The Muslim bomber, who died in the explosion, had a belt laden with explosives, police said, and staged the explosion a little before 7:00 pm near the wall of the French embassy complex.

The French embassy said the two guards were hospitalized after the attack but were only being treated for shock and had not suffered any injuries.

“The Westerners are in hospital but their lives are not in danger,” a police official said.

It was not immediately known who was behind the attack.

The attack came three days after Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who toppled Mauritania’s first democratically elected leader in a military coup last year, was sworn in as president of the Saharan country after winning an election last month.

Defeated opponents have denounced the poll as a fraud, but France said it was ready to re-engage with the Islamic state, which has pledged to make the fight against al-Qaeda a policy priority.

REALLY ??????? AFTER THIS KIND OF “DEMOCRATIC” SUPRESSION

PS: Sorry guys been a long time since I’ve been on Word press, Thanks for all the mails, I appreciate it. The reasons for the absence was one there were some threatening calls made to my house, I have no clue how these lunatics found my house phone number, long story short thankfully those things being behind me now with the law taking its course I can come back to some more fun over here. Thanks again for the all your mails.

The threat was delivered on June 10 to a Christian woman who lives next to Rabita Manzil, the National Catholic Office for Social Communications, which includes the offices of the WAVE (Workshop Audio Visual Education) studio, Radio Veritas Asia’s Urdu service and the Union of Catholic Asian News.

The woman said two masked men arrived on a motorbike without number plates.

“We know that you and those at the recording studio are Christians. We warn you to leave this area, embrace Islam, pay 1,500,000 rupees (US$18,750) or be ready to die in a suicide bomb attack. Inform your neighbors as well,” she quoted the men as saying.

Christians have received similar threats in various parts of the country as fighting between government troops and the Taliban militants continues to rage in the country’s northwest.

Sacred Heart Cathedral, several Catholic schools in Lahore and various pastors have received threatening notes telling them to convert to Islam.

A Pentecostal Bible school in the southwestern city of Quetta was closed indefinitely after suspected Taliban militants threatened a suicide bomb attack last month.

Father Nadeem John Shakir, director of Rabita Manzil, issued a statement in Lahore immediately after learning about the threat to his center.

“This is the first time the studio has received such warning,” Father Shakir said in the press release June 10. “This has made us sad and very insecure. We are quite helpless in this regard. The threat has also demoralized our employees. If something happens to our center a number of Church activities will collapse.”

In his statement, Father Shakir called on people to prayer for studio staff and those engaged in “such inhuman acts or supporters of such beastly activities, so that they may change their nature and become good human beings.”

The priest told UCA News that neighbors of the center had been supportive.

“However, no one can guarantee the security of our houses, convents, churches, schools, hospitals and other institutions. Even the law enforcement agencies are not safe themselves.”

Intense government fighting against Taliban militants has triggered a wave of attacks in cities across the country, the most recent being a suicide bombing of a hotel in Peshawar on June 9. The attack on the city’s premier Pearl Continental Hotel left 11 dead, including two UN aid workers, and 60 injured.

The latest bombing affects relief efforts in the country. Peshawar lies near the Swat Valley, where Pakistani government forces are battling Taliban militia in fighting that has forced more than 2.5 million people from their homes. The hotel was used by some foreign aid workers helping the displaced.

Arkansas Jihad Update. “Suspect in soldier shooting says he was justified,” by Kelly P. Kissel for Associated Press, June 9 :

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A Muslim convert charged with fatally shooting an American soldier at a military recruiting center said Tuesday that he doesn’t consider the killing a murder because U.S. military action in the Middle East made the killing justified.”I do feel I’m not guilty,” Abdulhakim Muhammad told The Associated Press in a collect call from the Pulaski County jail. “I don’t think it was murder, because murder is when a person kills another person without justified reason.”…

“Yes, I did tell the police upon my arrest that this was an act of retaliation, and not a reaction on the soldiers personally,” Muhammad said. He called it “a act, for the sake of God, for the sake of Allah, the Lord of all the world, and also a retaliation on U.S. military.”

In the interview, Muhammad also disputed his lawyer’s claim that he had been “radicalized” in a Yemeni prison and said fellow prisoners that some call terrorists were actually “very good Muslim brothers.”

He also said he didn’t specifically plan the shootings that morning.

“It’s been on my mind for awhile. It wasn’t nothing planned really. It was just the heat of the moment, you know,” said Muhammad, who was arrested on a highway shortly after the attack….

Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.

He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.

No, they burn those.

“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.Asked whether he considered the shootings at the recruiting center an act of war, Muhammad said “I didn’t know the soldiers personally, but yes, it was an attack of retaliation. And I feel that other attacks, not by me or people I know, but definitely Muslims in this country and others elsewhere, are going to attack for doing those things they did,” especially desecrating the Quran….

True to form in such cases, no Muslim in his area has ever heard of this guy:

Muhammad had moved to Arkansas in the spring to work at his father’s bus tour company and had never attended the Islamic Center of Little Rock, a mosque frequented by most of the area’s Muslims, said Iftikhar Pathan, the center’s president.Pathan said he spoke with most of the nearly 300 people who attend Friday prayers at the mosque and no one knew him. Those at the mosque also spoke with FBI agents in the days immediately after the shooting, he said.

“What he had in his mind, God knows,” Pathan said.

Last week, Hensley said his client, born Carlos Bledsoe, had been tortured and “radicalized” in a Yemeni prison after entering the country to teach English. He was held there for immigration violations, and Yemeni officials have denied mistreatment.

“Those claims … are all lies,” Muhammad said Tuesday. “That never happened in Yemen. The officials dealt with me in a gentle way.”

There’s a whole lotta lying going on, from the looks of this story.

“It’s a messy situation. It’s not easy,” Obama told C- SPAN in an interview. “We’ve got a lot of people there who we should have tried early, but we didn’t. In some cases, evidence against them has been compromised. They may be dangerous, in which case we can’t release them, so finding how to deal with that I think is going to be one of our biggest problems.”

Obama, who called the Bush administration’s policy of indefinitely holding prisoners in Guantanamo a “mistake,” said he’s spoken to former President George W. Bush since taking office in January. He didn’t elaborate on the conversations, saying, “I think the general policy of keeping confidence with the predecessors is important.”

The Democratic president defended his decision to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by early next year in a speech two days ago in Washington. He said some choices made by Bush and his advisers in pursuing the war on terrorism were “ad hoc” and “hasty” and left behind a “mess.” He repeated the criticism in the C-SPAN interview, which will air in full today at 10 a.m., Washington time.

Corners Cut

“There was a period of time after 9/11, understandably because people were fearful, where I think we cut too many corners and made some decisions that were contrary to who we are as a people,” Obama told the cable-television network.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush’s administration’s actions in a May 21 speech in Washington.

Cheney said the Bush administration employed tactics after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that saved lives, including using harsh interrogation techniques. He said he would support those decisions again “without hesitation.”

Obama has banned the interrogation techniques in question, including simulated drowning, or water boarding. He contends the measures betray the country’s “ideals” and aren’t necessary to “wage an aggressive battle against organizations like al-Qaeda that want to do us harm.”

“I’m confident that we are stronger when we uphold our principles, that we are weaker when we start pushing them aside,” he told C-SPAN.

In a much-anticipated speech, Obama will defend his still-emerging plan to shutter the detention camp at a U.S. naval base in Cuba as he tries to ease concerns that some terrorism suspects held there could be set free in the United States.

Obama will renew the pledge he made in his first days in office to close Guantanamo by January 2010 but will apparently stop short of providing details demanded by friends and foes alike on what will be done with the facility’s remaining 240 prisoners.

At the same time Obama is speaking, former Vice President Dick Cheney, an architect of Bush’s detainee policy and a harsh critic of Obama’s efforts to dismantle it, will be at a Washington think tank giving a speech partly titled “Keeping America Safe.”

Four months into his presidency, Obama suffered a stinging setback on Wednesday when the Senate, controlled by fellow Democrats, blocked the $80 million he had sought for the shutdown until he decides what to do with the facility’s inmates.

 Democratic lawmakers, worried that some of the prisoners could be jailed or even released in the United States, rebelled against Obama after opposition Republicans threatened to brand them as soft on terrorism. Please do answer us why Mr. President you want to release such dangerous Islamic terrorists, who have no love for United States, no love for democracy or our way of life, among us.  You are doing a wonderful job economy wise but when it comes to this decision, as much as you are loved, you are fast becoming very unpopular. After the humiliating our premier spy agency CIA about the water boarding stuff, you had to make a quick back track, why didn’t some one of your intelligence see this coming. Why don’t your have some anti-terror law provisions where these hardcore Islamic terrorists will never see daylight among the common citizens of United States. 

We elected you to make us safe not unsafe, you seem to have a hangover of anti-Bush era; our advice from here is make decisions which are mature.

A trustee of an Islamic think tank in Northern Virginia that is long suspected of financing terrorists is expected to become the new head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s chapter in Jordan.

Ishaq Farhan is expected to be named interim head of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Jordanian political wing, the Jordan Times reported. The move follows the resignation of IAF directors after a leadership dispute.

As first reported by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, Farhan also is a longtime trustee of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). He is listed on the organization’s IRS Form 990s from at least 2005, through 2007, which is the most recent year available. The 990 is an annual report required of non-profits in the United States detailing their income, expenses and other operating details.

Farhan previously served as the IAF’s secretary general, and as an IAF member in the Jordanian Parliament. The IAF has a close relationship with Hamas, which was created by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987.

As Investigative Project on Terrorism Executive Director Steven Emerson said in congressional testimony in 2000, “Farhan played an integral role in the recruitment of Palestinian youth for the Hamas movement” during attendance at conferences for the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Muslim Arab Youth Association held in the U.S. during the mid 1990s.

Farhan wrote to U.S. officials to protest the detention of then-Hamas political chief Mousa Abu Marzook. Marzook was jailed by U.S. officials between 1995 and early 1997, when he was deported to Jordan.

As IAF secretary general, Farhan demanded Marzook’s release, writing in May 1996 that extraditing Marzook to face trial in Israel, as originally planned, would show that the U.S. was “captive to the Zionist will.”

Farhan called “on all the governments of the Arab and Islamic Worlds and all defenders of human rights to raise their voices and demand the abolition of this decision and the release of Dr. Musa Abu Marzook, a prisoner of opinion and political struggle.”

In November 1996, the U.S. Embassy in Amman received a far more threatening letter about Marzook’s detention:

“We demand that you immediately release Dr. Musa Abu Marzook and urge you not to hand him over to the Zionist enemy…We warn you that if you do not release Dr. Musa Abu Marzook, and if you hand him over to the Jews, we will turn the ground upside down over your heads in Amman, Jerusalem, and the rest of the Arab countries and you will lament your dead just as we did to you in Lebanon in 1982 when we destroyed the Marine House with a boobytrapped car, and there are plenty of cars in our country. You also still remember the oil tanker with which we blew up your soldiers in Saudi Arabia.”

A State Department translation of the letter indicates that the fax page “bears the Islamic Action Front [IAF] name.”

Meanwhile, the IIIT remains the focus of a federal grand jury investigation.

Sami Al-Arian’s refusal to testify before that grand jury despite a grant of immunity and court orders is at the heart of his criminal contempt case. A ruling by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema on Al-Arian’s motion to dismiss that indictment is expected at any time.

The IIIT helped finance a think tank Al-Arian operated in Tampa, which worked with University of South Florida faculty. That think tank housed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Ramadan Shallah during the early 1990s and was listed as the employer for PIJ ideologue and governing board member Basheer Nafi. Immigration agents arrested Nafi in 1996 and deported him after discovering he was working at the IIIT in violation of his work visa.

Attempting to renew Nafi’s visa so he could stay in the U.S. was among the tasks Al-Arian, in his 2006 guilty plea, acknowledged doing as a service in support of the PIJ.

Previously released records include a 1992 letter written to Al-Arian by then-IIIT President Taha Jaber Al-Awani. In it, Al-Awani said he considers Al-Arian’s think tank “an extension” of IIIT. “When we make a commitment to you or try to offer,” Al-Awani wrote, “we do it for you as a group, regardless of the party or the façade you use the donation for.”

The financial and work relationships between Al-Arian and the IIIT prompted Virginia prosecutors to subpoena Al-Arian in 2006.

For example, the group was listed among “[a] list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in an internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum about the group’s future in North America.

This document has become infamous for its ominous description of the Brotherhood’s long-range ambitions in the United States (see page 21 of the link):

“The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

IIIT representatives have acknowledged past ties to the Brotherhood, but claim they broke away years ago. Farhan’s clear Brotherhood connection seems to challenge that assertion.

Law enforcement officials have known about Brotherhood ties to the IIIT for 20 years.

Reports obtained by the IPT last year through the Freedom of Information Act show IIIT board members Jamal Barzinji and Yaqub Mirza are listed among “members and leaders of the IKHWAN” or Brotherhood.

In one report, the IIIT was described as “organizing external political support which involves influencing both public opinion in the United States as well as the United States government.”