “emir of marksmanship,” working to build the Egyptian sheikh’s American cell.
In December 1990, after a mere six weeks of investigation, the FBI let the Times know that it believed “more strongly than ever that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane.”
And what about Abdel Rahman? The federal investigators said they regarded his presence in New York “as a tantalizing but possibly meaningless footnote.” There was, they claimed, “no evidence that the sheikh had known Mr. Nosair or had ever spoken with him in private.” No evidence, that is, other than the cassette tapes seized from Nosair’s home that no one had troubled to analyze and that contained recordings of Nosair and Abouhalima bantering with the blind sheikh about paramilitary training for jihad.
On January 29, 1992, Judge Alvin Schlesinger imposed the maximum sentence: seven-and-one-third to twenty-two years’ imprisonment. In a blatant message to the parole board, he also made it clear that if there were a legal way to lock the cell door and throw away the key, he would do so. Nosair, he said, had “conducted a rape of this country, of our Constitution and of our laws, and of people seeking to exist peacefully together.”
Most significant, however, was the extensive notebook Nosair kept on plans and philosophy. “To those against whom war is made,” he wrote, “permission is given to fight [back] because they are wronged and verily Allah is most powerful in their aid.” He described what he foresaw as a “counter-psychological war against God’s enemies for their attempt to demonstrate their might.” And, three years before radical jihadists would bomb the World Trade Center, and more than a decade before they would succeed in annihilating it, he wrote of “exploding the structure of their civilized pillars . . . such as the touristic infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings which they are proud of and their statues which they endear and the buildings in which gather their leaders.”
For anyone with eyes to see, this “lone, deranged gunman” had, with the murder of Kahane, propelled himself into the pantheon of jihad warriors. This is certainly the way it seemed to the countless members of Abdel Rahman’s budding New York militia who would beat a path to Nosair’s prison cell. From the moment he was moved to Riker’s Island to await trial from the hospital where he had been recuperating from his bullet wound, he was in continuous contact with his associates. Prominent among them was Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, his cousin and chief confidant. El-Gabrowny not only became the coordinator of all jailhouse visits; he also formed the Nosair Defense Committee, raising funds internationally that included a $20,000 contribution from one Osama bin Laden.
Even as he pleaded not-guilty in court to the charge of murder, attempted murder, and weapons offenses, Nosair brazenly used his newfound celebrity to promote fundraising and recruitment for jihad. He made rousing audiotapes, distributed by El-Gabrowny, citing the threat posed by Jewish immigration to “Palestine” and braying that “God the Almighty commanded us to fight” the Israelis. He also sought to stiffen his listeners’ resolve with a glorious rendition of his sneak attack on Kahane:
"In New York, God the Almighty enabled His extremely brave people, with His great power, to destroy one of the top infidels. They were preparing him to dominate, to be the prime minister, someday. . . . So, brothers, begin the jihad! Begin the jihad! Begin the jihad! There is no honor without jihad."
(Flash back to) Sheikh Abdel Rahman’s New Jersey home. There, the blind sheikh registered his special pleasure that Salem was helping re-start the paramilitary training of jihadists that had been dormant since Nosair’s arrest. The time was coming, Sheikh Omar declared with pregnant emphasis, “when all would need to be trained.”
And so they were. Their worldwide company would include Nosair’s friends Salameh, Ayyad, and Abouhalima, all of whom took occasional time-outs from constructing the World Trade Center bomb to make the trek to Attica for consultations with Kahane’s assassin. It would also include the nineteen men trained to hijack planes simultaneously and use them as missiles on September 11, 2001—trained in this case not by the blind sheikh but by the organization run by Osama bin Laden, the man who a decade earlier had contributed $20,000 to the Sayyid Nosair Defense Fund and who would publicly credit the blind sheikh, by then languishing in an American prison, with issuing the fatwa authorizing the 9/11 attacks.
Would a successful interdiction of Kahane’s murderer, or swift and thorough investigation of Abdel Rahman’s circle in its aftermath, have prevented the monstrous deeds of subsequent years? That is of course unknowable. But an aggressive effort by United States authorities would have indicated a seriousness of purpose toward the threat of Islamic terrorism that itself might have changed the story of our times for the better. We still live, and will continue to live, with the consequences of our own blindness.
Egypt's President-elect Mohammed Morsi made a nod to his base in a speech on Friday when he pledged to seek the release of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman from U.S. custody.
Sheik Abdel-Rahman, who is better known as the "blind sheik" is serving a life sentence at a federal penitentiary in North Carolina for his role in planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City.
His detention has become a cause célèbre among hard-line Salafi Islamists whom Mr. Morsi counted on in his runoff against ex-regime loyalist Ahmed Shafiq.Conclusion
In the '02 Independence Day Jihad attack at L.A.X., Israeli-Americans, not the jihadist Hadayet, were the incident's true "martyrs"- who were sacrificed to expose:
1) Domestic Jihadi ambitions (punishment of kuffars (non-Muslims, particularly Israelis, Jews, and their supporters) and intimidation to deter criticism and woo conversion to Islam) towards cultural and political influence (and eventual domination) present among Muslim culture in the Western world; and
2) The dire results of reluctance to recognize fundamentalist supremacism as a dogma among Western Muslims; and
3) The dire results of slackness in security policy and practice to keep fundamentalists in check, and to protect the object of their animus (Zionists, Jews, Israelis, Christians, and democracy) from defamation and harm.
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