18 minute read
Issue 1854- May- 28/05/2021
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Why Germany Is A Jihadist, Money Laundering Safe Haven
By Jassim Mohamad - Bonn
There is much curiosity to know why Germany is considered as a safe haven and a centre for carrying out terrorist operations inside and outside Europe. The country’s image as a hub of extremist activity is complicated by the fact that it seems to attract all types of networks: the Muslim Brotherhood which regards southern Germany’s Munich city as a potential centre of its activities in Europe since the 1940s as well as
A police officer walks out of Al-Irschad Mosque during a raid on April 30, 2020 in Berlin, as dozens of police and special forces stormed mosques and associations linked to Hezbollah in Bremen, Berlin, Dortmund and Muenster in the early hours of the morning. (Getty) other extremist Islamist groups such as Salafi jihadist, Al Qaeda, ISIS and Hezbollah. This comes in addition to right-wing and left-wing radical groups. The infamous September 11, 2001 terrorist event was planned and launched by the Hamburg Cell, based out of the German city of Hamburg. The Abu Al-Walla Al-Iraqi network was also known for providing logistical support to ISIS from within Germany, by sending individuals and groups to fight alongside ISIS since 2014. This also includes Hezbollah which has taken Germany as a safe haven since the 1980s as well as a basic source of funding to operate terrorist attacks. After the defeat of ISIS by the international coalition, around 500 fighters of the Islamic ISIS fled through Turkey, Syria and Iraq to Europe, according to the investigative program “The French TV channel M6 Enquête”. These terrorist groups have settled in some European countries mostly in Germany. Despite a crackdown by the German intelligence services which resulted in many arrests, some of the Jihadists are still living relatively free in Germany. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) monitors with deep concern the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Eastern state of Saxony. Gordian Meyer-Platt, head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency in Saxony, said that the Muslim Brotherhood exploited– through organizations such as the Cultural Association of Saxony Forum – lack of places of worship for Muslims who came to Saxony as refugees, to expand their structures and spread their perception of political Islam.
The Muslim Brotherhood
The Muslim Brotherhood was established in Germany since the 1960s by Saeed Ramadan who was able to assume the presidency of the Islamic Center in Munich, which is still the headquarters of the Brotherhood. The group controls several Islamic centres in Frankfurt (Main), Marburg, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Cologne, Munster, Braunschweig and other major cities. The close ties between the Egyptian and Syrian branches of the MB were formalized in 1994 when their supporters established the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (Zentralrat der Muslime in Deutschland (ZMD), the umbrella organization of the Muslim Brotherhood in Germany. The number of leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood organization in Germany is about 1,350. German internal intelligence classifies the Muslim Brotherhood as a source of threat to democracy in Germany and more dangerous than ISIS. The Muslim Brotherhood in Germany also seeks to constantly attract new supporters by targeting Muslims and organizing social activities for Muslim communities.
The ISIS member Abdul-Aziz Abdullah
The story of the most potent member of ISIS, AbdulAziz Abdullah, known as Abu Alwalla Al Iraqi, is a good example of how Jihadists are providing logistic support to ISIS from inside Germany. Providing logistical support to ISIS from inside Germany, Ahmed Abdulaziz Abdullah moved from Iraq in 2000. He settled with his family in the town of Tönisvorst in North Rhine-Westphalia. He established himself as the most influential Salafi jihadist in Germany. He was called Abu Walla Al-Iraqi as well as Sheikh Hildesheim and the preacher who has no face. He preached at the Deutschsprachiger Islamkreis mosque in the city of Hildesheim in Lower Saxony. What is interesting to know is that the mosque turned into a meeting point for the extremist Salafist, not only from Lower Saxony, but also from outside it, and the mosque became one of the centres of the Salafi jihadist scene. It is believed that about 20 men who left Germany to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria have turned to extremism through the mosque.
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Abu Walla pledged allegiance to ISIS and created a network to recruit young German ISIS fighters. He provided financial and logistical assistance to recruits to travel to conflict areas in Syria and Iraq. He was in contact with Anis Omri, the perpetrator of the Berlin Christmas Market attack. Abu Wala Al-Iraqi owned accounts on social networks such as Telegram and Facebook, and the number of fans of his page reached about 25, 000 people. He was broadcasting his thoughts and sermons on his official YouTube channel, and most of the preacher’s videos did not show his face. He owned a special application called ‘Abu Walaa’ in the Apple Store, where smartphone users of his supporters could track his activities. On February 10th 2021, the Public Prosecutor announced that last year 381 investigations related to Islamist extremism had been opened. According to Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank, about 60 percent of the total new investigations in the Terrorism Department were related to Islamists. The response stated that in 2021 it could also be expected that the country would be subjected to violence by jihadists.
Hamburg cell
In details that emerged about the Hamburg cell’s activities, after the Hamburg connection was discovered two days after the U.S. attacks, prosecutor Kay Nehm described how the hijackers and their alleged accomplices became acquainted at a mosque frequented by vehemently anti-Western Muslims. The Hamburg cell played a decisive role in the attacks on the United States in 2001. Some members of the cell met while studying at a German college. Among the most prominent members of the cell are the Egyptian Muhammad Atta, who arrived in Hamburg in 1992. The Lebanese Ziyad Jarrah, and the Moroccan, Said Bahaji and Munir al-Motassadeq were also members of the cell and visited Al-Quds Mosque in Hamburg repeatedly and met with many extremists, including the radical preacher Muhammad Al-Fazazi, before the events of September 11, 2001. The discovery of the Hamburg cell was a shock to the German authorities, as they had been clearly sleeper cells for a long time. Although German intelligence was aware of the extremism of the Hamburg cell members, they were unaware of the true threat level of the danger they represented.
Safe Haven
There was much criticism against Germany, when intelligence reports said that there are a great number of Arab clans, Russians and Eastern Europeans operating money laundering gigs from inside Germany. It was too late when German security services realized that since 2019 Arab and foreign gangs and the Mafia were laundering money especially from Berlin, Frankfurt and other major cities. There are many facts that let gangs be operative, mostly, the German law, that allow people to buy some expensive things cash without using the banking system. It is good to know that German laws do not require an upper limit for cash payments unless the amount exceeds 10,000 euros. Only then the buyer must show his personal identification documents, unlike the situation in Italy, which does not allow cash purchases when the amount exceeds 1000 Euros. This is what makes Germany a destination for the mafia, according to Italian Senator and antiMafia fighter Laura Garavini. Transfer and credit card purchases “allow the authorities to trace their source,” Garavini said. Members of government and parliament have been asking for stricter rules to curb this practice since it has led to uncontrolled rising rents and purchase prices. BaFin´s role in preventing money laundering The German BaFin department’s job is mostly to prevent the misuse of the financial system for the purpose
Parts of this image have been pixellated to obscure the identity of the defendant) Defendant Abdullah A. arrives before hearing the verdict of his trial for murder on May 2021 ,21 in Dresden, Germany. Abdullah A. is a refugee from Syria whom authorities accuse of being a member of the Islamic State and of having attacked a gay couple with a knife in Dresden last October, killing one of them men and seriously injuring the other. (Getty)
of money laundering, terrorist financing and other criminal offences, which can lead to a threat to assets of an institute. Bodies in the financial sector subject to the money laundering supervision of BaFin include not just credit and financial services payment institutions, but also life insurance undertakings and asset management. The project manages investigations to prevent money laundering and crime, terrorism, multinational money laundering and corporate management. It is believed that organized crime has become a problem in Germany,. But fighting money launderers has proven to be difficult. Transactions from Italy, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus caught the investigators’ attention. In addition to real estate agents, restaurant and amusement arcade owners, it appears to have also become common among individuals, to allow criminals to use their bank accounts for money laundering purposes. Politicians and media outlets had long avoided the topic for fear of accusations of xenophobia. German crime clans have long earned infamy with violence and brazen robberies but now, police warn, they have targeted a new generation of refugees for recruitment.
Counter Terror Policies
Germany is working seriously to form an operations room to exchange information through a regular meeting held at the Berlin Counter-Terrorism Center, to present, discuss and exchange data and information directly. This means that the establishment of operating rooms for the security and intelligence services and the departments concerned with national security avoids a lot of the bureaucracy of dealing. Germany is working seriously now to re-equip the security services and put them in a good position to meet the challenges. German officials believe that overcoming the challenges of terrorism will require enforcing improved cooperation between intelligence services and police agencies.
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Cryptographic Anarchism: Bitcoin Not Allowed in China
Bitcoin Restores Privacy of Individuals Amid Era of Computing
Hala Nasrallah
The Cryptographic Anarchism Pact, written by computing brand Timothy May in 1988, says that computing is about providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a completely anonymous way. Two people or parties can exchange messages, conduct business and negotiate electronic contracts without knowing each other’s real name or identity.
A few days ago, the Chinese authorities issued a decision to prevent the mining of Bitcoin, and a few days earlier, they had also issued
In this photo illustration a Bitcoin (BTC) cryptocurrency logo is seen on a smartphone and a pc screen. (Getty) another decision in which they banned the use of anything related to digital money.
If we compare the basic provisions stipulated in May›s document with the ban on China, we discover that the latter stands on the threshold of real concerns related to the decentralization of coding for individualism among the members of its communist societies.
May›s document marked the first seed from which Bitcoin sprang thirty years later.
Apart from the issue of Bitcoin price and its economic importance, it is an event that restores the privacy and status of man in the era of rapid computing.
Bitcoin is based on a type of encryption that humanity has not previously known, and it is one of the most difficult encryption methods that it is impossible to this day to break or breach. Bitcoin in its broad slogan is unbreakable anonymity.
This kind of identity screen allowed individuals to create financial anonymity that the authorities could not track. On the other hand, Bitcoin, which is mainly based on distributing data in decentralized places, resulted in technologies and programs that adopt the same protocol.
It is built on blockchain technology, which later resulted in new types of operating systems and smart programs that are based mainly on the idea of converting smartphones into «nodes».
Nodes keep individuals› data on phones, that is, not in the central storage centers of large companies.
It was the pivotal moment during which many individuals around the world discovered the value of their lives in various forms.
On a personal level, Bitcoin was the first reason that pushed me towards learning programming, computing and security protection. Bitcoin, which is viewed by the overwhelming majority as a place to make a quick profit, is for another group the safe place, and it is a fortress within which a person is protected from the repression of the authorities of all kinds.
With Bitcoin, many people discovered their economic entity far from the sight of governments. Also, Bitcoin allowed individuals to go through the experience of being anonymous individuals on the Internet.
China hates anonymity
If we want to define China, we can say that it is a country based on connecting its citizens within a unified computing network headed by the app WeChat.
China imposes certain types of smart applications on its citizens. These applications contribute to shaping the opinions of its citizens.
These apps provide all basic information about citizens, such as the name and national number, the social networks associated with them, accurate information about their economic activity and the violations they carries out, in addition to the evaluation of citizenship.
This is China in its depth. It is a country that has a deep entity that always wants to delve into the details of the citizens› lives, down to the trivial details about them.
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This is the function of the surveillance cameras deployed by China wherever they are, which work to track citizens and know their movements.
In a country built on tracking, tracing, prosecution and authoritarian control, Bitcoin will surely be one of its greatest enemies.
Digital anonymity is what states hate that use the digital world as a central tool for policing citizens.
Bitcoin and Anarchist Capitalism
Internationally, individuals are reproached if they support capitalism, but with a composition that reconfigures the concept of anarchism extracted from the womb of communism and restrains it on the grounds of capitalism.
The anarchist capitalist entity represents a state of refusing to interfere with the bank or any third authority with its funds armed with a digital encryption model that is difficult to breach, to block the path of this on the authorities and prevent them from interfering much with their private life and personal decisions.
But at the same time, whoever acquires bitcoin realizes that the latter will bring them huge financial gains. I entered the world of Bitcoin in early 2019, and since that date it has occupied the largest part of my daily and intellectual interests.
At that time and place, studies and research dealing with its political side and its role in changing societies were quite rare.
Wherever it is present, either it poses a threat to the state as a deep entity like the Chinese case, or the deep entity is being transformed to integrate in its economic process with a composition, which is what the United States of America represents despite its constant objection to technology.
China hates capitalism
We always have to ask ourselves what money is. Why Bitcoin is an exchange medium similar to gold and not paper money like the dollar.
So we also have to agree that everything in the world can be transformed into a reciprocal medium.
Hence, the reciprocal medium must have some basic criteria in order to continue and survive to the maximum possible degree, and it must also have the four characteristics: time, place, impenetrability, and scarcity.
If we compare the flow of Bitcoin and its stock with the flow and stock of gold, we discover that Bitcoin is many times rarer than gold.
The prospect of finding more gold in the future is strongly available in nature, but we cannot find more than 21 million bitcoins in nature.
Therefore, Bitcoin is better than gold with the three characteristics, surpassing it by the factor of scarcity, and by looking at its annual growth, it has achieved very huge growth.
Bitcoin carries winds of change at the level of individual wealth making.
A customer uses a bitcoin automated teller machine (ATM) in a kiosk Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday, Feb. 2021 ,23. Bitcoin climbed, aided by supportive comments from Ark Investment Managements Cathie Wood and news that Square Inc. boosted its stake in the cryptocurrency. (Getty)
China does not prevent its citizens from making wealth, but one of the conditions for this wealth is that it passes clearly within its institutions and obeys its conditions.
But in the structure of Bitcoin we find a categorical rejection of authority, which we read in the first line of the white paper belonging to its inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.
«Here, pure electronic cash goes from peer to peer over the Internet,» Satoshi says. «Payments are sent directly from one end to the other without going through the financial institution.»
In Satoshi›s documented online conversations, the latter expects each bitcoin to reach 10$ million due to several factors, including the collapse of currencies and high inflation.
There is no worse occurrence than for Bitcoin to be hit by the Chinese approach in the long run, but it is also known that there is no authority in the universe capable of preventing Bitcoin because it is a decentralized network. Bitcoin is a technology that enhances individual nonparticipatory tendency in creating wealth.
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Capitalism and the People
By: Saif Al Abri
Inequality is on the rise, and wages are nearly stagnant. This all came about after the fall in corporate rate of profits in 1970. After the golden age of capitalism, often referred to as embedded liberalism or controlled capitalism. Whereby capitalist engineered a new age of free market capitalism by manufacturing consent. This writing will not be talking about neoliberalism nor how consent was engineered (David Harvey did a comprehensive survey on that) but will talk about an inner contradiction of capitalism.
Productivity and real GDP per capita have been on the rise. At the same time, wealth concentration is reaching heights last seen during the roaring twenties, and wages are almost stagnant. The source of productivity in an economy is producing products. For productivity to be profitable, it requires demand. People constitute a significant amount of demand in an economy. However, how could economic growth be possible if incomes have been nearly stagnant? On top of that, the standard of living has remained the same.
The answer is debt, as financial times calls it, capitalism›s dirty little secret. The only way that allows people to keep their standard of living in some places even increase and allow capitalists to keep the growth of rates of profits is debt. The credit market of households lies at 16.64 trillion dollars (2020), and bank regulation is at an all-time low. This is unsustainable and defies any intuitive understanding of economics.
This goal of economists of having a 3% economic growth is unsustainable and never will be, especially with capitalist persistence of increasing rates of profits to the point of reducing household wealths (taking into account debt) and artificially stimulating demand through financial innovation.
Furthermore, their persistence of reducing labour cost by increasing automation, not paying taxes and holding minimum wage through lobbying is in itself the most short term thinking ever heard of. Production requires demand if people are out of work. There is no demand except if the welfare system funded by “corporation paying taxes” increases payouts or the other unsustainable road they chose to deregulate banks.
Furthermore, minimum wages are vital to the survival of an economy as it constitutes a significant sum of demand yet their efforts to keep it low is naïve. This is the problem of free market capitalism: short term profits are prioritised over long term growth. Another example is global warming. I will discuss the relationship between capitalism and the environment at a later date.
In conclusion, capitalism un-controlled is a threat to social prosperity and, frankly, the existence of humans (global warming). As Marx stated, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” and now is no exception. We live in an age whereby short-term profits are prioritised over sustainable existence and people; it’s a class struggle between capitalist and the many.
