A popular Muslim shopkeeper was murdered in Glasgow, Scotland by another Muslim on 24 March 2016, mere hours after posting a warm Easter message onFacebook. The shopkeeper, 40-year-old Asad Shah, was a devout Muslim who originally hailed from Rabwah in Pakistan. According to an eyewitness, in addition to stabbing him his assailants stomped on his head. Roughly four hours before his brutal murder, Shah wrote on Facebook: "Good Friday and a very Happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation. Let's follow the real footstep of beloved holy Jesus Christ and get the real success in both worlds." He was then found seriously wounded on Minard Road, Glasgow, and taken to a nearby hospital where medical staff were forced to pronounce his death. The following afternoon, police arrested a 32-year-old Muslim man for taking part in the murder. "A full investigation is under way to establish the full circumstances surrounding the death," added a police spokesperson. In the wake of his shocking murder, a fundraising campaign to help support his family was launched on the GoFundMewebsite on Friday "to show how much he was cared for." Within six hours, the six had raised over 5,000 pounds (over $7,000). (INN) Pray for the grieving family of this brutally murdered man and that those who carried out the gruesome attack will be found and brought to justice. [Comment]

Canada’s foreign affairs minister has called on the United Nations to review its appointment of a Canadian law professor with a history of anti-Israel bias to a key Middle East post. Stephane Dion is questioning the naming of Michael Lynk of Western University in Ontario as the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on human rights in Palestine. On 25 March 2016, the day after the council tapped Lynk, Dion said: "We call onUNHRC President to review this appointment & ensure Special Rapporteur has track record that can advance peace in region.” Canada’s opposition party also called for Lynk to be disqualified from the position based on his past statements on Israel. Lynk "was not put forward by Canada and does not represent the views of this government,” Dion’s office said. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said Lynk "has been significantly involved in anti-Israel advocacy in Canada,” including signing anti-Israel petitions, accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and serving as a leader of a group that promotes Israeli Apartheid Week. The Geneva-based group UN Watch said the council’s choice of Lynk was "a travesty of justice.” (JTA) [Comment]

The ISIS affiliate in Egypt's Sinai peninsula plans to carry out a "big operation" in southern Israel, which will include an attack on the resort city of Eilat, a source close to the group warned. Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, a Salafistmovement senior official in the Gaza Strip, said that Israel and the USA are among the ISIS group’s chief targets. "The Islamic State [ISIS] educates its people that Israel and the United States are the leaders of the infidels and we believe that Israel should be done away with," Ansari said. He vowed that "it is only a question of time when there will be a big operation in Eilat and in the south of Israel." Col. Yehuda Cohen, the commander of the IDF’s Sagi Brigade operating on the border with Egypt, acknowledged in Sep. 2015 that ISIS in Egypt would at any moment attempt to carry out a terrorist attack against Israel. I believe that it will happen during my tenure,” he warned in an interview with Army Radio. "I teach my people to expect it to come tomorrow, to always be ready for it. When it happens, my doctrine is that we must strike a very strong blow at the same point and ensure that there are zero successful actions for the enemy,” he said. (J.Post) "No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn.” Isa 54:17 [Comment]

 Iraqi Christians gathered in Baghdad over the weekend to mark Easter but celebrations were tempered by fears that ISIS terrorists would eradicate their shrinking community, even as the army launched a USA-backed offensive to retake Mosul, their ancestral homeland. In mid-2014, Christians in Mosul were forced to flee when ISIS seized the northern city and began destroying centuries-old religious sites, ending a presence that once numbered in the tens of thousands and dates back to Christianity's earliest years. USA backed Iraqi forces launched an offensive against ISIS last week touted as the beginning of a broader campaign to clear areas around Mosul, though progress has been slow. "We are threatened with extinction. Every day we are being depleted. Our people are travelling, migrating," said Father Muyessir al-Mukhalisi, a priest at Saint George's Church in east Baghdad. Members of the Christian minority have moved from northern towns, and many have joined the masses fleeing to Europe. Their numbers have fallen to a few hundred thousand from about 1.5 million before the USA-led invasion in 2003. (Newsmax) Pray that protection, encouragement and restoration will come to Syrian Christians as ISIS forces are increasingly driven back.
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Syrian forces backed by Russian airstrikes drove ISIS from Palmyra on Sunday, 27 March 2016, state media and an opposition monitoring group said. Government forces had been on the offensive for nearly three weeks to try to recapture the central down, which fell to ISIS in May, 2015. The recapturing of Palmyra ends the group’s reign of terror over a town whose famed 2,000-year-old ruins once attracted tens of thousands of visitors. Their advance marks the latest setback suffered by ISIS, which has come under mounting pressure on several fronts in Iraq and Syria. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed there were around 400 deaths among the extremists. "That's the heaviest losses that ISIS has sustained in a single battle since its creation," Observatory director RamiAbdel Rahman told media sources. Palmyra, affectionately known as the "Bride of the Desert," used to attract tens of thousands of tourists every year. ISIS drove out government forces in a matter of days and later demolished some of the best-known monuments in the UNESCO world heritage site. ISIS also used Palmyra’s ancient amphitheater as a venue for public executions, including the beheading of the city’s former antiquities chief. (Fox) Continue to pray for the complete dismantling of this most brutal of terrorist organizations. [Comment]

Western intelligence services repeatedly warned Belgium of a serious and imminent terror threat. They even gave the intended targets, the airport and the underground system, but Belgian security services failed to take the necessary preventative measures that may have stopped the huge loss of life and injury on 22 March, 2016 in Brussels. As one Israeli counter-terror source said, "they fell asleep on guard duty even after being told the enemy was about to attack them.” Whether the Belgians either did not take the warnings seriously, or they did not know what to do with the intelligence, it does seem, when adding other cases of Belgian dismissal of counter-terror warnings that there is deep rooted problem in that country. Last November’s, 2015 deadly terror outrage in Paris showed that Belgium was the base of the terrorists operations. A top USA counter-terror official travelling in Europe was turned down when he requested to meet his Belgian counterparts. He was told that they were "too busy” investigating the Paris atrocity. This brush-off was one small sign of USA frustration over Belgian handling of their growing Islamic terror threat. This frustration has stretched to Turkey which, last year, deported one of the Paris suicide bombers, Brahim Abdeslam, back to Belgium. He, apparently, slipped off the Belgian security radar, allowing him to travel to France and perpetrate his deadly attack. (INN) [Comment]

Every year, the UK funds the Palestinian Authority to the tune of more than $100 million, including direct cash transfers. Much of it goes to supporting terrorists guilty of the worst atrocities. A new investigation by the UK Daily Mail has revealed that much of the $100 million given to the PA has been used for purposes other than humanitarian aid, including the construction of lavish mansions and funding for terrorists guilty of murdering Israelis. On Saturday, 27 March, 2016 the paper revealed that until last year, the UK had been funding the Palestine Liberation Organization directly, supplying the terrorist group with money it passes on to terrorists and their families. Among the recipients of these funds are Amjad and Hakim Awad, the terrorist murderers who broke into the Fogel family home in Itamar, slaughtering the parents and three children. The terrorist cousins received $23,000 thus far.Abdallah Barghouti, a senior Hamas commander and bomb-maker, known as "the engineer”, is another beneficiary of the terrorist fund, receiving an estimated $150,000. Barghouti is responsible for a series of deadly suicide bombings, including the bombing of Hebrew University in 2002. All of this comes despite the fact that the UK's national deficit forced the government to borrow £70 billion (nearly $99 billion) in 2015. (Arutz-7) [Comment]

With Brussels on lockdown and the French prime minister saying that Europe is "at war," European leaders held emergency security meetings and deployed more police, explosives experts, sniffer dogs and plainclothes officers at key points. "The threat we are facing in Europe is about the same as what Israel faces," said Olivier Guitta, the managing director of GlobalStrat, an international security consultancy. Pini Schiff, a former security director at Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport, which is considered among the most secure in the world, said the attacks at the Brussels airport mark "a colossal failure" of Belgian security and that "the chances are very low" such a bombing could have happened in Israel. After Palestinian attacks on Israeli planes and travelers in the 1970s, Israeli officials put in place several layers of security at that airport in Tel Aviv, meaning an attacker who escapes notice at one level of security would likely be captured by another. There are 11 visible security and inspection points at Ben-Gurion Airport - from a roadblock at the airport entrance to the airplane gates. According to media reports, Belgian authorities had advance warning about an "imminent terror attack." Yet neither the country's police nor its security forces increased their presence in the streets or deployed checkpoints at the entrances to the airport. (Times of Israel/Jerusalem Post/NJ Herald) [Comment]

The Molenbeek district in Brussels Belgium has been the eye of the European terrorist storm since it emerged that it was home to core members of the Paris attack squad. Police arrested Salah Abdeslam on Friday, 18 March, 2016 just a block from the family home in Molenbeek, a district where he once ran a bar with his brother Brahim - who blew himself up during the attacks in the French capital in November, 2015. The suspected Paris ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, also hailed from Molenbeek and was a friend of Salah Abdeslam. As far back as 2001, it was in Molenbeek where the assassins of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud had stayed. It was also home to one of the 2004 Madrid train bombers and the main suspect in the 2014 Jewish Museum attack in Brussels, while the perpetrator of a foiled attack in August, 2015 on an Amsterdam-Paris train stayed in Molenbeek with his sister before boarding in Brussels. But it is the sheer size of the network in Belgium that has emerged since the Paris attacks which has most alarmed officials. Not only was Abdeslam allegedly helped by several people after fleeing back to Brussels after the attacks, but the Paris cell had rented at least three properties around the country which were used to prepare the attacks. In the days after Abdeslam's arrest, Belgian authorities feared that a terror plot was afoot. "He was ready to restart something in Brussels, and it may be the reality because we have found a lot of heavy weapons, in the first investigations and we have found a new network around him in Brussels," FM Didier Reynders said. A grim-faced PM Charles Michel said on Tuesday: "We feared a terror attack and it happened." (INN) [Comment]

Brussels has become infamous as a hotbed of Islamic extremism because of links to a series of recent attacks in Europe, and now the Belgian capital itself has suffered the worst ever terror attack in its history. ISIS attacks on the Brussels airport and metro system in which terrorists murdered around 34 people came just days after Salah Abdeslam, a key suspect in November's 2015, ISIS Paris attacks, was captured in the city after four months on the run. A large and often poorly integrated Muslim population with high levels of unemployment and crime - especially in the gritty district of Molenbeek where Abdeslam was found near his family home - has created a breeding ground for extremism. Analysts say that has metastasized into a dedicated terror network in Belgium as many hardened jihadists return from fighting in Syria with ISIS and other extremist groups. "It is very likely that this attack will have been planned and prepared well in advance of last week's arrest of Salah Abdeslam, one of the central figures in the Paris attacks from last November," said Shiraz Maher, Senior Fellow at International Center for the Study of Radicalization, King's College London. "It therefore points to the existence of a broad and sophisticated terrorist network in Belgium. Our research shows that, per capita, Belgium has the highest number of foreign fighters in Syria of any European country.” (Arutz-7) [Comment]