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Obsession: Who is Faisal Shahzad?

by Rush Limbaugh - May 6,2010

RUSH: Well, it’s a false alarm out there at JFK. The Emirates no-fly scare, JFK, a false alarm. An apparent case of mistaken identity. The plane has been cleared for departure, which tells me that there were no white males in their forties aboard who could be brought in, coconspirators with — why is it I can’t remember this guy’s name? It’s Faisal, Faisal Shahzad. For some reason I’m focusing on that Nosehair guy.

At any rate, isn’t it funny — I say smirkingly — isn’t it funny we keep hearing all of these bogus reports, all of these bogus warnings about the rise of right-wing extremist hate groups but nothing about the amazingly rapid growth of Islam in the United States since 9/11? And in fact, when we do hear about incidents like this Saturday night near-disaster at Times Square, immediately the news media gets in gear to excuse it or to justify it or explain it in some way. Is the Obama administration gonna start asking us for our papers when we get on an airplane now? I’m sorry, they already do ask for our papers when we get on an airplane. Never mind. That’s fundamentally against what America is all about, though, cause in Arizona, it’s fundamentally against what America is all about, if they ask for papers.

Folks, I have to tell you something. I am amazed, I don’t read the New York Times much, I really don’t, but I can’t escape it in coverage of the terror plot that went awry through sheer dumb luck Saturday in Times Square. What is with all this Shahzad coverage in the New York Times? I mean it is everywhere, every day, multiple stories. They are flooding the zone with Shahzad stories in the New York Times. Now, unusually, the New York Times gives Islamic terrorist plots very short shrift. They don’t talk about them much. They try to paper ’em over, but look at all the opportunities this story is giving the Times to push their real agendas here. There is the heartbreak of foreclosure due to the Bush administration destruction of the housing market. There are highly evil drone attacks in Pakistan, started by the evil George Bush. There’s even the opportunity to propagandize for gun control since Mr. Shahzad had bought a low-powered rifle.

Have you heard about the rifle this guy bought? They keep talking about this guy being a rank amateur. He went out and bought a very sophisticated rifle that is as close to a huge pistol as you can get without having to have any papers. I’m waiting for Shahzad to claim discrimination for being gay, then the New York Times, I mean the whole front section will be devoted to how this guy is being persecuted. Frank Rich would move his column from Sunday to the front page every day that week if it were discovered that Shahzad was claiming discrimination because he’s gay, because they’re going after every angle of this story that pushes their agenda. The heartbreak of foreclosure, Bush, the drone attacks in Pakistan drove the guy crazy, that’s Bush, even the opportunity to propagandize for gun control.

Here’s an example, New York Times, ‘Money Woes Changed Shahzad, Friend Says — Theirs was an arranged marriage: two well-educated children of prominent Pakistani families set up through a mutual friend. He was the quiet one; she was the one who laughed at parties. At their wedding in Peshawar six years ago, men and women danced separately but also together, ‘a rarity at that time,’ recalled one guest. ‘It was such a huge gathering that even their family friends from Qatar came.’ When they returned to the United States, his colleagues at the cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden celebrated with a small office party.

‘The husband, Faisal Shahzad, put photographs of his wife, Huma Mian, on his desk at the Arden office in Stamford, Conn. They bought a brand-new house for $273,000, 35 miles away on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton. By the time they moved in, she was pregnant, the neighbors recalled. As another day passed with Mr. Shahzad talking to investigators about the car bomb he had admitted driving into Times Square on Saturday, details emerged on Wednesday about the couple and their life together, along with speculation about his radicalization. People who knew them, both in Connecticut and in Pakistan, said he had changed in the past year or so, becoming more reserved and more religious as he faced what someone who knows the family well called ‘their financial troubles.’

‘As a newlywed, the wedding guest said of Mr. Shahzad by e-mail from Pakistan, ‘there was no sign of him being extremist or, for that matter, he wasn’t a bit religious,” but then he got married. Marriage radicalized the guy, and then getting married caused him to run outta money, so money woes and marriage changed Shahzad. So I have a pop quiz for all of you, because this story is written sympathetically. Well, of course now we understand why he wanted to blow up Times Square. He got married and he had money problems. Who wouldn’t do that? So here, ladies and gentlemen, is a pop quiz. Complete the following sentence. I have money woes after getting married. I think I will, A, drink more, B, go to church and pray more, or C, A and B, or D, blow up Times Square. If you chose A, drink more, or B, go to church more, or C, drink more and go to church more, then you are most people. If you chose D, you are not most people, you are Faisal Shahzad. Not to be confused with Keyser Soze. I think it’s another reason why I’m getting confused by this guy’s name. Have you seen the movie The Usual Suspects, Keyser Soze, one of the great all time movie names ever.

So money woes. Money woes. We all have money woes. Well, not everybody, but people get married. How come it is never mentioned — seriously, now — how come it is never mentioned that the Faisal Shahzads skipped out on their mortgage and fled to another country? Instead, we are made to feel sorry for them for the bank foreclosing on their house, yet they ran away from the mortgage. After all, Mr. Shahzad didn’t lose his job or fall behind on his mortgage payments for any particular reason except that he was probably planning to move to Pakistan to begin his jihad. He quit his job. He wasn’t fired or laid off. Indeed, the records show that the Shahzads had tried to flip the house for a lot more money than they had originally paid for it. And then when the market went down, they simply tried to sell it for what it had cost them and when that didn’t work then they got really mad at Bush. Well, that’s what the New York Times wants us to believe. So when that didn’t work out, they skipped. They left the house a total mess.

So where is the sympathy for Chase Manhattan bank? I don’t expect there to be any, but they’re the ones that got stiffed here. Chase Manhattan got screwed. Where was the sympathy for them? They’re now out more than $200,000 for giving a bad mortgage to a guy with dual citizenship, and how, by the way, did he get citizenship so fast after getting married? Michelle Malkin had a pretty good piece yesterday on how this is becoming a technique of jihadists. They come to the country, they marry here and it speeds up their citizenship process, and that allows them to travel freely and move around the country to do whatever they want to do. Now, I’m told that Michelle Malkin is wrong about one thing, that they were married in 2004, not 2008. Bottom line is there’s still a lot of information about the Faisal Shahzads that — doesn’t it sound like we’re talking about a couple we’d invite over for a cocktail party, except for the little problem here that they tried to blow up Times Square? But we might even want to have them over if we work at the New York Times because what more can we learn about what’s wrong with our stinking country when Bush ran it, that we haven’t been able to publish in our pages because we haven’t ferreted it all out?

From CBS News, not to be confused with the New York Times: ‘Since Faisal Shahzad’s arrest in the failed Times Square car bombing, authorities have been looking closely at whether the Pakistan Taliban played a role in planning the attack. A source told CBS News that it is ‘increasingly plausible’ the militant group was involved. The New York Times first reported on the mounting evidence indicating just that. CBS News received a report from freelance journalist Behroz Khan Thursday indicating that the Taliban was now trying to distance itself from Shahzad.’ Probably ’cause he did such a bad job here. We went back and forth, maybe it was a suicide bomber that got scared. No, couldn’t have been a suicide bomber because he wouldn’t have had alarm clocks or a getaway car. A suicide bomber goes in with a detonator.

‘Azam Tariq, the group’s spokesman, denied a link to the suspect while while praising his bravery. ‘This is a noble job and we pray that all the Muslim youths should follow Faisal Shahzad. But he is not part of our network.” But he might be. The Pakistan Taliban now say that this bomb was one of their plots. How soon before the left picks this up, assuming the Taliban didn’t get the idea from the press in the first place, which is entirely possible. (interruption) Well, Mr. Snerdley, I’m not aware of whether or not Mr. and Mrs. Shahzad — well, mister doesn’t matter in this case. I’m not aware of Mrs. Shahzad having an abortion. If she had had an abortion, it might have relieved some of the financial pressure. Well, but there was already enough pressure with being foreclosed on and then not having a good enough job and Bush, drone attacks in Pakistan and all the rotten things being said about Obama. (interruption) I don’t know if he had to pay taxes. I don’t know. We’re still learning things. New York Times on the case. They really are. And we’ll have more details as they become available. Right now we have to take a — (interruption) Well, she wore a burqa, and yet she was the life of the party, according to the New York Times. I guess it’s all in the eyes. But aside from her wearing a burqa they were just like any other Connecticut couple, having trouble meeting a mortgage, housing bubble caused by Bush, just money woes. And like we all do, wanted to blow up Times Square.

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RUSH: All right, one more thing here on Faisal Shahzad and the Pakistan Taliban. The Taliban’s announcement was, ”This is a noble job, and we pray that all Muslim youths should follow Faisal Shahzad, but he is not part of our network,’ Tariq said. Tariq said that the plot was ‘hatched by the United States and its allies to trap Muslim and Pakistan youth in terror activities.” So the Pakistan Taliban has accused the Obama regime of staging the whole thing to then blame Muslims and Pakistan youth for jihad. Will the media pick up on this like they picked up on something I didn’t say, that the regime blew up the oil rig? Remember that e-mail chain going all over the country the past two or three days that I accused the regime of blowing up the rig, which I never did. Now the Taliban’s accusing Obama of plotting this whole incident and entrapping this poor guy who all he had was money woes.

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RUSH: By the way, you remember the movie Airport? (laughing) Follow me on this, now. The plot of the movie Airport revolved around a guy with money woes. He builds a bomb, he intended to blow it up on the plane and die — he was a domestic American suicide bomber — so that his wife could get his life insurance proceeds. Remember? Now, I think the jihadis, be they the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, are missing a golden business opportunity here. Go out and just recruit people. The New York Times is providing the blueprint, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, simply recruit people who lost their house because of Bush’s economy. Give them money to pay the premium for a-million-dollar life insurance policy, then go steal a car, preferably an SUV, pack it with explosives, have these poor people drive the car to Times Square, make sure that there is a white guy in his forties nearby that would be caught on video when you park the car, and then light the bomb and stand next to it. And then the burqa babe, the wife and terrorists back home would get the insurance company payout.

So it would be a double whammy on America. You could blow up Times Square or any other target plus get evil American insurance companies to pay the jihad. The New York Times has provided the blueprint for this in their exhaustive, extensive coverage here on Keyser Soze. (interruption) No, you don’t pay the mortgage, you run out on the mortgage. You run out on the mortgage because you can’t pay the mortgage because Bush has screwed you over. The million-dollar payoff goes over to the training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. No, no, no, no. The payoff goes to finance jihad training. That’s the opportunity they’re missing here. Kill two or three birds with — I do expect a call from the Secret Service on this or maybe the Department of Justice. I’m just going to direct ’em to the New York Times. It’s a twofer. You fund more terrorism, you get rid of terrorists that are willing to die, and you get even with evil American insurance companies. I mean it’s actually a threesome here. And as I said, the New York Times has got the blueprint for how it ought to be done. Maybe it is in the process of being done and we’re just catching up on it right now.

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RUSH: I gotta correct something. I said that Faisal Shahzad, Keyser Soze had been on a Homeland Security list since 2009. He’s been on the list since 1999. He’s been on a travel lookout list since 1999. It was ‘between 1999 and 2008 because he brought approximately $80,000 cash or cash instruments into the country.’ Yeah. Still he was foreclosed on, had ‘money woes,’ and decided to blow up Times Square — as any normal person with ‘money woes’ would decide to do.

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