http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_our_islamic.html
.All these new zealots were brought up in a traditional Muslim way by parents whose religious views were generally orthodox but not extremist. But in the 1980s, a new Muslim leadership of mullahs inspired and paid for by various Islamic powers around the world was entering the country and setting up bases in Britain, thanks to an immigration-law loophole that allows religious personnel open-ended permission to stay. Iranian money, Saudi money from worldwide foundations for the promotion of Islam, was establishing mosques and setting up madrasas, schools that purvey primitive religious instruction and teach the Quran by rote. Adolescents attracted to this new radical preaching, young people whose childhood religious observances had already set them apart from their British contemporaries, came under the domination of a stricter observance with the allure of an ideology. The new mullahs were offering a single-minded, luminously simple explanation of the cosmos and promising membership in an organization that would dominate the world. "We carry Islam as a political belief, a complete system," says Omar Bakri Muhammad, a poisonous cleric who runs a London Muslim organization. "We don't carry Islam as a religion. It's an ideology." If you prostrate yourself to an all-powerful and unfathomable being five times a day, if you are constantly told that you live in the world of Satan, if those around you are ignorant of and impervious to literature, art, historical debate, and all that nurtures the values of Western civilization, your mind becomes susceptible to fanaticism. Your mind rots. Worse, it can become the instrument of others who send you out on suicidal missions. Three years ago, the Yemeni police caught eight young men with plans and equipment to bomb British targets in that country: the offices, homes, and churches of the British diplomatic and expatriate community. Six of these young Muslims, all of Pakistani origin, held British passports. Three were from the Midlands, two from the North, and one from London, the stepson of a Muslim preacher in the Finsbury Park mosque. The Yemeni courts tried and convicted them of conspiracy to commit terrorism. Their cover stories were pathetic. They said they had gone to Yemen to learn Arabic: that's like going to Pakistan to learn English. The Foreign Office in London instructed the British diplomats in Yemen to extend their support to these citizens. One can imagine the conversation: "I say, old chap, you didn't really come here to blow me and my children up, did you? Ah well-we'd better see you safely back to old Blighty, hadn't we?" I set out to write about these adventurers at the time. Their wives or partners-young white women wearing headscarves and ankle-length skirts, like the Albanian peasants who beg on the London Underground-appealed on TV for the British government to secure their release. The men in Yemen denied that their aim was terrorism and begged for their freedom, alleging that the Yemeni police had tortured and sexually assaulted them. They, their lawyers, and their families claimed the protection of the British state; and Britain, accepting an obligation to them as British subjects, made representations on their behalf to the Yemeni government. Where did these young men, British by birth and schooling, develop the hatred that would take them to Islamic guerrilla training camps in Yemen and then on a mission to kill British diplomats and their families? Journalists traced the roots of their mission back to Finsbury Park in north London, to the mosque situated in a largely Turkish Cypriot area of the city and to a preacher called Abu Hamza, a one-eyed mullah with a claw, like Captain Hook's, for a right hand. I asked him where he had lost his hand. His reply was: "I didn't lose my hand; I gained it." I persisted, and he claimed that he had been a mujahid in Afghanistan and lost his hand in the fighting, though it seemed to me that its amputation was consistent with the premature explosion of a bomb. He boasted to me that he had sent young men to training camps. He would not say what they trained for or where, but his general contention was that, as Muslims, they must fight for the conversion of the world to Islam. The young men in Yemen were part of the worldwide jihad. He would not say which one of the professed worldwide campaigns he was part of. He seemed proud that his own stepson was involved in the murdering foray into Yemen and said that, if they had gone to destabilize the Yemeni government, he would not condemn their enterprise. I pointed out that Yemen was a Muslim country and that these British men and their Algerian co-conspirators were being tried under Islamic law. His contention was that any court that did not support the attack on Western interests in the Middle East was insufficiently Islamic.. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Take a look at donorschoose.org, an excellent charitable web site for anyone who cares about public education! http://us.click.yahoo.com/_OLuKD/8WnJAA/cUmLAA/TySplB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
