Monday, August 9, 2010

Quick Thinking in Germany

German authorities have finally gotten around to shutting the mosque when Mo Atta and crew were "radicalized," reports the New York Times:
BERLIN — Authorities in Hamburg said Monday they had shut down the mosque there where several of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had met because it remained a source of radicalization nearly a decade later.
The Masjid Taiba mosque, known at the time of the hijackings in 2001 as the Al Quds mosque, was “closed effective immediately,” according to a statement by the Hamburg Interior Ministry.
The mosque’s closure came after a group of radicalized young people associated with the mosque, most of whom were German citizens with roots in Muslim countries, traveled last year to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Police searched the mosque and the apartments of leading members starting at 6 a.m., and seized the group’s assets. Photographs published on the Web site of the daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt showed police carrying computers out of the mosque in Hamburg’s St. Georg neighborhood.
“Today we closed the Taiba mosque because young men were being turned into religious fanatics there,” said Christoph Ahlhaus, secretary of the interior for the city of Hamburg, at a news conference Monday. “Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war,” Mr. Ahlhaus said....
The obvious questions:
  1. What took you so long?
  2. How many Atta-wannabes have been turned into "religious fanatics" (i.e. jihadis) in the interim?
  3. Isn't the proposed GZM "a supposed cultural organization," too?

2 comments:

Blazingcatfur said...

“Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war,”

Gee kinda like the New York Mosque hu.

scaramouche said...

All they want to do is "To Serve Man" with their, er, "culture". Anyone who objects to that is clearly living in a twilight zone.