Posted on 09/14/2001 1:09:48 PM PDT by knak
what do these people beleive?
Well, not exactly.
Whereas Muslims believe that God sent a later prophet named Mohammed who received the Quoran throught the angel Gabriel, LDS (Mormons) believe that God sent a later prophet, Joseph Smith, who dug up "golden plates" which were buried in a hill in Palmyra, New York as he was directed by the angel Moroni. Those plates, which according to Joseph Smith were written in "ancient Egyptian," were translated by Smith, using magical spectacles, into what was the original Book of Mormon. While the Muslims believe that Muhammad was the last prophet to be sent by God, the Mormons believe in a long succession of prophets, including the head of their church today, who claims to receive direct revelation from God.
You do not want a version filtered through some nutcases mind.
Buy a copy of the Koran and read it yourself.
You may have to force yourself, it is like a bad comic book, for mental retards.
For low IQs, boring and repetitious.
So I should not discuss beliefs while riding in the taxi? I should be afraid?
When you get back to Iran, tell them that there is about to be a new definition of "peril".
Tell them to find a deep, deep hole to hide in. For a long time.
I saw the purity of the faith Tuesday, and just between us, I was not impressed.
And lest you feel tempted to say those were isolated nutcases, I will be happy to post quotes from clerics that will curl people's hair.
Purity of their faith my...
Think about it. What counts is what they do, not what they say, nor what propaganda company they can hire.
Was Sister Teresa Muslim? Do you think that's an accident? Can you think of any Muslim anything even close?
That's not what I tried to say at all. One, these are not isolated cases. Two, these guys are cold, calculating, and diabolical. Calling them "nutcases" denotes some mental defect. On the contrary, these agents of terror have keen intellects and sharp minds to be able to carry out such a diabolical plot virtually undetected and with precision timing. That is why I said we should not underestimate them (as mental midgets). They are devoted. They have clearly defined goals. And they intend to purify the world for the one world government that they believe will come about as the result of their martyrdom under the One True Religion, as they call it.
They want a united islamic world that does not fight within, but only without. They want "domestic" matters within islamic countries to follow a law code, the "shariah", that is essentially unchanged from medieval times and largely based on past rulings of islamic judges ("qadis"). They have the fantasy that if everyone who professes to be muslim agreed with them, no muslim would ever fight another, but all would fight outsiders. They have essentially made their own narrow ideas of islamic orthodoxy into a sort of modern "movement" ideology. At the root, the primary thing motivating them is not piety at all, but an imported notion of "authenticity". They get their sense of identify from negating everything foreign, modern, western, secular.
In the case of Laden, he was radicalized during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. He was already a wealthy man from construction and government contracting work in Saudi Arabia. During the 1980s, the Saudis and the rest of the gulf states helped fund the Afghan resistence against the soviets. Pakistani intelligence ran some of the resistence factions, and Iranian intelligence ran others. US aid was funneled in too, mostly through the Pakistanis. The Saudis (et al) provided funding, the US provided intel and weapons, the Pakistanis provided bases, direct logistics, and command and control. Laden got involved in distributing some of the funds coming from the gulf. This made him a power in the whole network created to run the war. He had his agents in the Afghan refugee camps just over the border in Pakistan, worked with some elements of Pakistani intelligence, with several factions in Afghanistan itself, and occasionally cooperated with Iranian-backed factions.
The sense he had from all of that was of the different islamic factions played off against each other by foreign paymasters, both east and west. He decided that islamic identity was the only trustworthy "litmus test", that islamic unity was what the locals needed, while learning cynicism about everything else. He came to see the Saudis as US dupes. The soviets he saw as unspeakably cruel atheist invaders.
Then in 1989, the US made the deal that led to withdrawl of soviet forces from Afghanistan. Part of the deal was that the US cut off further funding to all factions of the Afghan rebels. The soviets pulled out their own troops, but continued to fund their proxies inside the country. The result was civil war. Laden and those like him viewed this as a sell-out by the US. Having achieved our anti-soviet purposes, he sees the US as having left the country to Russian client communists and to civil war trying to oust them. Graditude for the help given, let alone understanding of the limits on what the US could do, or the usefulness of the withdrawl deal, were not among his impressions.
In the resulting civil war, there were factions backed by the Russians, the Iranians, the Pakistanis, several local ones fighting for particular ethnic groups, etc. Several attempts at unity governments failed. Around the same time, the US went into Saudi to help evict Iraq from Kuwait. Laden and company saw this as confirmation of the Saudi role as western dupes. They were particularly incensed about US troops on Saudi soil because the Saudis are the custodians of Mecca, the site of the Haj pilgrimage all muslims are supposed to make at least once in their life. From Laden's perspective, from islam being a once unified civilization, its country of origin had come to be an occupied area, as this and that group favored this or that interest, policy, or set of outsiders.
He moved to opposing the Saudi government and calling for its overthrow, and replacement by an islamic regime along the lines of the one in Iran (a few differences, but that is not misleading). The Saudis exiled him from the country, although he still has a following there.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan the Taliban movement arose, trying to end the civil war. It largely followed his own ideas - that islamic unity was the only way to freeze out foreign influences and thus re-unify the country, or to avoid being divided and conquered. However, unlike Laden, the Taliban were not explicitly expansionist. They wanted their way for Afghanistan. They received wide popular support based on the belief that they could put an end to the civil war and no one else could. They won the civil war over most of the country in a few years. The Pakistanis backed their rise, as the likely winning horse, to keep their own influence and freeze out the Iranians and Russians. Only one of the many rival factions remains a force against the Taliban - the northern alliance, which was part of the anti-soviet resistence, and also based on a different ethnic group than the majority in the south ansd southwest of the country.
Laden, meanwhile, was aggressively exporting his notion of islamic identify as anti-western, anti-modern, as the means to avoid foreign politiking and in his dreams, to re-unite the muslim world. His main goals in this respect are internal, not external - but external policy is his appeal, his means of recruitment. That is, he vies for popularity within the islamic world. His rivals are the various governments of muslim countries, especially the more moderate, pro-western, or even somewhat secular ones. His "selling point" in that rivalry is that he will stand up to the west and the "first world" generally; that all muslims should direct all hostility and political action outward; that this supposedly will prevent divisions within the muslim world and establish shariah law as a basis of domestic "justice".
His acts of terrorism against the west are -not- designed to change western policy - although in the longer term he does want all non-islamic countries completely out of any region of the world muslims live in, and all muslim governments that do not agree with his own brand of external hostility and internal fanaticism overthrown as well. They are not even meant to terrorize the west in the usual sense in which terrorist seek to do so. They are primarily meant for "home" consumption, as acts of defiance and war, to show he and those like him are the ones who will really fight "ferreigners" (he'd say "the infidels"). They are meant to show by contrast that all other governments of islamic countries are western lackies.
Incidentally, the Baath party of Syria and Iraq had similar ideas decades earlier, but restricted to Arab nationalism (one nation, those who speak Arabic languages - roughly from Morocco to Iraq, excepting Turkey) rather than Islamic identify (the whole religion, which is much larger than just the Arab-speaking nation - including Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, the southern Republics of the former USSR, etc).
Both are jingoistic, "authenticity"-kick forms of internally cohesive and repressive politics, based on being more strident than the next guy about hating foreign influences. Ideologically, the precusors of these movements do not lie within Islamic thought, and the backers of them often have a remarkably shallow and crude understanding of their own traditions. Instead, the precursors come from 1920s and 1930s Europe. The same sort of resentment of foreign policy impotence that fueled extremism in Weimar Germany has been present in many parts of the muslim world, uninterrupted, since that time. The same subjects - the evil of a decadent capitalist west, its moral equivalence with materialist and atheist communism, anti-semitism - are exploited in these people's propaganda. The same millenial claims of reviving long dead empires a thousand years old, romanticising what those originally were, etc
They are no more the essence of islam, than nazism was the essence of Christianity because a hooked cross was its symbol. They wave around their claim to islamic authenticity like a flag, but would not know mercy or compassion if it bit them.
Incidentally, there are islamic fundamentalists in a proper sense of that term who are not of this stripe, do want shariah law domestically but are not "unify by killing the outsiders" thugs, and are rather more learned about their own history and laws. Shariah law has legal status in Pakistan, without these ideas governing that country. In other words, just being traditionalist or in favor of established religion, is not equivalent to the Laden brand of "movement", ideologized "islam".
I hope this helps somewhat. If you have questions about the sort of thing they think, I'll be happy to elaborate. Please keep in mind that denunciation is not understanding and helps not a wit. Do not take anything I've said above as condoning anything these extremists say or do. As I think I have made clear, I have a very low opinion of them. But one can understand why a movement exists, what instincts it appeals to, without in the least condoning it.
Well, you can start by seeing what several of them said themselves. That's always a good place.
The web page for this below is at --
http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm
23 February 1998
Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin
Ayman al-Zawahiri, amir of the Jihad Group in Egypt
Abu-Yasir Rifa'i Ahmad Taha, Egyptian Islamic Group
Shaykh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan
Fazlul Rahman, amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh
Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.
The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter.
No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life."First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
On that basis, and in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it [EMPHASIS ADDED], in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
This is in addition to the words of Almighty God: "And why should ye not fight in the cause of God and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? -- women and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"
We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.
Almighty God said: "O ye who believe, give your response to God and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that God cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."
Almighty God also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For God hath power over all things."
Almighty God also says: "So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith."
How's that for a "starter"?
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