Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Albania Jails Radical Imam, Welcomes New Synagogue

By STEPHEN SCHWARTZ

The isolated and often-derided country of Albania, with a Muslim majority amounting to 70 percent of its three million citizens, has lately illustrated that small nations may often have great ideas, or, at least, may act responsibly in the face of major challenges that cause bigger powers to procrastinate.

On Friday, December 17, Muhammad Abdullahi, a prominent imam in the Albanian port of Durres, was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for jihadist incitement. Abdullahi had posted extremist sermons on an Albanian-language Wahhabi website, http://www.albselefet.net/.

Abdullahi worked in 2002 as the Albanian representative of the Al-Haramain Foundation, a Saudi-based global network named by the U.S. Treasury in 2004 as having “provided financial, material, and logistical support” to al Qaeda. The head of the U.S. branch of Al-Haramain, Pete Seda, an Iranian native, was found guilty in September 2010, by a federal court in Oregon, of financing radical activities in Chechnya through smuggling and money laundering. Al-Haramain in America also sent copies of the notorious Saudi-Wahhabi edition of the Koran to convicts in U.S. prisons, from an office in the Oregon town of Ashland...................continues.......

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/albania-jails-radical-imam-welcomes-new-synagogue_524724.html

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