 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
End |
Reviews |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home |
Credits |
Cast |
1 |
2 |
3 |
End |
Reviews |
|
|
|
. . . TERRORISM (FRANCE) Fighting Terrorism: Lessons from France France has been remarkably successful in thwarting Islamist terrorism. The French experience holds some challenging lessons for the U.S. By BRUCE CRUMLEY Sep. 24, 2001 The French have a long and intimate acquaintance with terror, earned in years of attacks by Algerian independence fighters. Although currently plagued by an Islamist terror threat, French authorities have made their country so inhospitable to terrorist networks that many have relocated to Germany. How did they do it? What lessons can the U.S. learn? And, perhaps most important, how many civil liberties are we willing to give up in the process? The French connections The French approach terrorism much like doctors approach the common cold: Rather than wiping it out completely, they look for ways to manage it. This is done through a combination of years of patient intelligence-gathering and police work to ascertain the terrorists' modus operandi, and a set of laws that would (and in France at times did) make civil libertarians' hair stand on end. These were necessary in part because the terrorists were not a single band of extremists, but rather a multi-layered series of cells and networks each contributing in a small way to sophisticated terror operations whose scope and magnitude is known only to one or two men. In the early 1990s, Islamist radicals found a pool of willing recruits in the cauldrons of youthful rage found in the impoverished suburban ghettoes that house many of France's 5 million people of Arab origin. The point of connection between the suburbs of Paris and Marseilles and Osama Bin Laden's Afghanistan-based networks came via Algeria. There, the military-backed government overturned elections won by the Islamists, banned their party and drove its most extreme elements underground - where they've led a merciless war of terror against politicians and citizens alike. The most notorious Algerian terror faction, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), had been founded by men who'd fought as volunteers alongside Bin Laden in Afghanistan's anti-Soviet 'jihad.' When that war ended with the Soviet withdrawal, the men moved into France and began recruiting young thugs and exploiting their larcenous talents to raise money and build an infrastructure to attack France for its support of the Algerian government. A far-reaching law Operatives recruited in France helped staged a series of bombing attacks during 1995 that left eight dead and around 150 wounded. French anti-terrorist police ultimately tracked down the bombers, and developed an extensive "human intelligence" capability to monitor the wider networks of which they'd been a part. French law-enforcement was also aided by a catch-all crime law: Simply by citing "association with wrong-doers involved in a terrorist enterprise," French police are able to arrest and detain any suspect in any crime whose goal, however remotely, can ultimately assist terrorist activity. That law shocks civil libertarians in the U.S. and Britain, but French officials retort that those countries' commitment to strict civil libertarian principles has made them havens where Islamist militants can plot terror with less risk of detection because of the legal restraints on techniques such as spot ID checks and information monitoring. The combination of these laws and human-level intelligence gathering (infiltration and interrogation of suspects) helped France successfully uproot terrorist networks in the mid-1990s and to thwart outrages planned during the 1998 soccer World Cup. Casting the net wide revealed that many people police had previously assumed were simply petty crooks had actually been thugging for the Islamists. Inside the terror networks The French sweeps also revealed the informal and dispersed nature of the terror networks: They were mostly cut off from one another to contain the damage of detection or infiltration, and were guided by a limited number of people who'd move around assembling the fruits of each cell's particular talents - false documents from one, funds from another and weapons from a third, for example. The organizers who linked these discrete cells could then synchronize complex multiple attacks. [. . . ] --- TERRORISM (IN RUSSIA) Russia siege toll tops 350 Putin admits weakness, denounces 'attack on our country' September 4, 2004 Beslan, Russia -- The death toll in the Russian hostage crisis has climbed beyond 350 as President Vladimir Putin denounced the massacre as "an attack on our country." In a nationally televised speech Saturday, Putin said the fall of the Soviet Union had left the country unable to react to attacks, and he urged Russians to join together to fight terrorism. "We must create a much more effective system of security," he said. "We couldn't adequately react. ... We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten." North Ossetia government spokesman Lev Dzugayev told CNN that 323 hostages, including 156 children, died in the siege in the southern town of Beslan. In addition, 26 hostage-takers -- including 10 people from Arab countries -- and at least 10 Russian special forces were killed. The two-day standoff ended Friday after Russian forces stormed the school amid explosions and intense gunfire. More than 700 people were wounded, officials said. Dzugayev said Saturday evening that 448 people were still in hospitals in the region, including 248 children. Among the total hospitalized, 69 were in serious condition. Dzugayev said most of those who died were killed when a bomb exploded in the school gymnasium where hostages were being held, collapsing the roof and starting a fire. Of those who died from gunshot wounds, most were shot in the back as they fled the building, he said. Russian Deputy Prosecutor Sergei Fridinsky acknowledged that more than 1,000 people had been held hostage during the ordeal. Earlier, officials had placed the number of hostages at a few hundred. Putin ordered the borders closed in the North Ossetia region where the siege took place as security forces searched for accomplices in the massacre. Investigators are looking at the possibility that the hostage-takers may have brought their weapons and explosives into the school well before the siege. The Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed regional security officer as saying the weapons had been hidden under the floor during summer construction work. An escaped hostage said she recognized some of the terrorists as having done construction work, Echo Moscow Radio reported. Putin traveled to the traumatized region near Chechnya early Saturday, visiting wounded in the hospital and meeting local officials. "Russia is grieving with the people of North Ossetia," he said in Beslan. "Nobody wanted to use force." "Even alongside the most cruel attacks of the past, this terrorist act occupies a special place because it was aimed at children," news agencies quoted him as saying. "One of the tasks pursued by the terrorists was to stoke ethnic hatred, to blow up the whole of our North Caucasus. "Anyone who feels sympathetic towards such provocations will be viewed as accomplices of terrorists and terrorism," he said. At least 79 bodies have been identified, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition and will require DNA testing for identification, which could take several days. One witness told a reporter that a hostage-taker had set off a suicide bomb in a gymnasium full of children. Interfax quoted a defense official as saying that "the terrorists planted a lot of mines and booby-traps filled with metal bolts in the gym." Valery Andreyev, head of the local branch of the FSB intelligence service, said 10 of the hostage-takers killed were from Arab countries. Chechens in the past have been affiliated with the al Qaeda terror network, and an Arab connection further suggests a link between the Chechen rebel movement and international terrorists. Chechen rebels have been fighting Russian troops for a decade. Near the scene, the bodies of dead children were placed on stretchers. One woman leaned down and caressed the body of a young boy. Other women stood shocked, holding their hands to their mouths and weeping. [. . .] The hostage incident began Wednesday when an armed gang of terrorists took children, parents and teachers hostage on the first day of school in Beslan. Friday's storming operation was not planned, said a local official from Russia's FSB intelligence service, who told Russian media the troops had been ready for a long siege. The forces stormed the building around midday after Russian officials, under a cease-fire agreement with militants, tried to collect bodies lying outside the building. There was an explosion, hostages fled, and hostage-takers opened fire on the children and rescue workers. One of the workers was killed and another was wounded. Russian troops then opened fire at the rebels, and the battle began. Several hours later the scene remained in chaos, with pockets of resistance remaining and machine-gun fire heard on the scene and troops going room-by-room as the wounded were being taken out of the building. Children who survived said they were denied food and water and had to take off their clothes because of the heat. Some boys said they had to drink their own urine because they lacked liquids. The standoff followed a bloody week in Russia. A female suicide bomber killed nine people outside a Moscow subway station Tuesday. Two suspected Chechen female suicide bombers downed two airliners on August 24, killing all 89 people aboard the planes. Russian officials have said the new wave of attacks is an attempt at revenge for last weekend's elections in Chechnya in which a Kremlin-backed candidate won the presidency. The Russian Foreign Ministry, in a statement posted on its Web site, thanked other nations for their support, condemned the incident and said a "moment of truth" had come in the fight against international terror. "We have witnessed a cruel tragedy, a new, unprecedented form of boundless terrorist lawlessness where bandits victimized innocent women, children, and even completely defenseless infants," the statement said. "The losses are heavy and irretrievable. Bandits were shooting hostages point-blank and were blowing up everyone indiscriminately. "One needs to draw a lesson from this monstrous crime. It confirms yet again that terrorists are a bunch of beasts for whom nothing is sacred. They challenge the very foundations of civilization to achieve their criminal goals. Terrorism is absolutely incompatible with principles of morality and humanity," the statement said. Correspondents Matthew Chance, Ryan Chilcote and Jill Dougherty contributed to this report. --- TERRORISM (LONDON) Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death- spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity? --Mark Steyn, A victory for multiculti over common sense http://tinyurl.com/9kfuz - It needs to be seen and said clearly: there are, among us, apologists for what the killers do. They make more difficult the fight to defeat them. The plea will be - it always is - that these are not apologists, they are merely honest Joes and Joanies endeavouring to understand the world in which we live. What could be wrong with that? What indeed? Nothing is wrong with genuine efforts at understanding; on these we all depend. But the genuine article is one thing, and root-causes advocacy seeking to dissipate responsibility for atrocity, mass murder, crime against humanity, especially in the immediate aftermath of their occurrence, is something else. --Norm Geras, "There are apologists amongst us", _The Guardian_ [21 July 21 2005] http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1532738,00.html - "London Terrorists' Mindset Is an Open Book" By Salil Tripathi in _The Wall Street Journal_ August 10, 2005 London Shahid Hasan was born of Muslim parents from Pakistan in Kent near London; he immersed himself in rock music and postcolonial literature at a young age. He went to study in London, where he drifted into an affair with his lecturer DeeDee Osgood, who also introduced him to the sensual experiences of drug-induced hallucinations. His trance-like universe of moral relativism was disturbed when he met a group of his co-religionists who promised him answers and certainties, if only he renounced his wayward path and became a true believer. Shahid felt their austerity was more virtuous than the shameless hedonism that DeeDee pursued. London was Jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic city of ignorance and decadence; the clarity of the Book would wipe away those cobwebs, he thought. Farid, born in Bradford in northern England, surprised his family by suddenly giving up his passions -- cricket, pop music and designer labels. He then broke off his engagement with Madelaine Fingerhut, the white daughter of a senior police officer, much to the disappointment of his Pakistani father, a taxi driver called Parvez, for whom the imminent wedding was like winning the lottery. Farid told his father: "In the end, our cultures cannot be mixed....[T]hey say, integrate, but they live in pornography and filth, and tell us how backward we are." Like many other British Muslims of the second generation, feeling estranged from their parents, he found the polite sermons of older imams dull. He preferred the radical messages of a conservative imam from Pakistan who had moved to Bradford. Encouraged by these words, Farid campaigned against prostitution. When Parvez confronted him, Farid left home -- with a backpack. The experiences of Shahid and Farid -- particularly the eerie departure with a backpack -- are remarkably similar to the transformations in the lives of Shehzad Tanveer, Hasib Hussain and Siddique Khan, three of the four bombers who killed 56 people, including themselves, in the London bomb blasts of July 7. But there is one key difference: Shahid and Farid are fictional. They are characters the British author Hanif Kureishi created. Mr. Kureishi has been writing for several years about the dangers of radical Islam in Britain with remarkable prescience. Farid appeared in Udayan Prasad's 1997 film, "My Son the Fanatic," based on Mr. Kureishi's story that had earlier appeared in The New Yorker magazine. And Shahid was the protagonist of his 1995 novel, "The Black Album." While Farid's fate remains uncertain at the conclusion of "My Son the Fanatic," "The Black Album" had a life-affirming end. When Shahid's Islamic friends decided to burn a book by an author Shahid admired (a clear reference to Salman Rushdie's 1988 novel, "The Satanic Verses"), and even as opportunistic leftists cheered the Islamists, Shahid left them, rushing to DeeDee, who had opposed the burning, and together they fled London. Fiction writers have that sixth sense of being able to discern subtle undercurrents and cast light on the larger truth that policy makers miss. Graham Greene did that with his 1955 novel "The Quiet American," published only a year after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which ended the French supremacy in Indochina. The novel centers on a cynical journalist who is horrified to discover the misguided utopian plans of an idealistic American sent there to promote democracy by creating a third force. What turn would the Vietnam War have taken had the Kennedy administration paid attention to Greene? In the same vein, several British Asian novelists have been writing about the turbulence within Britain's Muslim community. But while they have been honored, their warnings have gone unheeded. Mr. Kureishi has won the Whitbread Award for "The Buddha of Suburbia." Many of Mr. Rushdie's novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize, which he won in 1982 for "Midnight's Children." Monica Ali was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2003, for "Brick Lane." Nadeem Aslam won the Encore Award this year in London for "Maps for Lost Lovers." (In June he also won an American award, the Kiriyama Prize, which is given to enhance the West's understanding of the East.) If those novels were read carefully, then the composite picture that emerges today -- of disaffected youth finding a new meaning through faith, joining religious groups and following foreign-born preachers, as well as of subterranean misogyny and ostracizing, and even killing those who leave the community by marrying outside the faith -- should not have surprised anyone. Britain's multiculturalism rests on political correctness. This means the mediator becomes more important than the message. Minority writers get a disproportionate amount of space on the bookshelves, but what is being said is seemingly willfully neglected. That partly explains why so many -- including their neighbors and much of the British establishment -- were surprised to find that three home-grown British Pakistanis became suicide bombers. Many in Britain think -- smugly -- that they know how to handle multiethnic relations. After all, chicken tikka masala had been crowned the country's favorite dish; the whole of Britain cheered when boxer Amir Khan won a silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004; until recently Nasser Hussain led the English cricket team; and British courts had allowed Muslim schoolgirls not only the right to wear headscarves, but also the jilbab, an outfit that covers their entire body. How could things go wrong? To understand that, let us go back to the book that started it all, Mr. Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." It dealt with Britain's Faustian bargain with overseas radicals, allowing them space to preach incendiary messages, provided they promised not to contaminate Britain. In the novel, a Khomeini-like "bearded and turbaned imam" lived in London, a "loathed exile [hoping to] return in triumph" to his homeland. Perceptively, Mr. Rushdie called the microcosm of immigrants "a city visible but unseen." The ferment in that invisible city was ignored, even though more novelists continued to point out the ugly reality. In "Brick Lane," Ms. Ali wrote about an 18-year-old Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, arriving in London to join 40-year-old Chanu, for an arranged marriage. She does not speak English, and Chanu doesn't think she needs to. As she leads her quotidian life of stitching clothes, around her housing project young boys in Nike warmups and young girls in headscarves form a group called the Bengal Tigers, which debates whether to engage in global jihad. And in "Maps for Lost Lovers," a Pakistani community tries in vain to live by the eighth-century code of life derived from Sharia law in the midst of a gray, snow-bound town similar to Dewsbury. A couple that defies the norm is killed. For too long Britain has allowed these communities to remain "visible but unseen." When Muslims in Bradford burned "The Satanic Verses," the government initially protected Mr. Rushdie's right to free speech and pandered to those who claimed to have been offended that the government's backing wasn't strong enough. This sort of political correctness has even driven Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, to welcome the Qatari-based cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who regularly offers religious justification for beating women, insulting Jews and gays, and praising suicide bombers. Heinrich Heine had warned in his 1821 play, "Almansor": "They who start by burning books will end by burning men." Modern Britain is not Nazi-era Germany, but in 1989, in England's northern cities, Muslim activists burned copies of "The Satanic Verses" -- a chilling reminder of the massive book burnings undertaken by the Nazis in May 1933. Sixteen years later, young men from those English towns carried bombs in their backpacks and exploded them, burning -- and killing -- themselves and 52 other people. Mr. Tripathi is a writer based in London. -- TERRORISM, FROM 1961 TO PRESENT: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/5902.htm  . . The massacre of innocent children at Beslan, where terrorists turned guns on each other to coerce obedience to the plan, demonstrated the very failure of extremist Islam's ideology to inspire - and how the hideousness of their actions could sow doubt in even the most criminally hardened minds. When even the terrorists are at a loss to see how killing over 150 schoolchildren can help their cause, you know they have a problem. Most Chechens have now turned away from the very radicals who seek to free them because they see the horrific lengths to which the extremists will go, and realize that they too could be the targets of the assassins. Like him or not, Vladimir Putin's resolve to stare down Beslan's terrorists - about whom he understood nothing - will (if by accident) be seen one day as a turning point in the war against extremism, because the depravity of Beslan's architects has turned the silent majority in the Muslim world on its ear. Editors, political leaders, and mullahs from Jeddah to Istanbul to Jakarta are decrying the insanity of the Beslan murders. And they are beginning to realize that always blaming others for their woes won't help elevate their disaffected people or spread the word of their failed vision any faster or better. We Muslims (I am an American whose faith remains that of the humane and dignified Islam) have no legs to stand on anymore when those who proclaim our religion are willing to put a gun to a child's head, pull the trigger, and call it an act of martyrdom. Islam no longer carries a message of hope, only the indelible impressions of cruelty. Its purveyors are bankrupt of ideas that inspire, and have failed in an ideology that in its very heart today has become hypocritical. To top it all off, America's Muslims - whose freedom to craft and convey an opposition to the terrorist cancer is protected by the very people those terrorists seek to destroy, sit silent - stone cold silent. Islam's "vanguard," as Zawahiri called it, has an opportunity to redefine the message and turn away from the extremists. America will win the war against extremism because America's values are righteous, and because God, whatever you conceive Him to be, is at our side. But Islam will surely lose its credibility as a great religion if its benefactors don't stand now and drive the final nail into the coffin of the terrorists who have hijacked a noble faith. The terrorists have turned on themselves because they have no morality and no code. Let's now finish the job and rise up against them en masse with ideas that reflect human values, not just Islamic values: to mobilize the Muslim masses against their own extremist creed for the good of humanity. To do otherwise is to show the ultimate disrespect for our fallen heroes, both here in America and now in the fields of Beslan, where the innocence of our children was lost as well. --Mansoor Ijaz, Jihad in Chaos http://www.nationalreview.com/ijaz/ijaz200409101000.asp - The first to denounce [the Abu Ghraib scandal] were the Americans themselves, who thought that the acts of some of their soldiers distorted the image of the U.S. and served as a mark of shame... But don't the Arabs feel an even greater sense of shame when some of them kill and massacre Iraqi citizens? Don't the rest [of the people] feel pangs of conscience when they try to come up with excuses and justifications for the murderers and criminals whom they call the 'resistance?' How can someone outraged at the torture of or disrespect for another person be silent and ignore [Al-Zarqawi's] declaration of the [program of] extermination of millions of people because of their sectarian affiliation? --Bahraini journalist Omran Salman, quoted at http://memri.org/bin/latestnews.cgi?ID=SD101005 . . It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims. The hostage-takers of the children in Beslan were Muslims. The hostage-takers and murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers in Iraq were also Muslims. . . . The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses, and buildings all over the world were Muslim. . . . "What a pathetic record. What an abominable `achievement.' Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies, and our culture?. . . We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us. . . . They are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image. We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the sheiks who thought it ennobling to re-invent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges. --Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat - The Other War By Dorothy Rabinowitz "The Wall Street Journal" August 11, 2005 "Blood must flow. There must be widows, there must be orphans." -- Jihadist Fayiz Azzam addressing a gathering in Atlanta [1990] "We conquer the land of the infidels, and we spread Islam by calling the infidels to Allah." -- From a speech by Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, outlining the plan for Islamic world rule, at an event sponsored by the Islamic Charity Project International, Detroit [1991] "He is now extremely anxious when he sees police officers in the subway system." -- From a description, by the New York Civil Liberties Union, of one of the complainants who joined its lawsuit against the New York City Police Department [August 2005] A solemn handful of plaintiffs surrounded New York Civil Liberties Union head Donna Lieberman last week as she announced the agency's latest lawsuit -- this one targeted at new procedures allowing for the random inspection of bags carried onto the subways. This will not come as a surprise -- the agency has had an exceptionally busy few years, since 9/11, campaigning against expanding police powers, increased surveillance and other antiterror measures, all of which, the NYCLU and likeminded watchdogs regularly inform us, pose a greater danger than any that might come from the terrorists themselves. How Americans of normal intelligence respond to this reasoning should make entertaining reading someday. Most of those entering the subways these days are, it seems, unperturbed by the prospect of a bag check, and not a few have made clear their approval of such precautions. Indeed, in its latest war on the security search, the NYCLU has entered on decidedly iffy terrain: one close to home, psychologically, for masses of Americans (and not just those who take city trains and buses), all in a good position to weigh the sort of argument which holds that government security methods are a greater threat to them than terrorism. It was a war undertaken even as the pictures of the London bombings remain fresh in memory -- along, of course, with those of the devoted jihadists, shown (via surveillance cameras) sprinting through that city's transportation system after their attempt at a second strike. Who can forget the faces of this crew, as it rushed furtively about through empty corridors and train cars -- a sight that lent a special touch of nightmare immediacy to the picture unfolding in Britain these last weeks. The pictures revealed, as none had before, the scope of the Islamic terrorist apparatus and support groups operating from within -- a threat not limited to Britain. Which is one reason why, in the matter of the subway searches and the lawsuit against New York City and its police commissioner, all the sides to the conflict and what they stand for are perfectly clear to most people. Matters must have seemed even clearer to those who followed the news of the NYCLU's press conference a few days ago, at which the agency announced the legal action and introduced five plaintiffs who had signed on. Among them was a lawyer, quoted above, a traveler so apprehensive about being searched that he took alternative routes: Even so he remained, according to the claim, extremely anxious at the sight of police in the subways. A sad case, doubtless. One also wildly at odds with the reactions of most subway travelers, who tend to feel good at the sight of police officers in the subways -- the more of them the better, preferably in close proximity. Good feelings come, to be sure, in all forms. Another of the NYCLU plaintiffs told how, when a member of the police force asked if he could look in his bag, he declared, "Absolutely not" -- and walked away. With the other plaintiffs, he declared himself affronted by the police request, the invasion of his privacy, by the threat to personal freedom, not to forget the Constitution. Not everyone gets to go on trips like this with a MetroCard. Taking affront at government security measures in wartime is, of course, a choice available only to a free people, as is the right to cavil ceaselessly about the alleged erosion of our liberties, the dark night of oppression settling on us daily, as the NYCLU has so conspicuously done these last years -- though not without echoing choruses from its parent organization, the ACLU, and various crank outposts of the libertarian movement. [. . . ] Ethnic/racial profiling may not, in fact, work very well as a security strategy -- but the frenzy of the attacks it has excited tells more than we may want to know about our post-9/11 condition. Large numbers of citizens of every religion and ethnicity lost their lives in the terrorist attacks. Today, a strategy designed to help ensure that such a calamity will not again occur has been converted to a bizarre race-discrimination issue, subordinated to the concerns and ambitions of politicians. This won't, in the end, do much for the office-seekers and -holders now competing for the honor of delivering the most hysterical denunciations of ethnic and racial profiling. What, after all, can citizens (black and brown among them) think of leaders still prepared to argue that young Arab males receive no more scrutiny than the famous 80-year-old little grandmother -- and that the people's security lies in measures clearly the least suited to assuring their safety? Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board. - "Why Not a 'Million Muslim March'?" By Ahmed H. Al-Rahim in _The Wall Street Journal_ July 26, 2005 Two recent events have sent shock waves through Egypt. The later of the two was the terrorist bombing of the resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh. The first, unnoticed in the West but no less unsettling, was the silencing of a liberal scholar, Sayyid Mahmud al-Qimany. Mr. Qimany, an outspoken critic of Islamism whose many writings have been banned by al-Azhar University (Sunni Islam's most revered institution of higher education), recently received a death threat declaring him an apostate. "We have individuals," the message read, "who are willing to cleanse their sins with your blood." The individuals threatening him wished to make an example of Mr. Qimany in the same way they had of his fellow secular writer Farag Fouda, assassinated in 1992. If Mr. Qimany did not retract his statements and writings against the Islamists, his fate was death. Despite the Egyptian government assigning bodyguards to protect him, he knew that once he was declared an apostate, the state could do little to prevent the Islamists from assassinating him. So to spare his family the fate that befell Fouda's, Mr. Qimany recanted all his writings, promising never to write again. He knew that he was alone in his battle against the dark forces of Islam; his only weapon was his pen, which alas he surrendered to the Islamists as others before him surrendered their lives. The silencing of Mr. Qimany could not come at a worse time, when there are so few Muslims speaking out against Islamism and the recent spate of bombings. Sadly, only the voices of Western political leaders constantly remind us that Islam is a "religion of peace." Where are the Muslims, especially those living in the West, who have the freedom to organize and make their voices heard? It seems that the only time we hear from the Muslim masses is when there are alleged desecrations of the Quran, or of prisoner abuse in Iraq. Where is the Muslim outrage, the mass protests to defend Islam, in whose sacred name murder is committed nearly every day, against what Western leaders describe as a "perversion of its true nature"? Alas, the battle against Islamism -- and also for the heart of Islam -- has become a battle for the West to fight. As a Muslim, these acts of terrorism committed by fellow Muslims -- and yes, they are Muslims, from whom we cannot distance ourselves by the sophistry that asserts that their version is but a perversion of Islam -- are a great source of shame. But what is more shameful is that there are no mass Muslim protests to speak of against terrorism that is committed in our name. In the same way that Muslims have protested against alleged desecrations of the Quran, they now should be out in full force in the streets of Cairo, London and New York, sending a clear message to the Islamists that Enough is Enough. Why not a "Million Muslim March" on Washington, of law-abiding Muslim citizens clamoring to reclaim their faith from those who would kill innocents in its name? Muslims must no longer stand by while murder and suicide bombings are committed in their name. Mr. Rahim, an Iraqi-American, has taught Arabic and Islamic studies at Harvard University. - People have often asked me, "Why has been there been no terrorism in the United States since 9/11?" And my answer to them is really my answer to you. I believe Al-Qaeda, these forces of virulent, you know, Sunni fundamentalism that we've been up against since 9/11, their main focus right now, Charlie, is to defeat us in the very heart of their world. That is why they're focused right now on defeating us in Iraq, because after all, they want to control the Middle East. They're not interested in controlling, you know, Las Vegas. And they know if they defeat America in the heart of their world, the resonance that will have is enormous. If we defeat them in the heart of their world, in collaboration with other Arabs and Muslims, by putting together some kind of decent democracy in Iraq, that will have an enormous impact, an enormous resonance in the region and be a terrible defeat. So what you're seeing now is in many ways acts of unspeakable violence. I mean, going into a mosque, blowing it up, one of the most prominent Shi'ites shrines, the reason they're doing that is actually because in some ways they've been losing. The process of Iraq coming together has been happening. And I believe that the most dangerous point for America, as with Iraq, is the closer we actually get to producing a decent outcome there, the crazier our opponents are going to get, because they know if they lose, it's strategic. --Thomas Friedman, "Good Morning America" [TV show] with Charles Gibson, [24 February 2006] end page | ABORTION - ARABS | ANTI-AMERICANISM | ANTI-SEMITISM | BALI - BUSH | CAPITAL PUNISHMENT - CLINTON (HILLARY) | ELECTION [AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL - 2004] & FOX NEWS | GLOBAL WARMING & GUANTANAMO | GUN CONTROL & GUNS | HEALTH CARE (CANADIAN) - HOMOSEXUALS | HURRICANE KATRINA | IRAN | IRAQ 1 | IRAQ 2 | ISLAM - ISRAEL v. PALESTINE | LEFTISTS | MEDIA (THE) & MEDIA BIAS | MOORE (MICHAEL) & NEW YORK TIMES | NORTH KOREA - PATRIOT ACT | RADICAL THOUGHT | RAP MUSIC | STEM CELL RESEARCH | TERRORISM 1 | TERRORISM 2 | TERRORISM 3 | TERRORISM 4 | TERRORISM (PREVENTING) | UNITED NATIONS | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
||