This week’s announcement of the extraordinary college admissions scandal — dubbed “Operation Varsity Blues” by the FBI officials who have been working on the investigation for years — was met by an equally extraordinary (and unique) silence from Hollywood.
It’s not surprising. The scandal has unmasked the entertainment capital’s liberalism as nothing before. The word hypocrisy only begins to encompass it. What we have before us is nothing less than child abuse -- by the very people who, while exhibiting contempt for the great unwashed in “flyover country,” pontificate endlessly about every liberal cause known to woman or man.
Nevertheless, cheating to get their kids into college is okay.
Oscar nominee Felicity Huffman (“Transamerica”) paid -- in the form of a phony charitable contribution -- to have someone doctor the answers on her daughter’s SATs. (The score went up a staggering 400 points.) TV star Lori Loughlin (“Full House”) and her husband ponied up an astonishing $500,000 to obtain University of Southern California admissions for their daughters. This was done by making it appear on their applications that the girls were crew team stalwarts when they had barely picked up an oar.
Huffman and Loughlin are now out on bail. Dozens of others have been swept up by this metastasizing scandal, a number of them also media or sports personalities. An estimated $25 million in bribes have been paid.
What made these people, among the most privileged in our society, act this way? Did they not think that they were either teaching their children to lie or, almost as bad, plunging them into situations where they were doomed to fail? Or were they relying on the current spate of grade inflation to save the day for their underqualified offspring?
Whatever the case, what accounts for this particularly repellent version of do what I say, not as I do? Is it just an insatiable desire for status by an insecure community, this time on the backs of their children?
Unfortunately, it’s more. In my book “Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown,” I likened the approach to social and political issues in Hollywood to the “mini-me” in an Austin Powers movie. The mini-me’s task is to make the most extreme liberal pronouncements in public on virtually any subject, virtue-signaling to its heart’s content, so it can be loved by all the world. Meanwhile, the “real me” gets to be as selfish as he or she wishes in private, demanding ever more money and power.
Hollywood is rampant with this excessive public moral posturing, which disguises often equally excessive private amorality or even immorality. The biggest liberal or progressive stars are frequently the most avaricious and nasty people in their personal lives. It’s a form of split personality cum self-hypnosis that has been employed successfully by the entertainment industry for some time, but the college admissions scandal is bringing it unpleasantly to the surface, as did the recent #MeToo controversy.
Hollywood, however, is far from alone in deserving blame for the admissions scandal. Although the FBI has not taken legal action against the colleges involved, they should be considered at minimum unindicted co-conspirators. Our universities have come under increasing criticism of late for political bias — in one study, only 39 percent of colleges had even one Republican professor — suppression of freedom of speech, and their own covert form of racial discrimination. Asian-Americans, with justification, are currently suing Harvard for admissions bias against them.
These days our colleges seem as much, if not more, bent on social engineering as they are on education. This encourages many students to compete in what is, in essence, a victimhood derby under the trendy rubric of intersectionality. Besides being a waste of educational time and money, this does not augur well for the future of our country.
What we have in the college admissions scandal is corrupt people applying for an already corrupted system. If the attention that glamorous Hollywood usually attracts brings more attention to this problem, it is all to the good. And if it helps to begin to solve it, better yet. Then we can once more say as we have in the past, although this time somewhat ironically, “Hooray for Hollywood!”
Roger L. Simon, co-founder and CEO emeritus of PJ Media, is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.
A Florida Republican is threatening to expose an alleged extramarital affair between President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen and multiple women.
Cohen answered questions from lawmakers behind closed doors Tuesday and will do the same Thursday. He is scheduled to testify in an open setting Wednesday as politicians look for answers about any illegal activity Trump might have been involved in during his campaign and after he was elected.
"Hey @MichaelCohen212 - Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she'll remain faithful when you're in prison. She's about to learn a lot…"
Gaetz immediately started catching heat for the tweet because of its threatening nature. Law & Crime even raised the question of whether Gaetz committed witness tampering with his tweet.
After his tweet started to go viral, Gaetz talked to The Daily Beast and said he did not intend to intimidate Cohen.
"No, it is challenging the veracity and character of a witness," Gaetz said. "We do it every day. We typically do it during people's testimony. This is what it looks like to compete in the marketplace of ideas."
Later, according to Mediaite, Gaetz insisted he was engaging in "witness testing, not witness tampering."
Cohen met with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday behind closed doors. He will also meet privately Thursday with the House Intelligence Committee. His public testimony Wednesday, during which he is expected to accuse Trump of illegal acts, will be in front of the House Oversight Committee.
Indonesia's presidential candidate Joko Widodo speaks during a debate with his opponent Prabowo Subianto (not pictured) in Jakarta, Indonesia, February 17, 2019. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan
March 20, 2019
JAKARTA (Reuters) – A new Indonesian election survey shows President Joko Widodo’s big lead over his challenger, retired general Prabowo Subianto, is narrowing, just weeks ahead of next month’s vote in the world’s third-largest democracy.
The April 17 election will be a rerun of the 2014 race, in which Widodo beat out Prabowo by almost six percentage points.
A survey by pollster Litbang Kompas, which is part of Indonesia’s biggest newspaper Kompas, shows Widodo likely to win 49.2 percent of the vote, surpassing 37.4 percent for Prabowo.
Although still a double-digit lead, the electability gap in the survey between February 22 and March 5 was narrower than the Kompas survey in October that gave Widodo a 19.9-percentage point lead over his rival.
Opinion polls in January by other pollsters, including Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting and Australian-based Roy Morgan, put Widodo at an advantage of about 20 percentage points over Prabowo.
The president’s campaign team is confident he will still win by a big margin, spokeswoman Meutya Hafid said in a statement.
“There’s a number of indications why votes for Jokowi will be higher than in 2014,” she said, referring to the president by a popular nickname.
“Jokowi will be able to grab votes from places that are normally the stronghold of candidate number two (Prabowo), such as West Java,” Hafid said, referring to Indonesia’s most populous province.
The latest Kompas survey showed Widodo’s support may be shrinking among mature millennials aged between 31 and 40, as well as baby boomers.
After a slow beginning, the six-month campaign has picked up pace, with televised debates between the candidates and rallies held across the archipelago of more than 17,000 islands.
Some analysts say the debates were a missed opportunity for Prabowo, who has struggled to land any big blows against Widodo, while the president has appeared workman-like in projecting his achievements in areas such as infrastructure while in office.
But the challenger’s running mate, private equity tycoon Sandiaga Uno, has appeared to generate a buzz on the campaign trail while proving popular online, especially with women and young voters.
Uno attacked Widodo’s track record on education and healthcare last weekend, saying his government would be able to solve Indonesia’s problems in education and large deficits in health insurance.
Last week, the anti-graft agency named a prominent politician backing Widodo’s re-election campaign a suspect in a bribery case, which could further dent his campaign.
(Reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor and Gayatri Suroyo; Editing by Ed Davies and Clarence Fernandez)
The German share price index DAX graph is pictured at the stock exchange in Frankfurt, Germany, February 15, 2019. REUTERS/Staff
March 28, 2019
By Agamoni Ghosh
(Reuters) – European shares rose on Thursday as signs of progress in U.S.-China trade talks helped investors look past worries over global growth and Britain’s chaotic effort to leave the European Union.
The pan-region STOXX 600 index rose 0.2 percent with Frankfurt’s trade-sensitive index climbing about 0.4 percent.
China has made unprecedented proposals on issues like forced technology transfers as it works with the United States to end their trade war, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday. In addition, Premier Li Keqiang said China would expand market access for foreign banks and insurance companies.
Basic resources led gains on the STOXX, but banking stocks fell as bond yields, and what they say about expectations for global growth, continued to decline.
“European stocks are slightly higher. It seems almost a battle of ideas,” said Teeuwe Mevissen, senior market economist, eurozone at Rabobank in Utrecht. “In the background you have Brexit and not less important are trade talks between China and the U.S. and the slowdown in China.”
Britain’s exporter-heavy FTSE 100 rose 0.6 percent as sterling weakened after Prime Minister Theresa May failed to sway hard-line opponents of her proposed Brexit agreement, leaving the process deadlocked.
“In general, markets still assume that a Brexit deal will take place or you will get a prolonged delay. The ‘no deal’ is not completely ruled out, but it’s certainly not the basic scenario for market participants,” said Mevissen.
Efforts to persuade lawmakers to back May’s deal will continue on Thursday, but it remains uncertain how, when or even if Britain will leave the EU.
In the euro zone, German biotech company Evotec lead gains on the STOXX, rising 4.5 percent after its results beat expectations. Tobacco stocks Imperial Brands and British American Tobacco gained about 2 percent after Citi upgraded each to “buy”.
Car makers extended gains from Wednesday but Fiat Chrysler Automobiles slid 1 percent after Nissan Motor Co’s chief executive said he was unaware of discussions about its French partner Renault SA making a bid for the company.
Adding to its woes, the Italian carmaker’s German rival Volkswagen said it was not interested in a partnership with the company.
Shares of 1&1 Drillisch, a unit of United Internet, fell 12 percent after the telecom service provider issued a disappointing profit outlook.
Debenhams dropped 23 percent after the retailer said its bondholders agreed to change the terms of some of their bonds, a move that could end a bid from Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct and wipe out shareholders.
(Reporting by Agamoni Ghosh and Medha Singh, editing by Larry King)
Houston Public Library banned a man who had been previously charged for sexually assaulting a child from reading to children at Drag Queen Storytime ever again.
The library apologized after not completing a background check on Albert Alfonso Garza, 32, who was last known to be reading to kids at the Montrose Library in September 2018, reported ABC 13 Friday.
Garza was charged with child sexual assault involving a victim records show was under the age of 14 in 2008.
The library blamed the failure to complete a background check on a volunteer.
The storytimes are supervised by staff, the library said, according to ABC 13.
Houston Public Library issued the following statement:
We were made aware today that one participant for Drag Queen storytime who read at the September 29, 2018, Drag Queen Storytime has a criminal background that should have prevented him from participating in the program.
We assure you that this participant will not be involved in any future HPL programs.
In our review of our process and of this participant, we discovered that we failed to complete a background check as required by our own guidelines. We deeply regret this oversight and the concern this may cause our customers. We realize this is a serious matter.
Every program sponsored by HPL is supervised by HPL staff, and all children are accompanied by a parent and/or guardian. No participant is ever alone with children, and we have not received any complaints about any inappropriate behavior by participants at storytimes.
We are taking the appropriate action to ensure that the status of every participant in every program throughout our system is verified. We will continue to review our process to ensure that this cannot happen again.
Once again, we apologize for our failure to adhere to our own process in this matter and to the hundreds of parents and caregivers who have enjoyed this program with their children.
Drag queen storytimes are nothing new. For example, K-12 schools brought drag queens into the classroom to teach gender ideology in 2018.
There is a spiritual battle taking place in the world today and patriots will be given the keys to victory if they stay connected to God. Alex Jones calls in from the road to reveal spiritual solutions for America.
Anna Sorokin leaves during the lunch break at her trial in New York State Supreme Court, in New York, Monday, April 22, 2019. Sorokin, who claimed to be a German heiress, is on trial on grand larceny and theft of services charges. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
NEW YORK – A Manhattan jury heard competing narratives Tuesday in the bizarre case of the fake German heiress, as a prosecutor portrayed Anna Sorokin as a profligate con artist and a defense attorney insisted she had ambitious business plans but was taken in by the extravagance of New York.
Jurors will now decide whether Sorokin is guilty of grand larceny and theft of services following a spending spree that spanned 10 months and, prosecutors allege, defrauded people and businesses out of $275,000 and bankrolled her foray into the Manhattan socialite scene.
The deliberations cap a more than three-week trial that drew international attention and tabloid headlines about Sorokin's courtroom fashion choices. Sorokin, who adopted the name Anna Delvey, deceived friends and financial institutions alike into believing she had a 60 million euro wealth overseas that would cover her lavish hotel stays and jet-setting lifestyle.
Closing arguments focused in large part on Sorokin's intent, which prosecutors must demonstrate was criminal in order to convict her.
Her defense attorney, Todd Spodek, insisted Sorokin had been "buying time" and planned all along to settle her six-figure debts, portraying her as an entrepreneur who got in over her head. He compared her at one point to Frank Sinatra, saying "they both created their own opportunities" in New York.
"There's a little bit of Anna in all of us," Spodek said. "This is the life she chose to live."
Spodek added that Sorokin "was ambitious, she was persistent and she was determined to make her business a reality," referring to a private arts club she proposed building and for which she sought a $22 million loan. She led an unorthodox — and at times unethical— lifestyle, he added, but Sorokin was "enabled every step of the way by a system that favors people with money."
Assistant District Attorney Catherine McCaw said Sorokin told "lie after lie" to prolong a life of luxury she couldn't afford, providing forged financial records and identifications to banks. She lived out of ritzy hotels on an overdrawn account, dined at the finest restaurants and even hired a personal trainer who charged $300 a session, McCaw said.
Sorokin not only assumed a different identity for herself but created a team of "imaginary" assistants, McCaw said, a ruse that lent credence to her efforts to expand her credit. There was, for instance, an accountant who didn't exist whom Sorokin blamed for delays in wire transfers.
"All of the defendant's wire transfers are merely a figment of her imagination," McCaw said. "These are not white lies. These are lies that help you understand that the defendant, in fact, had criminal intent in this case."
McCaw said Sorokin once burned through $40,000 over a period of just eight days. During one stay at a W Hotel, McCaw said, Sorokin "barricaded herself" in her room and would not even allow staff to check the minibar, even as she insisted they refill it.
She said Sorokin racked up $679 in "incidental" expenses at the hotel.
"That's an awful lot of M&Ms," McCaw said. "She knew she couldn't pay for it."
The U.S. Coast Guard Legend-class maritime security cutter USCGC Bertholf (WMSL 750) pulls into Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawii, U.S. to support the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2012 exercise in this June 29, 2012 handout photo. Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jon Dasbach/U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS
March 25, 2019
By Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States sent Navy and Coast Guard ships through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, the military said, as the United States increases the frequency of movement through the strategic waterway despite opposition from China.
The voyage risks further raising tensions with China but will likely be viewed by self-ruled Taiwan as a sign of support from Washington amid growing friction between Taipei and Beijing.
The two ships were identified as the Navy Curtis Wilbur destroyer and the Coast Guard Bertholf cutter, a U.S. military statement said.
“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” the statement said.
“The U.S. will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” it added.
Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, which also include a trade war, U.S. sanctions and China’s increasingly muscular military posture in the South China Sea, where the United States also conducts freedom of navigation patrols.
Washington has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help defend the island nation and is its main source of arms. The Pentagon says Washington has sold Taiwan more than $15 billion in weaponry since 2010.
China has been ramping up pressure to assert its sovereignty over the island, which it considers a wayward province of “one China” and sacred Chinese territory.
China has repeatedly sent military aircraft and ships to circle the island on drills in the past few years and worked to isolate the island internationally, whittling down its few remaining diplomatic allies.
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a report earlier this year describing Taiwan as the “primary driver” for China’s military modernization, which it said had made major advances in recent years.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said trade negotiations with China were progressing and a final agreement “will probably happen,” adding that his call for tariffs to remain on Chinese imported goods for some time did not mean talks were in trouble.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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.”
The U.S. government say Butina was part of an unofficial influence campaign that overlapped with the 2016 presidential election and targeted conservatives; chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports from the U.S. district court in Washington.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].”
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.
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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, 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)
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