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$93,000,000,000,000: AOC’s Green New Deal Cost Put Into Perspective

The Green New Deal proposal championed by Democrats comes with a price tag of approximately $93 TRILLION dollars, according to a think tank’s analysis.

But just how much is $93,000,000,000,000?

Here are some figures to put the socialist pipe dreams’ incomprehensible cost in perspective.

– The entire U.S. GDP in 2017 was $20 trillion.

– The entire GLOBAL GDP in 2016 was about $75 trillion.

– If the Green New Deal’s cost was distributed evenly among America’s 326 million people, it would cost approximately $285,276.00 per person in the U.S.

– If evenly distributed among the world’s population of 7.5 billion, the proposal would cost $12,400.00 for every man, woman and child on Earth.

– If you were to convert $1 into 1 second, the Green New Deal would translate to a span of 2,790,000 years.

– If you were to convert $1 into 1 millimeter, the Green New Deal would translate to 93 million miles (you could circle the Earth 2,325 times).

Here’s a visual representation to make the staggering cost even more comprehensive:

This graphic depicts $100 million as a pallet comprised of $100 bills.

Here is what $1 billion would look like:

And this is what $1 TRILLION looks like (note the pallets are DOUBLE stacked):

Now multiply that by 93 and you’ll start to understand the gargantuan scale of the Green New Deal.

“The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive,” concluded the American Action Forum. “It’s further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”


Twitter: 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video on Instagram in which she said it’s logical for this generation to reconsider having children because of climate change affecting the globe. Alex exposes this eugenics talking point now going mainstream.

Source: InfoWars

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Illinois woman held 33 Guatemalans in basement, forced them into labor, threatened deportation, authorities say

An Illinois woman was arrested after she held 33 Guatemalan immigrants, including children, in her basement, forcing them to work and threatening them with deportation, federal authorities said.

Concepcion Malinek faces forced labor charges following a Tuesday morning raid at her Cicero home, where they discovered 19 adults and 14 children, all believed to be from Guatemala, in the basement, a 12-page complaint filed in the Northern District of Illinois stated.

It’s unclear if the Guatemalans were in the country legally, however a victim told authorities he believed a majority of them had claimed political asylum. He claimed at least two of them were in the country illegally, the complaint stated.

Federal authorities began investigating Malinek in March after a person who worked with one of the victims contacted the FBI about potential human trafficking occurring at the residence.

LARGE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT GROUPS CROSSING US-MEXICO BORDER PUSHING AGENTS TO ‘BREAKING POINT’

Malinek helped the immigrants travel to the U.S. in 2018 and 2019, but then accused them of owing her thousands of dollars once they were on American soil, the complaint stated. To pay her back, Malinek allegedly forced them to work in a factory in Romeoville and took them to and from their workplace in a white passenger van.

The 49-year-old kept track of the Guatemalans’ debts in a ledger, which appeared to contain signatures and “contract-type language regarding the debts owed to Malinek,” authorities said. One of the “contracts” stated the victim was “free to leave or stay” after the debt was settled.

The immigrants received a minuscule amount of the money they earned, according to the complaint, because the majority of it went to Malinek to pay the debt they owed, authorities said.

DOUBLE-AMPUTEE RESCUED FROM ISLAND IN MIDDLE OF RIO GRANDE RIVER WHILE TRYING TO CROSS INTO US

One of the victims told authorities Malinek claimed he owed her $18,000 for letting him use her name and home address on his immigration paperwork. He said Malinek allowed his 15-year-old daughter to live on the first floor of the house, but left him and other people in the basement. He would only be able to see his daughter “for limited periods of time” and had to ask for permission to leave the basement, according to the complaint.

Another victim, who allegedly agreed to pay Malinek about $37,000 to get him and his family into the U.S., said he lived in the basement with his wife, 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter.

Malinek allegedly kept her captives quiet about the scheme by threatening deportation and dared them to call immigration officials.

“They already know you are here, so go ahead and call them,” she told them, according to the complaint.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

She allegedly told one person, “immigration knows how many people live in this house, you guys are poor and I have all the money.”

Malinek is expected to appear in court on Thursday.

Source: Fox News National

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Indian court moves to lift ban on Chinese video app TikTok: lawyers

FILE PHOTO: The logo of TikTok application is seen on a mobile phone screen in this picture illustration taken
FILE PHOTO: The logo of TikTok application is seen on a mobile phone screen in this picture illustration taken February 21, 2019. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui/Illustration/File Photo

April 24, 2019

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – An Indian state court on Wednesday moved to lift a ban on popular video app TikTok in the country, two lawyers involved in the case said, in a boost for its developer Beijing Bytedance Technology Co.

Earlier this month, the court in the southern state of Tamil Nadu ordered the federal government to prohibit TikTok downloads, saying the app was encouraging pornography.

Acting upon instructions from the federal IT ministry, Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google last week removed TikTok from their Indian app stores.

But on Wednesday, hearing a plea from Bytedance, the state court reversed its April 3 decision pushing for the ban, the lawyers said.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the IT ministry would revoke its instructions to Apple and Google.

TikTok allows users to create and share short videos with special effects and is one of the world’s most popular apps. It has been downloaded by nearly 300 million users so far in India, out of more than 1 billion downloads globally, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.

The ban worried the social media industry in India as it sees legal worries mounting if courts increasingly regulate content on their platforms.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Sudarshan Varadhan; Edited by Martin Howell and Mark Potter)

Source: OANN

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Rome mayor promises race-hate probe after Roma protest

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi says there will be an investigation on charges of inciting racial hatred against the perpetrators of a violent protest against the arrival of Roma families at government-run housing.

Raggi on Wednesday described a "very heavy climate, of hatred," during the protest organized by two far-right groups, Casa Pound and Forza Nuova, against the arrival of the families on the outskirts of Rome Tuesday evening.

She said that the families, including 33 children, were being placed elsewhere in the meantime.

The Roma community, also known as gypsies, often faces a hostile, discriminatory climate. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has called for a census of the Roma population, while police closed a Roma camp in the capital last June in defiance of an EU ruling.

Source: Fox News World

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New Zealand bridge washed away in severe storm

A bridge over the Waiho River breaks and washes away due to a swelling river, near Franz Josef, New Zealand in this still frame taken from social media video
A bridge over the Waiho River breaks and washes away due to a swelling river, near Franz Josef, New Zealand in this still frame taken from social media video dated March 26, 2019. JACOB SCHONBERGER/via REUTERS

March 26, 2019

(Reuters) – A motorway bridge over a New Zealand river was washed away in a severe rain storm on Tuesday, prompting the authorities to declare a state of emergency.

The storm battered the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, forcing 300 km(186 miles) of road to be closed due to flooding, according to media reports.

Footage shown on local television and distributed on social media showed part of the Waiho Bridge, near the town of Franz Josef, breaking off in torrential river flooding and swaying loose in the rushing water, with the remaining sections soon collapsing.

In a short video posted on Facebook, Westland Mayor Bruce Smith declared a state of emergency and said the storm was expected to continue for another day.

“I have concerns about people’s lives in Franz Josef,” Smith said in the message, adding another bridge was also damaged.

There were no reports of injuries.

About 50 people, mostly tourists, were staying at a makeshift emergency centre in a local hall to see out the storm, media reported.

The Meteorological Service of New Zealand said in a statement the storm was “a significant event even by West Coast standards”.

It added that the New Zealand Transport Agency was advising residents of the South Island’s west coast to avoid all but essential travel.

The Waiho Bridge has been raised three times since 2002 after flooding left sediment that lifted the river’s floor, media reported.

(Reporting by Byron Kaye in SYDNEY; Editing by Kim Coghill)

Source: OANN

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Man claims police ignored his warnings about extremist members at alleged New Zealand shooter's rifle club

A man who once visited the rifle club which also counted as a member the New Zealand mass shooting suspect says he warned police about the shocking and extremist views of members there years ago, but nothing was done.

Pete Breidahl, a New Zealand Army veteran, says he went to the Bruce Rifle Club outside the town of Dunedin once for a serviceman's rifle match hosted by the club, and was horrified by what he saw. Discussions among members there about zombie apocalypses as well as rifles used for combat and "homicidal fantasies" were enough to make Briedahl concerned about the mental stability of those members -- and report what he heard to an arms officer with local police.

"You gotta do something about the Bruce Rifle Club, those people are not f---ing right," Breidahl said he told the officer in a video live-streamed to Facebook. He added that he also met the accused shooter, who Fox News is choosing not to name, that murdered 50 Muslims at two mosques on Friday. But police officers reportedly did not take Briedahl seriously.

“She dismissed me straight away,” he recently told TIME about the officer's response to his warning. “She told me they were ‘a bunch of funny folk’ down at the club and ‘it’s just who they were.'"

FACEBOOK UNDER FIRE AS WATCHDOG DISPUTES CLAIM NEW ZEALAND MASSACRE VIDEO WAS NOT FLAGGED

He also said another member expressed his desire to carry his weapon around at the school he attended and argued it was no different than other students who carried around skateboards. Breidahl said that same student told him that he needed to prepare himself against the growing Muslim population in New Zealand.

“[He] told me that the army will be deployed on the streets of Dunedin to protect us from the growing terrorist attacks of Muslims,” Breidahl said.

Breidahl, a father-of-three who admits to suffering from PTSD, said he was just trying to do the right thing, though he allows he has a tense relationship with police due to an unspecified conflict with his ex-wife. His heartbreak over the recent shootings reportedly nearly caused him to move.

NEW ZEALAND PRIME MINISTER VOWS TO NEVER MENTION MOSQUE GUNMAN'S NAME

"I tried," he said. "And I failed. People died and I feel like I should have done more."

New Zealand police didn't immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.

Investigators revealed Wednesday that police stopped the shooter while he was on his way to a third mosque. Police commissioner Mike Bush said officials "strongly believe we stopped him on the way to further attack," BuzzFeed reports.

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The first victims of the devastating mass shooting were buried on Wednesday as the country's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced the government would introduce a reform to its gun laws in response to the incident.

Source: Fox News World

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Russia wins WTO ‘national security’ case in potential boost for Trump

FILE PHOTO: The World Trade Organization (WTO) headquarters are pictured in Geneva
FILE PHOTO: The World Trade Organization (WTO) headquarters are pictured in Geneva, Switzerland, July 26, 2018. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo

April 5, 2019

GENEVA (Reuters) – Russia won a dispute about “national security” at the World Trade Organization on Friday, in a ruling over a Ukrainian railway dispute that may also lend support to global automobile tariffs that could be imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The WTO panel ruling, the first ever on the right to a national security exemption from the global trade rules, can be appealed. The panel also confirmed the WTO’s right to review national security claims, denting U.S. claims that national security was not subject to review by the global trade body.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Source: OANN

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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].”

CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP

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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Source: InfoWars

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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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