from The Great Debate:
The case for letting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed live
What should be done with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? If the Defense Department is to be believed, the chief planner of the 9/11 attacks on America is guilty of mass murder and crimes against humanity. Even if the evidence elicited by waterboarding him 183 times is void, his declaration in 2002 that “I was responsible for the 9/11 Operation from A to Z” should ensure conviction.
In addition to the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,973, he is credited with commissioning shoe-bomber Richard Reid to down a transatlantic jetliner laden with 300 passengers; planning the 1993 attempt to fell the Twin Towers, the Bali nightclub bombing that killed 200 and a bomb attack in Istanbul in 2003 that killed 60; as well as plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton and to demolish the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. For those who would argue Mohammed is a war combatant rather than a dangerous psychotic, it should also be noted that he personally sawed off the head of the American reporter Daniel Pearl.
Mohammed and his co-conspirators face the death penalty, but it is by no means certain the prosecution will ask for it. There are a number of practical reasons Mohammed should instead live out his days buried in the vaults of a maximum security prison. He desperately wants to end his days of idle impotence and emerge as an inspirational figure in the Islamist war against the West. “This is what I wish, to be a martyr for a long time. I will, God willing, have this, by you,” he explained in 2008. He would be sooner forgotten alive than dead; just think of Charles Manson.
Moreover, Mohammed remains a key source for understanding al Qaeda’s modus operandi and its next moves. He has been spilling the names and whereabouts of sleeper cells, and it was his information that led to the discovery and death by Navy SEAL of Osama bin Laden. Better alive and singing than taking his secrets to the grave.
Demanding the death penalty would also entail a far longer trial, giving Mohammed more opportunities to have his remarks in court relayed to his followers. A capital sentence would open up a lengthy avenue of appeals, keeping him and his murderous creed in the headlines. Asking for life imprisonment would cut that short.
But by far the most important argument against the judicial killing of Mohammed lies in the nature of what the Princeton sage Bernard Lewis calls the “clash of civilizations” between Islamist fundamentalism and the Judeo-Christian West in which Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a mere speck.
The core of our beliefs is not represented by the clamor for eye-for-an-eye retribution that emerges when our peaceful way of life is shattered by terrorism. It is to be found in the key instrument of the Jewish faith, the Ten Commandments, and in the words of Jesus Christ. The Sixth Commandment could not be more clear: “Thou shalt not kill.” And Christ’s example is one of meeting violence with forgiveness and turning the other cheek.
Al Shabaab recruited dozens of Americans: U.S. report
An al Qaeda-affiliated group in Somalia, al Shabaab, has recruited more than 40 Muslim Americans to its battle in the war-ravaged country and at least 15 have been killed, a congressional report said on Wednesday.
U.S. officials have become increasingly worried about the group, particularly after capturing an al Shabaab commander who had allegedly been a liaison with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an active Yemeni group that has tried to strike the United States.
So far, al Shabaab has conducted only limited attacks outside of Somalia, notably the twin bombings in Uganda that killed 79 people watching the World Cup final last year. The group has waged a long, violent battle to control Somalia.
Republican Peter King of New York, chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, has been holding a series of hearings to probe concerns about Muslim Americans becoming radicalized and joining militant groups.
A report by his staff found that more than 40 Muslim Americans and 20 Canadians have been recruited to al Shabaab and at least 15 Americans were killed in fighting, including three suicide bombers.
Photo credit: REUTERS/Feisal Omar (Somali men parade as members of al Shabaab in the capital Mogadishu, March 5, 2011)
Pakistan’s patchy fight against Islamist violence sows confusion
At the rehabilitation center for former militants in Pakistan’s Swat valley, the psychiatrist speaks for the young man sitting opposite him in silence. “It was terrible. He was unable to escape. The fear is so strong. Still the fear is so strong.” Hundreds of miles away in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, a retired army officer recalls another young man who attacked him while he prayed – his “absolutely expressionless face” as he crouched down robot-like to reload his gun.
Both youths had been sucked into an increasingly fierce campaign of gun and bomb attacks by Islamist militants on military and civilian targets across Pakistan. But there the similarity stops.
One is now being “de-radicalized” in the rehabilitation center in Swat, the northern region which only two years ago was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban and has since been cleared after a massive military operation. He will be taught that Islam does not permit violence against the state and that suicide bombing is “haram” or forbidden.
The other had attacked the minority Ahmadi sect, declared non-Muslim by the state and subject to frequent attacks in Punjab, where many of them live. Though he was arrested after being overpowered by the retired army officer, survivors said many of their neighbors celebrated his act of violence with the distribution of sweets.
The different responses to the two are symptomatic of Pakistan’s compartmentalized approach on counter-terrorism and counter-extremism. In some parts of the country – like Swat – violent Islamists are crushed and their beliefs confronted. In others – like Punjab, the heartland province far more important to the stability of Pakistan than the more talked-about tribal areas bordering Afghanistan – they are tolerated while their ideology of religious extremism flourishes.
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Islam is intolerant to criticism and this has been demonstrated time and time again throughout history. It is most evident in the recent past as demonstrated by fatwa’s against the Danish cartoonist who drew your mighty prophet followed by attempts on his life by peace-loving Muslims. The “religion of peace” is responsible for virtually all terrorist attacks of today.
Even the most tolerant countries like Sweden and Denmark are realizing that Islamists will not treat them like in the same inviting and accepting manner that they have been accepted into western society.
Most immigrants are grateful for having the privilege of being accepted into such a society, but the Islamists turn back and join jihadists, donate money to their causes and further the destruction of the very countries that took them in. It is time to stop immigration of Islamists.
Their hypocrisy of peace has been evident for centuries but they still continue to insist that they are peace-loving.
Ayman al-Zawahri: Suburban doctor who became chief of al Qaeda
The Egyptian who has taken the helm of al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden did not emerge from the crowded slums of Egypt’s sprawling capital a militant or develop his ideas in any religious college or seminary. Instead, Egyptian-born Ayman al-Zawahri was raised in Cairo’s leafy Maadi suburb where comfortable villas are a favourite among expatriates from the Western nations he rails against. He studied at Cairo University and qualified as a doctor.
The son of a pharmacology professor was not unique in his generation. Many educated youngsters were outraged at the treatment of Islamists in the 1960s when Egypt veered towards a Soviet-style one-party state under socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser. Thousands of people suspected of subversion were thrown into prison after show trials. “Zawahri is one of the many victims of the Nasser regime who had deep political grievances and a feeling of shame at Egypt’s defeat by Israel in 1967. He grew up a radical,” said Khalil al-Anani, an expert in Islamist movements at Durham University.
He rose to be al Qaeda’s No. 2 before taking over as leader after bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces at his Pakistan hideout on May 2, almost 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Born in 1951 to a prominent Cairo family, Zawahri was a grandson of the grand imam of Al Azhar, one of the most important mosques in the Muslim world. As he studied for a masters in surgery in the 1970s, Zawahri was active in a movement that later became Islamic Jihad, which aimed to expel the government and establish an Islamic state.
Taking over the leadership of Jihad in Egypt in 1993, Zawahri was a main figure in a violent campaign in the mid-1990s to set up a purist Islamic state, when more than 1,200 Egyptians were killed. In 1999, an Egyptian military court sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia. By then he had swapped his comfortable suburban background for the spartan life of a holy warrior in Afghanistan.
Read the full NEWSMAKER profile by Tom Pfeiffer and Marwa Awad here. For more, see:
Beyond bin Laden – Britain’s fight against violent Islamist radicalism
In a community centre in the British Midlands, 12 teenage boys — all of south Asian descent — watch intently as Jahan Mahmood unzips a canvas bag and pulls out the dark, angular shape of a World War Two machine gun. He unfolds the tripod, places the unloaded weapon on a table and pulls back the cocking handle. The boys crane forward. Mahmood pulls the trigger; a sharp snap rings out.
It’s two days since the killing of Osama bin Laden, and Mahmood, a local historian, is taking his own stand against global militancy. His show comes with a dose of education: a lesson in how Muslim and British soldiers fought together to defeat the Nazis. His methods are unconventional, but Mahmood believes they help address a weakness at the core of British counter-terrorism policy.
The U.S. operation to kill bin Laden may have marked “a strike at the heart” of international terrorism, as Prime Minister David Cameron put it, but in the broader fight against terror, the al Qaeda leader’s death was largely irrelevant.
In deprived British inner-city districts like Alum Rock — a huddle of redbrick homes, fabric shops, Urdu-language DVD stores and fruit stalls — the Saudi-born militant is almost an afterthought. Young men’s beliefs here are driven more by their own sense of alienation, racial abuse and what they see as a deeply anti-Muslim foreign policy.
On the frontline of the war against terrorism — and Britain is undoubtedly a frontline — private initiatives like Mahmood’s hint at the failure of state-sponsored efforts to counter jihad. Almost six years on from a massive coordinated terror attack on London’s transport system, the main nationwide programme to deter young men from extremism still hasn’t moved past mistrust and suspicion. The one-year-old Conservative-led government now wants to tweak the policy. For some Muslims, the question is whether the state should even try.
“There’s still a basic inability to get the idea that, actually, as government, you might not know best,” says Rachel Briggs, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “There’s a very difficult balance between where government can be involved, and be effective, and where actually government involvement negates the whole process.”
Read the full story by Michael Holden, Stefano Ambrogi and William Maclean here.
Russia’s Muslim elite vows to tackle Islamist extremism
Russia’s Muslims on Thursday set up a council of experts to devise ways to tackle extremism, two weeks after a suicide bomb attack on the country’s busiest airport killed 36. Earlier this week Islamist leader Doku Umarov said he had ordered the devastating attack on Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
“People need to be protected from extremism and terrorism, and educated away from this,” said Ravil Gaynutdin, the chief Mufti of Russia, which is home to some 20 million Muslims, or a seventh of the population. “These experts will play a very important role towards making things better… for Muslims to be more involved in Russian society,” Gaynutdin, clad in a flowing black robe and crowned by a silk white hat, told Reuters in an interview before chairing the council’s first meeting.
He added that the council, comprised of 38 Russian Muslims involved in politics, law and media, will regularly meet to analyse how Muslims live in today’s Russia and make recommendations to government on how their lives can improve. Initiatives could include offering religious guidance to Muslim youths, setting up sports clubs, building more mosques and making sure Muslim literature is easy to find.
A decade after federal troops drove separatists out of power in a second war in Chechnya, the North Caucasus — home to around half of Russia’s Muslims — is plagued with violence and rebels there want to carve out a separate Islamic state.
President Dmitry Medvedev has told security officials terrorism is Russia’s biggest threat.
Read the full story here. Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld
Anti-Muslim bias now the social norm, UK cabinet minister says
Prejudice against Muslims has “passed the dinner-table test” and become socially acceptable in Britain, says the Conservative Party’s chairwoman Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.
Warsi, a Pakistan-born minister without portfolio in Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet, will say in a speech at the University of Leicester on Thursday evening that dividing Muslims into “moderate” and “extremist” fuels intolerance, according to prepared remarks published in the Daily Telegraph.
“It’s not a big leap of imagination to predict where the talk of ‘moderate’ Muslims leads; in the factory, where they’ve just hired a Muslim worker, the boss says to his employees: ‘Not to worry, he’s only fairly Muslim,’” according to the first Muslim woman in a British cabinet. “In the school, the kids say: ‘The family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad’. And in the road, as a woman walks past wearing a burka, the passers-by think: ‘That woman’s either oppressed or is making a political statement.’”
There are 2.9 million Muslims in Britain, almost 5 percent of the population, according to an estimate last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Britain has regularly been a focus of Islamist militant plots. In the worst attack in the country, suicide bombers killed 52 people on the London transport network in July 2005.
“Those who commit criminal acts of terrorism in our country need to be dealt with not just by the full force of the law,” Warsi was due to say. “They also should face social rejection and alienation across society and their acts must not be used as an opportunity to tar all Muslims.”
Read the full story by Olesya Dmitracova here.
Warsi’s comments have already prompted lively reactions in Britain:
I agree with Lady Warsi that Islam is misunderstood. The extremist hijack the whole notion of peaceful and tolerant Islam which is why the public gets mixed messages. Hence it is important to note that Islam has no link to terrorism what so ever as discussed in the historic Fatwa on Terrorism. Islam is a peaceful and tolerant faith and I agree there is a real need to educate the public and to promote the truth about Islam.
My organisation Minhaj-ul-Quran UK has always been working to promote British values of integration, democracy, interfaith harmony and tolerance for many years. We have been at the forefront of the fight against extremism in this country.
The founder of Minhaj-ul-Quran International, Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri has recently said that “The hollow notion of ‘Clash of Civilization’ needs to be replaced with ‘Dialogue among Civilizations’. The enhanced engagement among different religions especially Islam and Christianity would serve to build bridges and raze down walls that separate us. Islam stands for peace, harmony and human development.”
from The Great Debate:
America’s trouble with Islam
Of the many posters held aloft in angry demonstrations about plans for an Islamic cultural centre and mosque in New York, one in particular is worth noting: "All I ever need to know about Islam, I learned on 9/11."
As an example of wilful ignorance, it's in a class by itself. It passes judgment, in just 12 words, about a sprawling universe of 1.3 billion adherents of Islam (in 57 countries around the world) who come from different cultures, speak a wide variety of languages, follow different customs, hold different nationalities and believe in different interpretations of their faith, just like Christians or Jews. Suicidal murderers are a destructive but tiny minority.
But for the people waving all-I-ever-need-to-know posters in front of national television cameras two blocks from "ground zero," site of the biggest mass murder in American history, Islam equals terrorism. No need for nuance, no need for learning, no need for building bridges between the faiths. The mindset epitomized by the slogan mirrors the radical fringe of Islamic thought, equally doubt-free and self-righteous.
Both sides have data to back up their assertions. The Islam-equals-terrorism school of thought can point to 3,000 victims of the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those who preach that the U.S. is waging war on Islam itself, and terror acts are therefore a form of self-defence, can argue that Christian soldiers have been killing Muslims through history, from the Crusades to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The "ground zero mosque" affair began with a dispute over the center's proximity to the hole where the Twin Towers once stood. Too close to hallowed ground, argue opponents, including family members of people who died in the attack. The question of location morphed into a national debate on religious tolerance and prompted demonstrations against planned mosques more than a thousand miles from New York.
Does all this add up to a rising wave of anti-Muslim bigotry? Or is it more of the same, with the volume turned higher in advance of mid-term elections? There are no hard data to answer that question and it is worth looking back a few years at polls on American attitudes towards Muslims. In 2006, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent favoured rules requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification to better spot potential terrorists.
Callers to a Washington radio show host who followed up on the ID issue suggested identifying Muslims with a crescent-shaped tattoo on their foreheads, stamps on their driving licenses, passports and birth certificates, or special armbands.
If one were simply to read the ancient history then one would conclude that the clash of civilisation is bound to recur. The crusaders tried it before and they are preparing the ground work fo the repeat of a holy war against Islam. In Islam there are no holy wars, nor any justification to kill other humans. It was the crusaders who went to Jerusalem at the behest of the christian church to eliminate the barbarian muslims. The so called christians are once again on the same path, any criminal act by a muslim is associateed with Islam and any criminal act of a state to invade another muslim country is considered an innocent undertaking to free the people or to introduce democracy or protect the women? Unless we witness George W, Tony Blair and their associates being tried for war crimes, I shall hang on to my opinion of coming clash of civilisation.
Rex Minor
Planned mosque near New York’s Ground Zero sparks debate
Plans to build a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks have touched off a firestorm among New Yorkers nearly a decade after Muslim extremists linked to al Qaeda slammed planes into the World Trade Center. The Cordoba House mosque, part of a Muslim center to be built two blocks from what is now known as Ground Zero proposed as a conciliatory move, was overwhelmingly approved by a local community board in May.
But the plans are being resisted by some New Yorkers who say a mosque would be inappropriate so close to the place where nearly 3,000 people were killed. “I’m certainly not against religious expression, but I feel it’s an insensitive place to do that,” said Paul Sipos, a member of the community board who did not vote on the issue.
The center is a project of the Cordoba Initiative, a New York group aiming to improve relations between Muslims and the West. It would feature a 13-story structure with a 500-person auditorium, swimming pool, bookstores and a prayer space. Its chairman, Islamic scholar Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, said the center would be open to everyone and would help foster better understanding. “My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists,” Rauf wrote in an editorial in the New York Daily News. “We are the people who want to embolden the vast majority of Muslims who hate terrorism to stand up to the radical rhetoric.”
At first I didn’t mind, but now, when everybody talks about it, I’m thinking it’s not proper. I think that if newspapers wouldn’t write about it, then they could build it without the drama
Muslim scholars recast jihadists’ favourite fatwa
Prominent Muslim scholars have recast a famous medieval fatwa on jihad, arguing the religious edict radical Islamists often cite to justify killing cannot be used in a globalized world that respects faith and civil rights. A conference in Mardin in southeastern Turkey declared the fatwa by 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya rules out militant violence and the medieval Muslim division of the world into a “house of Islam” and “house of unbelief” no longer applies.
Osama bin Laden has quoted Ibn Taymiyya’s “Mardin fatwa” repeatedly in his calls for Muslims to overthrow the Saudi monarchy and wage jihad against the United States.
Referring to that historic document, the weekend conference said: “Anyone who seeks support from this fatwa for killing Muslims or non-Muslims has erred in his interpretation. “It is not for a Muslim individual or a Muslim group to announce and declare war or engage in combative jihad … on their own,” said the declaration. Click here for my full report on it.
The declaration is the latest bid by mainstream scholars to use age-old Muslim texts to refute current-day religious arguments by Islamist groups. A leading Pakistani scholar issued a 600-page fatwa against terrorism in London early this month. Another declaration in Dubai this month challenged the religious justification for violence used by Islamist rebels in Somalia and calling for peace and reconciliation there (more on that here).
Fatwas may not convince militants, but they can help keep undecided Muslims from supporting them, the scholars say. Because Islam has no central authority to define the faith in all its details, militants who hijack it by twisting texts for their own purposes need to be confronted by moderates who cite chapter and verse to refute them.
Outside the Muslim world, declarations like these risk the fate of trees that fall in the forest when nobody’s listening. This conference was held in Mardin, a medieval town near the Syrian border, and the media present were mostly Turkish and Arabic speakers. It got good coverage in the Turkish press and Al-Jazeera television ran extensive footage in Arabic. But getting the message out to the rest of the world, including the majority of Muslim who speak neither Arabic nor Turkish, means getting it out in English.
Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul journalist and blogger known to readers of this blog, was there writing in English for the Hürriyet Daily News. And one of the main speakers was Aref Ali Nayed, another name regular FaithWorld readers will recognise, whose Kalam Research & Media theological think tank provided the quick English translation of the final declaration. They helped complement the basic information provided by the conference organisers.
It would perhaps be useful, islamicaly correct, and intellectually honest,for the organizers of this conference, to have mentionned somewhere that Ibn Taymiyya’s Mardin fatwa had been translated and studied thoroughly, a few years before this meeting, by Prof. Yahya Michot, both in French and in English. See his :
- “IBN TAYMIYYA. Mardin : Hégire, fuite du péché et « demeure de l’Islam »”. Textes traduits de l’arabe, annotés et présentés en relation à certains textes modernes. Préface de James PISCATORI, « Fetwas d’Ibn Taymiyya, 4 », Beyrouth, Albouraq, 1425/2004, XII & 176 p. – ISBN 2-84161-255-4.
- “IBN TAYMIYYA. Muslims under Non-Muslim Rule. Ibn Taymiyya on fleeing from sin, kinds of emigration, the status of Mardin (domain of peace/war, domain composite), the conditions for challenging power.” Texts translated, annotated and presented in relation to six modern readings of the Mardin fatwa. Foreword by J. PISCATORI, Oxford-London: Interface Publications, Dec. 2006, xviii & 190 p. – ISBN 978-0-9554545-6-1.
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Forgiving is the attribute of Almighty and justice as well.I hope the Almighty forgives America for its wars on flimsy reasons.There is nothing calling my life is more worthier than others.Killing innocents in abhorrent no matter who does it.