onuman: The Nexuses: 1) One of the earliest demands of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, an Islamic Sharia justice, Tanko Mohammed, appointed by President Buhari was request for Islamic Sharia criminal laws be inserted in Nigeria’s constitution.
2) In 2001, Muhammadu Buhari said he would not stop until Islamic Sharia criminal laws are used all over Nigeria.
3) How come another Islamic cleric Pantami as Buhari’s Information Minister?
Read, reasearch, comprehend.
Firstly, Pantami is not the information minister. He is the minister of communications. He has a PhD in ICT and he was an ICT lecturer.
Secondly, none of what you posted shows that Pantami is on any terrorist watchlist. Can you show us the watchlist? We have been looking for it since yesterday
capitalzero: No serious Intel will make watchlist public. It is only media that can dig that out. Daily independent even goofed for digging it out. Terrorists are security threat to the world. It is not proper for media to reveal identities of those on the watch list. It is not good for investigation.
Hahahahahahaha
You are right. I've seen the watchlist. Capitalzero is on the list because he has ties with ISWAP
capitalzero: You provided the list from FBI and I told you it is domain of cia because pantami is not us resident. Also watch list is different from wanted list. FBI even shows wanted list. No serious Intel will make watchlist public. It is only media that can dig that out.
Hahahahahahahaha
Still no proof.
So how come the BBC, CNN, etc have not been able to "dig it out", but it's only Daily Independent that "dug it out"?
Did you read the Pulse article? Did you read their calls and messages with the US Embassy, CIA, FBI, etc?
Wilstino: The news was not that he was a 'wanted terrorist' but places on 'watchlist'.
He may or may not be as retracted... but my point is that they two different things and this link doesn't answer the questions on people's mind.
Read now.
Provide any kind of evidence that he is on any list. Just one.
BBC, CNN, none of them reported any such thing. The US Embassy and other US agencies say the news is false, yet you and your "may or may not have been retracted" know better than them.
flames01: You Muslims have given the world nothing but agony, bitterness, murder, hatred and destruction. Everywhere you go, destruction follows you. You paint the pictures of violence, intolerance, evil, especially you Nigerian version of Muslims.
So, it is only natural for people to view your sheiks, imams, Alfas, etc with suspicion.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
"You muslims"
Bigotry at its finest.
He thinks that I have to be a muslim in order to use common sense.
naptu2: By the way, that Pantami issue reminds me of a discussion at a family event c2005. In just a few words someone said something that had been at the back of my mind but I didn't know how to express it. It blew my mind.
This was during the politicking for the 2007 elections and there had been a picture of a politician at a shrine and people online, in the newspapers and on radio had been condemning the politician and then this guy says, "But if we had seen a picture of him in church with a bishop, nobody would have complained".
Think about that.
Yesterday some people said, "How can a sheikh be Nigeria's minister of communications", but the same people did not ask, "How can a pastor be Nigeria's vice president".
How can a sheikh be an ICT expert? How can a pastor be a professor of law.
This ⬆⬆⬆ is the first article that answered the question that I asked yesterday.
naptu2: Is there any statement by any US agency about this watchlist business? I've checked the FBI, State Department and other websites, but I haven't seen anything yet.
It was only reported on Nigerian newspaper websites.
This is not 1985. It was difficult to verify this kind of news item in 1985, but today all these agencies and people are online and verification is much easier. That's why I immediately went to the FBI's list of wanted terrorists when this story broke yesterday. There's no Pantami on the list. See for yourself. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists
Now, if it was some top secret list that nobody had access to, do you think that Nigerian newspapers would have access to the information?
That's the other thing, how come the story only appeared on Nigerian news sites (most of them copied it from Daily Independent)? How come it's not on the BBC, CNN, etc?
This looks more like some kind of propaganda campaign.
Fact Check: Is Communications Minister Pantami on a US terrorism watchlist?
Yesterday at 2:08 PM | Pulse Nigeria | Jude Egbas
There have been news reports suggesting that Nigeria's Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, is on a United States terrorism watchlist.
According to the reports, Pantami who is a former student of Salafist ideologies, was trained in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East with other top Islamic jihadists.
The reports also say before his appointment as a minister by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019, Pantami was a known Islamic preacher who held dangerous views against the American government.
The platforms have also substantiated their stories by establishing a nexus between Pantami's alleged ties with terrorists and an old video of the minister debating Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf.
Was Pantami an Islamic cleric?
Yes, Pantami was an Islamic cleric who had a contest of ideas and doctrines with Yusuf and other scholars.
Pantami has also been an Islamic scholar for many years.
In the Youtube videos cited and currently making the rounds on social media, Pantami can be heard interrogating Yusuf's fundamentalist and extremist views and showing them up as deeply flawed.
Far from being a friendly chit-chat with the Boko Haram founder, Pantami in the videos referenced, tells Yusuf that his views on western education are problematic and erroneous.
The Islamic scholarly community in Nigeria is a very small, closely-knit one. It is not uncommon for scholars and clerics with opposing ideologies and differing views in this setting to publicly engage on doctrines and interpretation of the Koran.
Ahmad Salkida, a journalist who has covered the Boko Haram crisis from the trenches for many years tweets that: "Pantami put the Boko Haram doctrine to task more than any other Muslim cleric in northern Nigeria.
"Pantami, as a university Don at the time, had public debates with Yusuf about western education, democracy and some of the issues that the group was preaching against. He's been threatened repeatedly by the same group that you say he has links to.
"The problem is not Pantami, the problem here is our unwillingness to understand this crisis, and yet we want to end it. 10 years down the road we still miss the fuse that drives the #BokoHaram doctrine. The group has zero tolerance for the likes of Pantami."
What are the US and Nigerian intelligence agencies saying?
Pulse has reached out to the US Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Embassy in Nigeria, the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), the Department of State Services (DSS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) through calls, emails and text messages on the allegations against Pantami in the local media.
A lady on the other end of the line at the US embassy in Nigeria said the allegation was untrue, before handing Pulse an email address for the press department and referring us to the FBI.
Text messages and calls to the NIA and DSS in Nigeria have not been responded to.
At the CIA and FBI, voices on the other ends of the lines first described the reports as untrue or hasty, before directing us to the publicly available terrorism list on the FBI website which Pulse has painstakingly gone through.
There is no 'Pantami' on the FBI's publicly available terrorism or most wanted watchlist.
We will update this story with responses to the emails we sent to the US State Department, the CIA and the US Embassy in Abuja as soon as we have them.
It is also instructive that no US news outlet or credible news platform in Nigeria has reported this bit of trending, 'weighty' news.
Conclusion
There is at this time, no shred of evidence that Nigeria's Communications Minister Isa Pantami is on any local or international terror watchlist.
The reports appear to have conveniently woven a link between Pantami's days as an Islamic cleric, his public interaction with a terrorist sect founder and his Salafist ideology.
In our reckoning, all of these are not enough to tag him a terrorist who belongs in a most wanted list kept by US intelligence agencies.
For while the Sunni Islamic Salafi movement is conservative in outlook and doctrine, Boko Haram's brand of Islam is brutal and lies on the extreme end of the spectrum.
Insinuations that Pantami's name is on a US terror watchlist are therefore baseless, speculative, frivolous and untrue at this point.
The reports in themselves have deployed the word "allege"--indicating that there is not enough evidence in them to convict Pantami at the time of writing.
Yes there are. There are outdoor ranges that the military use and there are indoor ranges that are used for sport. There's an indoor range at Rowe Park in Yaba and another at Police College Ikeja and here is a video of the chief of army staff (Ibrahim Babangida) and the GOC 2 Division (Sani Abacha) using the outdoor range at Ibadan in 1984.
Is there any statement by any US agency about this watchlist business? I've checked the FBI, State Department and other websites, but I haven't seen anything yet.
It was only reported on Nigerian newspaper websites.
Pantami threatens legal action over reported link with insurgents, demands public apology
April 12, 2021 19:30
Isa Pantami, minister of communications and digital economy, has written to the publishers of Daily Independent newspaper, demanding retraction and a public apology over a story alleging that he has ties to Boko Haram.
The minister’s action follows the publication of an unconfirmed report, alleging that the he is on the watchlist of the United States for his connection to insurgents.
Speaking through his legal representatives, Karina Tunyan & Company, in a letter on Monday, Pantami issued a 24-hour ultimatum to the newspaper to retract the story or face legal consequences.
He also demanded that the newspaper tenders a public apology, which should be published in renowned print and online media platforms.
According to the letter signed by Michael Numa, and addressed to the managing director/editor-in-chief of the newspaper, the lawyers said Pantami’s reputation was badly damaged by the publication.
The lawyers described the report as a “false, malicious, misleading and degrading narrative simply targeted at tarnishing and bringing the good name of our client and that of the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari to disrepute”.
“That you are hereby given a 24-hour notice from the date of receipt of this letter to categorically retract your libelous statement made against our client,” the letter reads.
“That the said retraction and letter of apology be published in at least 5 print media circulated nationwide and 5 different renowned online media outfits across the globe.
“That you convene a press conference to publicly announce your retraction while dissociating our client from the false claims you made which are seriously injurious to our client’s personality.”
According to the lawyers, failure to comply with the minister’s demands within the stipulated time will lead to the commencement of legal proceedings against the paper and all persons involved.
The inspector-general of police, director-general of the department of state security (DSS), and the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) were copied in the letter.
Politics › Re: Fact Check: Isa Pantami Is Not On A US Terrorism Watchlist by naptu2(op): 8:33am On Apr 13, 2021
