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Bernie Sanders Spokesperson Apologizes For Israel Comments

The national deputy press secretary for the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is apologizing after she made disparaging comments on social media about Israel.

According to Politico, Belén Sisa said she regrets asking whether the "American-Jewish community has a dual allegiance to the state of Israel."

"In a conversation on Facebook, I used some language that I see now was insensitive. Issues of allegiance and loyalty to one's country come with painful history," Sisa said.

"At a time when so many communities in our country feel under attack by the president and his allies, I absolutely recognize that we need to address these issues with greater care and sensitivity to their historical resonance, and I'm committed to doing that in the future."

Sisa was referencing an online discussion that took place Sunday night, during which she also pledged her support of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who has come under fire for making statements considered to be anti-Semitic.

When asked if the question could be applicable to Sanders, Sisa wrote, "I think I would probably have to ask him? But his comments make me believe otherwise as he has been very blunt on where he stands."

And last month, according to The Washington Free Beacon, Sisa shared an article on Facebook that drew parallels between Democrats and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Republicans and the National Rifle Association.

It was reported last week, meanwhile, that two other members of Sanders' staff have been implicated in an anti-Semitism scandal.

Source: NewsMax Politics

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French Police Ambushed by Fireworks Gang

French police officers were injured when their vehicle was attacked by a gang shooting fireworks at close range, according to local media.

The patrol was passing through a neighborhood in Yvelines when it was ambushed by approximately six suspects.

Video of the siege was shared to social media, indicating it may have been premeditated, Actu17 reports.

"The neighborhood was quiet when around 22:20, a municipal police car that passed Place des Violettes and rue des Frères Tissier in Carrières-sous-Poissy, was the target of fireworks fire by half a dozen individuals. One of the attackers suddenly approached the vehicle to use his mortar against the police."

The driver of the vehicle can be seen losing control and nearly crashing into parked cars at the onset of the siege before speeding off as the assailants give chase.

Two officers reportedly sustained burns to the head and arms after at least one of the explosives entered the vehicle, and all three officers involved are suffering from tinnitus.

Additional patrols were deployed to the neighborhood, but none of the suspects could be located and no arrests were made.

Europe appears lost as reports emerge that German police are actually covering up migrant crimes to push the narrative that migrants are never violent or break the law and should be welcomed with open arms.

(PHOTO: Screenshots / Twitter)

Source: InfoWars

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Roger Stone Complains of Gag Order

Political consultant and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone on Tuesday complained of a gag order issued in his criminal case, The Hill reports.

The "real reason they want to gag me is so I cannot raise money necessary to mount a vigorous legal defense," he wrote in a fundraising email.

Additionally, he said he has been targeted because of his relationship with the president, and has been surviving on peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches. 

"We both know I have been targeted by Mueller and the Deep State simply because I am a long-time confidant and friend of the president and I effectively helped defeat Hillary Clinton," Stone wrote. "The Democrats want me side-lined in 2020 so I cannot help the president."

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson last Friday said the order was necessary to ensure Stone's right to a fair trial and "to maintain the dignity and seriousness of the courthouse and these proceedings."

Her ruling, which came after a string of media appearances by the outspoken political consultant, is narrowly tailored to comments about his pending case.

Berman on Tuesday called for an emergency hearing to take place Thursday in the wake of Stone posting a threatening message about her on Instagram. His social media post included an image of Jackson's face with crosshairs in the top left corner.

Stone said the photo was misinterpreted.

Source: NewsMax America

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Dems Try to Steer 2020 Race to the Middle

Moderate Democrats are pushing back against popular far-left proposals like the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all and liberal tax plans — fearing they will backfire in the 2020 election.

The centrists' move has been strengthened by the entrance into the White House race of moderate presidential candidates like former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke, and the expected announcements of former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., The Washington Post reported.

Because of that, the policies now taking center stage are public options or marginal Medicare expansions, market-based solutions to climate change, closing tax loopholes, and expanding tax breaks for the middle class, the Post reported.

"There was a clear story coming out of the midterms, and it is like it never happened," Jane Hartley, a former U.S. ambassador to France who helped raise millions to support 31 Democratic House candidates, told the Post.

"We have to look at how we won. The Democrats have to put together a coalition, and it's a coalition that includes suburban voters."

President Donald Trump has already suggested he will capi­tal­ize on the prominence of the Democrats' progressive policy ideas.

"If they beat me with the Green New Deal, I deserve to lose," Trump said at a recent fundraiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Post reported. "What they want to do to the country would be horrible. We have to win."

Biden's probable entrance into the race could offer the strongest counterweight to the liberal surge, the Post reported.

"Show me the really left-left-left-left-wingers who beat a Republican," he said last week, the Post reported. "The fact of the matter is the vast majority of the members of the Democratic Party are still basically liberal-moderate Democrats in the traditional sense."

Larry Summers, who served as treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and a top economic adviser in the Obama administration, told the Post the Democratic Party has been down a radical path before — to no good end.

"There is a bit in the air that is worryingly reminiscent of 1972, when Democrats were rightly enraged with a corrupt and malign president were disillusioned by their previous unsuccessful establishment presidential candidate, gravitated to radical redistribution economic policy, focused on turning out their activists, and failed to focus on the middle," Summers told the Post.

"The result was the political catastrophe of Richard Nixon's re-election."

Source: NewsMax Politics

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More women work in construction that's still a man's world

Tameeka Gwyn is used to schlepping concrete weighing as much as 60 pounds (27 kilograms) around a construction site. For Janna Rojas, it's a cinch to carry metal pipes as heavy as 100 pounds (45 kilograms) going into new plumbing.

"When you first do it, it's quite a shock, but it's reality," says Gwyn, who with Rojas is helping build a Manhattan high-rise for the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.

They are some of the new faces of the 21st-century American construction worker — with women slowly making inroads in an industry still dominated by men. While there has been progress thanks to a rebounding economy, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found women represent only 3.4 percent, or about 285,000, of the nation's 8.3 million construction workers. Over the last decade, the total number of women in the construction industry has risen by about 31 percent.

One program in New York City addresses the gender gap head-on, kickstarting recruits' training while gaining a promise from unions to try to reserve 15 percent of on-site actual apprenticeships for women. The Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York is working with a nonprofit group, Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW), which runs a pre-apprenticeship program for women who want to become plumbers, electricians, carpenters and members of other trades.

"We've had a real shift in terms of really working with the unions as partners in our work because they recognize that the need for a diverse workforce, a workforce that represents the population of New York City and beyond," said NEW president Kathleen Culhane. She says they recruit trainees by distributing flyers at job fairs, community organizations and unemployment offices in addition to social media outreach.

It's clear the industry has a long road ahead to even out its gender discrepancy — one that is hardly surprising for a job often characterized by male workers whistling at women who walk past job sites — despite a push from the #MeToo movement that is leading to sweeping changes in many occupations around the globe.

"The #MeToo movement has highlighted what's right and what's wrong, and women are being accepted more and more on the job sites," says Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council, an organization of 15 labor union affiliates representing 100,000 workers.

Philip LoMonaco, the foreman of the cancer center project, has seen that happen firsthand. He says he first saw a woman on a construction job about a decade ago. Now, there are 200 female workers, including Gwyn and Rojas, building the high-rise on Manhattan's East Side — representing about 5 percent of all workers on that project, according to the builder, Turner Construction. Jacobson & Company, a large carpentry contractor in metropolitan New York, says 9 percent of its nearly 300 employees are women.

Many of the female workers come from low-income circumstances and some are single mothers used to juggling multiple jobs to pay the bills. But once they break into the trades, these women are better off than those in other lines of work, facing a smaller wage gap compared to men. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says women in construction are paid 96 cents on the dollar compared to their male colleagues, versus only about 80 cents on the dollar in the general workforce.

Gwyn finished her five-year apprenticeship in 2015. The 30-year-old plumber had gone to college to become a teacher, but left school when her student loans mounted. She says she now earns about double what she would have made as a teacher.

Rojas, a 37-year-old plumbing apprentice at the hospital site, is hoping for an eventual six-figure salary after she finishes the program.

Since 2013, about 1,500 apprentices have come out of NEW's tuition-free trade school, housed in a former firehouse in Manhattan. They spend seven weeks being introduced to basics in such skills as carpentry and electrical work, as well as using a measuring tape to execute a design and mathematical equations to accurately match materials into a space. Similar programs have popped up in Illinois, Vermont, Oregon, Wisconsin and Washington state.

"People might say that it's a man's job because it's dominated by men, because women has been frozen out of this industry for so long," said Zakiyyah Askia, a plumbing apprentice in a program run by the nonprofit Chicago Women in Trades. "And now that the opportunities are presenting themselves, then it's time for us as women to seize this opportunity."

The NEW program also puts its workers to the test physically.

"Every day, we had to carry ladders and buckets with, like, 60 pounds of concrete up and down stairs," says Gwyn.

In addition to the physical challenges of their jobs, some of the women in the NEW program say they've encountered social hurdles — what one called "old-school behavior" such as some male co-workers reluctant to ask them to do equal work, or occasional attempts at unwelcome flirtation.

Gwyn says she made sure she looked "stern and serious, because if you smile, they sometimes say, 'Oh, she's cute' and try to pursue you."

"I'd say, 'Thank you, but no thank you!' I came here to work, and the more I'm here, the less it happens," she says.

The program provides sexual harassment workshops during its training and all workers in participating trade unions are given the same training. It also ensures women have access to restrooms as well as safety gear and clothing that fits them.

The modest progress women have made in the industry has not come easily or quickly.

In 1985, 19 women sued a New York City public corporation and a real estate firm in Manhattan federal court, saying they were unfairly denied jobs for which they were qualified because they were female. The court approved a settlement requiring builders to make good-faith efforts to hire women-in-training.

LaBarbera, the union president, calls the women coming in through apprenticeships "trailblazers."

And generally, neither gender nor age is impediments.

For Myrtle Wilson, a 49-year-old laborer who had previously worked multiple jobs and struggled to raise her kids, the past two years working on the Memorial Sloan Kettering project doing "a little bit of everything" have been a game-changer.

"I have watched this job literally come from the ground up, and it's been an amazing experience," she says with a grin.

Source: Fox News National

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Comedian leads new poll in Ukraine presidential election

FILE PHOTO: Candidate in the upcoming presidential election Zelenskiy argues with participants of a protest prior to his concert in Lviv
FILE PHOTO: Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukrainian actor and candidate in the upcoming presidential election, argues with his opponents, who stage a protest prior to Zelenskiy's concert in Lviv, Ukraine February 8, 2019. REUTERS/Mykola Tys

February 20, 2019

KIEV (Reuters) – Comic actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy is the frontrunner in Ukraine’s presidential election, according to the latest opinion poll published on Wednesday.

A survey, conducted by the Kiev-based Razumkov Center, showed the 41-year-old Zelenskiy, a political novice, was ahead of current President Petro Poroshenko and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

The center said it had interviewed 2016 voters in all regions, except in annexed Crimea, from Feb. 7 to Feb 14.

The election takes place on March 31, where 44 candidates are set to compete.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Matthias Williams and Alison Williams)

Source: OANN

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French senators: Macron security affected by ex-aide's acts

French senators say they think French President Emmanuel Macron's security has been affected by the conduct and actions of an ex-aide at the center of a political scandal.

A Senate commission released a report Wednesday about the former security aide, Alexandre Benalla. He was fired in August after a video surfaced of him beating a protester at a May Day demonstrator last year.

Philippe Bas, president of the Senate Laws Commission, said the panel found elements showing "there have been numerous errors, irregularities and missteps" before and after Benalla was fired from the presidential Elysee Palace.

Paris prosecutors opened an investigation last week of whether Benalla told lies during the investigation.

Benalla was jailed on Tuesday night for allegedly not respecting the conditions of his judicial supervision.

Source: Fox News World

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Tiger woods celebrates after winning the 2019 Masters
FILE PHOTO: Golf – Masters – Augusta National Golf Club – Augusta, Georgia, U.S. – April 14, 2019 – Tiger Woods of the U.S. celebrates on the 18th hole after winning the 2019 Masters. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

April 26, 2019

Tiger Woods is sending a message that he thinks he still has enough left, emotionally and physically, to win three more major championships to tie Jack Nicklaus’ record 18 titles.

Speaking to GolfTV in his first sit-down interview since the Masters, Woods said he has taken some time off since his victory at Augusta National, which still doesn’t feel real.

“Honestly, it’s hard to believe,” Woods said. “I was texting one of my good friends last night … that I couldn’t believe that I won the tournament. That it really hasn’t sunk in. I haven’t started doing anything. I’ve just been laying there. And every now and again, I’ll look over there on the couch and there’s the jacket.”

That’s the fifth green jacket for the 43-year-old Woods, who hadn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Along the way, four back surgeries, a divorce and other personal issues derailed him.

He said he has been spending time with his children – daughter Sam, 11, and son Charlie, 10 – who weren’t born when their father was the most dominant golfer on the planet.

“They never knew golf to be a good thing in my life and only the only thing they remember is that it brought this incredible amount of pain to their dad and they don’t want to ever want to see their dad in pain,” Woods said. “And so to now have them see this side of it, the side that I’ve experienced for so many years of my life, but I had a battle to get back to this point, it feels good.”

He said he hopes – maybe expects — they’ll see this side again.

And no one will take Woods for granted at the PGA Championship at Bethpage Black Course on Long Island, N.Y., which starts May 16.

Woods said he’ll be ready for a course he already conquered once in a major: the 2002 U.S. Open.

“I’m doing all the visual stuff, but I haven’t put in the physical work yet. But it’s probably coming this weekend,” he said.

Before Woods encountered health and personal problems, it was expected that topping Nicklaus’ major mark was “when” and not “if.” Then the certainty went away, but Woods thought he still had a chance.

“I always thought it was possible, if I had everything go my way. It took him an entire career to get to 18, so now that I’ve had another extension to my career – one that I didn’t think I had a couple of years ago – if I do things correctly and everything falls my way, yeah, it’s a possibility. I’m never going to say it’s not.

“Now I just need to have a lot of things go my way, and who’s to say that it will or will not happen? That’s what the future holds, I don’t know. The only thing I can promise you is this: that I will be prepared.”

–Field Level Media

Source: OANN

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Maria Butina, the Russian woman who was accused of being a secret agent for the Russian government, was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday by a federal judge in Washington after pleading guilty last year to a conspiracy charge.

Butina, who has already served nine months behind bars, will get credit for time served and can possibly get credit for good behavior, the judge said. She will be removed from the U.S. promptly on completion of her time, the judge added, and returned to Russia.

MARIA BUTINA, ACCUSED RUSSIAN SPY, PLEADS GUILTY TO CONSPIRACY

An emotional and apologetic Butina said in court Friday she is “truly sorry” and regrets not registering as a foreign agent.

“I feel ashamed and embarrassed,” she said, adding that her “reputation is ruined.”

Butina has been jailed since her arrest in July 2018. She entered the court Friday wearing a dark green prison jumpsuit and spoke in clear English, with a slight Russian accent.

“Please accept my apologies,” Butina said.

Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said after the sentencing they had hoped for a “better outcome,” but expressed a desire for Butina to be released to her family by the fall.

Prosecutors had claimed Butina used her contacts with the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast to develop relationships with U.S. politicians and gather information for Russia.

Prosecutors also have said that Butina’s boyfriend, conservative political operative Paul Erickson, identified in court papers as “U.S. Person 1,” helped her establish ties with the NRA.

WHO IS MARIA BUTINA, THE RUSSIAN WOMAN ACCUSED OF SPYING ON US?

In their filings, prosecutors claim federal agents found Butina had contact information for people suspected of being employed by Russia’s Federal Security Services, or FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB. Inside her home, they found notes referring to a potential job offer from the FSB, according to the documents.

Investigators recovered several emails and Twitter direct message conversations in which Butina referred to the need to keep her work secret and, in one instance, said it should be “incognito.” Prosecutors said Butina had contact with Russian intelligence officials and that the FBI photographed her dining with a diplomat suspected of being a Russian intelligence agent.

Fox News’ Jason Donner, Bill Mears, Greg Norman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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An official Sri Lankan police Twitter account was deleted after it misidentified an American human rights activist as a suspect in the country’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks.

On Thursday, police posted the names and photos of six people that they said were at-large suspects in the bombings that killed more than 250 people.

However, one of the names on the list was Muslim U.S. activist Amara Majeed, who quickly tweeted that she had been falsely identified.

“I have this morning been FALSELY identified by the Sri Lankan government as one of the ISIS terrorists that committed the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka. What a thing to wake up to!” she wrote.

SRI LANKA AUTHORITIES SAY EASTER ATTACK LEADER KILLED IN ONE OF NINE HOTEL BOMBINGS

She wrote in a follow-up tweet that the claim was “obviously completely false” and asked social media users to “please stop implicating and associating me with these horrific attacks.”

“And next time, be more diligent about releasing such information that has the potential to deeply violate someone’s family and community,” she continued.

Later, she wrote an update saying police apologized for wrongly mistaking her as a suspect.

Police said in a statement: “However, although one of the released images was identified as one Abdul Cader Fathima Khadhiya in the information provided by the CID, the CID has now informed that a) the individual whose image was labeled as Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya is not in fact Abdul Cader Fathima Khadiya b) the individual pictured is not wanted for questioning c) Abdul Cader Fathima is the correct name of the suspect wanted by the CID.”

On Friday, the account, @SriLankaPolice2 was deleted with no explanation. Police did not release more information regarding the mistake.

Majeed, who founded “The Hijab Project” when she was 16 years old, told the Baltimore Sun that it was hurtful to be linked to the attacks.

“Sri Lanka is my motherland,” the Brown University student said. “It’s very painful to be associated with [the bombings].”

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Mohamed Zahran, the suspected leader of the attacks which targeted six hotels and churches, killed himself in a suicide bombing at the Shangri-La hotel. Police also said they had arrested the second-in-command of the group, called National Towheed Jamaat. Catholic churches in Sri Lanka canceled all Sunday Masses until further notice over concerns that they remain a top target of Islamic State-linked extremists.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News World

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FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Easter Sunday, in Colombo
FILE PHOTO: Sri Lankan Special Task Force soldiers stand guard in front of a mosque as a Muslim man walks past him during the Friday prayers at a mosque, five days after a string of suicide bomb attacks on Catholic churches and luxury hotels across the island on Easter Sunday, in Colombo, Sri Lanka April 26, 2019. REUTERS/Dinuka Liyanawatte/File Photo

April 26, 2019

By Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam

KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka (Reuters) – Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran was 12 years old when he began his studies at the Jamiathul Falah Arabic College. He was a nobody, with no claim to scholarship other than ambition.

Zahran and his four brothers and sisters squeezed into a two-room house with their parents in a small seaside town in eastern Sri Lanka; their father was a poor man who sold packets of food on the street and had a reputation for being a petty thief.

“His father didn’t do much,” recalled the school’s vice principal, S.M. Aliyar, laughing out loud.

The boy surprised the school with his sharp mind. For three years, Zahran practiced memorizing the Koran. Next came his studies in Islamic law. But the more he learned, the more Zahran argued that his teachers were too liberal in their reading of the holy book.

“He was against our teaching and the way we interpreted the Koran – he wanted his radical Islam,” said Aliyar. “So we kicked him out.”

Aliyar, now 73 with a long white beard, remembers the day Zahran left in 2005. “His father came and asked, ‘Where can he go?’.”

The school would hear again of Mohamed Zahran. And the world now knows his name. The Sri Lankan government has identified him as the ringleader of a group that carried out a series of Easter Sunday suicide bombings in the country on April 21.

The blasts killed more than 250 people in churches and luxury hotels, one of the deadliest-ever such attacks in South Asia. There were nine suicide bombers who blew apart men, women and children as they sat to pray or ate breakfast.

Most of the attackers were well-educated and from wealthy families, with some having been abroad to study, according to Sri Lankan officials.

That description does not, however, fit their alleged leader, a man said to be in his early 30s, who authorities say died in the slaughter. Zahran was different.

INTELLIGENCE FAILINGS

Sri Lanka’s national leadership has come under heavy criticism for failing to heed warnings from Indian intelligence services – at least three in April alone – that an attack was pending. But Zahran’s path from provincial troublemaker to alleged jihadist mastermind was marked by years of missed or ignored signals that the man with a thick beard and paunch was dangerous.

His increasingly militant brand of Islam was allowed to grow inside a marginalized minority community – barely 10 percent of the country’s roughly 20 million people are Muslim – against a backdrop of a dysfunctional developing nation.

The top official at the nation’s defense ministry resigned on Thursday, saying that some institutions under his charge had failed.

For much of his adult life, Zahran, 33, courted controversy inside the Muslim community itself.

In the internet age, that problem did not stay local. Zahran released online videos calling for jihad and threatening bloodshed.

After the blasts, Islamic State claimed credit and posted a video of Zahran, clutching an assault rifle, standing before the group’s black flag and pledging allegiance to its leader.

The precise relationship between Zahran and Islamic State is not yet known. An official with India’s security services, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that during a raid on a suspected Islamic State cell by the National Investigation Agency earlier this year officers found copies of Zahran’s videos. The operation was in the state of Tamil Nadu, just across a thin strait of ocean from Sri Lanka.

“LIKE A SPOILED CHILD”

Back in 2005, Zahran was looking to make his way in the world. His hometown of Kattankudy is some seven hours’ drive from Colombo on the other side of the island nation, past the countless palm trees, roadside Buddha statues, cashew hawkers and an occasional lumbering elephant in the bush. It is a town of about 40,000 people, a dot on the eastern coast with no clear future for an impoverished young man who’d just been expelled.

Zahran joined a mosque in 2006, the Dharul Athar, and gained a place on its management committee. But within three years they’d had a falling out.

“He wanted to speak more independently, without taking advice from elders,” said the mosque’s imam, or spiritual leader, M.T.M. Fawaz.

Also, the young man was more conservative, Fawaz said, objecting, for instance, to women wearing bangles or earrings.

“The rest of us come together as community leaders but Zahran wanted to speak for himself,” said Fawaz, a man with broad shoulders lounging with a group of friends in a back office of the mosque after evening prayers. “He was a black sheep who broke free.”

Mohamed Yusuf Mohamed Thaufeek, a friend who met Zahran at school and later became an adherent of his, said the problems revolved around Zahran’s habit of misquoting Islamic scriptures.

The mosque’s committee banned him from preaching for three months in 2009. Zahran stormed off.

“We treated him like a spoiled child, a very narrow-minded person who was always causing some trouble,” said the head of the committee, Mohamed Ismail Mohamed Naushad, a timber supplier who shook his head at the memory.

Now on his own, Zahran began to collect a group of followers who met in what Fawaz described as “a hut”.

At about that time, Zahran, then 23, married a young girl from a small town outside the capital of Colombo and brought his bride back to Kattankudy, according to his sister, Mathaniya.

“I didn’t have much of a connection with her – she was 14,” she said.

Despite being “a bit rough-edged”, Zahran was a skilled speaker and others his age were drawn to his speeches and Koranic lessons, said Thaufeek. He traveled the countryside at times, giving his version of religious instruction as he went.

Also, Zahran had found a popular target: the town’s Sufi population, who practice a form of Islam often described a mystical, but which to conservatives is heresy.

Tensions in the area went back some years. In 2004, there was a grenade attack on a Sufi mosque and in 2006 several homes of Sufis were set afire. Announcements boomed from surrounding mosques at the time calling for a Sufi spiritual leader to be killed, said Sahlan Khalil Rahman, secretary of a trust that oversees a group of Sufi mosques.

He blamed followers of the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam that some locals say became more popular after funding from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Wahhabism, flowed to mosques in Kattankudy.

It was, Rahman said, an effort “to convert Sufis into Wahhabis through this terrorism”. Rahman handed over a photograph album showing charred homes, bullet holes sprayed across an office wall and a shrine’s casket upended.

ONLINE RADICAL

It was an ideal backdrop for Zahran’s bellicose delivery and apparent sense of religious destiny.

He began holding rallies, bellowing insults through loudspeakers that reverberated inside the Sufis’ house of worship as they tried to pray.

In 2012, Zahran started a mosque of his own. The Sufis were alarmed and, Rahman said, passed on complaints to both local law enforcement and eventually national government offices. No action was taken.

The then-officer in charge of Kattankudy police, Ariyabandhu Wedagedara, said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t arrest people simply because of theological differences.

     “The problem at the time was between followers of different Islamic sects – Zahran was not a major troublemaker, but he and followers of other sects, including the Sufis, were at loggerheads,” Wedagedara said.

Zahran found another megaphone: the internet. His Facebook page was taken down after the bombings, but Muslims in the area said his video clips had previously achieved notoriety.

His speeches went from denouncing Sufis to “kafirs”, or non-believers, in general. Zahran’s sister, Mathaniya, said in an interview that she thought “his ideas became more radical from listening to Islamic State views on the Internet”.

In one undated video, Zahran, in a white tunic and standing in front of an image of flames, boomed in a loud voice: “You will not have time to pick up the remains of blown-up bodies. We’ll keep sending those insulting Allah to hell.”

“HARD TO TAKE”

Zahran spoke in Tamil, making his words available to young Muslims clicking on their cellphones in Kattankudy and other towns like it during a period when, in both 2014 and 2018, reports and images spread of Sinhalese Buddhists rioting against Muslims in Sri Lanka.

In 2017, Zahran’s confrontations boiled over. At a rally near a Sufi community, his followers came wielding swords. At least one man was hacked and hospitalized. The police arrested several people connected to Zahran, including his father and one of his brothers. Zahran slipped away from public view.

That December, the mosque Zahran founded released a public notice disowning him. Thaufeek, his friend from school, is now the head. He counted the places that Zahran had been driven away from – his school, the Dharul Athar mosque and then, “we ourselves kicked him out, which would have been hard for him to take”.

The next year, a group of Buddha statues was vandalized in the town of Mawanella, about five hours drive from Kattankudy. There, in the lush mountains of Sri Lanka’s interior, Zahran had taken up temporary residence.

“He was preaching to kill people,” said A.G.M. Anees, who has served as an imam at a small mosque in the area for a decade. “This is not Islam, this is violence.”

Zahran went into hiding once more.

On the Thursday morning before the Easter Sunday bombings, Zahran’s sister-in-law knocked on the door of a neighbor who did seamstress work near Kattankudy. She handed over a parcel of fabric and asked for it to be sewn into a tunic by the end of the day.

“She said she was going on a family trip,” said the neighbor, M.H. Sithi Nazlya.

Zahran’s sister says that her parents turned off their cellphones on the Friday. On Sunday, when she visited their home, they were gone.

She does not know if Zahran arranged for them to be taken somewhere safe. Or why he would have carried out the bombing.

But now in Kattankudy, and in many other places, people are talking about Mohamed Hashim Mohamed Zahran.

(Reporting by Tom Lasseter and Shri Navaratnam; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani, Shihar Aneez and Alasdair Pal; Editing by John Chalmers and Alex Richardson)

Source: OANN

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