Al-Qaeda founder launches fierce attack on Osama bin Laden

Telegraph.co.uk ^ | 20 Feb 2009 | David Blair in Cairo

[YellowRoseofTx]

One of al-Qaeda's founding leaders, Dr Fadl, has begun an ideological revolt against Osama bin Laden, blaming him for "every drop" of blood spilt in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif: The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive, he writes

[YellowRoseofTx]

I did a search for this title and didn't find anything. Sorry if it was already posted under another title.

[keepitreal]

The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive, he writes. "Ramming America has become the shortest road to fame and leadership among the Arabs and Muslims. But what good is it if you destroy one of your enemy's buildings, and he destroys one of your countries? What good is it if you kill one of his people, and he kills a thousand of yours?" asks Dr Fadl. "That, in short, is my evaluation of 9/11."

Seems the Cowboy George Bush was onto something.

[Lorianne]

The terrorist attacks on September 11 were both immoral and counterproductive .... Ya think so do you? What? Is your counterproductive @ss on the line now?

[lightman]

Yup, they finally got the memo.

Too bad we didn’t...or rejected it.

[Buckhead]

Dr. Fadl’s conversion and his criticisms of Al Qaeda were extensively discussed in The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. It is an outstanding book. Fadl’s critique is very significant in the war of ideas within Islam.

[End Times Sentinel]

He is equally unsparing about Muslims who move to the West and then take up terrorism. "If they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum," writes Dr Fadl, then it is "not honourable" to "betray them, through killing and destruction".

[snip] The criticisms have emerged from Dr Fadl's cell in Tora prison in southern Cairo, where a sand-coloured perimeter wall is lined with watchtowers, each holding a sentry wielding a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Torture inside Egyptian jails is "widespread and systematic", according to Amnesty International.

See, I toldja torture worked.

[johnnycap]

Finally. I guess better late than never but I believe there is a God and God will be especially just to those Muslims who stood silent while nearly 3000 (not one), Americans were forced to either jump from burning towers, crushed by tons of debris or pulverized in the seats of flying missiles. That silence is unforgivable.

[Buckhead]

I was mistaken. Lawrence Wright covered Fadl’s criticism in a lengthy but and fascinating article in the New Yorker on June 2, 2008.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all

Well worth the read.

[He who knoweth not his name]

Why don`t you try a straight on fight with our military instead of attacking civilians......YEA, I thought so. As a friend of mine often says..”Don`t be so g*& d^%$# STUPID!”

COWARDS!!!!!

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

OBL also messed up AQ’s secret Satan program.

[SoldierDad]

This should be tatooed onto the foreheads of every liberal detractor who bashed President Bush for the past 6 or 7 years.

[Eagles6]

Interesting.

[4woodenboats]

yippee ky ya ;~)

[piytar]

Wow, too much to say. This is proof of the jihadists’ stupidity. After being slaughtered wholesale by the US military for years, one of their leaders finally reacts in a rational fashion just when a weak willed jihadi symp (Zero) starts running our foreign affairs. Just goes to show Americans don’t have a monopoly on strategic ignorance, Thank God.

[donna]

So, will Dr Fadl now be meeting with President Barack Hussein Obama to plan America’s surrender to this new peaceful Al Qaeda ?

[dixjea]

Thank you for posting the link. That was a very interesting article.

[4woodenboats]

Dr. Fadl’s revisions and Zawahiri’s response show that the movement is disintegrating,” Karam Zuhdy, the Islamic Group leader, told me one afternoon, in his modest apartment in Alexandria. He is a striking figure, fifty-six years old, with blond hair and black eyebrows. His daughter, who is four, wrapped herself around his leg as an old black-and-white Egyptian movie played silently on a television. Such movies provide a glimpse of a more tolerant and hopeful time, before Egypt took its dark turn into revolution and Islamist violence. I asked Zuhdy how his country might have been different if he and his colleagues had never chosen the bloody path. “It would have been a lot better now,” he admitted. “Our opting for violence encouraged Al Jihad to emerge.” He even suggested that, had the Islamists not murdered Sadat thirty years ago, there would be peace today between the Palestinians and the Israelis. He quoted the Prophet Muhammad: “Only what benefits people stays on the earth.”

“It’s very easy to start violence,” Zuhdy said. “Peace is much more difficult.” ♦

It sure is thought provoking how the paths of a few can massively disrupt those of a billion or so others. The take on the effect of Sadat's murder is one I hadn't heard, along with all of Fadl's reflections.

I don't know if you keep a ping list or run into many articles like this, but if there are any follow up or similar articles, I'd sure like to see 'em.

[Buckhead]

Well, Lawrence Wright’s book “The Looming Tower” is really an outstanding intellectual and personal history of Al Qaeda. It gives bios of the leading figures in the formation of Al Qaeda, and their intellectual journey to radicalism. The Muslim Brotherhood, al Quttub (sp?), Dr. Fadl and others figure prominently in this story.

As great a work as it is, I take issue with Lawrence Wright and others who assert that the emergence of violent jihad and the doctrine of takfir in the 20th century is a new development and new perversion of Islam. In rebuttal I would cite Andrew G. Bostom’s encyclopedic work The Legacy of Jihad, which traces the intellectual and physical history of violent jihad ideology from the the life of Mohammed through the Koran, the Hadith, and all the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Violent jihad has rich and fulsome support in each of these sources of Islamic doctrinal authority, and has been manifested more or less continuously throughout the history of Islam. In this sense, there is nothing particularly new about the ideas articulated by the “philosophers” of Al Qaeda. Thus, Lawrence Wright fails to put Al Qaeda in its proper historical context in the history of jihad.

To me, the takeaway is that while the recantation of violent jihad by Fadl and others is welcome news and will be quite helpful, it is really just part of the ebb and flow seen through the history of jihad. In any case, Fadl’s primary criticism of Osama and Zawahiri seems to be that they are losing and not winning, and that it is impolite and ungrateful to slaughter innocent civilians while a guest of a foreign country. This practical failure rises to the level of a doctrinal failure given that Islamic doctrine is in part a field manual for violent conquest.

Best regards,

[4woodenboats]

Thanks Buckhead