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Islamism - 7 - Pandyan - 04-06-2008
It was originally posted on Liveleak and then later removed since millions of peaceful and loving Muslims had sent death threats to the employees and staff of Liveleak. So now its on youtube where I don't think it will stay for long since Muslims like to flag videos they don't like and have it removed. I have a copy of it on my harddrive, ready to upload it just in case it gets removed.
Islamic bullies threatening Youtube.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020546.php
Islamism - 7 - Guest - 04-06-2008
^Pandyan liveleak has now reloaded the video back on its site. <!--emo&:beer--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='cheers.gif' /><!--endemo-->
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Fitna is back up at liveleak</b>
On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film "fitna" from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. <b>With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site.</b> We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don't consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Islamism - 7 - Guest - 04-06-2008
<b>Stop showing âun-Islamicâ Indian serials, says Afghan Govt</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Afghanistan's Parliament recently passed a resolution seeking to bar TV programmes from showing dancing and other practices that are âun-Islamicâ.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Now Taliban rules under NATO nose or under NATO protection <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Islamism - 7 - dhu - 04-08-2008
taking on Indian serial addicts, this maybe the end of islam.
http://inhome.rediff.com/movies/2008/apr/07msg.htm
Islamism - 7 - Bharatvarsh - 04-10-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu beaten to death for remarks on Prophet Muhammad in Pakistan
Amir Mir
LAHORE: In yet another case of religious persecution of the minorities in Pakistan, a Hindu was beaten to death in the port city Karachi by dozens of his Muslim co-workers at a leather factory for uttering blasphemous remarks about Prophet Muhammad.
The incident took place in a factory in Sector 15 of the Korangi Industrial Area, after a discussion about religion became heated between Jagdish Kumar and his Muslim co-workers.
According to the Karachi police sources, Jagdish, a 25-year-old resident Mirpurkhas, was tortured to death on Tuesday over allegations that he spoke against the sanctity of the Prophet Muhammed.
According to Farrukh Bashir, the police superintendent for the Korangi area, the angry mob at the leather factory kept beating Jagdish for almost half an hour and left him only after someone pointed out that he had died. However, they even tried to burn his body.
The local police reached the place after they were called by someone in the factory.
The police officer said that the atmosphere in and outside the factory was highly charged and it was a tough task for police to take the body out of the factory.
To a question, he said the doctors who conducted autopsy of the deceased at the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre in Karachi, Jagdish Kumar seems to have been beaten to death as his dead body had multiple marks of torture and injuries caused by hard objects.
He said no-one had been detained for questioning so far as any action could only be taken when a case is registered and a conclusion is reached on the basis of the autopsy report and investigations. He, however, admitted that Jagdishâs killing was a case of intentional murder, rather one of death in a brawl.
However, Raju, the brother-in-law of the victim, has demanded of the Korangi police officials that the killing must be investigated and his co-workers should be taken into custody and interrogated, because no-one can even think of uttering blasphemous remarks against the Prophet Mohammad in a Muslim society.
He has maintained that the murder had nothing to do with religion and it could have been the result of a personal feud. âJagdish was a simple man who knew little about religion. He had come to Karachi to earn a living and not to indulge in debates over religion.â
However, in the Pakistani society, it is easy to kill someone from the minority community and then accuse him of having committed blasphemy. Blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan, although no one has ever been executed for it, while communal tensions often run high whenever accusations of blasphemy are made.
The blasphemy law allows a person to register a case against anyone for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad by word or deed.
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1159250<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Notice that it becomes a fact that the Hindu "blasphemed", if it was Hindus that did this you will see allegedly and "blasphemed" (in quotation marks implying that he may not have done it or what he said doesn't constitute "blasphemy") in the news report.
Islamism - 7 - Shambhu - 04-11-2008
A bit about what I heard on a political talk show on the radio yesterday:
Guy called in and started talking about Western countries and Islamic countries.
So host says, "If you want to refer to countries by religion, the western ones should be called predominantly Judeo-Christian. Why do you refer to West by geography and the other countries you are talking about by religion?"
Guy said, "Iraq, Iran, Pakistan , Saudi etc put "Islamic" in the official title of the country..blah blah"
---
Hard to argue with that. But it shows you how Muslims have managed to spread their beloved motto all over the world:
"One law for you, but another law for me. And we all have to behave as if we are all equal citizens under the same law. But we all know who is the more equal citizen. If you get too frustrated about it, well, become muslim! Any kind of behaviour other than that will be termed islamophobia. Get it?
No grumbling please. Lets all be civilized here. I dont remember giving you permission to talk."
Islamism - 7 - Bodhi - 04-16-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Dhaka - At least 1,000 Islamic activists joined a rally outside the national Baitul Mukarram mosque in central Dhaka Tuesday calling for the scrapping of proposed policy to improve the rights of women in Bangladesh, witnesses said. The rally was organized by a militant Islamic group called the Islamic United Alliance which has accused the army-backed interim government for violating the injunctions of the Koran, Islam's holiest book.
Militant Muslim cleric Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini, who led the rally, branded the policy that gives women and men equal status in the matter of inheriting ancestral property as anti-Islamic and demanded its withdrawal.
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/19...ours-women.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Islamism - 7 - Guest - 04-17-2008
Shambu:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Guy said, "Iraq, Iran, Pakistan , Saudi etc put "Islamic" in the official title of the country..blah blah"<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Something that we miss often when we talk about Islamic nation is Turkey which I believe is not Islamic on paper. But there are som recent developments in Turkey which is is most interesting.
Heard of Secular Jihad?
Short story: Islamic party gained majority in last election. Formed govt. They amended constitution in the way girls can wear scarves in univesity/schools. Boy did it enrage the seculars and they say it's against constitution. They want the govt banned - in other words, goverment elected less than a year ago with majority will be out of power if judiciary has any say in the matter. 8 of the 11 judges in SC which has already agreed to hear the case were appointed by seculars and only 7 votes are needed.
link
This is nothing but a coup by different means.
Those who follow seculars in India should pay close attention, very very close attention - if you get my drift. The word 'secular' was introduced in our constitution sometime in 80s I think. Indira Gandhi govt did it if I recall but what were the circumstances?
Islamism - 7 - Bodhi - 04-21-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The refugee Muslims first landed in Kutch. And they are called the Kutchy Memons even today but not the Memons who bomb Mumbai. But the Memons who lived with us.
In the year 1917, many of you might be aware, a case went to the Prey Council, equivalent to the Supreme Court now. The Kutchy Memons went and told the Prey Council that we are Muslims for namesake, but we follow only the Hindu law. Please don't impose the Shariat on us. The Prey Council ruled that they are Muslims but the only sacred book they have is called "Dasaavathaara", it is not Koran. In fact they knew no language other than the Kutchy language.
And in the "Dasaavathaara", nine avatharas were common between Hindus and Kutchy Memons. We call the tenth avathaara "Kalki" and they call him "Ali". The Prey Council ruled that the Shariyat law is not applicable to them. The All India Muslim League took up the case, went to the British and told them that this finding is dangerous to Islam and requested them to pass a law which will overrule this judgment. The British government passed a law in 1923 which was called the "The Kutchy Memons Act" declaring, "If a Kutchy Memon wants to follow the Shariat, allow him to do so".
It doesn't mean a Muslim must follow the Shariat. Between 1923-1937, before the All India Shariat Act was passed not a single Kutchy Memon filed an affidavit with the plea that he wants to follow the Shariaat. That was the integration prevalent in India.
In 1937, when the All India Shariat Act was passed, the preamble to the act mentioned that this was being passed by a demand made by the AIML leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Today, the Shariat has become a part of Muslim consciousness.
The purpose behind making you aware of this background is that 99% of the people who speak about the constitutional rights of the minorities or the distinctiveness of Muslim life are unaware of the facts. Till the year 1980, in Cooch Behar district, the Shariat law was not applicable. In 32 instances between 1923 and 1947 by legislation, the Shariyat law was not applicable to the Muslims. This is the extent of the intellectual gap in India.
The intellectual scene in Post-independence India - A speech of S. Gurumurthy given to IIT Chennai
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Islamism - 7 - dhu - 04-25-2008
<b>A battle of ideologies</b>
Prafull Goradia
<i>
Those who place the ummah above all are bound to be at war with the world
</i>
In 1979, a Pakistani journalist in Tehran interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini. The occasion was the forthcoming anniversary of Pakistan Day namely, March 23. Understandably, Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a significant focus of the occasion. The Ayatollah was all praise for the Qaid-e-Azam. He was brilliant at arguments; he knew the British mind like the back of his palm; he inspired faith in people and so on.
<b>To give a balance to his report, the journalist asked the Ayatollah whether Jinnah had any shortcomings as a leader? Khomeini said yes; he should have had more vision. Had it been so, he would not have sought partition. He would have waited until the whole of India had acquired a Muslim majority. It was already well over a quarter Muslim and in the course of decades, crossing 50 per cent would not have been difficult.</b>
The great man of Iran was not a terrorist. Why then blame Safdar Nagori or any other member of SIMI for dreaming to convert India to Islam through jihad and making it part of the Muslim ummah? Reportedly, Nagori has claimed Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive head of the Taliban, as his role model. The fountain of SIMI's drive is ideological; only its weapon is terrorism in the garb of jihad.
In the words of Prof Bernard Lewis (The Crisis of Islam), for most of the 14 centuries of recorded Muslim history, jihad was most commonly interpreted to mean armed struggle for the defence or advancement of Muslim power. In Muslim tradition, the world is divided into two houses: The House of Islam (Dar-ul Islam), in which Muslim Governments rule and Muslim law prevails and the House of War (Dar-ul Harb), the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. According to Islamic law, it is lawful to wage war against four types of enemies: Infidels, apostates, rebels, and bandits. Although all four types of wars are legitimate, only the first two count as jihad.
Jihad is thus a religious obligation. The root of the ideology lies in the central belief that there is no God other than Allah. There can be no second God. Christianity also believes in a single God. The Ten Commandments include an open exhortation that 'you shall have no other god before My face'. You shall not bow down to any idol for I am the Lord or God and God should brook no rival. The followers of Jesus have not, however, been quite so fanatical against infidels or non-believers; although considerable cruelty including burning at the stakes of heretics was reported.
The comparative liberality could also be attributed to the deep influence of the Greek civilisation upon Europe. The essence of ancient Greek commitment was captured by Protagorus who said that man is the measure of all things. Things that are and things that are not. It was a humanistic ethos which stressed on the pursuit of happiness rather than on god or religion. But for this humanistic background, the 16th century Reformation might not have been tolerated, nor would Christianity have split into so many denominations.
In contrast, Islam has remained pristine; it has been ruthless with apostates. When it comes to conversion, both Islam and Christianity are equally keen. From their point of view, their intentions are altruistic. The logic of a single God is that non-believers cannot qualify for a place in heaven. It is out of this ultimate goodwill to enable all human beings to have the chance to reach heaven that a kafir or infidel is attempted to be converted. This goodwill at the individual level, when transferred to the collective, turns into jihad. It is for either Islamising humanity or for defending the Muslim ummah against a kafir threat.
In strategic terms, Islamising humanity is the aggressive face of jihad. Prophet Mohammed had exhorted his followers to "marry women who will love their husbands and be very prolific, for I wish you to be more numerous than any other people". The exhortation has been obeyed scrupulously to the extent that it is now recognised that the demographic offensive succeeded almost beyond belief.
Muslims today comprise 21 per cent of the world population, a jump of 110 per cent over the last century. <b>From the 25 per cent of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, they now comprise 40 per cent. </b>Russia appears likely to become an Islamic country before very long. Moscow is already 25 per cent Muslim.
France, Belgium and Holland are also under threat of going Islamic. The immigrant Muslims are multiplying on the lines inspired in the scriptures, whereas the indigenous Whites are declining in number. Hardly a quarter of the young people get officially married; they, in turn, produce few children. The phenomenon of the single parent child does not help the required birth rate. Apart from Holland, Sweden and Denmark have become openly anti-immigration. Britain and France realise that multiculturalism has failed but political correctness makes them reluctant to go out against Muslims openly.
In sharp contrast to this correctness, the mullahs who lead the immigrants are open and candid about their intention to create Islamic polities within the European states. The ulema of Britain have already demanded a separate Muslim Parliament. Europe has been threatened by Islam repeatedly through history. The Turks began by overrunning Anatolia which was an extension of Greece. The Ottomans virtually took over the Balkans and also knocked at the gates of Vienna twice, the last time was in 1683. Spain had its spell of Moorish rule for seven centuries beginning with 711 AD. Several parts of France were overrun by the Moors until they were stopped by Charles Martell at the historic Battle of Potiers. But all this while the enemy was at the gate. The new avatar of the same enemy, however, is now a cancer within European society having reached and residing in the city centres.
<b>This reality is a clash of civilisations as distinct from a war between nations. </b>Safdar Nagori's SIMI belongs to the same faithful ideology although with one great advantage. <b>Unlike the Europeans, the Indian polity is welcoming them as 'Muslim first', in the words of the Prime Minister.</b> Which war is easier to fight than when the enemy happens to be an ally? This is the good fortune of Safdar Nagori and his cohorts in the SIMI.
Uncannily, BR Ambedkar had, while analysing the demand for Pakistan in 1940, sponsored an exchange of populations and supported partition on the plea that it was safer to have Muslims outside the borders of India than within.
Islamism - 7 - ramana - 04-29-2008
I think Islamist laws are already accepted inside India and govts connive to implement them. Look at Kerala and AP govts role in this case.
From Deccan Chronicle, 29 April 2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Keralite who killed AP man pardoned
Â
Thiruvananthapuram, April 28: <b>A Kuwait court reportedly revoked on Monday the death sentence given to Mr Simil, 26, a Keralite who was found guilty of killing his colleague, Mr Suresh Ambati, a native of Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh. Mr Similâs death sentence was commuted to seven years imprisonment after Mr Sureshâs family informed Kuwait authorities that they had pardoned him. The family had taken a compensation of Rs 15 lakh for signing the pardon document.</b> The tense parents of Mr Simil in Alapuzha was told the good news by his brother, who is also working in Kuwait.
It was the<b> Kerala Opposition Leader, Mr Oommen Chandy, who persuaded the family of Mr Suresh to accept âblood moneyâ and pardon the Keralite languishing in the Kuwait death row.</b>
The <b>AP Chief Minister, Dr Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy, and local Congress leaders also helped Mr Chandy in his efforts.</b> It was a quarrel over a cricket match that led to the killing of Mr Suresh on November 21, 2007, in Kuwait. Mr Sibil surrendered before the police and claimed that he had accidentally stabbed his colleague. However, he was given death sentence.
After his story was published by the local media, <b>Mr Chandy and the Union overseas Indians affairs minister, Mr Vayalar Ravi, intervened in the issue. Kuwait law permits the family of murder victims to pardon the accused if the killing is not premeditated. Mr Shashi and Thelma, parents of Mr Simil, visited Kadapa first but only met with furious reactions from Mr Sureshâs family. </b>
After the <b>intervention of Congress leaders, the family agreed to take compensation of Rs 6 lakh. However, hopes receded after the family raised the amount to Rs 20 lakh. There were hurried negotiations and finally Mr Sureshâs wife agreed to accept Rs 15 lakh.</b> The money was collected from various sources including NRIs in Gulf countries. The AP government also chipped in.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Islamism - 7 - Shambhu - 05-09-2008
Pakistani cleric issues fatwa on Indian fatwa on slaughtering cows
* Jamaat-ud-Dawa cleric says cow major cause of âidolism and polytheismâ
http://news.hinduworld.com/click_frameset....htering-cows%2F
-----------------------------------------
Just as some Indian Muslim cleric was trying to blink and get out of the darkness into the light, a Paki idiot comes in and displays his true color. Yes, there is no typo there. Only one color: green.
Islamism - 7 - Guest - 05-09-2008
They should allow pork sale during Ramzan, otherwise it is sign of stoneage.
Islamism - 7 - Bodhi - 05-27-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Basic Islam for Hindu Dhimmis
By Subramanian Swamy
Temples have been demolished in the Valley on a daily basis. The world could not care less. An American had once told me: âWhy should we care? Indian democracy is led by the majority who are Hindus and you want us to talk about the human rights of the community of rulers?â
We do not have much time, in fact about 45 years, as the X-graph of statistical regressions estimated by J.S. Bajaj and colleagues shows. âXâ represents the two trendsâHindu percentage declining and Muslim percentage rising, and intersecting in the year 2061.
We Hindus must understand the true nature of Islam before we can formulate a strategy to defeat those who threaten us.
Thanks to Shri Vedantamji of the VHP, I had visited Thondi and Rasathipuram Municipalities of Ramanathapuram and Vellore districts respectively, and was truly shocked by what I saw. Both these municipalities are in Muslim-majority areas, and the local bodies election had empowered the Muslims with their capture of the municipalities.
The Muslim-ruled municipalities have thereafter converted these areas into mini Dar-ul-Islams, in a Hindustan of 83 per cent Hindus! The minority Hindu areas of the municipality were thus denied civic amenities, funds for schools, garbage clearing etc., and sent notices in Urdu. Hindus were bluntly told convert to Islam if they wanted civic facilities.
I could not believe that in South India this was possible where Hindus are actually above national average at 90 per cent of the population. I know that in Kashmir Valley, Muslims who are in majority have actively or passively connived in driving out half a million Hindus out of their homes and made them refugees in their own country. Temples have been demolished in the Valley on a daily basis. The world could not care less. An American had once told me: âWhy should we care? Indian democracy is led by the majority who are Hindus and you want us to talk about the human rights of the community of rulers?â
Such atrocities are happening not only in Kashmir, but in other parts of India as well in pockets wherever Muslims are in majority, e.g., Mau and Meerut. In pocket boroughs of India, thus, Dar-ul-Islam has today returned to India after two centuries. Considering that a demographic re-structuring is slowly but surely taking place, with Hindu majority shrinking everywhere, Dar-ul-Islam in pockets might indeed, like amoeba, proliferate, coalesce, and jell into a frightening national realityâunless we Hindus wake up and take corrective action now, actions for which we shall of course not get a Nobel Peace Prize.
Dar-ul-Islam is a Muslim religious concept of a land where Muslims rule, and the non-believers in Islam are termed as Dhimmis. The term Dhimmi was coined after the Jews were crushed in Medina [Khaybar to be exact], and the defeated Jews accepted that if they did not convert to Islam, then they would accept second-class status politically, culturally, and religiously. This included zero civil rights including the right to modesty of women, and the special tax jaziya.
There is thus no scope for Muslims and non-Muslims uniting as equals in the political, cultural, or social system in a Dar-ul-Islam where Muslims rule. Secular order in India thus is possible only when Muslims are not in power. Thondi, Rasathipuram and other places prove that the Muslim mind suffers from a dangerous dualityâof seeking secularism when out of power and imposing a brutal demeaning theocracy for non-Muslims when in power.
It is this duality that patriotic Hindus must re-shape by modern education and other means, as also retain its demographic overwhelming majority in India. We do not have much time, in fact about 45 years, as the X-graph of statistical regressions estimated by J.S. Bajaj and colleagues shows. âXâ represents the two trendsâHindu percentage declining and Muslim percentage rising, and intersecting in the year 2061.
The dhimmitude of Jews in Medina and later in Mecca represents the beginning of religious apartheid inherent and basic to Islamic mores, and practised long before what we saw in South Africa on the basis of colour and race, and that which became prevalent during the Islamic imperialist rule in parts of India. Hindus had been dhimmis for six hundred years in those parts of India despite being a bigger majority in the country than even today. Hence, a majority is not enough. Hindus need also a Hindu mindset to be free.
In his presidential address to the Muslim League in Lahore in 1940, Mohammed Ali Jinnah had articulated this concept of apartheid in his own inimitable way:
âTo visualise Hindus and Muslims in India uniting to create a common nation is a mythical concept. It is only a fancy dream of some unawakened Hindu leadersâ¦. The truth is that Hindus and Muslims are two different civilisationsâ¦. since their thought process grow on different beliefs.â
Large sections of Muslims in India then had rejected Jinnah and his concept of non-compatibility of Muslims with Hindus. But after Independence and Partition, instead of building on this rejection by many Muslims, the Nehru era saw increasing pandering precisely to the religious element that believed in this apartheid. Indira Gandhi vigorously continued this appeasement thereby nurturing the apartheid mentality of Muslim orthodoxy.
But the final undermining of the enlightened Muslim came when the government capitulated in the Shah Bano case. Thousands of Muslims had demonstrated on the streets demanding that the government not bring legislation that would nullify the Supreme Courtâs judgment in the Shah Bano case but in vain. Rajiv Gandhi, I learnt later, on counsel from his Italian Catholic family, had surrendered to the hard line clerics who protested that the Supreme Court had no right to interfere and to de facto amend the Shariat, the Islamic law code. These relatives on a directive from the Vatican thought that if secular law would be applied to Muslims, it can be to the Christians too.
This was a nonsense argument of the Muslim clerics, since the Shariat had already been amended, without protest, in the criminal law of India. The Indian Penal Code represents the uniform criminal code that equally applies to all religious communities. I therefore ask the clerics: if a Muslim is caught stealing, can any court in India direct that his hand at the wrist be cut off as the Shariat prescribes? If Muslims can accept a uniform criminal code what is the logic in rejecting the uniform civil code?
In India, Dhimmi status for Hindus during Islamic imperialist rule has had other social implications. Defiant Brahmins and Kshatriyas, who had refused to convert and chose to remain Hindus, were forced to carry night-soil and suffer great indignities for their women folk. Or it meant gross mental torture. Guru Tegh Bahadur, for example, had to see his sons sawed in half, before the pious Guruâs own head was severed and displayed in public.
The debasement of Hindu society then was such that those targeted valiant Brahmins and Kshatriyas, who had refused to convert and thus made to carry night-soil, were disowned by other Hindus and declared to be asprashya or âuntouchableâ. The ranks of the Scheduled Caste community, which was not more than 1 per cent of the population before the advent of Islam in India, swelled to 14 per cent by the time Mughal rule collapsed.
Thus, todayâs SC community, especially those who are still Hindus, consists mostly of those valiant Brahmins and Kshatriyas who had refused to become Muslims but preferred ostracization and ignominy in order to remain Hindus. Hindu society today should offer koti koti pranams to them for keeping the Bhagwa Dhwaj of Hindu religion flying even at great personal cost and misery.
I have already written enough in these columns about Hindus being under siege from Islamic fanatics and Christian proselytizers. I have suggested that we can lift this siege only if we develop a Hindu mindset, which is a four dimensional concept. But that mind must be informed, and understand why others do what they do to Hindus before we can defeat their nefarious designs. Here I suggest therefore that we Hindus must understand the true nature of Islam before we can formulate a strategy to defeat those who threaten us. In a later column I will write about the true nature of Christianity and how to combat the menace of religious conversions of Hindus.
At this juncture let me add even though I oppose conversion as violence, as Swami Dayanand Sarasvati boldly wrote to the Vatican Pope, nevertheless if an Indian Muslim or Christian changes his religion to Hinduism today, I will not regard it as conversion because it is a return to the Hindu fold of those whose ancestors had been forcibly converted.
Unlike Hinduism, which says not a word against non-believers, in fact says that other religions also lead to God, Islam is harsh on them, and justifies violence against them as sacred. The choice to non-believers in Islam is: convert or accept dhimmitude. Hence, the explanation for Thondi, Rasathipuram, Mau etc., and the duality in ethics practised by Muslims everywhere. A true Muslim is Dr. Jekyll when in minority, and Mr. Hyde when in majority.
So what should we Hindus do? First, recognise that being a pious Hindu is not enough. Hindus must unite and work to install a Hindu-minded government. If 35 per cent of the 83 per cent Hindus unite to vote for a party, absolute majority is attainable. If Hindu Dharma Acharya Sabha, RSS, and VHP decide to mobilise the voter to support a party that espouses an approved Hindu agenda, then the union government is within reach through the ballot box. Second, search for those Muslims who are ready to openly and with pride declare that their ancestors were Hindus. My guess is that about 75 per cent of Muslims will be ready to do so. These are the Muslims who can be co-opted by Hindus to fight Islamic fundamentalism. If we do not do so, then the Muslim clerics will have a free run of their fanaticism.
For this a required reading is Sri Sri Ravishankarâs Hinduism & Islam: Dedicated to the People of Pakistan Who have Forgotten Their Own Roots [www.artofliving.org]. In this Sri Sri Ravishankar has shown how âMuslims have completely forgotten that their forefathers were Hindus, so they have every right to Vedic cultureâ. He in fact traces the pre-Islam origins of the Kâaaba. Third, invest heavily in primary education to make it world class, ban the madrasas for any student below 21 years, and make Sanskrit a compulsory language for all students.
(The writer is a former Union Law Minister.)
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Islamism - 7 - Bharatvarsh - 05-27-2008
"Large sections of Muslims in India then had rejected Jinnah and his concept of non-compatibility of Muslims with Hindus."
Another myth, most Muslims accepted it then if we go by 1946 provincial election results, the only province where the League couldn't get power was in Sindh.
The Muslims in current day India (especially Bihar and UP) were the most fanatical supporters of the league not the current day Paki and Bangla Muslims, so we retained the most fanatical elements, and expect them to become secular doves.
Islamism - 7 - Guest - 05-30-2008
Long story short, apparently the other jihadis are revolting against Osama for targeting US, which has caused jihadis around the world to be the object of US's ire. Now these jihadis want to abandon Osama so that the jihadis can continue their "peaceful" struggle in Palestine, kashmir and other places.
My Webpage
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Unraveling
The jihadist revolt against bin Laden.
Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Noman Benotman on a Libyan government private jet bound for Tripoli on a secret mission in January 2007.
Courtesy of Noman Benotman
Noman Benotman on a Libyan government private jet bound for Tripoli on a secret mission in January 2007.
Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996. Benotman, the scion of an aristocratic family marginalized by Qaddafi, had known bin Laden from their days fighting the Afghan communist government in the early '90s, a period when Benotman established himself as a leader of the militant Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
The night of Benotman's arrival, bin Laden threw a lavish banquet in the main hall of his compound, an unusual extravagance for the frugal Al Qaeda leader. As bin Laden circulated, making small talk, large dishes of rice and platters of whole roasted lamb were served to some 200 jihadists, many of whom had come from around the Middle East. "It was one big reunification," Benotman recalls. "The leaders of most of the jihadist groups in the Arab world were there and almost everybody within Al Qaeda."
Bin Laden was trying to win over other militant groups to the global jihad he had announced against the United States in 1998. Over the next five days, bin Laden and his top aides, including Ayman Al Zawahiri, met with a dozen or so jihadist leaders. They sat on the floor in a circle with large cushions arrayed around them to discuss the future of their movement. "This was a big strategy meeting," Benotman told one of us late last year, in his first account of the meeting to a reporter. "We talked about everything, where are we going, what are the lessons of the past twenty years."
Despite the warm welcome, Benotman surprised his hosts with a bleak assessment of their prospects. "I told them that the jihadist movement had failed. That we had gone from one disaster to another, like in Algeria, because we had not mobilized the people," recalls Benotman, referring to the Algerian civil war launched by jihadists in the '90s that left more than 100,000 dead and destroyed whatever local support the militants had once enjoyed. Benotman also told bin Laden that the Al Qaeda leader's decision to target the United States would only sabotage attempts by groups like Benotman's to overthrow the secular dictatorships in the Arab world. "We made a clear-cut request for him to stop his campaign against the United States because it was going to lead to nowhere," Benotman recalls, "but they laughed when I told them that America would attack the whole region if they launched another attack against it."
Benotman says that bin Laden tried to placate him with a promise: "I have one more operation, and after that I will quit"--an apparent reference to September 11. "I can't call this one back because that would demoralize the whole organization," Benotman remembers bin Laden saying.
After the attacks, Benotman, now living in London, resigned from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, realizing that the United States, in its war on terrorism, would differentiate little between Al Qaeda and his organization.
Benotman, however, did more than just retire. In January 2007, under a veil of secrecy, he flew to Tripoli in a private jet chartered by the Libyan government to try to persuade the imprisoned senior leadership of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the regime. He was successful. This May, Benotman told us that the two parties could be as little as three months away from an agreement that would see the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group formally end its operations in Libya and denounce Al Qaeda's global jihad. At that point, the group would also publicly refute recent claims by Al Qaeda that the two organizations had joined forces.
This past November, Benotman went public with his own criticism of Al Qaeda in an open letter to Zawahiri, absorbed and well-received, he says, by the jihadist leaders in Tripoli. In the letter, Benotman recalled his Kandahar warnings and called on Al Qaeda to end all operations in Arab countries and in the West. The citizens of Western countries were blameless and should not be the target of terrorist attacks, argued Benotman, his refined English accent, smart suit, trimmed beard, and easygoing demeanor making it hard to imagine that he was once on the front lines in Afghanistan.
Although Benotman's public rebuke of Al Qaeda went unnoticed in the United States, it received wide attention in the Arabic press. In repudiating Al Qaeda, Benotman was adding his voice to a rising tide of anger in the Islamic world toward Al Qaeda and its affiliates, whose victims since September 11 have mostly been fellow Muslims. Significantly, he was also joining a larger group of religious scholars, former fighters, and militants who had once had great influence over Al Qaeda's leaders, and who--alarmed by the targeting of civilians in the West, the senseless killings in Muslim countries, and Al Qaeda's barbaric tactics in Iraq--have turned against the organization, many just in the past year.
After September 11, there was considerable fear in the West that we were headed for a clash of civilizations with the Muslim world led by bin Laden, who would entice masses of young Muslims into his jihadist movement. But the religious leaders and former militants who are now critiquing Al Qaeda's terrorist campaign--both in the Middle East and in Muslim enclaves in the West-- make that less likely. The potential repercussions for Al Qaeda cannot be underestimated because, unlike most mainstream Muslim leaders, Al Qaeda's new critics have the jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite. "The starting point has to be that jihad is legitimate, otherwise no one will listen, " says Benotman, who sees the Iraqi insurgency as a legitimate jihad. "The reaction [to my criticism of Al Qaeda] has been beyond imagination. It has made the radicals very angry. They are very shaky about it."
Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by Al Qaeda's leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because Al Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al Qaeda's Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where Al Qaeda's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, Al Qaeda in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world's Sunni majority.
Additionally, Al Qaeda and its affiliates have killed thousands of Muslim civilians elsewhere since September 11: hundreds of ordinary Afghans killed every year by the Taliban, dozens of Saudis killed by terrorists since 2003, scores of Jordanians massacred at a wedding at a U.S. hotel in Amman in November 2005. Even those sympathetic to Al Qaeda have started to notice. "Excuse me Mr. Zawahiri but who is it who is killing with Your Excellency's blessing, the innocents in Baghdad, Morocco and Algeria?" one supporter asked in an online Q&A with Al Qaeda's deputy leader in April that was posted widely on jihadist websites. All this has created a dawning recognition among Muslims that the ideological virus that unleashed September 11 and the terrorist attacks in London and Madrid is the same virus now wreaking havoc in the Muslim world.
Two months before Benotman's letter to Zawahiri was publicized in the Arab press, Al Qaeda received a blow from one of bin Laden's erstwhile heroes, Sheikh Salman Al Oudah, a Saudi religious scholar. Around the sixth anniversary of September 11, Al Oudah addressed Al Qaeda's leader on MBC, a widely watched Middle East TV network: "My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed ... in the name of Al Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?"
What was noteworthy about Al Oudah's statement was that it was not simply a condemnation of terrorism, or even of September 11, but that it was a personal rebuke, which clerics in the Muslim world have shied away from. In Saudi Arabia in February, one of us met with Al Oudah, who rarely speaks to Western reporters. Dressed in the long black robe fringed with gold that is worn by those accorded respect in Saudi society, Al Oudah recalled meeting with bin Laden--a "simple man without scholarly religious credentials, an attractive personality who spoke well," he said--in the northern Saudi region of Qassim in 1990. Al Oudah explained that he had criticized Al Qaeda for years but until now had not directed it at bin Laden himself: "Most religious scholars have directed criticism at acts of terrorism, not a particular person. ... I don't expect a positive effect on bin Laden personally as a result of my statement. It's really a message to his followers."
Al Oudah's rebuke was also significant because he is considered one of the fathers of the Sahwa, the fundamentalist awakening movement that swept through Saudi Arabia in the '80s. His sermons against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia following Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait helped turn bin Laden against the United States. And bin Laden told one of us in 1997 that Al Oudah's 1994 imprisonment by the Saudi regime was one of the reasons he was calling for attacks on U.S. targets. Al Oudah is also one of 26 Saudi clerics who, in 2004, handed down a religious ruling urging Iraqis to fight the U.S. occupation of their country. He is, in short, not someone Al Qaeda can paint as an American sympathizer or a tool of the Saudi government.
Tellingly, Al Qaeda has not responded to Al Oudah's critique, but the research organization Political Islam Online tracked postings on six Islamist websites and the websites of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya TV networks in the week after Al Oudah's statements; it found that more than two-thirds of respondents reacted favorably. Al Oudah's large youth following in the Muslim world has helped his anti-Al Qaeda message resonate. In 2006, for instance, he addressed a gathering of around 20,000 young British Muslims in London's East End. "Oudah is well known by all the youth. It's almost a celebrity culture out there. ... He has definitely helped to offset Al Qaeda's rhetoric," one young imam told us.
More doubt about Al Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, the ideological godfather of Al Qaeda, sensationally withdrew his support in a book written last year from his prison cell in Cairo. Al Sharif, generally known as "Dr. Fadl," was an architect of the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar, unbelievers. Although Dr. Fadl never explicitly called for such individuals to be killed, his takfiri treatises from 1988 and 1993 gave theological cover to jihadists targeting civilians.
Dr. Fadl was also Zawahiri's mentor. Like his protégé, he is a skilled surgeon and moved in militant circles when he was a member of Cairo University's medical faculty in the '70s. In 1981, when Anwar Sadat was assassinated and Zawahiri was jailed in connection with the plot, Dr. Fadl fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he operated on wounded mujahedin fighting the Soviets. After Zawahiri's release from jail, he joined Dr. Fadl in Peshawar, where they established a new branch of the "Jihad group" that would later morph into Al Qaeda. Osama Rushdi, a former Egyptian jihadist then living in Peshawar, recalls that there was little doubt about Dr. Fadl's importance: "He was like the big boss in the Mafia in Chicago." And bin Laden also owed a deeply personal debt to Dr. Fadl; in Sudan in 1993, the doctor operated on Al Qaeda's leader after he was hurt in an assassination attempt.
So it was an unwelcome surprise for Al Qaeda's leaders when Dr. Fadl's new book, Rationalization of Jihad, was serialized in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November. The incentive for writing the book, he explained, was that "jihad ... was blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years. ... [N]ow there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non Muslims in the name of Jihad!" Dr Fadl ruled that Al Qaeda's bombings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against civilians in Western countries was wrong. He also took on Al Qaeda's leaders directly in an interview with the Al Hayat newspaper. "Zawahiri and his Emir bin Laden [are] extremely immoral," he said. "I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who are seduced by them, and don't know them."
Dr. Fadl's harsh words attracted attention throughout the Arabic-speaking world; even a majority of Zawahiri's own Jihad group jailed in Egyptian prisons signed on and promised to end their armed struggle. In December, Zawahiri released an audiotape lambasting his former mentor, accusing him of being in league with the "bloodthirsty betrayer" Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak; and, in a 200-page book titled The Exoneration, published in March, he replied at greater length, portraying Dr. Fadl as a prisoner trying to curry favor with Egypt's security services and the author of "a desperate attempt (under American sponsorship) to confront the high tide of the jihadist awakening."
Ultimately, the ideological battle against Al Qaeda in the West may be won in places such as Leyton and Walthamstow, largely Muslim enclaves in east London, whose residents included five of the eight alleged British Al Qaeda operatives currently on trial for plotting to bring down U.S.-bound passenger jets in 2006. It is in Britain that many leaders of the jihadist movement have settled as political refugees, and "Londonistan" has long been a key barometer of future Islamist trends. There are probably more supporters of Al Qaeda in Britain than any other Western country, and, because most British Muslims are of Pakistani origin, British militants easily can obtain terrorist training in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda's main operational hub since September 11. And now, because it is difficult for Al Qaeda to send Middle Eastern passport holders to the United States, the organization has particularly targeted radicalized Muslims in Britain for recruitment. So the nexus between militant British Muslims, Pakistan, and Al Qaeda has become the leading terrorist threat to the United States.
Over the last half-year, we have made several trips to London to interview militants who have defected from Al Qaeda, retired mujahedin, Muslim community leaders, and members of the security services. Most say that, when Al Qaeda's bombs went off in London in 2005, sympathy for the terrorists evaporated.
In Leyton, the neighborhood mosque is on the main road, a street of terraced houses, halal food joints, and South Asian hairdressers. Around 1,000 people attend Friday prayers there each week.
Usama Hassan, one of the imams at the mosque, has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Imperial College in London, read theoretical physics at Cambridge, and now teaches at Middlesex University. But he also trained in a jihadist camp in Afghanistan in the '90s and, until a few years ago, was openly supportive of bin Laden. And, in another unusual twist, he is now one of the most prominent critics of Al Qaeda. Over several cups of Earl Grey in the tea room next to the mosque, Hassan--loquacious and intelligent, every bit the university lecturer--explained how he had switched sides.
Raised in London by Pakistani parents, Hassan arrived in Cambridge in 1989 and, feeling culturally isolated, fell in with Jamiat Ihyaa Minhaaj Al Sunnah (JIMAS), a student organization then supportive of jihads in Palestine, Kashmir, and Afghanistan. In December 1990, Hassan traveled to Afghanistan, where he briefly attended an Arab jihadist camp. He was shown how to use Kalashnikovs and M-16s and was taken to the front lines, where a shell landed near his group's position. "My feeling was, if I was killed, then brilliant, I would be a martyr," he recalls. Later, as a post-graduate student in London, Hassan played a lead role in the student Islamic Society, then a hotbed of radical activism. "At the time I was very anti-American. ... It was all black and white for us. I used to be impressed with bin Laden. There was no other leadership in the Muslim world standing up for Muslims." When September 11 happened, Hassan says the view in his circle was that "Al Qaeda had given one back to George Bush."
Still, as Al Qaeda continued to target civilians for attacks, Hassan began to rethink. His employment by an artificial intelligence consulting firm also integrated him back toward mainstream British life. "It was a slow process and involved a lot of soul-searching. ... Over time, I became convinced that bin Laden was dangerous and an extremist." The July 2005 bombings in London were the clincher. "I was devastated by the attack," he says. "My feeling was, how dare they attack my city."
Three days after the London bombings, the Leyton mosque held an emergency meeting; about 300 people attended. "We explained that these acts were evil, that they were haram," recalls Hassan. It was not the easiest of crowds; one youngster stormed out, shouting, "As far as I'm concerned, fifty dead kuffar is not a problem."
In Friday sermons since then, Hassan says that he has hammered home the difference between legitimate jihad and terrorism, despite a death threat from pro-Al Qaeda militants: "I think I'm listened to by the young because I have street cred from having spent time in a [jihadist] training camp. ... Jihadist experience is especially important for young kids because otherwise they tend to think he is just a sell-out who is a lot of talk." This spring, Hassan helped launch the Quilliam Foundation, an organization set up by former Islamist extremists to counter radicalism by making speeches to young Muslims in Great Britain about how they had been duped into embracing hatred of the West.
Such counter-radicalization efforts will help lower the pool of potential recruits for Al Qaeda--the only way the organization can be defeated in the long term. But the reality facing British counterterrorism officials, such as Detective Inspector Robert Lambert, the recently departed head of the Metropolitan police's Muslim Contact Unit, is that "Al Qaeda values dozens of recruits more than hundreds of supporters." In order to target the most radical extremists, the Metropolitan police have backed the efforts of a Muslim community group, the Active Change Foundation, based around a gym in Walthamstow run by Hanif and Imtiaz Qadir, two brothers of Kashmiri descent.
Hanif Qadir, now 42, revealed to us that he himself was recruited by Al Qaeda after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jihadist recruiters in east London, no doubt noting wealth, sought out Qadir, who had earned enough money running a car repair shop to buy a Rolls-Royce and live in some style. "The guy who handled me was a Syrian called Abu Sufiyan. ... I'm sure he was from Al Qaeda," recalls Qadir. "He was good at telling you what you wanted to hear ... he touched all my emotional buttons." Qadir agreed to join. He drew up a will and, in December 2002, bought a first-class ticket to Pakistan. But, as the truck he was in crossed the dirt roads into Afghanistan, a chance occurrence changed his life: A truck, carrying wounded fighters, approached them from the other direction. Among them was a young Punjabi boy whose white robes were stained with blood. "These are evil people," another of the wounded shouted. "[W]e came here to fight jihad, but they are just using us as cannon fodder." Qadir's truckload of wannabe jihadists made a u-turn. "That kid, he was like an angel. He kicked me back into reality," recalls Qadir. "When I landed back in the U.K., I wanted to find [the Al Qaeda recruiters] and cut their heads off."
Qadir never found them, but he became determined to stop others like him from being recruited. In 2004, he and his brother opened the gym and community center in the Walthamstow neighborhood of east London. Soon, hundreds of young Muslims were attending.
The scale of the challenge was quickly clear. Soon after the center opened, he got wind that pro-Al Qaeda militants were secretly booking rooms there for their meetings. Worse, in the summer of 2006, several of those arrested in connection with the Al Qaeda airlines plot, including alleged ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali, were found to have attended his gym. But, rather than shutting the radicals out, Qadir continued to allow them to meet. "Sometimes our youngsters get into debates with these people, for example on jihad, and make them look ridiculous in front of their followers," he says. Qadir believes his approach is finally starting to pay off: "The extremists are burning out: The number of radicals in Walthamstow is diminishing, not growing."
At another mosque in London, the Muslim Brotherhood joined forces with the British authorities to reclaim the institution from pro-Al Qaeda militants. The Brotherhood is the most powerful Islamist group in the Arab world, with chapters throughout Europe and North America. It has long opposed Al Qaeda's jihad, a stance that so angered Zawahiri that he published a book, The Bitter Harvest, condemning the organization in 1991. From the late '90s, the Finsbury Park mosque in London had been dominated by the pro-Al Qaeda cleric Abu Hamza Al Masri. During that time, few selfrespecting jihadists traveling through London passed up the free accommodation in its basement. Visitors included Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "twentieth hijacker" of the September 11 plot, and Richard Reid, who tried to down a U.S.-bound airliner with a shoe bomb in December 2001.
In 2003, British police shut the mosque, but Abu Hamza's followers continued to have a strong presence in the area. In February 2005, police helped broker a deal for the mosque to re-open under the leadership of the local chapter of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB), a Muslim Brotherhood group. No sooner had the moderates gained control of the Finsbury Park mosque than they were confronted by Abu Hamza's angry followers, led by the pugnacious Atilla Ahmet, who calls himself "the number-one Al Qaeda in Europe" and who, in October, pled guilty to providing British Muslims with terrorist training. "They brought sticks and knives with them," recalls Kamal El Helbawy, spokesman for the new trustees at the mosque.
Undeterred, a few days later Helbawy gave the first Friday sermon, explaining that this was a new start for the mosque and stressing how important it was for Muslims to live in harmony with their neighbors. Detective Inspector Lambert, the Metropolitan police officer who helped broker the takeover, says that, because of its social welfare work and its track record supporting the Palestinian cause, the MAB has "big street cred in the area and [has] made an impact on Abu Hamza's young followers."
Salman Al Oudah, the Saudi preacher, spoke at the re-opened mosque in 2006, as has Abdullah Anas, an Algerian former mujahedin fighter based in London who has been a critic of Al Qaeda for years. Anas worked with bin Laden in Pakistan during the '80s, fought in Afghanistan for almost a decade against the communists, and married the daughter of a Palestinian cleric who is still lionized as the spiritual godfather of the jihadist movement, the most radical wing of which would morph into Al Qaeda. Anas told us that his critiques of Al Qaeda were not well-received in 2003, but that, "in the last two or three years, there has been a change in opinion," citing the Madrid and London bombings as turning points. In 2006, Anas went public with his criticisms of Al Qaeda, in an interview with Asharq Al Awsat, one of the leading newspapers in the Arab world, criticizing the London subway bombings as "criminal deeds ... prohibited by the Sharia."
Detective Inspector Lambert told us preachers like Anas and Al Oudah "can't be discounted. ... When you have Muslim leaders who are attacked both by Al Qaeda supporters and by commentators who oppose engagement [with Islamists], then they are in a useful position."
In December, Al Qaeda's campaign of violence reached new depths in the eyes of many Muslims, with a plot to launch attacks in Saudi Arabia while millions were gathered for the Hajj. Saudi security services arrested 28 Al Qaeda militants in Mecca, Medina, and Riyadh, whose targets allegedly included religious leaders critical of Al Qaeda, among them the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abd Al Aziz Al Sheikh, who responded to the plot by ruling that Al Qaeda operatives should be punished by execution, crucifixion, or exile. Plotting such attacks during the Hajj could not have been more counterproductive to Al Qaeda's cause, says Abdullah Anas, who was making the pilgrimage to Mecca himself. "People over there ... were very angry. The feeling was, how was it possible for Muslims to do that? I still can't quite believe it myself. The mood was one of shock, real shock."
Is Al Qaeda going to dissipate as a result of the criticism from its former mentors and allies? Despite the recent internal criticism, probably not in the short term. As one of us reported in The New Republic early last year, Al Qaeda, on the verge of defeat in 2002, has regrouped and is now able to launch significant terrorist operations in Europe ("Where You Bin?" January 29, 2007). And, last summer, U.S. intelligence agencies judged that Al Qaeda had "regenerated its [U.S.] Homeland attack capability" in Pakistan's tribal areas. Since then, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have only entrenched their position further, launching a record number of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year. Afghanistan, Algeria, and Iraq also saw record numbers of suicide attacks in 2007 (though the group's capabilities have deteriorated in Iraq of late). Meanwhile, Al Qaeda is still able to find recruits in the West. In November, Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain's domestic intelligence agency MI5, said that record numbers of U.K. residents are now supportive of Al Qaeda, with around 2,000 posing a "direct threat to national security and public safety." That means that Al Qaeda will threaten the United States and its allies for many years to come.
However, encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like Al Qaeda are the seeds of their own long-term destruction: Their victims are often Muslim civilians; they don't offer a positive vision of the future (but rather the prospect of Taliban-style regimes from Morocco to Indonesia); they keep expanding their list of enemies, including any Muslim who doesn't precisely share their world view; and they seem incapable of becoming politically successful movements because their ideology prevents them from making the real-world compromises that would allow them to engage in genuine politics.
Which means that the repudiation of Al Qaeda's leaders by its former religious, military, and political guides will help hasten the implosion of the jihadist terrorist movement. As Churchill remarked after the battle of El Alamein in 1942, which he saw as turning the tide in World War II, "[T]his is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Noman Benotman, bin Laden's Libyan former companion-in-arms, assesses that Al Qaeda's recent resurgence, which he says has been fueled by the Iraq war, will not last. "There may be a wave of violence right now, but ... in five years, Al Qaeda will be more isolated than ever. No one will give a toss about them." And, given the religio-ideological basis of Al Qaeda's jihad, the religious condemnation now being offered by scholars and fighters once close to the organization is arguably the most important development in stopping the group's spread since September 11. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell tacitly acknowledged this in his yearly report to Congress in February, when he testified that, "Over the past year, a number of religious leaders and fellow extremists who once had significant influence with Al Qaeda have publicly criticized it and its affiliates for the use of violent tactics."
Most of these clerics and former militants, of course, have not suddenly switched to particularly progressive forms of Islam or fallen in love with the United States (all those we talked to saw the Iraqi insurgency as a defensive jihad), but their anti-Al Qaeda positions are making Americans safer. If this is a war of ideas, it is their ideas, not the West's, that matter. The U.S. government neither has the credibility nor the Islamic knowledge to effectively debate Al Qaeda's leaders, but the clerics and militants who have turned against them do. Juan Zarate, a former federal prosecutor and a key counterterrorism adviser to President Bush, acknowledged as much in a speech in April when he said, "These challenges from within Muslim communities and even extremist circles will be insurmountable at the end of the day for Al Qaeda."
These new critics, in concert with mainstream Muslim leaders, have created a powerful coalition countering Al Qaeda's ideology. According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33 percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August 2007.
Unsurprisingly, Al Qaeda's leaders have been thrown on the defensive. In December, bin Laden released a tape that stressed that "the Muslim victims who fall during the operations against the infidel Crusaders ... are not the intended targets." Bin Laden warned the former mujahedin now turning on Al Qaeda that, whatever their track records as jihadists, they had now committed one of the "nullifiers of Islam," which is helping the "infidels against the Muslims."
Kamal El Helbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who helped bring in moderates at the Finsbury Park mosque in London, believes that Al Qaeda's days may be numbered: "No government, no police force, is achieving what these [religious] scholars are achieving. To defeat terrorism, to convince the radicals ... you have to persuade them that theirs is not the path to paradise."
Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank are research fellows at New York University's Center on Law and Security. Peter Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama Bin Laden I Know.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Islamism - 7 - ramana - 06-09-2008
Interesting excerpt from a British Indian Muslim, Ziauddin Sardar on Koran
Book Excerpt of Ziauddin Sardar's book
He drags in Hindu views on Lord Ram.
Islamism - 7 - acharya - 06-10-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Jun 9 2008, 06:07 AM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Jun 9 2008, 06:07 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Interesting excerpt from a British Indian Muslim, Ziauddin Sardar on Koran
Book Excerpt of Ziauddin Sardar's book
He drags in Hindu views on Lord Ram.
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He thinks that Hinduism and Hindus are shallow that they will start looking at their own religion similar to the western religions just because they got western education. He comes from a western religious point of view and is not able to transcend to the Hindu and Indian point of view.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The western fixed scale of measurement, secularism, is replaced in Hinduvta discourse by an equally rigid, and totally fabricated, notion of Ram. Secularism creates an authoritarian structure by placing itself above all other ideologies; it presents itself as an arch ideology that provides the framework within which all other ideologies can exist. Truth thus becomes secular Truth: other notions of truth must prostrate themselves in front of secular absolutes. Secular man thus not only knows the Truth, he actually owns it. The new Ram of Hinduvta politics is a similar linear construction: devoid totally of multilayered complexity and richness of traditional concept of Ram, the newly constructed deity now appears as a flat, singular projection that allows for no deviation, no alternative visions, no compromises. The tender and tolerant Ram of traditional Hindu religiosity, the figure that inhabits the memories of traditional Hindus, is replaced with a intolerant, violent Ram hell-bent on war against Muslims. This Secularist Ram now defines Truth solely in terms of his attitudes to the Other: he is the yardstick by which one determines who is an insider and who an outsider in the Indian Nation. But this Ram has not only been secularised; he has also been commodified: those who know Ram, know the Truth, also own the Truth: Ram is a property, a corporation that can take over the âdisputed sitesâ of the outsiders. Just as secularism is totally disdainful of all religion, so too Hindu chauvinism is quite contemptuous of Hindu religiosity. This is a direct result, argues Purushottam Agrawal, of the âcultural inferiority complex suffered by the colonial literati. This literati was anxious to replace traditional religiosity (of which it was disdainful) with a muscular ânationalâ religion capable of embodying the aggressiveness latent in their sense of political and cultural inferiority as a colonised people. Thus popular religiosity became a recurring object of disdain in the writings of Dayanand Saraswati, and in a more subliminal fashion, in the writings of Savarkar and Golwalkar.
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Islamism - 7 - Guest - 06-10-2008
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Deoband's Dar-ul Islam</b>
Pioneer.com
Sandhya Jain
Deoband's May 31, 2008, fatwa against terrorism marks official Islam's most significant departure from the phase of unproductive violence adopted by this beleaguered faith since the advent of Western colonialism, particularly in the last two centuries. Though slow in coming, the decision by Indian Islam's leading seminary to repudiate terrorism as a "most inhuman crime" was not unexpected; it may mark modern Islam's first decisive move towards demarcating the religious sphere from the polity, thereby facilitating believers to live without mental discomfort in non-Muslim societies.
Regular readers may recall that I have been expecting a dilution of Islamic fervour since Saudi Arabia itself experienced jihadiviolence, viz, the May 12, 2003, car-bomb attacks and the November 9, 2003, suicide attack on Muhaya compound, both in Riyadh. Then US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage rightly concluded that the real target of the attacks was the Saudi monarchy, sponsor of the puritanical Wahhabi Islam that is wrecking havoc in Muslim countries and the world. As radical Islam began creating a crisis of political legitimacy for Muslim regimes, they were forced to seek a religio-political response to counter the corrosive appeal of Osama bin Laden and his ilk.
The first hint that King Abdullah, keeper of Islam's two holiest shrines, intended to steer the faith away from extreme violence came during his 2006 Republic Day visit to New Delhi: He ignored the Hurriyat. I wrote then that the King would work to protect Islam's flanks in the emerging third crusade with political Christianity by giving predominantly Hindu India relief from the jihad sponsored by Pakistan and ISI-controlled Bangladesh. Such a wise strategy would inhibit India from joining the <b>so-called clash of civilisations against Islam, as the conflict is essentially an intra-Abrahamic affair.</b>
The evidence was Indian Muslims refraining from violence when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published cartoons insulting the Prophet in September 2005 and thereafter some European journals re-published these in March 2008 as a deliberate provocation. Realising they could not stage a terrorist strike in Europe, angry jihadis attacked the Danish Embassy in Islamabad on June 2, 2008, unaware that Denmark had withdrawn its citizens from the mission.
Deoband's fatwa is certainly part of the Islamic world's plan to move cautiously away from Western, especially American, dominance. This distancing is being calibrated with the emerging multi-polar economic order led by Russia, China, Central Asia and Latin America, which validates the concept of sovereign wealth (state control over natural resources), as opposed to private corporate monopolies. The Islamic world is wary because Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq was assassinated for nationalising oil; Saddam Hussein paid the price of attempting a non-dollar oil bourse; and Iran is demonised for opening a Euro-based oil bourse.
The decision that Deoband would host an 'Anti-Terrorism Conference' in New Delhi is a tacit admission by the ummah that India alone has been victim of sustained jihad for over a century, not for sins of Hindus, but to serve a colonial agenda. Though India was not complicit in the humiliation of Islam in Palestine or other places, Hindus alone suffered the brunt of blind Muslim rage, which did not cease even with Partition in 1947.
India was chosen for jihadi terror because it was, and remains, the key politico-geographical territory that needs to be controlled in order to dominate the world. Viceroy Curzon said as much in his October 1908 speech to the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh: "It was the remark of De Tocqueville that the conquest and Government of India were really the achievements that had given Britain her place in the world... Consider what would happen were we to lose India...for it is inconceivable that India could stand or be left alone. We would lose its unfailing markets... almost the only formidable element in our fighting strength; our influence in Asia would quickly disappear... Remember, too, that India is no longer a piece, even a king or queen on the Asiatic chessboard. It is a royal piece on the chessboard of international politics."
To an India bleeding from the war of a thousand cuts, sponsored by America's Pakistani protectorate, the fatwa that "Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence... and does not allow it in any form... The religion of Islam has come to wipe out all kinds of terrorism and to spread the message of global peace" synchronises too closely with the Jaipur bombings. Though BJP president Rajnath Singh rightly appreciated Darul Uloom's "seeking to dissociate Muslims from terrorism," he must also insist that Indian Islam de-link itself from the ummah in the matter of Muslim grievances which do not originate on this soil, and to put its best foot forward on the issue of combating terrorism in this country.
Instead of nitpicking with the lame duck UPA Government over an anti-terrorism law and the hanging of Parliament attack convict Mohammed Afzal, Mr Rajnath Singh should call upon Muslim leaders and citizens to actively dissociate with Pakistani and Bangladeshi terrorists by denying them refuge or recruits, and help the security agencies to identify and arrest them. Those with knowledge about the laundering of funds for terrorist purposes, especially the use of the stock markets for pumping funds into the economy, should assist enforcement agencies in exposing these frauds.
On the issue of illegal Bangladeshi immigration, the BJP should ask the Muslim community to help identify and deport the unwanted aliens. Whatever the economic compulsions, Bangladeshis entering India illegally are mostly Muslims practicing hijrat (flight) from a Muslim majority country into a predominantly Hindu country. Unlike their persecuted Hindu and Buddhist brethren, Muslim Bangladeshis are indulging in an un-Islamic activity by quitting Dar-ul Islam (land of the pure). <b>If they do not view India as Dar-ul Harb (land of war), they should return to Sanatan Dharma when they enter the original motherland. Dhaka must admit the failure of the logic of partition and contemplate its own return</b>.
For the present, however, the BJP should co-operate with the Prime Minister in setting up a federal investigating agency to deal with terrorism; the federal law will inevitably follow. <b>However, the party is right to insist that Congress-appointed Governors immediately assent to Acts against organised crime passed by its Governments in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh</b>.
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Islamism - 7 - ramana - 06-10-2008
So King of Saudi Arabia is acting as the Caliph in the modern world as Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was planning in his book "Future of Islam!"