Posted on 05/12/2003 12:15:00 AM PDT by miltonim
What Drove 2 Britons to Bomb a Club in Tel Aviv?
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But the radicalization of the well-educated, thoroughly Westernized Mr. Sharif, 27 — the forces that led him from Derby to Tel Aviv, where he is wanted on charges of helping to carry out a suicide bombing in a beachfront nightclub on April 30 — make a certain sense to the younger, second-generation immigrants born and raised here. Mr. Sharif was angry, they say, for reasons that would be all too understandable to Muslims everywhere.
"In a way, I sympathize," said Mohammed Zahid, 23, ... "When you see what's happening in Israel, something comes into your mind, something just goes."
... As Sarfraz Bashir, 31, a college graduate in between computer jobs who was helping out at the Jamia Mosque on Rose Hill Street, put it: "In the U.K., you can have a proper job and a proper education. We have everything here — why ruin it?"
Along with another Briton, Asif Mohammed Hanif, 21, Mr. Sharif is said to have entered Israel as a tourist, via Jordan, using his British passport. There, the two checked into a hotel, donned explosive belts and made their way to Mike's Place, a jazz club next to the United States Embassy.
Mr. Hanif's explosives detonated, killing him and three others and injuring at least 50 more, the authorities say; Mr. Sharif's explosives failed to go off and he managed to slip away. He and Mr. Hanif now enjoy the dubious notoriety of being the first British suicide bombers to strike within Israel.
Mr. Sharif's wife, sister and brother are under arrest in London, charged under antiterrorism legislation with failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism.
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"Some people take Islam deeper than others," said a young man on Normanton Road....
"Killing people is wrong, obviously, but if he was doing it for God himself — then fair enough," said the man, checking his cellphone for the time, so he could get to the bank before it closed. "You have to be pretty brave to do something like that, to hold a bomb in your hand and blow yourself up."
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"What he's done is very good, and they won't ever find him," said Basu Hussain, 18, taking a break from his job at Lick'n Chick'n, a fast-food outlet. "We should all get together and kill all the Jews."
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...said Hamida Akhtar, 54, who lives down the street on Breedon Hill Road and was a close friend of Mrs. Sharif. "They were very respectable and nice," she said.
The family emphasized education for their children, and Omar, the youngest, was perhaps particularly privileged. ...
At 18, he enrolled in college in London, and came back transformed. He wore a beard and clothes that identified him as a religious Muslim. He prayed five times a day.
"He used to be dressed like this," Ms. Akhtar said, pointing to her husband, Mohammed, who was wearing a suit and tie. "Suddenly, he was changed." He had a new wife, too, named Tahira Tabassum, who wore a traditional Islamic head scarf.
In recent years, too, Mr. Sharif began spending more time with the local representatives of Al Muhajiroun, a group based at the Finsbury Park mosque in London that has several regional offices around Britain. ...
... The group... has spoken very differently in the past, encouraging Britons to go to Afghanistan to fight on behalf of the Taliban, for example.
In 2000, it held a rally through the streets of Normanton, with placards urging the killing of Jews.
Last year, it sponsored a celebratory conference marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11 bombings; a fading notice advertising the event, with a picture of the burning twin towers and the words "a towering day in history," is still stuck to a post outside the Rose Hill Street mosque.
The Finsbury Park mosque, Al Muhajiroun's London base, is well known as a center for espousing anti-Western ideas. Among those who have passed through its doors are Richard C. Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, convicted in the United States of trying to carry out a suicide attack on a plane in 2001.
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"The literature they put out is embarrassing for mature members of the community, people who have more understanding," said Fareed Hussain, a member of the Derby City Council. "Not only do they they put out propaganda against Jewish people, but also against Indian people, Sikhs and Hindus."
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"We're extremely worried about young people being susceptible to their message," Shokat Lal, general secretary of the Pakistani Community Center, said of Al Muhajiroun. "The people in these groups present themselves as positive role models — they make you want to participate and be part of something."
Mr. Lal said young men across Britain were at risk. "Muslim, and particularly Pakistani, youth at the moment seem to fall within two categories," he said. "Either they join a fundamentalist group, as Sharif did, or they get involved in drugs and crime."
One young Derby Muslim who admires what Mr. Sharif is said to have done is Shaban Yasin, 17. He works at a halal fish, chips and kebab shop that caters to all manner of multiethnic culinary tastes. Suicide bombing, he said, is the "wrong way" to kill the Jews, adding that, "We should find out the best way to kill them, and do that."
Mr. Yasin grew up in Derby, too, and said that his parents, immigrants from Pakistan who settled here happily, had retired and were "living it large" on their British pensions. But, he said, he considers himself a Muslim first and foremost.
If he were to blow himself up for the cause, he said, "I think my parents would be proud of me."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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| Bombing suspects Omar Khan Sharif, left, and Asif Mohammed Hanif. |
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| Notices about a celebration last year marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York remain on poles outside a mosque in Derby, England. The event was sponsored an anti-Western group, Al Muhajiroun. |
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| Basu Hussain, far right, and Shaban Yasin, second from the left, praised suicide bombings in Israel. With them were Mohammed Rashid, far left, and Imran Waseem, second from right |
So if I walked into a mosque and detonated myself, killing 30 Muslims at prayertime, that would be a "brave" act? I don't think so.
They may be residents or citizens of that unfortunate land, but they surely are not "Britons".
The story makes it very clear that first and foremost, they are both anti-Jewish Moslem terrorists.
Well they do not see what is going on in Israel, they get the Bagdad Bob Media version of events from their Imam. So they buy a ticket to Israel, strap on a bomb and kill some Jews all based on what they HEAR not what they SEE. Sad, and stupid. But people who blow themselves up instead of throwing the belt are not quite bright to start with.
Yes, the Media has blood on its hands, a lot of it.
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