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Is it madness, or astonishing stupidity that drives cultural suicide in Sweden?
Sweden gives ISIS leader who returned from Syria a protected identity
and welfare benefits
DEC 27, 2020 1:00 PM
“She led the Islamic State Women’s Brigade in Syria – now Fatin, 33, receives protected identity and grants in Sweden,” translated from “Hon ledde Islamiska statens kvinnobrigad i Syrien – nu får Fatin, 33, skyddad identitet och bidrag i Sverige,” Fria Tider, December 23, 2020:
Domestic. The leader of the Islamic State’s women’s brigade in Syria, Fatin al-Mandlawi, 33, has moved back to Sweden and now lives in Angered in Gothenburg, Fria Tider can reveal today. The Swedish Tax Agency has given her the protected identity “Fatosh Ibrahim” which she uses to collect municipal social benefits and to run a black-market business where she offers to threaten people against payment.
– It’s a police matter. The municipality’s part is to offer support, says Zan Jankovski,
coordinator against extremism in the city of Gothenburg, to Fria Tider.
In July 2000, the father of seven, Mostafa al-Mandlawi, was interviewed by Göteborgsposten about the difficulties for immigrants to find work in Sweden.
– Yes, I hope I get a job. I have lived in Sweden for ten years and looked for a job all the time. Six years in Eskilstuna and four years in Gothenburg. In Baghdad, I had my own factory, but here I have sent lots of application papers, without anything happening, he said in the interview.
In the autumn of 2012, in connection with the so-called “Arab Spring”, Fatin’s big brother Hassan al-Mandlawi traveled to Syria to join an armed group close to the terrorist-branded al-Nusra Front.
After returning to Sweden, Hassan was sentenced in 2015 to life in prison for terrorist crimes for his involvement in the murder of two captured Syrian oil workers. According to the Gothenburg District Court, the motive for the murder of the workers was that they were employed by an oil company owned by the Syrian state. The verdict was later upheld by the Court of Appeal.
At the same time that Hassan traveled to Syria, his little sister, 25-year-old Fatin, also decided to leave the Gothenburg suburb of Angered for the Syrian city of Raqqa. There she joined what would later become known as the Islamic State.
In Syria, Fatin al-Mandlawi went by the alias Umm Fidah, which can be translated as “Mother of Restoration”. She married an IS terrorist from the UK in 2013. The man died the same year, while Fatin was expecting a child. In September 2013, she gave birth to a girl.
Fatin al-Mandlawi is one of the first women to travel from Sweden to Syria, and she became very active in attracting more women to travel there. In an interview with Kalla Fakta from 2015, the terrorist researcher Magnus Ranstorp described “Umm Fidah” as a key person in IS recruitment work.
– She seems to be very aggressive. She has acted outwardly as extremely brutal. Brutal in terms of conviction, but there are also pictures of her holding a weapon. She is weapon-trained, he says in the interview.
Women’s Brigade
Fatin is not least known as the initiator of the Islamic State Women’s Brigade.
“Can we not start a brigade for just sisters and fight the pigs and pray for martyrdom,” she writes in an open post on Facebook. The Women’s Brigade is named al-Khansa, an Arabic metaphor for beauty.
Fatin was the leader of the newly started IS brigade and had at most between 60 and 70 women under her command. The Women’s Brigade’s main task was to ensure that other women living in the Islamists’ self-proclaimed caliphate complied with strict Sharia law.
In a picture that “Umm Fidah” posted on Facebook, she can be seen in a square in the IS capital Raqqa. On the ground lie the bodies of beheaded people. On a fence next to her, a severed head is mounted on a fence.
“What? Are you talking to me? Oops you have no head!’ This is what we do with Bashar’s soldiers”, wrote “Umm Fidah” in English as a comment on the picture.
Back to Sweden
In the spring of 2017, the Islamic State was collapsing. Outside Mosul in Iraq, fighting was raging that led to IS being forced to give up the city in July of that year. At the same time, the terrorist group’s unofficial capital Raqqa in Syria was surrounded by a coalition of IS-hostile forces. It was only a matter of time before the caliphate fell.
Fatin al-Mandlawi, who was now pregnant again, decided to flee back to Sweden. In October 2017, she gave birth to her second child. According to Fria Tider, the father was an IS terrorist who is currently in prison in Australia. Fatin al-Mandlawi changed her name to Fatosh Ibrahim and was granted protected personal data by the Swedish Tax Agency. She now lives in Angered again.
During the work on this report, Fria Tider has been in contact with the Swedish Tax Agency several times during the summer and autumn to ask on what grounds a former IS fighter has been granted a protected identity. However, the authority has rejected the request, and we are not even allowed to examine the document in disguised form, as even a masked document could be used to find out that it is Fatin al-Mandlawi who is hiding behind the authority’s protected identity Fatosh Ibrahim.
“The Swedish Tax Agency assesses that there is special reason to assume that Fatin may suffer if the information about him (sic!) is disclosed,” the authority writes in its decision.
– It is covered by a fairly strong secrecy, explains Johanna Sjöberg at the Swedish Tax Agency’s personal protection department to Fria Tider.
Open about the IS background
However, according to several people that Fria Tider has spoken to, the 33-year-old terrorist’s background is nothing she herself is particularly keen to keep secret.
– She has told me that she wanted to blow herself up. She has told that she saw when they set fire to this Jordanian pilot in the cage. She brags that she has been in IS, says a woman with an immigrant background who previously hung out in the circles around the IS leader, to Fria Tider.
– We protect IS soldiers and they live on our tax money. I think it should be clear that our authorities are actually protecting IS terrorists who have been there and killed children and adults, innocent people, she continues.
– I think it is terrible that there is an IS terrorist, free out on the street, who has posed in a square in Raqqa with severed heads. I do not want a terrorist outside my door.
According to the woman, Fatin, or Fatosh as she now calls herself, has said that she has received money from the Security Police and that it is the Social Services in Gothenburg that have helped her with her protected identity. The reason is stated to be that the authority has judged that it may be more convenient for her if she does not have to be recognized as a terrorist in Gothenburg.
Reported for threats
After returning to Sweden, Fatin has tried to increase the social contribution by selling services that are marketed as a mixture between Islam and voodoo, but which in fact are reminiscent of traditional intimidation activities. On Facebook, she calls herself “Fatosh Montana” and uses her network of young girls to, among other things, try to make black-market money by “casting spells” on others.
Whether the victims of the activity are in fact exposed to crime is not clear, but the activity has been reported to the police several times for, among other things, illegal threats. However, all reports against the former IS terrorist have been dropped.
– She still walks around threatening young girls and says that she will ruin their lives, says one of the women Fria Tider spoke to.
Zan Jankovski is the coordinator for the work against violent extremism in the city of Gothenburg. He tells Fria Tider that the municipality’s tax-financed work is mainly about giving help and support to the extremists, and not about giving support to their possible crime victims.
– We have a defector business. That defector activity has been around for a few years, it has been around for a while, he says.
– Then we talk about all the defined environments that exist.
Anyone who is threatened or exposed to other crimes by the IS terrorists who have returned from Syria, and whom the Swedish state has decided to protect, can therefore not count on help or support from the municipality.
– It’s a police matter. The municipality’s part is to offer support to individuals who need it, says Zan Jankovski.
Every time I start to think that the Canadian Government is the most stupid in the world, Sweden does something like this!
And now for something completely different...
Pakistan: Top Cleric Says Israel Belongs to Jews
..
Cleric cites Islam, offering rare theological justification for Jewish sovereignty
by Shireen Qudosi, Clarion Project
December 29, 2020
Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani, head of the Council of Islamic Ideology, was also in the spotlight in 2016 when a religious body ruled that men should be allowed to ‘lightly beat’ their wives in the context of a draft of a women’s protection bill. (Photo: FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP via Getty Images)
Breaking news out of Pakistan signals a possible new layer for peace in the Middle East, as a senior cleric goes on the record to acknowledge that Israel belongs to the Jews.
How are we to understand this news? First, the conversation draws on history, specifically the history of the Islamic caliphates and its interface with theology. Second, this fact opens up a larger conversation for concrete changes in the Islamic world that can be found on the razor’s edge of both frameworks, one that shows Islam still has plenty of wiggle room for advancement.
Calling on Muslims around the world to accept the Jewish state, Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani announced before Christmas that the historic land of Israel “belongs only to the Jews.”
Sherani’s background includes serving as chairman of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology, which advises the Pakistani government and parliament on Islamic law. Until 2018, he was also a lawmaker in the National Assembly for the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party, a Sunni Deobandi political party in Pakistan. His credentials give the announcement even greater weight as they are rooted in Islamic theology.
“Educated Muslims need to understand that the Quran and history
prove to us that the Land of Israel belongs only to the Jews.
King David built the house of God in Jerusalem for the Israelis
and not for the Palestinians.”
– Maulana Muhammad Khan Sherani
He went to support what sounds like a blurred two-state solution without outlining boundaries, saying, “There should be an Israeli state in the western part and a Palestinian state in the eastern part.”
The emphasis on education and the need to understand theology and the historic backbone that the theology is carried on is a critical message for Muslims — one that speaks to the evolving nature of Islam and the awareness that Islam is what Muslims do with it.
Islam in the 21st century is no different than any other period in Islamic history; it is still being carved and etched into human understanding.
The marriage between theology and history is crucial to an understanding of Islam. Reinforcement for Sherani’s announcement goes beyond the Quran (where mention of a Jewish homeland is slim to non-existent) and to where a precedent for recognizing Israel can be found. That precedent lies in the second Islamic caliphate that offers not only recognition of Israel but an example to embrace a sovereign Jewish homeland in Israel.
The sanctification of Jerusalem happened during the Ummayad Caliphate, which lasted from 637 AD to 1099 AD. The 400-year rule of the caliphate was sandwiched between the chronicles of back-and-forth wars between Byzantine and Persia and the Crusades.
The Byzantines, who had banned Jews from worshiping on the Temple Mount and at the Wailing Wall, fell in battle to the Ummayad Caliphate, which granted both Christians and Jews safety. As history notes, for the first time “after almost 500 years of oppressive Roman rule, Jews were once again allowed to live and worship inside Jerusalem.”
Fast forward to the 21st century. Sherani’s announcement is significant because it is another layer to the ongoing development of Islam. Here’s how:
Primary source material in Islam (the Quran) is light-handed (and at times contradictory) on where the Jewish people stand on their claim to Israel.
The significance of Israel to Muslims (of Jerusalem, to be precise) waxes and wanes, cementing only during the Umayyad Caliphate as (some suggest) a political move to sanctify and glorify Jerusalem among the Muslims.
As Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes points out, the measures taken by the Ummayad Caliphate to sanctify Jerusalem retroactively fleshed out Jerusalem’s importance within the Quran and in Islamic theology.
The statements by Sherani regarding Israel are incredibly important in light of other statements that Sherani has made. In the context of the interview where he accepts Quranic verses condoning wife beatings (however light), Sherani says, “You cannot ask someone to reconsider the Quran.”
This brings us to an interesting side point in this discussion: Sherani’s position on Israel clearly points to a precedent in Islam of reframing our understanding of what the Quran says (without changing the Quran itself). If the Ummayad Caliphate initiated development projects to shape theology and manifest an expansive approach to the faith, the same can be done in any other area … including women’s rights, without needing to poke holes in source material like the Quran.
That alone is a significant leap in understanding the marriage between history and theology in Islam. This type of “reconstructive” theology lays out a pathway for recognizing Jerusalem but also opens the gates for many places where we could go next.
Now, who saw that coming?
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