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| Islamic-terror victim Vicky Hen's July 4 memorial |
How will we protect the West from a theo-political revolutionary movement the Obama era deems taboo to challenge?
From "Los Angeles Airport- top target of terror attacks, lax security, TSA agent arrested" by Julia Davis in Examiner.com
LAX has direct flights to North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East – more direct flights than any other airport in the world.
This has made LAX a prime target for terror attacks. Three of the four planes involved in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were originally headed for Los Angeles. American Airlines Flight 11, and United Airlines Flight 175, were from Logan International Airport, in Boston, Massachusetts, and American Airlines Flight 77 was from Washington Dulles International Airport, in Dulles, Virginia.
As well as being America's second most populous metropolis, the metro- Los Angeles area (which includes Orange County) is also a center for Muslim activity. The Shura Council claims that there are several hundred thousand Muslims in all four counties of Southern California - Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernadino. Orange County is also a hub of Muslim activism. There resides the influential and powerful Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi- chairman of the The Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, and Director of the Islamic Society of Orange County (and until 2001, President of I.S.N.A.- the Islamic Society of North America). The Council for American-Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.) has base of operations in SoCal, as does the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
There is a strong Muslim influence at the University of California at Irvine (U.C.I.) in Orange County, which manifests in a strong Muslim Students Association - a movement which was established by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963. Some MSA / MSU leaders were arrested and found guilty in conspiring to interfere with an invited on-campus address by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren- which resulted in the disbanding of the association for a semester). There is a strong anti-Israel attitude in Orange County's Muslim culture - typified by the anti-Zionist climate on the campus- which presents an annual, Israel-Apartheid Week of public demonstrations, lectures, and exhibits vilifying the Jewish state.
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Hesham Mohamed Hadayet
(photo courtesy BBC) |
On July 4th, 2002, a Muslim Egyptian chauffeur, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet (who had been residing in Orange County's Irvine, Calif.) executed a massacre of innocent people checking-in for an El Al Airlines flight to Toronto at LAX Airport. Brandishing 2 guns and a hunting knife, Hadayet began to shoot people around the El Al counter.
Hadayet's shots and slashes wounded 4 people and killed 2 people: 25-year-old, Israeli-American customer-assistance agent, Victoria Chen, who was shot checking-in passengers flying to Israel; also Jacob Aminov, a father of 5 children (and 1 on the way) who was only dropping-off a friend, Michael Shabtai (whose post-traumatic stress disorder from the bloodbath contributed to his pre-mature death at age 57). Physically injured were the 2 El Al security guards (including Haim Sapir, wounded in the gun-battle which ultimately brought Hadayet down); Canadian passenger Sarah Philips, age 61, shot in the ankle which necessitated immediate surgery; 54-year-old Israeli passenger Arie Golan, who incurred superficial stab wounds grappling against the knife-slashing Hadayet; and Dr. David Parkus, a trauma surgeon from Beaumont, Texas who lept in to wrestle Hedayet's weapons.
El Al Station Chief, Klaus Hackel, retraces the July 4, 2002 Islamic terror attack at LAX's Bradley International Terminal.
Mr. Hackel relates that only for the shooting not commencing until the end of the check-in for El Al's Flight 106 to Toronto and Tel Aviv were more potential victims spared.
Hadayat Belonged to Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s Operational Arm
According to
DEBKAfile's Counter-Terror Sources:
"Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 – both from Los Angeles - on the 4th of July at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, is revealed by DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counter-terror sources as a Muslim extremist. During his ten years in the United States, he was a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad who maintained undercover links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. Both are doing time for perpetrating the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.
Hadayat’s murderous attack on El Al flight 106 passengers points back to the Egyptair 990 disaster of 1999, reviving the many questions left open by that earlier, half stifled inquiry, which carefully stepped round any suggestion of terrorism. It also raises the question of how many sleeper cells the Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda’s primary operational arm, maintains in American cities.
Hadayat struck the El Al ticket line on his 42nd birthday. The initial FBI inquiry found through records of his fingerprints at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issued him with a limousine license, that he was married with at least one child, and had lived in Irvine for the last two years, working on a green card.
Since the attack, the possibility that he arrived in America as a sleeper terrorist must be seriously addressed. US investigators realize he was not a lone operative and are seeking his accomplices in such matters as setting up the hit, providing the guns he carried and intelligence on the security situation at the Tom Bradley terminal.
After the 4th of July attack, in order not to clash directly with the US authorities which refused to identify it as a terrorist assault, El Al and Israeli security spokesmen said that even if the Egyptian gunman was not a proven member of a terrorist group, his crime ranked as an act of terror.
However, Sunday, July 7 the influential Arabic London-based Al Hayat followed the original DEBKAfile disclosure of July 5 - that Hadayat was a member of the Egyptian Jihad Islami - and took it a step further. According to the Arabic paper, the Egyptian gunman met Dr. Ayman Zuwahri, the Jihad Islami chief who is Osama bin Laden’s deputy, twice in California – once in 1995 and again in 1998.
According to DEBKAfile’s sources, it was at that second encounter that Hadayat was told to leave his job with Mercury and given capital to set up his small limousine firm, so as to take advantage of his access to airport facilities and airline personnel contacts, while at the same time shaking off any watchers.
The Al Hayat report places Dr. Zuwahri in California unobserved less than three years before the 9/11 hijacking attacks in America and a year and a half before the Egyptair disaster.
The Hadayat family lives in Cairo. His father, a retired Egyptian army general, and his uncle, a former minister of science, admit that Hesham was a fervent Muslim who did what he could to encourage everyone to read the Koran. They say he was happy in Irvine, California. His neighbors in that Los Angeles suburb tell a different story,
that he hated Israelis and Jews and asked one of them to take down the American and US Marine flags put up after 9/11.
From all the foregoing, our counter-terror experts cite Hesham Hadayat as a classical al-Qaeda plant. He was positioned at Los Angeles airport in the early 1990s to bide his time for the right moment to carry out a terrorist attack against an El Al flight. When Hayat’s handlers saw he was under observation, they made him lower profile. His assignment was revised to fit his role as a limousine driver familiar to the Tom Bradley terminal staff and free to move around - namely to shoot down a line of passengers waiting to board an El Al flight.
Although from 1994 or 1995 at the latest, Hadayat was brought to the notice of American security, was under the eye of El Al security, and the Egyptian authorities must have known about him, he was never investigated - even after 9/11. The FBI has admitted he figured on no watch list for terrorists. This left him perfectly free to carry out his mission on behalf of the extremist Islamic organization – all of which raises some hard questions about the way in which the war against terror is carried out in the United States."
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Vicky Hen's boyfriend Yaron Cohen
had planned to propose the next day |
Mr. Avi Chen complains that on that day, L.A.X. Aiport Security failed to have a single, armed-officer patrolling the multi-airline ticketing terminal. These are the officers who are supposed to be looking for known suspicious individuals. 7 other policemen had been assigned away to cover beach and parade duty that day. He claims not only was the only officer working at the opposite end of the building from El Al, that once the shooting began - a call to 911 was not responded to for 7 minutes. An ambulance did not arrive for longer than 20 minutes. And suspiciously, airport security's response to his lawyer's request for a copy of the CCTV video from the EL AL corridor was that there was none- that the CCTV was not working at the time Mr. Hadayet was there and shooting.
Revisiting 1st Islamic terror in LA at LAX El Al, July 4 '02 - 10 years later
At the 10th annual, memorial gathering to remember the victims and their survivors at LAX, Klaus (Ben-Ami) Hackel, the German-raised, El Al Station Chief at the time of the massacre, remembers Vicky Hen in glowing terms - and with tears.
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Retired El Al LAX manager Klaus Hackel eulogized Vicky Hen
former Muslima, Amani Mustafa, exposed Jew-hatred in Islam |
Ms. Amani Mustafa, a Muslima for the first part her life, told the crowd of several dozen, that Islam inculcates hate and violence against Christians, Jews, and non-Muslim culture through Islamic verses, dogma, and culture, which probably inspired Mr. Hadayet to commit this slaughter. Investigators seeking clues to the motives and methods of the intended massacre at El Al reported that Hadayet had posted a notice on the front-door of his home, "Read the Quran."
Speeches at the memorial from Israeli Consul Danny Gadot, Klaus Hackel- El Al's LAX station manager; Ms. Amani Mustafa- a brave, apostate from Islam, speaking about the Koranic imperatives against Jews and Christians.
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| Vicky's survivors Avi, Rachel and brother Udi Hen |
In the following compilation of L.A. TV news coverage of the 10th Memorial event, only Fox 11 reporter Chris Blatchford included the Islamic militancy motives of Hedayet's attack. Most other reporters omitted it entirely, panderingly framing their stories as a memorial for victims of a common criminal- and avoiding the significance of the day as L.A.'s Pearl Harbor Day- commemorating the L.A. debut of the same
religio-political revolutionary movement that struck the World Trade Center, sparking America's "War on Terror" and seeking to influence American culture away from Judeo-Christian democracy and towards Islamic subjuagtion to a global, Islamic leadership.
ABC 7's Miriam Hernandez did call Hadayet's attack an act of terror, but appeared to downplay the role of Islam and terrorism in her story. She mischaracterized that federal investigators only took 2 months to declare the attack "a terrorist attack" tempered his motivations with extenuating frustrations in Hadayet's personal life, never mentioning Muslim or Islam, and while she did mention "According to the FBI, Hedayet wanted to die as a martyr," Ms. Hernandez cut off the phrase as published by CNN's Charles Feldman on Sept 4, '02: "He wanted to be a martyr and take as many people with him as possible." How would attacking the check-in line of El Al civilian passengers earn Egyptian-national Hadayet martyrdom? Egypt has been at peace with Israel since March, 1979. The Second Palestinian Intifada against Israeli civilians was in effect in 2002- was this a domestic American Muslim branch of Palestinian nationalist militantism? The attack came 10-months after Radical Islam's destruction of New York's World Trade Center. No connection? To achieve martyrdom by "taking as many people with him as possible," couldn't he have struck a more densely populated counter in the International Terminal? Why could the NYC attackers achieve martyrdom by killing assorted American "infidels" in the WTC, but in L.A. to be a martyr, Hedayet had to strike El Al?
Ms. Hernandez' ambiguous characterization inferred that Hedayet's motivation to achieve martyrdom was to avenge Israel's military oppression of Palestinian Arabs. If Palestine was an incitement for Hedayet, it was probably moreso as a hub for Islamic dogma to kill Jews. Palestinian TV (both Fatah and Hamas, but also Egyptian religious TV programs) available on satellite and the internet- are rife with government-appointed, clerics damning Judaism and Jews, which encourage the killing of Jewish people to be not just mandated as "the duty" of a good Muslim, but to die in the act of killing a Jew grants the highest reward in heaven. See the many examples on Palestinian Media Watch's page, "Kill Jews for Allah."
Hadayet posted on his front door, "Read the Quran." He might have simply posted the Hamas website poster, "Kill a Jew- Go to Heaven!" teaching that killing a Jew is enough to grant the rewards of Heaven.
The text on Hamas' poster reads, "I will knock on Heaven's doors with the skulls of Jews" - with an axe crashing through the word "Jews."
