In the lexicon of the mass media, as Karim so clearly points out in The Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence, “terrorism” is a term linked not simply to violent acts but more specifically to, “individuals and states which challenge the current configurations of power in the international system with violence” (Karim, 28).
The Collins Dictionary (1979) defines “terrorism” more generally as, “the act of terrorizing; systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal.”
Using Collins’ apolitical definition it is clear that terrorism is a strategy employed not just by small networks of political terrorists but also by large states engaged in the “war on terror” such as the USA, Israel, Canada and Russia. In fact, in modern warfare, as many as nine out of ten injured and killed are civilians (Brown, 2007, citing Dr. Gino Strada). In October 2004, the highly-respected UK medical journal The Lancet reported that:
We think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.
The “war on terror” is state terrorism.
Small-scale and state terrorism alike employ characteristics of both soft and hard power. Joseph Nye defines soft power in this way: “when one country gets other countries to want what it wants… in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants” (Unit Notes, 2-2). Soft power is the power of persuasion and hard power is military coercion.
In the case of small networks of terrorists the most prevalent feature of terrorism is its powerful propaganda effect that can effect soft power political change. Many examples of this strategy can be found in the current conflict in Iraq, such as the many hostages held and prominently displayed on network TV to successfully apply pressure to nations to withdraw forces and extract other concessions; or the daily bombings claimed by various factions and often highlighted, unedited, for a global audience on the world wide web – both for the shock effect on the western public and also for the inspirational effect on those who may lean towards violent responses to the longstanding Israeli-western hard power military domination of the Middle East.
A few highly militant terrorist actions also have features of hard power – such as the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, which killed 2,602 people (Wikipedia, 2007), injured thousands more, and caused very significant financial and psychological damage to the United States and its allies.
The “war on terror” waged by nation states, such as the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are more focussed on traditional hard power where brute military might is the predominant method of political control.
However it has long been recognized that no war can be won without winning the “hearts and minds” of the conquered people. Even the strongest military powers expend a great deal of effort and resources on propaganda – from leaflets and development aid, to photo ops and control of radio and television stations. While Canada bombs the countryside and kills civilians, Afghanistan is its top recipient of development aid. Soft power propaganda is an integral part of the “war on terror”.
For a very long time there has been a mix of soft power and hard power in warfare. Hitler’s Nazi regime is widely considered the first modern state whose soft power propaganda techniques succeeded in enlisting most of a nation in his “final solution” of Jewish extermination and world domination through hard power military conquest. As early as 1832, military strategist von Clausewitz famously described war as, “a mere continuation of policy by other means” (On War), showing the linkage.
The soft power of information, persuasion and propaganda is a key element in exercising power. Today, with global media including instant satellite and easily-accessed Internet broadcasting, soft power has become even more critical to projecting power.
Sphere: Related ContentRussian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush spent most of their time at the “lobster summit” at Kennebunkport, Maine, discussing how to prevent the growing tensions between their two countries from getting out of hand.
The media and international affairs experts have been portraying missile defense in Europe and the final status of Kosovo as the two most contentious issues between Russia and the United States, with mutual recriminations over “democracy standards” providing the background for the much anticipated onset of a new Cold War. But while this may well be true for today, the stage has been quietly set for a much more serious confrontation in the non-too-distant future between Russia and the United States – along with Canada, Norway and Denmark.
Russia has recently laid claim to a vast 1,191,000 sq km (460,800 sq miles) chunk of the ice-covered Arctic seabed. The claim is not really about territory, but rather about the huge hydrocarbon reserves that are hidden on the seabed under the Arctic ice cap. These newly discovered energy reserves will play a crucial role in the global energy balance as the existing reserves of oil and gas are depleted over the next 20 years.
Russia claims that the entire swath of Arctic seabed in the triangle that ends at the North Pole belongs to Russia, but the United Nations Committee that administers the Law of the Sea Convention has so far refused to recognize Russia’s claim to the entire Arctic seabed.
In order to legally claim that Russia’s economic zone in the Arctic extends far beyond the 200 mile zone, it is necessary to present viable scientific evidence showing that the Arctic Ocean’s sea shelf to the north of Russian shores is a continuation of the Siberian continental platform. In 2001, Russia submitted documents to the UN commission on the limits of the continental shelf seeking to push Russia’s maritime borders beyond the 200 mile zone. It was rejected.
Now Russian scientists assert there is new evidence that Russia’s northern Arctic region is directly linked to the North Pole via an underwater shelf. Last week a group of Russian geologists returned from a six-week voyage to the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater shelf in Russia’s remote eastern Arctic Ocean. They claimed the ridge was linked to Russian Federation territory, boosting Russia’s claim over the oil- and gas-rich triangle.
The latest findings are likely to prompt Russia to lodge another bid at the UN to secure its rights over the Arctic sea shelf. If no other power challenges Russia’s claim, it will likely go through unchallenged.
But Washington seems to have a different view and is seeking to block the anticipated Russian bid. On May 16, 2007, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made a statement encouraging the Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention, as the Bush Administration wants. The Reagan administration negotiated the Convention, but the Senate refused to ratify it for fear that it would unduly limit the U.S. freedom of action on the high seas.
Lugar used the following justification in his plea for the United States to ratify the convention: “Russia has used its rights under the convention to claim large parts of the Arctic Ocean in the hope of claiming potential oil and gas deposits that might become available as the polar ice cap recedes due to global warming. If the United States did not ratify the convention, Russia would be able to press its claims without the United States at the negotiating table. This would be directly damaging to U.S. national interests.” President Bush urged the Senate to ratify the convention during its current session, which ends in 2008.
The United States has been jealous of Russia’s attempts to project its dominance in the energy sector and has sought to limit opportunities for Russia to control export routes and energy deposits outside Russia’s territory. But the Arctic shelf is something that Russia has traditionally regarded as its own. For decades, international powers have pressed no claims to Russia’s Arctic sector for obvious reasons of remoteness and nonhospitability, but no longer
Sphere: Related ContentCuriously it’s ominously similar in many respects to the early 1970’s when prices for oil and food both exploded by several hundred percent in a matter of months. That mid-1970’s price explosion led President Nixon to ask his old pal, Arthur Burns, then Chairman of the Fed, to find a way to alter the CPI inflation data to take attention away from the rising prices. The result then was the now-commonplace publication of the absurd “core inflation” CPI numbers–sans oil and food. Stephen Roche was the young Fed economist who was assigned the statistical manipulation job by Burns.
The late American satirist, Mark Twain once quipped, “Buy land: They’ve stopped making it…” Today we can say almost the same about corn or all grains worldwide. The world is in the early months of the greatest sustained rise in grain prices, for all major grains including maize, wheat, rice that we have seen in three decades. Those three crops constitute almost 90% of all grains cultivated in the world.
Washington’s calculated, absurd plan
What’s driving this extraordinary change? Here things get pretty interesting. The Bush Administration is making a major public relations push to convince the world it has turned into a “better steward of the environment.” The problem is that many have fallen for the hype.
The center of his program, announced in his January State of the Union Address is called ’20 in 10’, cutting US gasoline use 20% by 2010. The official reason is to “reduce dependency on imported oil,” as well as cutting unwanted “greenhouse gas” emissions. That isn’t the case, but it makes good PR. Repeat it often enough and maybe most people will believe it. Maybe they won’t realize their taxpayer subsidies to grow ethanol corn instead of feed corn are also driving the price of their daily bread through the roof.
The heart of the plan is a huge, taxpayer subsidized expansion of use of bio-ethanol for transport fuel. The President’s plan requires production of 35 billion gallons (about 133 billion liters) of ethanol a year by 2017. Congress already mandated with the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that corn ethanol for fuel must rise from 4 billion gallons in 2006 to 7.5 billion in 2012. To make certain it will happen, farmers and big agribusiness giants like ADM or David Rockefeller get generous taxpayer subsidies to grow corn for fuel instead of food. Currently ethanol producers get a subsidy in the US of 51 cents per gallon ethanol paid to the blender, usually an oil company that blends it with gasoline for sale.
As a result of the beautiful US Government subsidies to produce bio-ethanol fuels, and the new legislative mandate, the US refinery industry is investing big time in building new special ethanol distilleries, similar to oil refineries, except they produce ethanol fuel. The number currently under construction exceeds the total number of oil refineries built in the US over the past 25 years. When finished in the next 2-3 years the demand for corn and other grain to make ethanol for car fuel will double from present levels.
Not just USA bio-ethanol. In March Bush met with Brazil’s President to sign a bilateral “Ethanol Pact” to cooperate in R&D of “next generation” bio-fuel technologies like cellulosic ethanol from wood, and joint cooperation in “stimulating” expansion of bio-fuels use in developing countries, especially in Central America, and creating a “bio-fuels OPEC-like” cartel market with rules that allows formation of a Western Hemisphere ethanol market.
In short, the use of farmland worldwide for bio-ethanol and other bio-fuels—burning the food product rather than using it for human or animal food—is being treated in Washington, Brazil and other major centers, including the EU, as a major new growth industry.
Phony green arguments
Bio-fuel—gasoline or fuel produced from refining food products—is being hyped as a solution to the controversial Global Warming problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, bio-fuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under best conditions. Its advocates claim that present first generation bio-fuels “save up to 60% of carbon emission.” As well, amid rising oil prices at $75 per barrel for Brent marker grades, governments such as Brazil’s are frantic to substitute homegrown bio-fuels for imported gasoline. In Brazil today 70% of all cars have “flexi-fuel” engines able to switch from conventional gasoline to 100% bio-fuel or any mix. Bio-fuel production has become one of Brazil’s major export industries as well.
Sphere: Related ContentThe United States lags far behind other when compared in terms of auto energy mileage rankings and technology to reduce energy use and reduce gasoline and other fossil fuels fuel economies.
It all adds up. Worse the very regimes who sell the United States and its allies petroleum hate them with a passion.
Fuel economy standards in the us have remained at the same levels. Any improvements are more than matched by the extensive marketing of fuel inefficient gas hogging SUVs. It is a dead end game.
The most given response to a Zogby interactive poll question on whether participants strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose or strongly oppose the war in Iraq was “strongly oppose” at 46.4 percent.
Some 85.8 percent of Democratic respondents said they strongly opposed the war as did 7 percent of Republicans and 42.7 percent of independents.
The next-most popular response was “strongly support,” which was given by 24.7 percent of the overall pool of 7,562 U.S. residents. Just 2.7 percent of Democrats were in that category along with 50.4 percent of Republicans and 21.7 percent of independents.
Some 19.2 percent of the entire group said they somewhat supported the war and 8.6 percent said they were somewhat opposed.
Some 54.2 percent of those asked either strongly agreed (39.9 percent) or somewhat agreed (14.3 percent) U.S. officials should set a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. About one-third — 34.1 percent — strongly disagreed and 10 percent somewhat agreed.
More than half — 36.7 percent strongly agreed and 18.3 percent somewhat agreed — of participants said if the United States withdrew from Iraq, it would be considered a defeat.
The poll was done July 13-16 and carries a margin of error of 1.1 percentage points.
Sphere: Related ContentTo invtervene successfully in conflicts where Muslims were affected , Al Quaeda established ideological, financial ad military control over several Islamic groups. Although Afghanistan was Al Qadeda’s principal military training base it also trained recruits in the Sudan m Yemen , Chechyna , Tajikistan , Somalia and the Phillipines. For example when Al Quaeda trainees had difficulties entering the landlocked Afghanistan after the East African embassy bombings in August 1998 Osama phoned Hashim Salamar , the leader of the MLF in mid February 1999, asking him to set up a new training camps in the Phillipines. These MLF camps “Hobeiba” and “Palestine” in the Abukar complex- were staffed by Al Qaeda trainers providing instructions and training for foreign recruits. With the dismantling of their infrastructure in Afganistan due to the American military campaigns launched in October 7 , 2001 , Al Quadea’s critical training needs will depend increasingly on other overseas camps.
Losing My Jihadism
By Mansour al-Nogaidan
Sunday, July 22, 2007; B01
BURAIDAH, Saudi Arabia Islam needs a Reformation. It needs someone with the courage of Martin Luther.
This is the belief I’ve arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey. It’s not a popular conviction — it has attracted angry criticism, including death threats, from many sides. But it was reinforced by Sept. 11, 2001, and in the years since, I’ve only become more convinced that it is critical to Islam’s future.
Muslims are too rigid in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran. It’s time for many verses — especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions — to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam. It’s time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions. It’s time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the prophet’s words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace and of light.
I didn’t always think this way. Once, I was one of the extremists who clung to literal interpretations of Islam and tried to force them on others. I was a jihadist.
I grew up in Saudi Arabia. When I was 16, I found myself assailed by doubts about the existence of God. I prayed to God to give me the strength to overcome them. I made a deal with Him: I would give up everything, devote myself to Him and live the way the prophet Muhammad and his companions had lived 1,400 years ago if He would rid me of my doubts.
I joined a hard-line Salafi group. I abandoned modern life and lived in a mud hut, apart from my family. Viewing modern education as corrupt and immoral, I joined a circle of scholars who taught the Islamic sciences in the classical way, just as they had been taught 1,200 years ago. My involvement with this group led me to violence, and landed me in prison. In 1991, I took part in firebombing video stores in Riyadh and a women’s center in my home town of Buraidah, seeing them as symbols of sin in a society that was marching rapidly toward modernization.
Yet all the while, my doubts remained. Was the Koran really the word of God? Had it really been revealed to Muhammad, or did he create it himself? But I never shared these doubts with anyone, because doubting Islam or the prophet is not tolerated in the Muslim society of my country.
By the time I turned 26, much of the turmoil in me had abated, and I made my peace with God. At the same time, my eyes were opened to the hypocrisy of so many who held themselves out as Muslim role models. I saw Islamic judges ignoring the marks of torture borne by my prison comrades. I learned of Islamic teachers who molested their students. I heard devout Muslims who never missed the five daily prayers lying with ease to people who did not share their extremist beliefs.
In 1999, when I was working as an imam at a Riyadh mosque, I happened upon two books that had a profound influence on me. One, written by a Palestinian scholar, was about the struggle between those who deal pragmatically with the Koran and those who take it and the hadith literally. The other was a book by a Moroccan philosopher about the formation of the Arab Muslim way of thinking.
The books inspired me to write an article for a Saudi newspaper arguing that Muslims have the right to question and criticize our religious leaders and not to take everything they tell us for granted. We owe it to ourselves, I wrote, to think pragmatically if our religion is to survive and thrive.
That article landed me in the center of a storm. Some men in my mosque refused to greet me. Others would no longer pray behind me. Under this pressure, I left the mosque.
I moved to the southern city of Abha, where I took a job as a writer and editor with a newly established newspaper. I went back to leading prayers at the paper’s small mosque and to writing about my evolving philosophy. After I wrote articles stressing our right as Muslims to question our Saudi clerics and their interpretations and to come up with our own, officials from the kingdom’s powerful religious establishment complained, and I was banned from writing.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave new life to what I had been saying. I went back to criticizing the rote manner in which we Muslims are fed our religion. I criticized al-Qaeda’s school of thought, which considers everyone who isn’t a Salafi Muslim the enemy. I pointed to examples from Islamic history that stressed the need to get along with other religions. I tried to give a new interpretation to the verses that call for enmity between Muslims and Christians and Jews. I wrote that they do not apply to us today and that Islam calls for friendship among all faiths.
I lost a lot of friends after that. My old companions from the jihad felt obliged to declare themselves either with me or against me. Some preferred to cut their links to me silently, but others fought me publicly, issuing statements filled with curses and lies. Once again, the paper came under great pressure to ban my writing. And I became a favorite target on the Internet, where my writings were lambasted and labeled blasphemous.
Eventually I was fired. But by then, I had started to develop a different relationship with God. I felt that He was moving me toward another kind of belief, where all that matters is that we pray to God from the heart. I continued to pray, but I started to avoid the verses that contain violence or enmity and only used the ones that speak of God’s mercy and grace and greatness. I remembered an incident in the Koran when the prophet told a Bedouin who did not know how to pray to let go of the verses and get closer to God by repeating, “God is good, God is great.” Don’t sweat the details, the prophet said.
I felt at peace, and no longer doubted His existence.
In December 2002, in a Web site interview, I criticized al-Qaeda and declared that some of the Friday sermons were loathsome because of their attacks against non-Muslims. Within days, a fatwa was posted online, calling me an infidel and saying that I should be killed. Once again, I felt despair at the ways of the Muslim world. Two years later, I told al-Arabiya television that I thought God loves all faithful people of different religions. That earned me a fatwa from the mufti of Saudi Arabia declaring my infidelity.
But one evening not long after that, I heard a radio broadcast of the verse of light. Even though I had memorized the Koran at 15, I felt as though I was hearing this verse for the first time. God is light, it says, the universe is illuminated by His light. I felt the verse was speaking directly to me, sending me a message. This God of light, I thought, how could He be against any human? The God of light would not be happy to see people suffer, even if they had sinned and made mistakes along the way.
I had found my Islam. And I believe that others can find it, too. But first we need a Reformation similar to the Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther led against the Roman Catholic Church.
In the late 14th century, Islam had its own sort of Martin Luther. Ibn Taymiyya was an Islamic scholar from a hard-line Salafi sect who went through a spiritual crisis and came to believe that in time, God would close the gates of hell and grant all humans, regardless of their religion, entry to his everlasting paradise. Unlike Luther, however, Ibn Taymiyya never openly declared this revolutionary belief; he shared it only with a small, trusted circle of students.
Nevertheless, I find myself inspired by Luther’s courageous uprising. I see what Islam needs — a strong, charismatic personality who will lead us toward reform, and scholars who can convince Islamic communities of the need for a bold new interpretation of Islamic texts, to reconcile us with the wider world.
Mansour al-Nogaidan writes
for the Bahraini newspaper Al-Waqt
Sphere: Related ContentThe One Laptop Per Child initiative has reached new heights by delivering internet porn to third world children.
According to a report
Thursday from the official News Agency of Nigeria, laptops in a primary school in Abuja “have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials.â€
It’s heart warming to know that the efforts of the well meaning folks behind the OLPC project are delivering real results on the ground; providing the same opportunities for teenage boys to access internet porn no matter how impoverished they are or where they live.
The party however will be short lived; a representative of the One Laptop Per Child group was reported saying that the OLPC computers would now be fitted with porn filters
Sphere: Related ContentPRESIDENT BUSH has hinted more than once that he expects to leave to his successor the task of ending America’s military occupation of Iraq. His reasons for doing so may go beyond calculations about the time needed to establish security and a functioning government in Iraq, beyond a reluctance to enter history as a president who presided over the retreat from a lost war. Perhaps Bush senses that the change of direction required to cut the nation’s losses in Iraq would expose the flagrant misconceptions on which his conduct of the Iraq war was based.
If Bush were to accept the need to cut deals with Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia as part of the price of containing the chaos in Iraq, he would be conceding that his grandiose notions of bestowing democracy on a key Arab country by force were delusional.
Were a realistic exit strategy to be carried out on Bush’s watch, it would become apparent — while he was still in office — that instead of implanting democracy in Iraq and conferring security on the oil-rich Gulf region, he has wrought almost the exact opposite.
A pattern of disasters
Bush called for a humble foreign policy as a candidate. But he and his advisers — especially Vice President Dick Cheney — believed from the start that America was so much stronger than all possible competitors that it need not be constrained from acting unilaterally whenever it saw the need. Bush has broken with predecessors of both parties, who sought security in strong alliances, support for the United Nations, diplomatic engagement with dangerous rivals, and respect for international treaties. And when deciding on fateful policies, Bush has often disdained to take into account the cultural and historical conditions specific to key countries.
In practice, that attitude has resulted in one calamity after another: the breakout of Iranian influence, unnecessary tensions with Russia, Bush’s refusal to demand a quick halt to last summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah, US disavowal of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Kyoto protocol, and six years of declining to stem the tide of extremism by actively seeking to broker a peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians.
Clearly Iraq is Bush’s greatest failure. Whether the many-sided conflicts raging there are the inevitable consequence of the US invasion or whether they stem from incoherent post-invasion policies, the result is the same: Sunni Arabs and Shi’ites are slaughtering each other. Al Qaeda in Iraq, an affiliate of Osama bin Laden’s gang, is sending suicide bombers to blow up mosques and markets, police stations, and US vehicles. With jihadist partners, the group has declared an Islamic State of Iraq in the west of the country. Disparate Shi’ite militias, each with its own source of Iranian backing, are killing Sunnis and Americans and fighting each other for local dominance.
A more dangerous world
Bush will be leaving his successor a strategic situation, in a wide arc around Iraq, that is far more dangerous than the one he inherited. Iran and its ally of convenience, Syria, have their hands at the throat of Lebanon. Iran is projecting its power not only through Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon but also through its support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. As Tehran pursues a nuclear weapons capability, frightened Sunni Arab states are considering problematic options: to develop their own nuclear capabilities or to reach accommodations with an ascendant Iran.
Simultaneously, there has been an ominous decline in America’s reputation throughout much of the Muslim world and even in Europe. The horrors of Abu Ghraib, the rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that torture, the lack of legal protections for captives in Guantanamo: These and other panicky reactions to the threat of terrorism have made American preaching about the rule of law seem hypocritical. Bush has played into the hands of propagandists who portray America as hostile to all Muslims or a threat to world peace. The result is a loss of soft power, the good will that inclines foreign states and populations to give America the benefit of the doubt.
To cope with the strategic situation Bush will be leaving, his successor will have to disavow the false assumptions underlying many of his policies.
On one key issue, Bush himself has actually begun to show the way — by departing from Cheney’s obtuse refusal to negotiate with North Korea. Originally, Bush and Cheney disdained Bill Clinton’s 1994 deal with the North as appeasement. They criticized South Korea’s “sunshine policy” of reconciliation with the North, refused to negotiate, and included that despotic regime in a purely rhetorical “axis of evil.” And they watched as the North produced enough new plutonium for eight to 10 bombs.
The false hope of regime change
The lesson of North Korea should be that false premises produce failed policies. There never was any realistic prospect that regime change would annul the threat of nuclear weapons in the North. By the same token, regime change in Iraq — particularly when accompanied by an abhorrence of nation-building — could hardly establish a stable power balance in the Gulf region, the flourishing of democracy, the encirclement of Iran, or long-term security for oil supplies. And there is virtually no chance that regime change could be the way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
In Iraq and elsewhere, Bush’s successor will be called on to clean up a staggering mess. Above all, this will mean returning to the principles of US foreign policy as practiced by every other president since FDR. Particularly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bush and his advisers presumed that this hoary old approach was no longer relevant. But the record shows that Bush has not succeeded in rewriting the rules of statecraft. Proceeding from false premises, he came to false conclusions. His successor, whether a Democrat or a Republican, will need to revive the internationalist traditions of his predecessors to clean up the mess he is leaving behind.
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Sphere: Related ContentLloyd Axworthy is an embarrassment to Canada.
He was chased out of B. C. ( British Columbia).
He has no business being the President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Winnipeg.
One should use proper titles as a sign of respect.
Canadians are a very passive lot.
Check out our latest scandal ” The Sponsorship Scandal.”
Not one word that basically all the personalities involved are from Quebec or that the proceedings are being held almost entirely in
French.
Never mind Gay marriages.
Canadians are among stupidest people in the world.
Max Labovitch
New York Rangers
1943-44 numbers 9 & 17
Today these are the very qualities that are clearly evident among Al Quaeda members - whether in Queens University in Waterloo Canada or in Mc Master Univerity in Ontario Canada. Whether in hospital , in a prison in Virgina m or in a Court house in Florida it is all the same. Al Queada fighters have learned to conquer death . Indeed they say ” We shall win ultimately. The other side loves life more than we do.”
Ir must jump into the fire of the roughest tests and into the waves of fierce trials.
The training leadership with them the testing march and the sweat and the blood. The leadership must be like the motherly warmth of a hen whose chicks grow under the wings throughout the long period of hatching and training.
The vanguard has to abstain from cheap worldly pleasures and must bear its distinct stamp of abstinence and frugality.
In like manner it must be endowed with firm belief and trust in the ideology instilled with a lot of hope for its victory.
There must be a strong determination and insistence to continue the march.
Al Quaeda was uncompromisingly distinct from most other Islamist groups in history , it avowed position being “Islamic governments have never been and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils. They are to be established as they always have been by guns and pen , by word and bullet by tongue and teeth.” As progress in these domestic campaigns - from Saudi Arabia to Egypt and Algeria- was slow , a second front was intitiated by Al Qaeda to target the U.S.A. (United States) and its allies. Without directly challenging Western military power , economic strength and cultural influence, the Islamists perceive that they cannot bring about a change in their home countries , because a group of Western countries , led by the USA steadfastily supports Isreal and the unrpresentative Arab regimes of the Middle East
Sphere: Related ContentAt the end of the anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad , the perennially fragile political situation in the Middle and Far East facilitated and internationalization of Al Qaeda . Having thus defeated the “Evil Empire” of the “Godless Communists” and in their minds taking nothing but full credit for the downfall of Communism and the Berlin Wall, driven by great and greater Islamic zeal . most Arab and Asian Mujahadin ( greatest warriors of god) who returned home from the internationally supported Jihad in Afghanistan wanted greatly to continue to precipitate great radical , social and political changes . They joined opposition political parties, religious bodies in their own countries campaigning against dictatorial Muslims - whether it be Saudis’s , Iraqi’s or others. They drew great fire against corrupt or perceived corrupt regimes. The die was set. Jihad, jihad , Jihad.
Tratfor
Sphere: Related Content
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s interior minister also said he thinks police should be allowed to search private computers via the Internet
0n the wake of the failed car-bombings in London and Glasgow, Germany’s conservative top security official, Wolfgang Schauble, said his country should consider detaining potential terrorists and sanctioning the killing of terrorist leaders abroad, the International Herald-Tribune reported Thursday.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s interior minister also said he thinks police should be allowed to search private computers via the Internet.
The old categories no longer apply, Schauble told the magazine Der Spiegel. We have to clarify whether our constitutional state is sufficient for confronting the new threats.
Many critics are saying, however, Schauble is wrong to suggest the country should sacrifice so much personal freedom for the sake of protecting themselves against the possible threat of terrorism.
He would lead the country down a very dangerous path, said Reinhard Butikofer, co-chairman of the opposing Green Party. He is advising the exact opposite of what (British) Prime Minister Gordon Brown has demonstrated so admirably: a combination of determination and equanimity.
Tratfor Stratgic Intelligence
http://www.tratfor.com