Stop blaming Islam for global terror
Islam seems to have become a soft target for the Indian and global media and political leaders, as well. In several cases, the poisonous spitting is not even worth of a reaction. But the matter takes a serious turn, when reputed scholars or journalists target Islam and that too on flimsy grounds – most often after terror attacks in any part of the world. Following the ISIS’attacks in Paris the issue of so-called Islamic terrorism and Jihad has become a burning issue, once again, for the media. Senior journalist Tavleen Singh has written one such article in The Indian Express. The stature of the columnist compels me to take a serious note of her irresponsible observations regarding Islam and Quran.
With all due respect for Ms. Tavleen Singh, I, very modestly, feel it my foremost duty to explain things and remove misconceptions, in order to clear the air. I am conscious enough to make this modest effort of mine, academic and objective, sans any sentimental approach. I am sorry to observe that Ms. Singh has very little knowledge about Islam, She has attempted to write a lot, on the basis of her personal perceptions without bothering to make any serious effort to learn about Islam or even knowing the fundamental facts about this faith, which unfortunately is the most misunderstood religion in the world today.
FULL ARTICLE :-
http://muslimmirror.com/eng/stop-blamin ... al-terror/
Stop blaming Islam for global terror
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ghulam muhammed
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Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/islam-facts-or-dreams/
Islam—Facts or Dreams?
In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.
Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.
One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.
I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?
Defendants do not have to testify at criminal trials, but they have a right to testify if they choose to—so I had to prepare for the possibility. Raised an Irish Catholic in the Bronx, I was not foolish enough to believe I could win an argument over Muslim theology with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence. But I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting Islam—then there must be two or three places where I could nail him by saying, “You told your followers X, but the doctrine clearly says Y.” So my colleagues and I pored over the Blind Sheikh’s many writings. And what we found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately.
Now, you might be able to argue that he took scripture out of context or gave an incomplete account of it. In my subsequent years of studying Islam, I’ve learned that this is not a particularly persuasive argument. But even if one concedes for the purposes of discussion that it’s a colorable claim, the inconvenient fact remains: Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.
When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up.
When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.
When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up.
You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century. Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation.
The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it.
Another point, obvious but inconvenient, is that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war. But even these benign constructions do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one contextualizes.
Another disturbing aspect of the trial against the Blind Sheikh and his fellow jihadists was the character witnesses who testified for the defense. Most of these people were moderate, peaceful Muslim Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us. But when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up—“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”—these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Blind Sheikh.
Now, understand: there was no doubt what the Blind Sheikh was on trial for. And there was no doubt that he was a terrorist—after all, he bragged about it. But that did not disqualify him, in the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheikh into terrorism—but no one was discrediting his status either.
Although this came as a revelation to me, it should not have. After all, it is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern society. Winston Churchill, for one, had encountered it as a young man serving in the British army, both in the border region between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the Sudan—places that are still cauldrons of Islamist terror. Ever the perceptive observer, Churchill wrote:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. . . . Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Habitually, I distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is objectively important to do so, but I also have a personal reason: when I began working on national security cases, the Muslims I first encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped us infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass-murder plots, and gather the evidence needed to convict jihadists. We have an obligation to our national security to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association—not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. Churchill appreciated this distinction. “Individual Moslems,” he stressed, “may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.” The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine.
What about Islamic law? On this topic, it is useful to turn to Robert Jackson, a giant figure in American law and politics—FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson penned the foreword to a book called Law in the Middle East. Unlike today’s government officials, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject worthy of close study. And here is what he concluded:
In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.
Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring tropes about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia a principal source of law—and under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy.
Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.
Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.
Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?
The reason is simple: stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense was best illustrated by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she described terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” In other words, the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam; it becomes, by dint of its being inconsistent with a “religion of peace,” contrary to Islam. This explains our government’s handwringing over “radicalization”: we are supposed to wonder why young Muslims spontaneously become violent radicals—as if there is no belief system involved.
This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications. Consider the inability of government officials to call a mass-murder attack by Muslims a terrorist attack unless and until the police uncover evidence proving that the mass murderers have some tie to a designated terrorist group, such as ISIS or al Qaeda. It is rare for such evidence to be uncovered early in an investigation—and as a matter of fact, such evidence often does not exist. Terrorist recruits already share the same ideology as these groups: the goal of imposing sharia. All they need in order to execute terrorist attacks is paramilitary training, which is readily available in more places than just Syria.
The dangerous flipside to our government’s insistence on making up its own version of Islam is that anyone who is publicly associated with Islam must be deemed peaceful. This is how we fall into the trap of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic supremacist organization, to infiltrate policy-making organs of the U.S. government, not to mention our schools, our prisons, and other institutions. The federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, acknowledges the Brotherhood as an Islamic organization—notwithstanding the ham-handed attempt by the intelligence community a few years back to rebrand it as “largely secular”—thereby giving it a clean bill of health. This despite the fact that Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, that the Brotherhood has a long history of terrorist violence, and that major Brotherhood figures have gone on to play leading roles in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.
To quote Churchill again: “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/islam-facts-or-dreams/
Islam—Facts or Dreams?
In 1993 I was a seasoned federal prosecutor, but I only knew as much about Islam as the average American with a reasonably good education—which is to say, not much. Consequently, when I was assigned to lead the prosecution of a terrorist cell that had bombed the World Trade Center and was plotting an even more devastating strike—simultaneous attacks on the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations complex on the East River, and the FBI’s lower Manhattan headquarters—I had no trouble believing what our government was saying: that we should read nothing into the fact that all the men in this terrorist cell were Muslims; that their actions were not representative of any religion or belief system; and that to the extent they were explaining their atrocities by citing Islamic scripture, they were twisting and perverting one of the world’s great religions, a religion that encourages peace.
Unlike commentators and government press secretaries, I had to examine these claims. Prosecutors don’t get to base their cases on assertions. They have to prove things to commonsense Americans who must be satisfied about not only what happened but why it happened before they will convict people of serious crimes. And in examining the claims, I found them false.
One of the first things I learned concerned the leader of the terror cell, Omar Abdel Rahman, infamously known as the Blind Sheikh. Our government was portraying him as a wanton killer who was lying about Islam by preaching that it summoned Muslims to jihad or holy war. Far from a lunatic, however, he turned out to be a globally renowned scholar—a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence who graduated from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. His area of academic expertise was sharia—Islamic law.
I immediately began to wonder why American officials from President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno on down, officials who had no background in Muslim doctrine and culture, believed they knew more about Islam than the Blind Sheikh. Then something else dawned on me: the Blind Sheikh was not only blind; he was beset by several other medical handicaps. That seemed relevant. After all, terrorism is hard work. Here was a man incapable of doing anything that would be useful to a terrorist organization—he couldn’t build a bomb, hijack a plane, or carry out an assassination. Yet he was the unquestioned leader of the terror cell. Was this because there was more to his interpretation of Islamic doctrine than our government was conceding?
Defendants do not have to testify at criminal trials, but they have a right to testify if they choose to—so I had to prepare for the possibility. Raised an Irish Catholic in the Bronx, I was not foolish enough to believe I could win an argument over Muslim theology with a doctor of Islamic jurisprudence. But I did think that if what we were saying as a government was true—that he was perverting Islam—then there must be two or three places where I could nail him by saying, “You told your followers X, but the doctrine clearly says Y.” So my colleagues and I pored over the Blind Sheikh’s many writings. And what we found was alarming: whenever he quoted the Koran or other sources of Islamic scripture, he quoted them accurately.
Now, you might be able to argue that he took scripture out of context or gave an incomplete account of it. In my subsequent years of studying Islam, I’ve learned that this is not a particularly persuasive argument. But even if one concedes for the purposes of discussion that it’s a colorable claim, the inconvenient fact remains: Abdel Rahman was not lying about Islam.
When he said the scriptures command that Muslims strike terror into the hearts of Islam’s enemies, the scriptures backed him up.
When he said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.
When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up.
You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century. Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation.
The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it.
Another point, obvious but inconvenient, is that Islam is not a religion of peace. There are ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war. But even these benign constructions do not make it a call to peace. Verses such as “Fight those who believe not in Allah,” and “Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war,” are not peaceful injunctions, no matter how one contextualizes.
Another disturbing aspect of the trial against the Blind Sheikh and his fellow jihadists was the character witnesses who testified for the defense. Most of these people were moderate, peaceful Muslim Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us. But when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up—“What does jihad mean?” “What is sharia?” “How might sharia apply to a certain situation?”—these moderate, peaceful Muslims explained that they were not competent to say. In other words, for the answers, you’d have to turn to Islamic scholars like the Blind Sheikh.
Now, understand: there was no doubt what the Blind Sheikh was on trial for. And there was no doubt that he was a terrorist—after all, he bragged about it. But that did not disqualify him, in the minds of these moderate, peaceful Muslims, from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of the core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheikh into terrorism—but no one was discrediting his status either.
Although this came as a revelation to me, it should not have. After all, it is not as if Western civilization had no experience dealing with Islamic supremacism—what today we call “Islamist” ideology, the belief that sharia must govern society. Winston Churchill, for one, had encountered it as a young man serving in the British army, both in the border region between modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the Sudan—places that are still cauldrons of Islamist terror. Ever the perceptive observer, Churchill wrote:
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. . . . Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Habitually, I distinguish between Islam and Muslims. It is objectively important to do so, but I also have a personal reason: when I began working on national security cases, the Muslims I first encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped us infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass-murder plots, and gather the evidence needed to convict jihadists. We have an obligation to our national security to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association—not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. Churchill appreciated this distinction. “Individual Moslems,” he stressed, “may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen.” The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine.
What about Islamic law? On this topic, it is useful to turn to Robert Jackson, a giant figure in American law and politics—FDR’s attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson penned the foreword to a book called Law in the Middle East. Unlike today’s government officials, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject worthy of close study. And here is what he concluded:
In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge—all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire—reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law.
Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring tropes about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia a principal source of law—and under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy.
Sharia rejects freedom of speech as much as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. It brooks no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is a comprehensive framework for human life, dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.
Even if this is not the only construction of Islam, it is absurd to claim—as President Obama did during his recent visit to a mosque in Baltimore—that it is not a mainstream interpretation. In fact, it is the mainstream interpretation in many parts of the world. Last year, Americans were horrified by the beheadings of three Western journalists by ISIS. American and European politicians could not get to microphones fast enough to insist that these decapitations had nothing to do with Islam. Yet within the same time frame, the government of Saudi Arabia beheaded eight people for various violations of sharia—the law that governs Saudi Arabia.
Three weeks before Christmas, a jihadist couple—an American citizen, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and his Pakistani wife who had been welcomed into our country on a fiancée visa—carried out a jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people. Our government, as with the case in Fort Hood—where a jihadist who had infiltrated the Army killed 13 innocents, mostly fellow soldiers—resisted calling the atrocity a “terrorist attack.” Why? Our investigators are good at what they do, and our top officials may be ideological, but they are not stupid. Why is it that they can’t say two plus two equals four when Islam is involved?
The reason is simple: stubbornly unwilling to deal with the reality of Islam, our leaders have constructed an Islam of their very own. This triumph of willful blindness and political correctness over common sense was best illustrated by former British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when she described terrorism as “anti-Islamic activity.” In other words, the savagery is not merely unrelated to Islam; it becomes, by dint of its being inconsistent with a “religion of peace,” contrary to Islam. This explains our government’s handwringing over “radicalization”: we are supposed to wonder why young Muslims spontaneously become violent radicals—as if there is no belief system involved.
This is political correctness on steroids, and it has dangerous policy implications. Consider the inability of government officials to call a mass-murder attack by Muslims a terrorist attack unless and until the police uncover evidence proving that the mass murderers have some tie to a designated terrorist group, such as ISIS or al Qaeda. It is rare for such evidence to be uncovered early in an investigation—and as a matter of fact, such evidence often does not exist. Terrorist recruits already share the same ideology as these groups: the goal of imposing sharia. All they need in order to execute terrorist attacks is paramilitary training, which is readily available in more places than just Syria.
The dangerous flipside to our government’s insistence on making up its own version of Islam is that anyone who is publicly associated with Islam must be deemed peaceful. This is how we fall into the trap of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic supremacist organization, to infiltrate policy-making organs of the U.S. government, not to mention our schools, our prisons, and other institutions. The federal government, particularly under the Obama administration, acknowledges the Brotherhood as an Islamic organization—notwithstanding the ham-handed attempt by the intelligence community a few years back to rebrand it as “largely secular”—thereby giving it a clean bill of health. This despite the fact that Hamas is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, that the Brotherhood has a long history of terrorist violence, and that major Brotherhood figures have gone on to play leading roles in terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.
To quote Churchill again: “Facts are better than dreams.” In the real world, we must deal with the facts of Islamic supremacism, because its jihadist legions have every intention of dealing with us. But we can only defeat them if we resolve to see them for what they are.
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/islam-facts-or-dreams/
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
Seems like QM loves all right wingers whether they hindu nationalist in India or Larry P Arnn of Hilsdale College
And yes I will NOT ever come back to India and stay in Western Country and fight for my rights
Atleas no one stops me from eating BEEF in my country and yes FGM did get stopped in Western Countries and Yes SMS and his goons were not giving Levish welcome during Ashra in Western Countries by elected officials once the NRI and others took upon themselves unlike YOUR BELOVED HINDU NATIONALISTS which are corrupt to the core
BTW read about Larry P Arnn of Hilsdale College what he thinks about people like you
And yes I will NOT ever come back to India and stay in Western Country and fight for my rights
Atleas no one stops me from eating BEEF in my country and yes FGM did get stopped in Western Countries and Yes SMS and his goons were not giving Levish welcome during Ashra in Western Countries by elected officials once the NRI and others took upon themselves unlike YOUR BELOVED HINDU NATIONALISTS which are corrupt to the core
BTW read about Larry P Arnn of Hilsdale College what he thinks about people like you
Controversies
"Dark Ones" Comment
In 2013 Larry Arnn was criticized for his remarks about ethnic minorities when he testified before the Michigan State Legislature. In testimony against the Common Core curriculum standards, in which Arnn expressed concern about government interference with educational institutions, he recalled that shortly after he assumed the presidency at Hillsdale he received a letter from the state Department of Education that said his college "violated the standards for diversity," adding, "because we didn't have enough dark ones, I guess, is what they meant." After being criticized for calling minorities "dark ones", he explained that he was referring to "dark faces", saying: "The State of Michigan sent a group of people down to my campus, with clipboards ... to look at the colors of people’s faces and write down what they saw. We don’t keep records of that information. What were they looking for besides dark ones?"[9] Michigan House Democratic Leader Tim Greimel condemned Arnn for his comments, which he called "offensive" and "inflammatory and bigoted", and asked for an apology.[10] The College issued a statement apologizing for Arnn's remark, while reiterating Arnn's concern about "state sponsored racism" in the form of affirmative action policies.[11]
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
Looks like they are planning to treat every muslim as a terrorist whether they are wearing a hijab or a bikini.
-
ghulam muhammed
- Posts: 11653
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2008 5:34 pm
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
Here’s What a Man Who Studied Every Suicide Attack in the World Says About ISIS’ Motives
More than anything, the terrorist group’s outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory.
Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.
Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.
He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.
According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:
What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.
ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.
Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”
But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into a ground war in Syria? Writing at the Harvard Business Review, Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms argues that these analyses are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:
It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.
So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs. That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.
Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”
Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:
If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.
Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls has shrunk by 10 percent:
The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power coming from local allies—the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that we don’t have enough ground forces.
It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is shifting its pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month, and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara, Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st, and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now also into Paris.
In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.
http://www.thenation.com/article/heres- ... s-motives/
More than anything, the terrorist group’s outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory.
Despite the existence of a good deal of research about terrorism, there’s a gap between the common understanding of what leads terrorists to kill and what many experts believe to be true.
Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda are widely seen as being motivated by their radical theology. But according to Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, this view is too simplistic. Pape knows his subject; he and his colleagues have studied every suicide attack in the world since 1980, evaluating over 4,600 in all.
He says that religious fervor is not a motive unto itself. Rather, it serves as a tool for recruitment and a potent means of getting people to overcome their fear of death and natural aversion to killing innocents. “Very often, suicide attackers realize they have instincts for self-preservation that they have to overcome,” and religious beliefs are often part of that process, said Pape in an appearance on my radio show, Politics and Reality Radio, last week. But, Pape adds, there have been “many hundreds of secular suicide attackers,” which suggests that radical theology alone doesn’t explain terrorist attacks. From 1980 until about 2003, the “world leader” in suicide attacks was the Tamil Tigers, a secular Marxist group of Hindu nationalists in Sri Lanka.
According to Pape’s research, underlying the outward expressions of religious fervor, ISIS’s goals, like those of most terrorist groups, are distinctly earthly:
What 95 percent of all suicide attacks have in common, since 1980, is not religion, but a specific strategic motivation to respond to a military intervention, often specifically a military occupation, of territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly. From Lebanon and the West Bank in the 80s and 90s, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and up through the Paris suicide attacks we’ve just experienced in the last days, military intervention—and specifically when the military intervention is occupying territory—that’s what prompts suicide terrorism more than anything else.
ISIS emerged from the insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq just as the Al Qaeda network traces its origins to the Afghan resistance to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
This view differs from that of Hillary Clinton and others who believe that ISIS “has nothing whatsoever to do” with Islam, as well as the more common belief, articulated by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, that ISIS can be reduced to “a religious group with carefully considered beliefs.” It’s a group whose outward expressions of religious fervor serve its secular objectives of controlling resources and territory. Virtually all of the group’s leaders were once high-ranking officers in Iraq’s secular military.
Pape’s analysis is consistent with what Lydia Wilson found when she interviewed captured ISIS fighters in Iraq. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the caliphate,” she recently wrote in The Nation. “But a detailed, or even superficial, knowledge of Islam isn’t necessarily relevant to the ideal of fighting for an Islamic State, as we have seen from the Amazon order of Islam for Dummies by one British fighter bound for ISIS.”
But how does the notion that terrorists are intent on getting powers to withdraw from their territory square with the view that the group’s shift to terrorist attacks in the West is designed to draw France and its allies into a ground war in Syria? Writing at the Harvard Business Review, Northeastern University political scientist Max Abrahms argues that these analyses are contradictory. But Pape says that it’s important to distinguish between ISIS’s long-term goals and its shorter-term strategies to achieve them:
It’s about the timing. How are you going to get the United States, France and other major powers to truly abandon and withdraw from the Persian Gulf when they have such a large interest in oil? A single attack isn’t going to do it. Bin Laden did 9/11 hoping that it would suck a large American ground army into Afghanistan, which would help recruit a large number of suicide attackers to punish America for intervening. We didn’t do that – we used very limited military force in Afghanistan. But what Bin Laden didn’t count on was that we would send a large ground army into Iraq to knock Saddam out. And that turned out to be the most potent recruiting ground for anti-American terrorists that ever was, more so than Bin Laden had ever hoped for in his wildest dreams.
So if your goal is to create military costs on these states and get them to withdraw, you’ve got to figure out a way to really up the ante. And the way that you really up the ante is to get them to overreact. You try to get them to send a large ground army in so that you can truly drive up the costs. That’s what ISIS is trying to sucker us into doing.
Another theory holds that ISIS—and Al Qaeda—set their sights on France in order to polarize mainstream French society against its Muslim community. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole put it after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, “The problem for a terrorist group like Al Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam.” In Cole’s formulation, if violent Islamic fundamentalists “can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”
Pape says this analysis is also consistent with his research:
If ISIS is going to end the military intervention by France, one attack is not likely to do it. In the statement that ISIS released, they say that they want a storm of similar attacks against Paris and other French targets because their goal is to knock France out of the military coalition. To do that, to achieve that goal, they’re going to need to recruit many more attackers to do suicide attacks like the ones that occurred in Paris. In the short-term it makes perfect sense to want an environment that stirs up hostility towards Muslims in France, because that will make them much easier to recruit for their longer-term object of kicking France of the coalition.
Pape also argues that ISIS’ shift in strategy to attacks overseas is a sign not of its strength, but of its weakness on the ground in Syria and Iraq. He points out that over the past year, the amount of territory ISIS controls has shrunk by 10 percent:
The U.S. strategy against ISIS is working and it’s putting enormous pressure on ISIS. It’s a strategy of air and ground power, with the ground power coming from local allies—the Kurds and the Shia in the region, and even some Sunnis who are opposed to ISIS. They’re increasingly working with us on the ground while we’re fighting from the air. The problem here is not that we don’t have enough ground forces.
It’s because the strategy is working that ISIS is now desperate, and is shifting its pattern of behavior. In October, ISIS launched only eight suicide attacks in Iraq and Syria, when they normally do 30 to 35 per month, and that’s the same month that they shifted to suicide attacks in Ankara, Turkey, on October 10. Then they downed the Russian plane on October 31st, and now the Paris attacks on November 13th. As ISIS’ territory has shrunk in Iraq and Syria, it is now clearly shifting its suicide attack resources out of Iraq and Syria, and into Turkey, into killing Russian civilians, and now also into Paris.
In Pape’s view, most of the conventional wisdom about what terrorists want to achieve is wrong, and that disconnect has limited the effectiveness of the West’s response to terrorism.
http://www.thenation.com/article/heres- ... s-motives/
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ghulam muhammed
- Posts: 11653
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2008 5:34 pm
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
I found this interesting analyses on another forum :-
The rise of ISIS, is linked to the role of Colonial Europe after World War 1.. The collapse of the Turk Caliphate in 1919, and the vulturous manner in which Britain and France divided the Turk empire, and created deep anger throughout the Muslim world. In India, it led to Khilafat and later the drive for Pakistan. After 1945, the West played the most dirty game in making Palestinians
homeless to give their land to Israel. The overthrow and murder of a duly elected Mossadeq in Iran, just to protect their crude oil interests led to the rise of Khomeini. In Pakistan the Mujahidin were armed to the teeth to weaken the Russians. Worst was the most stupid invasion of Iraq in 2003, to kill and murder its own one time ally Saddam, again with an eye on Iraqi oil. The blunder was repeated in Libya in the ouster and killing of Gadhafi. Today ISIS cadre are mainly from Syria, Iraq , Libya and Pakistan. Europe is paying the price of its own folly of a hundred years ago. God gave enormous power and wealth to the West. But they lacked the wisdom to use it wisely.
The rise of ISIS, is linked to the role of Colonial Europe after World War 1.. The collapse of the Turk Caliphate in 1919, and the vulturous manner in which Britain and France divided the Turk empire, and created deep anger throughout the Muslim world. In India, it led to Khilafat and later the drive for Pakistan. After 1945, the West played the most dirty game in making Palestinians
homeless to give their land to Israel. The overthrow and murder of a duly elected Mossadeq in Iran, just to protect their crude oil interests led to the rise of Khomeini. In Pakistan the Mujahidin were armed to the teeth to weaken the Russians. Worst was the most stupid invasion of Iraq in 2003, to kill and murder its own one time ally Saddam, again with an eye on Iraqi oil. The blunder was repeated in Libya in the ouster and killing of Gadhafi. Today ISIS cadre are mainly from Syria, Iraq , Libya and Pakistan. Europe is paying the price of its own folly of a hundred years ago. God gave enormous power and wealth to the West. But they lacked the wisdom to use it wisely.
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AgnosticIndian
- Posts: 446
- Joined: Sat Feb 08, 2014 6:10 am
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
Islam is a religion of peace. Terrorists are no Muslims is our way to fight radicalization. Living in denial or running away will not solve the problem.
The ISIS or Al Qaeda are Muslims. We call them Takfiris for them declaring other Muslims as non Muslims but then we call them non Muslims is OK.
Reforms a are needed within Islam. We cannot work on 7th century laws. Sharia law itself was made hundred or so years after Prophet. Hadiths written 300 years after Prophet.
Saudis have spent over $100 billion in propagating its vicious ideology. An ideology that uses Quran as its source. Wrong or right interpretation doesn't matter. They are using it. They are Muslims. And they are radicalizing youths.
Saudis have pumped in 1700 crores into India in the last three years to spread Wahabism. Result is 200 kids from India reported to have joined ISIS.
Let's not live in denial. There has to be a change and it can only come from within
The ISIS or Al Qaeda are Muslims. We call them Takfiris for them declaring other Muslims as non Muslims but then we call them non Muslims is OK.
Reforms a are needed within Islam. We cannot work on 7th century laws. Sharia law itself was made hundred or so years after Prophet. Hadiths written 300 years after Prophet.
Saudis have spent over $100 billion in propagating its vicious ideology. An ideology that uses Quran as its source. Wrong or right interpretation doesn't matter. They are using it. They are Muslims. And they are radicalizing youths.
Saudis have pumped in 1700 crores into India in the last three years to spread Wahabism. Result is 200 kids from India reported to have joined ISIS.
Let's not live in denial. There has to be a change and it can only come from within
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ghulam muhammed
- Posts: 11653
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2008 5:34 pm
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
CCTV footage that was shared after the Brussels attacks, believed to show video from inside Maelbeek Metro station, has been proven fake.
Brussels Metro attack: Video claiming to be CCTV of explosion was filmed in 2011
The footage was in fact from an attack on the Belarus capital Minsk in 2011
As news emerged of the third explosion in the Belgian capital, which targeted the station situated near EU offices, many began sharing what they believed to be footage of the bombing.
However it was soon discovered that the video in fact came from the Minsk Metro bombing of 2011 that killed 15 and injured over 200 people.
The full video below shows the Minsk Metro attack from several different angles, dating back to April 2011.
Other CCTV footage was shared that purported to show one of the explosions at Brussels airport. This was also proven to be from 2011, being from the attack on Domodedovo airport, Moscow.
The footage was even shared by VRT news agency, who later apologised for the error.
The latest official death toll from the Brussels attacks stands at 31. Up to 230 people are reported to have been injured.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 47801.html
Brussels Metro attack: Video claiming to be CCTV of explosion was filmed in 2011
The footage was in fact from an attack on the Belarus capital Minsk in 2011
As news emerged of the third explosion in the Belgian capital, which targeted the station situated near EU offices, many began sharing what they believed to be footage of the bombing.
However it was soon discovered that the video in fact came from the Minsk Metro bombing of 2011 that killed 15 and injured over 200 people.
The full video below shows the Minsk Metro attack from several different angles, dating back to April 2011.
Other CCTV footage was shared that purported to show one of the explosions at Brussels airport. This was also proven to be from 2011, being from the attack on Domodedovo airport, Moscow.
The footage was even shared by VRT news agency, who later apologised for the error.
The latest official death toll from the Brussels attacks stands at 31. Up to 230 people are reported to have been injured.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 47801.html
-
ghulam muhammed
- Posts: 11653
- Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2008 5:34 pm
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
Brussels attacks: Molenbeek's gangster jihadists
In the poor inner-city areas of Brussels, deprivation, petty crime and radicalisation appear to have gone hand in hand. The BBC's Secunder Kermani has been finding out how drinking, smoking cannabis and fighting - combined with resentment towards white Belgian society for its perceived discrimination against Arabs - prepared some young men for a role as fighters in Syria, and terrorists in Europe.
Molenbeek is a place full of contradictions.
It's been in the spotlight ever since the Paris attacks in November when it was revealed that the ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and three of the other attackers grew up in Molenbeek.
They include Salah Abdeslam - who was arrested after a four-month manhunt back in his home neighbourhood.
How did he manage to stay hidden for so long? And why have so many young people from Molenbeek ended up as jihadists?
Most people in Molenbeek are rather sick of journalists - they resent the way they are portrayed in the media as a "jihadist capital of Europe". But one phrase you often hear when foreign journalists attempt a vox pop is that "terrorism has nothing to do with Islam".
Certainly, many of those who joined IS from the area did not come from particularly religious backgrounds.
Salah Abdeslam and his elder brother Brahim - who blew himself up in the Paris attacks - used to run a cafe in Molenbeek that sold alcohol and was closed down for drug offences. One friend of the brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam "watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another". He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no-one took him seriously.
Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing - this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.
There is certainly a sense of disaffection among many in Molenbeek. I spent an evening on a street corner talking to one young Muslim man who had been accused of attempting to travel to Syria.
Many other young people I spoke to, who had no connection with extremism whatsoever, also had grievances about the way Muslims are treated. Some described how having a Molenbeek address made getting a job harder, and girls who wore the hijab complained of laws banning the headscarf in many places of work.
Sheikh Bassam Ayachi used to be considered a leading radical preacher in Molenbeek. The Syrian-born cleric, now 70 years old, arrived in the area in the 1990s. Some accuse him of sowing the seeds of radical Islam in Molenbeek - but he unequivocally condemns events like the Paris attacks.
When the Syrian conflict began, he travelled back to his homeland. Now allied to mainstream Islamist rebels, he's a staunch opponent of both the Assad regime and IS. So much so that the group tried to assassinate him, planting a bomb in his car. The attack cost him an arm but he survived.
Over Skype I asked him why he thought so many young people from his old neighbourhood in Molenbeek were joining IS - a group he believes "sully the name of Islam, and sully the name of the Syrian revolution".
He put it down to the lack of action against the Assad regime on the one hand, and domestic factors on the other.
"The young people from Molenbeek feel frustrated because they were marginalised by the Belgian government. They have never tried to give them work, education, social help in order to get them integrated into society," he said.
"Some of them were delinquents, selling hashish and so on. Over time they ended up in prison. In prison they found that returning to religion was something amazing: 'We can forget about any of the stupid things we did in our lives.' So they turned to religion but with hatred in them against Western society."
That sense of a need to atone for past sins is perhaps one reason why so many of those from Molenbeek who ended up with IS had criminal backgrounds.
"They go to Morocco they're told they're Belgian. Here they're told they're Moroccans. They don't feel at home anywhere - so they're forever trying to find out who they are."
One of the trainers at the club argues that the key cause of radicalisation in Molenbeek is a sense, rightly or wrongly, of not having a future.
"Radicalisation doesn't start with a religious ideal," he says. "The guys I know [who went to Syria] they have no ideology, they have no big ideas... They are going because they are leaving something. They are fed up with this society."
READ FULL ARTICLE :-
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35890960
In the poor inner-city areas of Brussels, deprivation, petty crime and radicalisation appear to have gone hand in hand. The BBC's Secunder Kermani has been finding out how drinking, smoking cannabis and fighting - combined with resentment towards white Belgian society for its perceived discrimination against Arabs - prepared some young men for a role as fighters in Syria, and terrorists in Europe.
Molenbeek is a place full of contradictions.
It's been in the spotlight ever since the Paris attacks in November when it was revealed that the ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and three of the other attackers grew up in Molenbeek.
They include Salah Abdeslam - who was arrested after a four-month manhunt back in his home neighbourhood.
How did he manage to stay hidden for so long? And why have so many young people from Molenbeek ended up as jihadists?
Most people in Molenbeek are rather sick of journalists - they resent the way they are portrayed in the media as a "jihadist capital of Europe". But one phrase you often hear when foreign journalists attempt a vox pop is that "terrorism has nothing to do with Islam".
Certainly, many of those who joined IS from the area did not come from particularly religious backgrounds.
Salah Abdeslam and his elder brother Brahim - who blew himself up in the Paris attacks - used to run a cafe in Molenbeek that sold alcohol and was closed down for drug offences. One friend of the brothers who used to hang out there told me he would regularly see Brahim Abdeslam "watching IS videos, with a joint in one hand, and a beer in another". He said Brahim would spout off radical statements but that no-one took him seriously.
Another friend showed me a video from a Brussels nightclub of the two Abdeslam brothers on a night out with girls, drinking and dancing - this was February 2015, just months before they started to plan the attacks in Paris.
There is certainly a sense of disaffection among many in Molenbeek. I spent an evening on a street corner talking to one young Muslim man who had been accused of attempting to travel to Syria.
Many other young people I spoke to, who had no connection with extremism whatsoever, also had grievances about the way Muslims are treated. Some described how having a Molenbeek address made getting a job harder, and girls who wore the hijab complained of laws banning the headscarf in many places of work.
Sheikh Bassam Ayachi used to be considered a leading radical preacher in Molenbeek. The Syrian-born cleric, now 70 years old, arrived in the area in the 1990s. Some accuse him of sowing the seeds of radical Islam in Molenbeek - but he unequivocally condemns events like the Paris attacks.
When the Syrian conflict began, he travelled back to his homeland. Now allied to mainstream Islamist rebels, he's a staunch opponent of both the Assad regime and IS. So much so that the group tried to assassinate him, planting a bomb in his car. The attack cost him an arm but he survived.
Over Skype I asked him why he thought so many young people from his old neighbourhood in Molenbeek were joining IS - a group he believes "sully the name of Islam, and sully the name of the Syrian revolution".
He put it down to the lack of action against the Assad regime on the one hand, and domestic factors on the other.
"The young people from Molenbeek feel frustrated because they were marginalised by the Belgian government. They have never tried to give them work, education, social help in order to get them integrated into society," he said.
"Some of them were delinquents, selling hashish and so on. Over time they ended up in prison. In prison they found that returning to religion was something amazing: 'We can forget about any of the stupid things we did in our lives.' So they turned to religion but with hatred in them against Western society."
That sense of a need to atone for past sins is perhaps one reason why so many of those from Molenbeek who ended up with IS had criminal backgrounds.
"They go to Morocco they're told they're Belgian. Here they're told they're Moroccans. They don't feel at home anywhere - so they're forever trying to find out who they are."
One of the trainers at the club argues that the key cause of radicalisation in Molenbeek is a sense, rightly or wrongly, of not having a future.
"Radicalisation doesn't start with a religious ideal," he says. "The guys I know [who went to Syria] they have no ideology, they have no big ideas... They are going because they are leaving something. They are fed up with this society."
READ FULL ARTICLE :-
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35890960
-
qutub_mamajiwala
- Posts: 1052
- Joined: Tue Jul 23, 2013 4:17 am
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
'Islam is not a magic potion'
'Islam insists on sameness, which is fine but can run the danger to jihad against those who are not the same.'
'Brahminical Hinduism insists on difference, which is fine but can run the danger of an oppressive internal hierarchy: Caste oppression, for instance.'
'In actual fact, humans need both sameness and difference to exist.'
http://www.rediff.com/news/interview/is ... 160426.htm
'Islam insists on sameness, which is fine but can run the danger to jihad against those who are not the same.'
'Brahminical Hinduism insists on difference, which is fine but can run the danger of an oppressive internal hierarchy: Caste oppression, for instance.'
'In actual fact, humans need both sameness and difference to exist.'
http://www.rediff.com/news/interview/is ... 160426.htm
-
qutub_mamajiwala
- Posts: 1052
- Joined: Tue Jul 23, 2013 4:17 am
Re: Stop blaming Islam for global terror
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/in ... India.html
'Why Islam needs a reformation now in India'
Now Germany too has banned full-face veils. France had done that earlier.
Switzerland banned minarets in 2010. Islamophobic politicians are gaining acceptance in most European countries.
They just refuse to understand why fear of Islam is deepening in every society, India being no exception.
They just take bans on veils or minarets as attacks on their religious freedom. They never worry about the lack of religious freedom in Muslim societies, not even for Muslims from minority sects or those considered heretic.
They do not understand that religious freedom is indivisible.
But one doesn't hear a word of condemnation from ulema or Muslim institutions.
Does Islam allow freedom of religion? Saudi Arabia doesn't allow building of temples or churches in its land. If there is one jihad that would be permissible according to the Quran's teachings it would be a jihad against Saudi Arabia, forcing it to allow worship places of other religions.
When Muslims were permitted to defend themselves with arms 13 years after the advent of Islam, it was to protect freedom of religion per se, not just that of Muslims.
In the words of the Quran (22:40): 'And had it not been that Allah checks one set of people with another, the monasteries and churches, the synagogues and the mosques, in which His praise is abundantly celebrated would have been utterly destroyed.'
But how come, we feel concerned only when it is a matter concerning a mosque or a supposedly 'Islamic' veil being banned and do not bother if Muslim and avowedly Islamic states do not allow religious freedom to other groups. Not only that.
We have scholars who claim that while non-Muslims have perfect freedom to practice their religion in an Islamic state (not quite true, of course), Muslims do not have that freedom at all.
Once born to a Muslim parent, you are doomed for ever to be a Muslim or else. Well, your throat will be slit, no less.
Indeed, there are 'revered' ulema in various schools of thought who say that if someone is seen so much as not attending Friday prayers, his throat should be slit.
Scholar
Writes Salman Tarik Kureshi, a noted Pakistani scholar: 'A person greatly admires Hazrat Maulana Rashid Gangohi, the outstanding scholar who was one of the founders of the Deoband madarsa.
The gentleman to whom I refer is a kindly soul, who can be depended upon for help by others.
However, when in the course of conversation I chanced to remark that the most basic virtue lay in kindness towards others, he contradicted me. Kindness, he contended, was reserved for 'pious, practising Muslims'.
As for others, they should be given a chance to mend their ways, after which 'they would be Wajibul Qatal (liable to be killed)'.
Another person I chanced to meet - a finance man, no less - feels that people who do not attend Friday prayers 'should simply be killed. Slit their throats!'
Religion
Denying freedom of religion to Muslims and ex-Muslims, not to speak of non-Muslims, indeed has a long and gory history.
The Quranic dictum (2: 256) la ikraha fid Deen (Let there be no compulsion in religion) did not leave an impact beyond the life of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). Forcible conversions started with the first Caliph Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) fighting Ridda (apostasy) wars against the tribes who had left Islam after the demise of the Prophet. They were all brought back to the fold of Islam or killed.
Similar is the case of Khwarij in the time of the fourth caliph Hazrat Ali (RA) and beyond to neo-Khwarij today, also known as Wahhabi or Salafi.
These groups mostly kill Muslims whom they consider 'heretics' including Shias and Ahmadis.
We Muslims need to be reminded of this history to be able to understand our present.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/in ... India.html
'Why Islam needs a reformation now in India'
Now Germany too has banned full-face veils. France had done that earlier.
Switzerland banned minarets in 2010. Islamophobic politicians are gaining acceptance in most European countries.
They just refuse to understand why fear of Islam is deepening in every society, India being no exception.
They just take bans on veils or minarets as attacks on their religious freedom. They never worry about the lack of religious freedom in Muslim societies, not even for Muslims from minority sects or those considered heretic.
They do not understand that religious freedom is indivisible.
But one doesn't hear a word of condemnation from ulema or Muslim institutions.
Does Islam allow freedom of religion? Saudi Arabia doesn't allow building of temples or churches in its land. If there is one jihad that would be permissible according to the Quran's teachings it would be a jihad against Saudi Arabia, forcing it to allow worship places of other religions.
When Muslims were permitted to defend themselves with arms 13 years after the advent of Islam, it was to protect freedom of religion per se, not just that of Muslims.
In the words of the Quran (22:40): 'And had it not been that Allah checks one set of people with another, the monasteries and churches, the synagogues and the mosques, in which His praise is abundantly celebrated would have been utterly destroyed.'
But how come, we feel concerned only when it is a matter concerning a mosque or a supposedly 'Islamic' veil being banned and do not bother if Muslim and avowedly Islamic states do not allow religious freedom to other groups. Not only that.
We have scholars who claim that while non-Muslims have perfect freedom to practice their religion in an Islamic state (not quite true, of course), Muslims do not have that freedom at all.
Once born to a Muslim parent, you are doomed for ever to be a Muslim or else. Well, your throat will be slit, no less.
Indeed, there are 'revered' ulema in various schools of thought who say that if someone is seen so much as not attending Friday prayers, his throat should be slit.
Scholar
Writes Salman Tarik Kureshi, a noted Pakistani scholar: 'A person greatly admires Hazrat Maulana Rashid Gangohi, the outstanding scholar who was one of the founders of the Deoband madarsa.
The gentleman to whom I refer is a kindly soul, who can be depended upon for help by others.
However, when in the course of conversation I chanced to remark that the most basic virtue lay in kindness towards others, he contradicted me. Kindness, he contended, was reserved for 'pious, practising Muslims'.
As for others, they should be given a chance to mend their ways, after which 'they would be Wajibul Qatal (liable to be killed)'.
Another person I chanced to meet - a finance man, no less - feels that people who do not attend Friday prayers 'should simply be killed. Slit their throats!'
Religion
Denying freedom of religion to Muslims and ex-Muslims, not to speak of non-Muslims, indeed has a long and gory history.
The Quranic dictum (2: 256) la ikraha fid Deen (Let there be no compulsion in religion) did not leave an impact beyond the life of Prophet Mohammad (pbuh). Forcible conversions started with the first Caliph Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) fighting Ridda (apostasy) wars against the tribes who had left Islam after the demise of the Prophet. They were all brought back to the fold of Islam or killed.
Similar is the case of Khwarij in the time of the fourth caliph Hazrat Ali (RA) and beyond to neo-Khwarij today, also known as Wahhabi or Salafi.
These groups mostly kill Muslims whom they consider 'heretics' including Shias and Ahmadis.
We Muslims need to be reminded of this history to be able to understand our present.
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