James wrote:Ha! Damn, I got lazy and read the wrong domain when I picked a link after reading about this on better sources—thought I found the article I read. If I had spent a little more time on it I could have given a better link. And more to the point, I'm not actually opposed to linking to RT, as long as the article is properly sourced and potential conflict of interest is taken into consideration (as should be the case with any publication).

Fair enough, of course. I wasn't objecting to the substance of the article, only to its lack of sourcing (one link to a CNN story) and its source (not the most reliable), and I know that you're generally very well-informed on the topic.
James wrote:Yeah, agreed. And I still haven't read the article I linked to.![]()
Reading more today and hearing more about it there's much more to the connection than the mutterings of a US official. And truth be told, I'm skeptical of governments on certain things—even some such as the extent to which the FBI claims North Korea was behind the Sony hack—but it's not a terribly new thing for terrorists to receive training from and/or coordinate with terrorist cells in the Middle East. It doesn't make for a very good recruitment campaign, though.
I agree with that, absolutely. Definitely through their imams in France they had connexions with terrorist cells operating out of Iraq and Syria; I found multiple sources on that. And I'll have to do more research on the Yemeni connexion - I hadn't heard of that one before you'd mentioned it.
James wrote:Yeah, and it's not just those examples. The Arab League and other countries chimed in as well. Not that I'd want to read a whole lot into voices from some of these sources. There's a degree of irony in chiming in on something like that while enforcing the more extreme interpretations of Sharia Law at home. Which also carries to the amusing irony in representation from many of the world leaders who went to France for the following march. It's a shame the United States couldn't make it to make their own ironic statement.
I did post some of my thoughts on that here. Personally, I found it reassuring that the President didn't cave to the pressure either from Fox News or from Jon Stewart to attend the rally. It would have sent precisely the wrong message, and in this case I think President Obama sent precisely the right one, and rightly measured. (The man does have a backbone. Problem is, I think he misplaces it from time to time.

With regard to Arab League nations, I think there might be a self-defensive element as well, and a kind of 'the enemy of my enemy' mentality. None of them wants to see terrorism come to its own turf, even if some of them (like Saudi Arabia and Qatar) are particularly eager to fund it on their enemies' turf.