Posted on 07/26/2005 1:51:58 PM PDT by forty_years
What do Islamist terrorists want? The answer should be obvious, but it is not.
A generation ago, terrorists did make clear their wishes. Upon hijacking three airliners in September 1970, for example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine demanded, with success, the release of Arab terrorists imprisoned in Britain, Switzerland, and West Germany. Upon attacking the B'nai B'rith headquarters and two other Washington, D.C. buildings in 1977, a Hanafi Muslim group demanded the canceling of a feature movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God," $750 (as reimbursement for a fine), the turning over of the five men who had massacred the Hanafi leader's family, plus the killer of Malcolm X.
Such "non-negotiable demands" led to wrenching hostage dramas and attendant policy dilemmas. "We will never negotiate with terrorists," the policymakers declared "Give them Hawaii but get my husband back," pleaded the hostages' wives.
Those days are so remote and their terminology so forgotten that even President Bush now speaks of "non-negotiable demands" (in his case, concerning human dignity), forgetting the deadly origins of this phrase.
Most anti-Western terrorist attacks these days are perpetrated without demands being enunciated. Bombs go off, planes get hijacked and crashed into buildings, hotels collapse. The dead are counted. Detectives trace back the perpetrators' identities. Shadowy websites make post-hoc unauthenticated claims.
But the reasons for the violence go unexplained. Analysts, including myself, are left speculating about motives. These can relate to terrorists' personal grievances based in poverty, prejudice, or cultural alienation. Alternately, an intention to change international policy can be seen as a motive: pulling "a Madrid" and getting governments to withdraw their troops from Iraq; convincing Americans to leave Saudi Arabia; ending American support for Israel; pressuring New Delhi to cede control of all Kashmir.
Any of these motives could have contributed to the violence; as London's Daily Telegraph puts it, problems in Iraq and Afghanistan each added "a new pebble to the mountain of grievances that militant fanatics have erected." Yet neither is decisive to giving up one's life for the sake of killing others.
In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and Islamic law, the Shari'a. Or, again to cite the Daily Telegraph, their "real project is the extension of the Islamic territory across the globe, and the establishment of a worldwide ‘caliphate' founded on Shari'a law."
Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming the "caliphate or death." A biography of one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam declares that his life "revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah's Rule on earth" and restoring the caliphate.
Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that "the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan." His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, "history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government." Another Al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that has declared "Due to the blessings of jihad, America's countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon," to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.
Or, as Mohammed Bouyeri wrote in the note he attached to the corpse of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker he had just assassinated, "Islam will be victorious through the blood of martyrs who spread its light in every dark corner of this earth."
Interestingly, van Gogh's murderer was frustrated by the mistaken motives attributed to him, insisting at his trial: "I did what I did purely out of my beliefs. I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted."
Although terrorists state their jihadi motives loudly and clearly, Westerners and Muslims alike too often fail to hear them. Islamic organizations, Canadian author Irshad Manji observes, pretend that "Islam is an innocent bystander in today's terrorism."
What the terrorists want is abundantly clear. It requires monumental denial not to acknowledge it, but we Westerners have risen to the challenge.
http://netwmd.com/articles/article1093.html
Al Qaeda
1993 World Trade Center bombing
1993 plots against Holland Tunnel, Empire State Building, UN headquarters
Dec. 1994 attempt to plunge airliner into Eiffel Tower
Mid-1990s plot to bomb CIA headquarters
December 1999 plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport
October 2000 bombing of USS Cole
September 2001 plot to crash aircraft into U.S. Capitol and White House
They want the world to live under the law of allah or die.
World domination. Anyone who doesn't get that must be answering the PEW polls.
And so try and explain that we are indeed at war with a nation, a nation whose rule of law is a theocracy by nature.
Can a free nation be at war with a theocratic government and not face the condemnations of prejudice?
The answer is distressingly simple. They want our souls.
I dont think they really want anything, They get off on the power to frighten and commit heinous acts.
They are people with small minds who think their act will bring them some sort of fame.
Their leaders get off on knowing that their followers are stupid enough to do their bidding.
Who cares what they want? Just kill 'em.
A very dangerous misperception, I think. Don't be fooled by what we (Americans) would perceive as a personal "power trip" without a larger motive. Yes, it's a lust for power, but there is a large segment of the "jihadist" community that truly has the destruction of America and the institution of Islam worldwide as its open goal.
I thought it was all about virgins in the afterlife.
If we surrendered like the scumbag dems want and got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, they would soon want Israel gone. Then, they'd want Spain back and independent states in France and Germany. Current Muslim nations would convert to fundamentalism. Then, they'd want, maybe, Kansas. And, in Europe and the Americas, women would have to comply with their silly rules. All the while, we'd have triator dems saying, "If we don't make them mad, maybe, they'll go away." And, they on;y thing that would stop Muslim world domination would be a Muslim civil war over whether Mohammed boinked dogs or camels.
What the terrorists want is abundantly clear. It requires monumental denial not to acknowledge it, but we Westerners have risen to the challenge.
As long as mainstream society thinks that if they just redress the right grievance, everything will be all right, we will continue to be attacked.
This is all that needs to be said:
As Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Shot during that "occupation" was none other than the man who rose to become a hero of the DC underclass, everybody's favorite cocaine vacuum: Marion Barry.
Marion Barry, taking coke off the street, one gram at a time.
Marion Barry, sacrificing his own nose that others might live.
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