The Bus Riding Saudis

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Michelle Malkin has been all over the story about the two Saudi men arrested on a bus in Florida:

SOMETHING DOESN’T SEEM RIGHT…with the story of the two lying Saudi men who boarded a school bus in Florida. And it is not racist to say so.

She is referring to this case:

Two men from Saudi Arabia were arrested today after they boarded a public school bus taking students to Wharton High School, the sheriff’s office reported.

Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, both of Tampa, were charged with trespassing on school grounds as unlawful riders on a school bus.

Deputies say the two boarded the bus at a regular bus stop at Fletcher Avenue and 42nd street. Deputies said the bus driver and the students saw them and became concerned by their presence. The driver notified her supervisors who, in turn, called authorities.

A sheriff’s deputy met then at Wharton High school and charged with them with trespassing.

The two men “initially told deputies they were from Morocco, but later admitted to being from Saudi Arabia,” the sheriff’s office said. “They told authorities they are enrolled at the English Language Institute at the University of South Florida. The defendants gave several versions of the reason they took a school bus to a high school, among those being they wanted to enroll in easier English language classes.”

Even more interesting is the fact that the Judge in the case has withheld bail for the two men:

A judge revoked bail for two Saudi men arrested Friday for boarding a school bus and riding to Wharton High.

Initially, Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, were held in Orient Road Jail on bails of $250 each on misdemeanor trespassing charges. Circuit Judge Monica Sierra decided to hold them at a court appearance Saturday so investigators could dig deeper into their pasts.

A friend of the two University of South Florida students tried to post their bail Friday night, said Ahmed Bedier, Tampa director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, but a jail clerk told the friend that they couldn’t be released because they were under an immigration hold until a hearing Saturday morning.

At the hearing, Sierra agreed with a prosecutor that she needed to know more about them before she could feel comfortable releasing them.

Of course the terrorist loving organization, CAIR, has come out and said it’s all because we just don’t understand the Arabic culture:

Ahmed Bedier, Tampa director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the men likely meant no harm and that because “they were from Saudi Arabia, that escalated the situation.”

He blamed the incident on cultural differences.

“They didn’t differentiate between a school bus and public transportation,” he said.

Why is this group coming out so quickly to defend these two when they supposedly know nothing about the case?

Do they know something we don’t?

I don’t have an answer for that but there is something I do understand, and that is the fact that there are organizations inside the United States which help fund, and recruit for, those who want to destroy this country. David Horowitz spelled it out in his book “Unholy Alliance”:

Charitable and political nonprofits were not incidental to the terrorist threat but central. A prime counterterrorism effort of the federal government, for example, was to pressure the Saudis not to fund madrassas or religious schools, which were the principal recruiting centers for Al Qaeda. (That worked out huh?) As terrorism expert Steven Emerson summed it up, “By far the most important tactic utilized by terrorist groups in America has been to use non-profit organizations to establish a zone of legitimacy within fund-raising, recruitment, and even outright planning can occur.”

An underappreciated fact about the War on Terror is that America itself is a primary base of Islamic terrorist operations. America has functioned as a prime organizing site for international terrorism because the liberties provided by the American legal system allow terrorists to travel freely, raise money, propagandize, recruit, and move men and money across international borders. Terrorist organizers, including the leaders of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood have all traveled extensively in the United States, raised funds, recruited soldiers and sent emissaries back and forth across America’s borders. This makes control of borders and other immigration issues a crucial front in the anti-terrorist war.

[…]The reforms introduced by the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the Patriot Act of 2001 were inspired by the fact that the framework of legal protections had made America a primary organizing base for global terrorism, and in particular for terrorism directed against the United States. Before embarking on their fatal mission on 9/11, all of the terrorists had lived, operated, and trained within the United States. The terrorist organizations Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad had actually been created in the United States and were able to coordinate their worldwide terror with the aid of existing American laws.

Among the architects of the terrorist jihad who had taken advantage of the situation existing prior to the enactment of the antiterrorism legislation was the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin laden himself. A university professor and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam founded the Alkifah Center in Peshawar in the early 1980’s, where he had gone following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Starting with only a storefront, he revived the concept of armed jihad among Muslims with the best-selling tract Defending the Land of the Muslims Is Each Man’s Most Important Duty. In 1985, Azzam recruited a young Osama bin Laden to be the financier of the holy war he had launched against Israel and the United States.

As Steven Emerson reports, “It was in the United States that Azzam was able to raise much of his money, enlist new fighters, and – most importantly – enjoy the political freedom to coordinate with other radical Islamic movements. From 1985 to 1989, Azzam and his top aide, Palestinian Sheikh Tamim al-Adnani, visited dozens of American cities, exhorting new recruits to puck up the sword against the enemies of Islam. They raised tens of thousands of dollars, and enlisted hundreds and hundreds of fighters and believers.” Thus, the First Conference of Jihad was held by Azzam not in Peshawar or Riyadh or Damascus, but in Brooklyn, at the Al-Farook Mosque on Atlantic Avenue. There, in 1988, Azzam exhorted the nearly two hundred Islamic militants who attended the conference with the following words:

Every Muslim on earth should unsheathe his sword and fight to liberate Palestine. The jihad is not limited to Afghanistan….You must fight in any place you can get…Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures.

The terrorist centers created by Azzam were embedded in mosques and Islamic community centers across the United States. He opened branches of Alkifah in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Pittsburgh, Tucson, and thirty other American cities, as well as in Europe and the Middle East.

I wonder what kind of connections these two have inside the United States?

UPDATE

Here is a recent example of some militant Islamic “scholars” inside the United States.

UPDATE II

Foxnews has picked up the story and has this quote from our CAIR friend:

Ahmed Bedier, director of the Central Florida Council on American-Islamic Relations, said it sounded like a cultural mix-up.

The only reason (this happened) is because of who they are, and that’s wrong,” he said.

Imagine that….it’s only because of who they are! Are they terrorists or just some Middle Eastern men traveling in some black trench coats on a school bus?

It’s all innocent I tell ya.

Sigh

UPDATE III

The two men were released today and found not to have been a threat:

Two Saudi men accused of boarding a school bus full of students were released from jail today after federal officials determined they don’t pose a security threat.

Through an interpreter, Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, told investigators that they got on the bus Friday morning because they wanted to visit the school and didn’t know it was just for students.

At the time, the men gave conflicting reasons why they boarded the bus bound for Wharton High School. But detectives later determined they meant no harm, and immigration agents found that they were here legally.

The two men arrived in the country six months ago on student visas and are enrolled at the English Language Institute at the University of South Florida, officials said.

Investigators said they boarded the school bus Friday, sat down and began speaking in Arabic. Their behavior concerned the driver, a substitute, who alerted the school district.

They were charged with misdemeanor trespassing and were jailed after a judge said Saturday she wanted more background information on them. They were released today on their promise to return to court later.

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