The spread of terror - Inayat is at it again,,,,

[N.O.R.F]

What say SOLers?

 

The spread of terror

 

Blaming terrorism on some unspecified evil within the Muslim community may please warmongers, but it won't help us defeat the violent extremists.

 

If you have not visited the Observer's home page this week, it is worth doing so. The following headlines stood out for me:

 

Highest alert as Glasgow attacked

 

Blair attacks false grievance

 

'80 civilians dead' in Afghanistan

 

As our country witnessed attempted terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow in which mercifully no one was seriously injured - apart from a couple of the would-be attackers themselves - air raids by Nato-led forces in Afghanistan reportedly killed scores of innocent villagers.

 

In the Observer piece mentioned above, our former prime minister, Tony Blair, set up a classic straw man argument:

 

"The idea that as a Muslim in this country that you don't have the freedom to express your religion or your views, I mean you've got far more freedom in this country than you do in most Muslim countries."

 

Blair's point is undoubtedly true, we do have far more freedoms here in the UK than most Muslim countries do. However, is that hatred of our freedoms really the driving motivation behind the terror attacks? Is it nothing to do with some of our actual policies overseas, policies that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people?

 

We now have a substantial body of data before us based on the testimonies of the 7/7 attackers themselves, the conviction of Dhiren Barot and his associates, and the recent convictions obtained in the Operation Crevice trial. Surely, we ought to be informed what the investigators learned about how these men were all radicalised? What were the key factors involved?

 

Instead it seems we have to content ourselves with being fed prejudiced comment pieces masquerading as informed opinion. It is not surprising why the shamefully pro-Iraq war Observer would turn to Hassan Butt and the pro-Iraq war Sunday Times (part of the Murdoch empire) would turn to Ed Husain. In both cases, Butt and Husain reinforce the editorial message of the newspapers concerned - ie that we do not need to revisit some of our own murderous actions overseas and examine whether they have contributed to the spread of violent extremism. No, no, no, it is all the fault of unspecified evil ideologues in the Muslim community.

 

This may be a welcome message for the warmongers at the Observer and the Sunday Times (and also for the pro-Israel cheerleaders at Harry's Place), but I am not convinced that it will really help us defeat the violent extremists.

 

If the Observer and the Sunday Times really want to know more about what fuels the terror threat perhaps they might consider sending their reporters to interview the relatives of those poor villagers who died in this week's Nato air raids.

 

Some responses

 

"the pro-Israel cheerleaders at Harry's Place"

 

Oh boy, your going to get it in your anti-semitic neck. Have you not leart Inayat, you can't say anything bad about Israel!!

Good article and absolutely correct. However, the government aren't ever going to admit it, no matter how obvious the facts are staring them in the face.

 

After a weekend of screaming headlines and excited pundits, it's good to look at the wider picture. We have a few amateur bombs that fortunately didn't go off. In Iraq they have 5 or 6 professional bombs that go off everyday, killing and maiming everyday. We should think about them, what we've unleashed on them and how they must feel. It seems rather ridiculous when you look at some of the headlines in the UK and compare to the facts on the ground in Iraq.

 

We're fighting a supposed war, yet the nation makes no sacrifice and in essence 0.0001% of the population have been affected. In Iraq they never asked for a war and 99.99999% have been affected by it.

 

Just from that I can understand why a few unhinged people would want to visit the carnage in Iraq onto the streets of Britain. Until we face up to that FACT we'll never move forward and everyone will lose.

I'm very disappointed in you Inayat. I thought you had moved on from cliched arguments that the west is mostly too blame for the actions of the jihadi death cult. The Muslim Brotherhood and it's offshoots made a terrible miscalculation, that the US was a a juicy plumb ripe for the picking. It's unleashed the beast and unfortunately the Muslim world will pay the price for decades to come. There will be many comments on this thread condemning you as a fellow traveler, I don't believe this. You've unfortunately bought into the hackneyed world view of the western left, you're better than this. Extend yourself a little, we really do need some explanation of why a mixture of revolutionary Marxism and medieval nostalgia has so much appeal in the Islamic world. Please do better next time.

You're British, Inyat. Explain why the deaths of Afghans in Afghanistan are a particular grievance of yours.

Click on the link to also read Ed Hussain and Hassan Butt's articles of last week.

 

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/inayat_bunglawala/2007/07/the_spread_of_terror.html

[N.O.R.F]

My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror

 

 

As the bombers return to Britain, Hassan Butt, who was once a member of radical group Al-Muhajiroun, raising funds for extremists and calling for attacks on British citizens, explains why he was wrong

 

Sunday July 1, 2007

The Observer

 

 

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

 

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

 

Friday's attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

 

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

 

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

 

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombings, and I were both part of the BJN - I met him on two occasions - and though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland and abroad, was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

 

How did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting this (flawed) utopian goal? How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion? There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a dualistic model of the world. Many Muslims may or may not agree with secularism but at the moment, formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion. There is no 'rendering unto Caesar' in Islamic theology because state and religion are considered to be one and the same. The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

 

What radicals and extremists do is to take these premises two steps further. Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr. Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world. Many of my former peers, myself included, were taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

 

This understanding of the global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain. For decades, radicals have been exploiting these tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state for their benefit, typically by starting debate with the question: 'Are you British or Muslim?' But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Islamic institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology. They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex topic of violence within Islam and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace, focus on Islam as personal, and hope that all of this debate will go away.

 

This has left the territory of ideas open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, every time mosque authorities banned us from their grounds, it felt like a moral and religious victory.

 

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism. A handful of scholars from the Middle East has tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion. In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

 

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me and a number of other people who have recently left radical Islamic networks as a far more potent argument because it involves stepping out of this dogmatic paradigm and recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

 

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief. For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here. But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

 

However, it isn't enough for Muslims to say that because they feel at home in Britain they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers. By refusing to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day. It may be difficult to swallow but the reason why Abu Qatada - the Islamic scholar whom Palestinian militants recently called to be released in exchange for the kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston - has a following is because he is extremely learned and his religious rulings are well argued. His opinions, though I now thoroughly disagree with them, have validity within the broad canon of Islam.

 

Since leaving the BJN, many Muslims have accused me of being a traitor. If I knew of any impending attack, then I would have no hesitation in going to the police, but I have not gone to the authorities, as some reports have suggested, and become an informer.

 

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism. (The Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from this state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.) However, demystification will not be achieved if the only bridges of engagement that are formed are between the BJN and the security services.

 

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence. And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

 

Hassanbutt1@gmail.com

[N.O.R.F]

The frenzy of news

The government's response to the present emergency has been measured and reassuring. The media's, however, has been hysterical beyond belief.

 

 

We live in times of more than average danger. Terrorism can strike at any time and at any one of us. That is no reason for turning our society into a police state, our airports and city centres into besieged citadels or our TV networks into whirlpools of furious speculation. We have endured worse in the past and may do so again in the future. What we need is steadiness under fire.

 

The government's response to the present emergency has been measured, welcome and reassuring.

 

The media's, however, has been hysterical beyond belief. There has long been a dangerous symbiosis between the plagues of global terrorism and rolling news. Terrorism needs the news channels as its platform, and the news channels look to terrorism to enhance their ratings. So it has been in the last days. Each one looks to the other for its launch pad, and even in a sense its raison d'etre. The architects of 9/11 were in a real sense the schedulers of CNN: they knew it was going to happen, and waited for it. They were not disappointed.

 

This is not to make the case for censorship, but only for a sense of proportion. No one has yet been killed in this emergency. The domination of the news agenda by at least three separate terrorist attacks (all unsuccessful) has been understandable. But the tone of the coverage suggests that the broadcasters especially have taken leave of their senses. The hysteria has spread beyond the all news channels to programmes with which should have the time and good sense to do better.

 

As so often, the BBC's Six O'Clock News has been the outstanding offender. On Monday night the stand-in newsreader on the spot, Ben Brown, congratulated himself on having "managed to" gain access to Glasgow airport. What do you mean, "managed to", Ben? Anyone could have walked in there. And hundreds of ordinary travellers, waiting for flights, already had. The BBC's arm-waver-in-chief, Richard Bilton, made a big deal of having been turned aside at a police road block. It happens, Richard. Try a war zone one day and you will find no end of them. More seriously, some of the commentary about the suspects being questioned bordered on the legally prejudicial.

 

There is another way, which is to have the news as it should be, presented straightforwardly, factually without hype. Or if it gets deadly, the broadcasters will have run out of hyperbole.

 

 

Martin Bell

[N.O.R.F]

Not in our name

Blaming UK foreign policy is not the answer. Where are the Muslim marches in revulsion against acts of terror in Islam's name?

 

The events of the last few days have been sobering for us all. The response from some UK Muslim groups (influenced by Islamist thinking) is still largely to blame foreign policy (undoubtedly an exacerbating influence but not the cause), rather than marching "not in my name" in revulsion against terrorist acts committed in Islam's name. By blaming foreign policy they try to divert pressure off themselves from the real need to tackle extremism being peddled within. Diverting attention away from the problems within Muslim communities and blaming others - especially the west - is always more popular than the difficult task of self-scrutiny. And what part of foreign policy do the Islamists want us to change to tackle terrorism? Withdrawal from Iraq?

 

The UK presence on the ground in Iraq is minuscule compared to the US. We currently have 5,500 troops from 40,000 at the start of the invasion. We will reduce them further to 5,000 by the end of the summer. The bulk of which will be located near Basra airport in a supporting role. Next year will likely see the numbers dwindle even further. Our troop presence is far more symbolic than military. It provides the Americans with their "coalition of the willing". The US, by contrast, is the only serious occupier in the country with over 160,000 troops. The government will not (and cannot) admit it, but we have been in withdrawal mode since the end of the war.

 

And once we've left Iraq, will they be satisfied? Of course not. Their list of grievances is endless: Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, Burma ... so long as the world is presented as one where the west is forever at war with Islam and Muslims there is nothing we can do to appease the terrorists and those who share their world view. Instead it is this extremist world view that must change.

 

Take for example the idea that radical Islamists are concerned about Muslim life (let's ignore human life in general for a moment). Where is their outrage at the 400,000 Muslims slaughtered in Darfur? Where are the marches and calls for action against this ongoing genocide? Where is the "Muslim anger" boiling up amongst British Islamists? It is nowhere to be seen because the Darfurians have been massacred by fellow Muslims, not by the west. Hence it does not appear on the Islamist radar screen as a "grievance". Such is the moral bankruptcy of this ideology.

 

No, it's not foreign policy that's the main driver in combating the terrorists; it is their mindset. The radical Islamist ideology needs to be exposed to young Muslims for what it really is. A tool for the introduction of a medieval form of governance that describes itself as an "Islamic state" that is violent, retrogressive, discriminatory, a perversion of the sacred texts and a totalitarian dictatorship.

 

When the IRA was busy blowing up London, there would have been little point in Irish "community leaders" urging "all" citizens to cooperate with the police equally when it was obvious the problem lay specifically within Irish communities. Likewise for Muslim "community leaders" to condemn terrorism is a no-brainer. What is required is for those that claim to represent and have influence among young British Muslims to proactively counter the extremist Islamist narrative. That is the biggest challenge for British Muslim leadership over the next five to 10 years. It is because they are failing to rise to this challenge that the government feels it needs to act by further eroding our civil liberties with anti-terror legislation to get the state to do what Muslims should be doing themselves. If British Muslim groups focus on grassroots de-radicalisation then this will provide civil liberty groups the space they need to argue against any further anti-terror legislation.

 

Of course I would like to see changes in our foreign policy and have marched on the streets (with thousands of non-Muslims) in protest on many occasions. But blaming foreign policy in the face of suicide attacks is not only tactless but a cop-out that fails to tackle extremism, fails to promote an ethical foreign policy and fails to protect our civil liberties.

 

Asim Siddiqui

[Ms DD]

Salaam

 

Why isnt Hassan Butt arrested? After all he confessed to plotting and aiding the 'enemy'.

[N.O.R.F]

^^No idea. I'm still trying to put a face to the name,,,,,

 

Inayat responds

 

Yesterday: 'I'm sure it is, but I cannot see how bombing innocent people in this country remedies that.'

 

It does not remedy that, but terrorists seem to have accepted the belief the mantra 'if you kill our civilians then we will kill your civilians'. The way out it seems to me is for everyone to stop killing each other. A revolutionary idea, I know...

 

EdmundIronsides: 'Utter garbage. How come the Wahhabists tried throughout the 1990's, long before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, to blow up the World Trade Center in the US? To blow up US warships in the Gulf?'

 

I believe that US foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly its unquestioning and massive support for Israel, has played a key role in this.

 

thetrashheap: 'Blair will never admit that his foreign Policy has made Britian a target but you similarly you don't seem to want to talk about the very serious problem of Islamism.'

 

Extremist ideas remain abstract until they find willing practitioners. My contention is that some of our policies in the Middle East have helped make extremist ideas more attractive.

 

DavidTHarryblog: 'You are the mirror image of white nazis like Nick Griffin.'

 

So kind!

 

usmarine: 'Suggesting that terrorists should dictate UK foreign policy is absurd.'

 

I didn't suggest that. My contention is - as stated above - is that some of our policies in the Middle East have helped make extremist ideas more attractive and gain more recruits.

 

[Jacaylbaro]

looooooooool@Hassan Butt

[Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar]

What is funny? Have you not heard the former Indonesian president, Cabdiraxmaan Gusdiir? And they say he was wadaad.

[Allamagan]

Originally posted by Northerner:

^^No idea. I'm still trying to put a face to the name

Here is the man, Hassan Butt

[Allamagan]

60 min: An interview of Hassan Batt (video)

 

In this video this guy have admitted to have been involved terrorism activities in UK and overseas, and helped fundraising lots of money to be used on these purposes only and I wonder why he is not charged with terrorism. He may have now realized of his evil doings, but then think about all the people that have been affected by his and his likes activities like selling drugs, brainwashing kids, collecting money for terrorism etc. strange, he should be accauntable for all these things and come clean.

 

This organisation Almuhajiroon activists are still active in British universities and preach hatred and make noises etc.

[Jacaylbaro]

Originally posted by Miskiin-Macruuf-Aqiyaar:

What is funny? Have you not heard the former Indonesian president, Cabdiraxmaan Gusdiir? And they say he was wadaad.

looooooooooooooooooool

 

 

I remember this pakistani used to work with us , his name was Dr. Waqar Butt ,,, and when somebody asks him YOUR NAME PLEASE ?? ,,, he says:

 

Dr. Butt ,,,,,,,,,

[Fabregas]

These groups work for the authorities. They attract young men, whilst brainwashing them and then the young boys are arrested. Meanwhile the "hate preachers" are not touched....

[-Lily-]

I have only read the first article for now.

 

I’ve realized nothing comes out of these heated, often emotional and sensationalized debates. Someone will say something and many will agree, does that make a difference? Will those behind the policy making stop and think & change as a result of what’s happening? Will those ‘Muslims’ who think that it’s perfectly all right to maim and kill innocent people on their way to work or holiday as a ‘revenge’ for the other innocent people who have been killed elsewhere change? I doubt it.

 

All I hear is a lot of noise and just more death and little progress.

[N.O.R.F]

If your mugged today (Allah forbid) will you go and mug someone tomorrow and cry 'it happened to me too'?

 

Lily, read the fourth artcile