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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (827)	12/19/2002 6:53:06 PM
From: lorne	Respond to of 15987

9 Suspected al-Qaida Arrested in Pakistan Dec 19, 9:15 AM (ET) By ASIF SHAHZADA LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) - Police arrested nine suspected al-Qaida operatives including two Americans and a Canadian in a joint raid with FBI agents in this eastern city Thursday. All nine were of Pakistani origin and belong to the same family. Pakistan Television reported an exchange of gunfire during the arrest. "We got information about these people and today the police went there and made these arrests. We can say they are suspected al-Qaida," Sheikh Rashid, Pakistan's information minister, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. He said some of the men might have been smuggling weapons for terrorist attacks. Among those arrested was Dr. Javed Ahmad, who was taken from his home in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, said a senior Interior Ministry official. Security agents and FBI officials searched Ahmad's home for at least two hours. They also arrested his two sons, two brothers, three nephews and one uncle. Ahmad, a Pakistani, lived in the United States between 1972 and 1983. Two of the others arrested were naturalized Americans and one a naturalized Canadian. "Pakistani security agencies accompanied by foreigners (FBI agents) arrested our family members like they were criminals," Marghoob Ahmad Mir, a brother-in-law of Ahmad, told a news conference in Lahore. FBI and police seized four computers and several compact discs. It was not clear what they expected to find. Ahmad's other family members have denied he or his relatives are involved with al-Qaida. Ahmad is the second Pakistani doctor to be arrested for alleged links to Taliban and al-Qaida fugitives. On Oct. 21, authorities arrested Dr. Amer Aziz, a British-trained orthopedic surgeon, and held him incommunicado for a month. apnews.excite.com

To: lorne who wrote (827)	12/19/2002 6:56:23 PM
From: zonder	Respond to of 15987

They are being told that their sole purpose in life is to kill and hate another race of people and to kill themselves and to take as many innocent people with them as they can. Unless everything drastically changed in the past couple of years that I have not been living in the ME, I can assure you that the situation is not as bad as such reports would have you believe. I am not contesting the authenticity of this particular report or most others, but what I am saying is that it is not correct to assume that the majority of kids in the ME are thus indoctrinated. For example, there are often reports of hate speeches in mosques here and there, urging Muslims to take up arms and kill "infidels" or some such. A few of these are statistically insignificant when you think of the number of days in a year and the number of times people congregate in a mosque per day, but they are perceived as the general climate of what happens every day in every mosque. They really believe that great rewards await them in paradise for murder. Very sad. Yes, the very far gone among them do, regrettably. When faced with these religious fanatics, I have often thought of Darwin's selection process - the stupid die young and hence the gene pool is improved <g> This was of course before the recent turn of events where they have started killing off vast numbers of others along with themselves. However, this is far from a general picture. Why don't you use your vast knowledge against this crime instead of something that happened 50 years ago Lorne - I just talk about the issues that come up. Recently, "something that happened 50 years ago" came up, and we talked about that. (It was very productive, actually, if you followed the conversation). I do not claim to have any "vast knowledge", by the way. Perhaps a unique perspective on the current divide between the ME and the Western world because of my education and life on and in both cultures, is all. We can't change the past but maybe the future, maybe. Hopefully the understanding that comes from such internet forums will help to that end. I have spoken my mind re my disbelief in the existence of God, pitfalls of religion in general and Islam in particular, etc quite openly while living in the ME as I do here. The fact that I have lived to tell is perhaps a bit of a proof that the general populace is not as fanatically (and murderously) religious in the ME.