Cell Phones And Islam

Nearly a year ago, on 10 August 2006, I had a post entitled "Let's Not Forget That We Are Still At War." It was largely in regards to the arrests in the U.K. of Muslim suspects who were arrested in connection with planned mid-air terror attacks, and how there have been several instances of Muslims apparently casing airports, airlines, and related security. One of the items I noted was the arrest of Osama Sabhi Abulhassan and Ali Houssaiky, two Michigan Muslims who were stopped for a traffic violation and found with airplane passenger lists, information on airport security checkpoints, $11,000 in cash, and 12 cellular phones.

Part of the increased awareness at the time was due to calls from various retail establishments regarding Middle-Eastern or Muslim looking men purchasing large quantities of pre-paid cell phones. Abulhassan and Houssaiky stated that bought close to 600 phones from Ohio stores in previous months. A few days later, in a related incident, three men of Palestian descent from Texas were arrested when they were found in possession of almost 1,000 cellular phones when their van was stopped by police.

Both the Michigan and Texas Muslims had the terror charges against them dropped, Muslim groups complained of xenophobic Americans trying to keep young Islamic men from getting ahead in this country, and nearly everyone forgot about it and moved on to the aftermath of the Israel/Syria conflict, Pope Benedict XVI's speech at Regensburg University, and the mid-term elections.

Fast-forward about eleven months, and we find ourselves revisiting Muslim terror plots and attacks in the U.K. Some of the key components in the investigation are the detonators in the London car bombs that failed to go off.

The bombs were rigged to go off when the mobile phones – the detonators - were called.

The bombers called the Tiger Tiger car twice and the other car four times but they failed to detonate.

Police were able to use information from the phones to trace the suspects.

They led police to homes in Liverpool, Staffordshire and near Glasgow, where the arrests were made.

That's right, cell phones were the detonators. It's not a first, but looking back to August of 2006, arresting Muslims who are found with large quantities of cell phones, especially when those Muslims are also in possession of a lot of cash and flight documents, doesn't seem so xenophobic. Hell, it sounds like the type of police work that could quite possibly end up saving the lives of innocent people.

And let's also keep in mind that two of those already picked-up by British authorities are doctors. These terror suspects may be young, old, poor, well-off, foreign-born, or life-long citizens; but they always seem to have the one common factor of being Muslim.

Look at the behavior and backgrounds of the terrorists and their supporters, political correctness be damned. If one of the common factors amongst terrorists is their religion, then that must be taken into account when we are trying to weed them out of our midst. That may go beyond the comfort zone of a lot of Americans, but how much comfort will that so-called moral high ground be when American kids are ripped open by a Muslim terrorist's nail bomb?

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