"The religious right preaches as much hate in the name of religion as right wing extremists do; they just intersperse it with religious songs." -jtmab
It could be that society has been set back 400 to 500 years. All kinds of violent acts are done in the
name of religion, and personal attacks on SI are directed at people in the name of politics, although
those politics may be supported by religion.- Mephisto
Here's an example of the former:
Jihad Lit
The New York Times
December 9, 2001
WORD FOR WORD
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
AIRO
CONFLICTING reports last week
suggested that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, one
of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, might
have died or lost his wife and several
children when American bombs struck
Taliban bases in the Afghan mountains.
Whatever his fate, Dr. Zawahiri, a
50-year-old Egyptian surgeon, is viewed as
the man who convinced Mr. bin Laden to
undertake a kind of death match against
Western civilization by transforming his
worldwide movement of Islamic militants
into an instrument of mass murder.
Excerpts from Dr. Zawahiri's autobiography,
"Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet,"
began appearing last week in the
London-based newspaper Al-Sharq
Al-Awsat. As the leader of Egyptian Islamic
Jihad, a militant group that assassinated
President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981,
Dr. Zawahiri writes with swagger about his
certainty that the "Islamic nation" will
triumph. Passages follow.
Even as he outlines his goals, Dr.
Zawahiri seems to acknowledge his own
uncertain future:
I wrote this book to convey the message to
our generation and the generations to come.
Maybe I will not be able to write after that
due to these worrying circumstances and
unsettled conditions. . . . This book is an attempt to revive the consciousness
of the Islamic nation, to tell them about their duties and how important these
duties are and how the new crusaders hate Muslims and the importance of
understanding the difference between our enemies and our friends.
This book is a warning for the evil powers targeting our nation that your
defeat draws nearer daily and we are taking step after step to retaliate
against you and that your fight with the nation is doomed to defeat and all
your efforts will come to nothing but merely postpone the inevitable victory
of our nation.
The battle has become international after all the powers of blasphemy united
against the mujahedeen. I wanted to show in this book some of the details of
this epic and to warn readers of this book that hidden enemies and their
wolves and foxes are on the road and you should be wary of them.
Heaping praise on the Taliban forces, he emphasizes the youthful zeal of
the jihad's warriors:
They were from all over the Muslim world, although ARABS were the most
prominent. These youths revived the duty that the nation was deprived of for
a long time when they fought in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Bosnia, Chechnya. In
the training camps and the battlefronts against the Russians, the Muslim
youths created a wide consciousness and deep understanding of the
conspiracy against Islam and developed an appreciation of the enemies of
Islam, the deviators from Islam and their agents.
Dr. Zawahiri argues that the chickens have come home to roost for the
United States:
The Western media and the Arab media are both responsible for demeaning
and distorting the image of the Arab Afghans. They portrayed them as half
insane maniacs who revolted against America, who trained and financed
them before. This was repeated over and over after the comeback of the
Arab Afghans in the second half of the 90's. . . . The aim of the American
campaign to defame the ARAB Afghans is clear. America is trying to deprive
the Arab nation of claiming the championship. It's as if the Americans are
saying to us, "Those who you think of as heroes are made by me and they
are mercenaries who revolted against me when I stopped financing them."
The radicalization of Islamic groups in Egypt, he maintains, can be
traced back to their oppression by the dictatorial Gamal Abdel Nasser,
shown to be a paper tiger by Israel's easy victory in 1967:
The most important event that influenced the jihad movement in Egypt was
"the Setback" of 1967. The symbol, Gamal Abdel Nasser, fell. His followers
tried to portray him to the people as if he was the eternal leader who could
never be conquered. The tyrant leader who used to threaten and pledge in
his speeches to wipe out his enemies turned into a winded man chasing a
peaceful solution to save at least a little face.
Abdel Nasser was consumed by termites and he fell on his face amid the
panic of his followers. The jihad movement got stronger, realizing that the
enemy was nothing but a statue made by the propaganda machine and the
tyrannical campaigns against innocent people. The Nasserist movement was
knocked out when Gamal Abdel Nasser died three years after "the
Setback." . . .
Abdel Nasser's crowded funeral was nothing but evidence of the coma that
the Egyptian people were living through. . . . It was the farewell for a leader
that the Egyptians soon replaced with a new leader, who took them in
another direction and started to sell them new illusions.
That was President Sadat, who gave free reign to the Islamic groups in
an effort to quash the lingering support for Nasser and his Soviet
patrons. "The genie was let out of the lamp," Dr. Zawahiri writes. But the
groups turned on Sadat after he made peace with Israel:
After Sadat's assassination the torture started again, to write a new bloody
chapter of the history of the Islamic movement in Egypt. The torture was
brutal this time. Bones were broken, skin was removed, bodies were
electrocuted and souls were killed, and they were so despicable in their
methods. They used to arrest women, make sexual assaults, call men with
women's names, withhold food and water and ban visits. And still this wheel
is still turning until today. . . . The Egyptian army turned its back toward
Israel and started fighting its own people.
Dr. Zawahiri tells of his own radicalization, an odyssey that began with
his work in a clinic in a poor Cairo neighborhood in 1980, soon after
Soviet forces swept into Afghanistan.
I was working in a temporary job in one of the Muslim Brotherhood clinics. .
. . One night the head of the clinic, who was a Muslim brother, asked me
about going to Pakistan to help the Afghan refugees. I immediately agreed. I
found this a golden opportunity to get to know closely the field of jihad,
which could be a base for jihad in Egypt and the Arab world, the heart of the
Islamic world where the real battle for Islam exists. . . .
The most important thing about the battle in Afghanistan was that it
destroyed the illusion of the superpower in the minds of the young Muslim
mujahedeen. The Soviet Union, the power with the largest land forces in the
world, was destroyed and scattered, running away from Afghanistan before
the eyes of the Muslim youth and at the hands of the Muslim youth. This
jihad was a training course for Muslim youth for the future battle anticipated
with the superpower which is the sole leader in the world now, America.
Dr. Zawahiri went on to head Islamic Jihad, and was jailed after
President Sadat's assassination. He later returned to Afghanistan. His
account of Islamic Jihad's 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in
Peshawar has a certain Keystone Kops quality, despite the horrific
results of the operation:
We had to react to the Egyptian government's expansion of its campaign
against the fundamentalists of Egypt outside the country. So we decided to
target a painful goal for all the parties of this evil alliance. After studying the
situation we decided to assign a group to react to this and we assigned their
targets, first bombing the American Embassy in Islamabad and if that wasn't
easy, then one of the American targets in Islamabad. . . .
If that didn't work, then the target should be bombing a Western embassy
famous for its historic hatred for Muslims, and if not that, then the Egyptian
Embassy. Their extensive and detailed surveillance found that targeting the
American Embassy was beyond the abilities of the assigned group, so we
decided to study one of the American targets in Islamabad, and we
discovered it has few American employees and most of the victims would be
Pakistani.
We also discovered that targeting the other Western embassy was beyond
the abilities of the assigned group, so we settled on targeting the Egyptian
Embassy in Islamabad, which was not only running a campaign for chasing
Arabs in Pakistan but also was spying on the Arab mujahedeen. Besides,
later Pakistani security found in the ruins of the embassy evidence revealing
the cooperation between India and Egypt in espionage.
A short time before the bombing of the embassy the assigned group asked
our permission. They told us they could strike both the Egyptian and
American Embassies if we gave them extra money. We had already
provided them with all that we had and we couldn't collect more money. So
the group focused on bombing the Egyptian Embassy. The rubble of the
embassy left a clear message to the Egyptian government.
The editors of Al-Sharq Al-Awsat say they aren't convinced that Dr.
Zawahiri is dead: Although the first volume of his autobiography was
brought to them by a courier from Afghanistan before the reports of his
death, at week's end they were still negotiating with an unidentified
intermediary for Volume 2.
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