In other words, al-Qaida should not have survived the 16 years since 9/11.

So why has it?
 

The ties that bind

A fighter from the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front holds his group flag in front of the governor building in Idlib province, north Syria. Twitter/via AP

Much of the credit goes to al-Qaida’s extraordinary ability to both form alliances and sustain them over time and under pressure.

In my forthcoming book “Alliances for Terror,” I examine why a small number of groups, such as al-Qaida and IS, emerge as desirable partners and succeed at developing alliance networks.

Understanding terrorist alliances is critical because terrorist organizations with allies are more lethal, survive longer and are more apt to seek weapons of mass destruction. Though terrorist partnerships face numerous hurdles and severing al-Qaida’s alliances has been a U.S. objective for over a decade, the fact is that these counterterrorism efforts have failed.

It was allies that enabled al-Qaida to survive the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The Afghan Taliban stood by al-Qaida after the attack, refusing to surrender bin Laden and thereby precipitating the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Fleeing, al-Qaida was able to turn to allies in Pakistan to hide its operatives and punish the Pakistani government for capitulating to U.S. pressure to crackdown on the group.

It was alliances that helped al-Qaida continue to terrorize. In October 2002, for example, al-Qaida’s ally in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah, struck a bar and a nightclub in Bali, killing more than 200 and injuring more than 200 more, to brutally commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11.

And it was alliances that allowed al-Qaida to project viability. With the “prestige” that came with conducting 9/11, al-Qaida was able to forge more of them and indeed create affiliate alliances in which partners adopted its name and pledged allegiance to bin Laden.

Al-Qaida’s first and most notorious affiliate alliance, al-Qaida in Iraq, was formed in 2004 with Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Using the standing he accrued through his role in the insurgency in Iraq, Zarqawi then helped al-Qaida acquire its second affiliate in 2006, al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. Then, in 2009, al-Qaida designated its branch in Yemen and Saudi Arabia as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Its alliances spanned the Middle East and helped it to project power, despite the U.S. war on terrorism.
 

A lower profile

While al-Qaida still sought affiliates, by 2010, it modified how its alliances work.

Al-Qaida forged an alliance with al-Shabaab in Somalia, but did not publicly announce it or ask al-Shabaab to change its name. Bin Laden justified to al-Shabaab’s leader the shift to a less visible form of alliance as a way to prevent an increase in counterterrorism pressure or a loss of funds from the Arabian Peninsula. He privately expressed concerns that al-Qaida’s name “reduces the feeling of Muslims that we belong to them, and allows the enemies to claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.” Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, saw the move as bin Laden capitulating to members of al-Qaida who worried about “inflating the size and the growth of al-Qaida.” After bin Laden’s death, Zawahiri publicly announced al-Qaida’s alliance with al-Shabaab, though al-Shabaab still did not adopt al-Qaida’s name.

Though al-Qaida’s alliance arrangements have varied, these relationships have helped it to survive the loss of its founding leader in 2011 and the ascent of a far less capable leader. Zawahiri’s rise to the helm of the group was the consequence of an alliance, specifically between his original Egyptian group, al-Jihad, and al-Qaida. The alliance culminated in a merger in 2001, with Zawahiri becoming bin Laden’s deputy and successor.

However, Zawahiri lacks bin Laden’s cachet or diplomatic savvy. He is a better deputy than a leader. His poor handling of the strife between jihadist group al-Nusra in Syria and its parent organization, the Islamic State in Iraq (previously al-Qaida in Iraq and now IS), led to the alliance rupture between al-Qaida and its affiliate in Iraq.

Though al-Qaida had an acrimonious break with IS, it gained al-Nusra as an affiliate in the central conflict in the Sunni jihadist movement: Syria. As was the case with al-Shabaab, this alliance with al-Nusra did not include a rebranding and was initially kept secret. In addition, al-Nusra subsequently changed its name, an effort to gain more legitimacy within the conflict in Syria by publicly distancing itself from al-Qaida, though seemingly with al-Qaida’s consent.

Al-Qaida has not acquired another affiliate since the alliance rupture and rise of IS as a rival in 2014. It organized existing members into a new branch, al-Qaida in the Indian subcontinent, that year. The branch in South Asia reflected al-Qaida’s success at expanding beyond its predominantly Arab base, particularly in Pakistan.

Critically, with the exception of IS, al-Qaida’s alliances have been resilient over time. This is true despite ample reasons for its partners to abandon ties, such as the heightened counterterrorism pressure that comes with affiliation to al-Qaida; the death of its charismatic leader; and the Islamic State’s efforts to court al-Qaida allies. Even the Afghan Taliban remains unwilling to sever ties, even though doing so would eliminate one of the major reasons that the United States will not withdraw from the “forever war” in Afghanistan.

There is a window now for the U.S. to damage al-Qaida’s alliances: It has a weak leader and major rival. But that window may be closing as the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate crumbles and al-Qaida grooms bin Laden’s son as its future leader.
 

Tricia Bacon, Assistant Professor of Justice, Law & Criminology, American University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Thousands of people have visited the memorial site, conspiracy theories continue to proliferate and for many the sense of loss is still visceral. After 15 years, the terrorist attack that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York continues to capture the imagination.

Over these 15 years, a diverse range of artistic and cultural responses have attempted to understand and give meaning to the events now known as 9/11. One medium that has had substantial critical attention has been the novel. And we can learn much from this attention. The ways in which these novels were anticipated, criticised and frequently linked to debates about the wider role of fiction in society evoke compelling questions about how we now see the attacks.

In some ways, the high profile critical debates that surrounded these novels and placed so much importance on them, actually reinforced George W Bush’s assertion that “on September 11 night fell on a new world”. And in doing so, some argue that they undercut the complex prehistories and aftermaths of 9/11, giving it inflated importance in the world narrative.

Writing terror

Even before there were such novels, the apparent need for literary interpretations of the attacks reflected just how incomprehensible they felt for many. And perhaps because 9/11 was such a visual spectacle, newspapers and magazines sought literary authors – experts at exploring the human condition through the written word – to interpret or narrate the trauma.

Early essays by Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis and John Updike spoke to other popular non-fiction responses, like the New York Times’ sombre Portraits of Grief profiles that appeared throughout the autumn of 2001. These literary authors also reflected on the difficulty of writing fiction about “unimaginable” events. This, of course, stoked anticipation for the inevitable 9/11 fiction to come: how would authors attempt to represent the “incomprehensible”?

Twin tower to twin couple.

When novels from DeLillo, Claire Messud, Jay McInerney and Ken Kalfus arrived, critics were quick to note striking similarities. These novels, all of which appeared between 2006 and 2007, focused on the ways privileged white New Yorkers dealt with trauma. And all of them did so through marriage or relationship narratives.

Discussing these novels in an article titled The End of Innocence, Pankaj Mishra asked with incredulity: “Are we meant to think of marital discord as a metaphor for post-9/11 America?” For Mishra, it was particularly galling that DeLillo – who has been so insightful about terrorism – was “retreating like McInerney and Kalfus into the domestic”.

Scholarly articles by Richard Gray and Michael Rothberg followed, similarly criticising those same novels for their “failure” to engage with otherness and the geopolitics of 9/11. Gray was trenchant: “The crisis is in every sense of the word, domesticated.”

Mishra, Gray and Rothberg all felt that fiction should be doing things that the mainstream media and US government responses were not – offering nuanced articulations of the geopolitics of the war on terror and the rise of fear and xenophobia in the US and the West.

But this position was challenged by scholars such as John Duvall and Robert P Marzec, who pointed to canonical novels like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), which registered the traumas of World War I precisely in this way – through domestic settings. Perhaps the strongest response came from Catherine Morley, who criticised the Mishra, Rothberg and Gray perspective that “fiction is no more than a political tool”.

Clearly, the debate about the 9/11 novel evoked larger ideas about what fiction is for and how it should deal with crisis or catastrophe in the 21st century.

A defining moment?

However polarised the debate became, both sides ascribed great importance to the 9/11 novel – and in doing so they also reinforced the idea of 9/11 as a defining moment. In 2008, this was pointed out by Zadie Smith. Discussing a new novel by Joseph O’Neill, Smith sardonically criticised the disproportionate interest in the 9/11 novel:

It’s the post–September 11 novel we hoped for. (Were there calls, in 1915, for the Lusitania novel? In 1985, was the Bhopal novel keenly anticipated?) It’s as if, by an act of collective prayer, we have willed it into existence.

The reference here to the Lusitania sinking and the Bhopal chemical disaster in India, which took the lives of many more people than 9/11 did, is pointed. Smith is clearly voicing a suspicion that the intense attention attached to the 9/11 novel is linked to an American exceptionalism that shrouds other moments, events and perspectives in contemporary history.

Recent books like Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, O’Neill’s Netherland and Amy Waldman’s The Submission have answered the calls of Mishra, Gray and Rothberg in their more politically engaged or international narratives.

In many ways, they have also retained aspects of the earlier texts and we can certainly now see the 9/11 novel as a genre. Marriages and relationships are at the centre of all of these novels and they also continue to explore the way privileged Americans absorb and respond to trauma.

Perhaps the book that most clearly aligns with Zadie Smith’s position, though, is Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Bleeding Edge goes the furthest in challenging the singular importance attached to 9/11 in its intertwined historical narrative, weaving in the significance of the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and a history of the internet’s transition from an anarchic to a completely corporate space.

It is certainly the case that the reception and debates around the 9/11 novel have been as informative as the novels themselves. The genre continues to provide food for thought on how we remember the attacks.

(Arin Keeble is Lecturer in English Literature, Nottingham Trent University)

This article was first published on The Conversation

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In the western world, few will mourn Osama bin Laden but god forbid that anyone should gloat

Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, Lest the Lord see [it], and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.”

This is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible (Proverbs 24:17-18), and indeed in the Hebrew language. It is beautiful in other languages too though no translation comes close to the beauty of the original.

Of course, it is natural to be glad when one’s enemy is defeated, and the thirst for revenge is a human trait. But gloating – schadenfreude – is something different altogether. An ugly thing.

Ancient Hebrew legend has it that god got very angry when the children of Israel rejoiced as their Egyptian pursuers drowned in the Red Sea. “My creatures are drowning in the sea,” god admonished them, “And you are singing?”

These thoughts crossed my mind when I saw the TV shots of jubilant crowds of young Americans shouting and dancing in the street. Natural, but unseemly. The contorted faces and the aggressive body language were no different from those of crowds in Sudan or Somalia. The ugly sides of human nature seem to be the same everywhere.

The rejoicing may be premature. Most probably, al-Qaeda did not die with Osama bin Laden. The effect may be entirely different.

In 1942 the British killed Avraham Stern, whom they called a terrorist. Stern, whose nom de guerre was Yair, was hiding in a cupboard in an apartment in Tel Aviv. In his case too, it was the movements of his courier that gave him away. After making sure that he was the right man, the British police officer in command shot him dead. That was not the end of his group – rather, a new beginning. It became the bane of British rule in Palestine. Known as the “Stern Gang” (its real name was “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”), it carried out the most daring attacks on British installations and played a significant role in persuading the colonial power to leave the country.

Hamas did not die when the Israeli air force killed Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the paralysed founder, ideologue and symbol of Hamas. As a martyr, he was far more effective than as a living leader. His martyrdom attracted many new fighters to the cause. Killing a person does not kill an idea. The Christians even took the cross as their symbol.

What was the idea that turned Osama bin Laden into a world figure?

He preached the restoration of the caliphate of the early Muslim centuries, which was not only a huge empire but also a centre of the sciences and the arts, poetry and literature when Europe was still a barbaric, medieval continent. Every Arab child learns about these glories and cannot but contrast them with the sorry Muslim present. (In a way, these longings parallel the Zionist romantics’ dreams of a resurrected kingdom of David and Solomon.)

A new caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist were it not for its opponents – the Americans. They needed this dream – or nightmare – more than the Muslims themselves.

The American empire always needs an antagonist to keep it together and to focus its energies. This has to be a worldwide enemy, a sinister advocate of an evil philosophy. Such were the Nazis and Imperial Japan but they did not last long.

Fortunately, there was then the Communist empire which filled the role admirably. There were Communists everywhere. All of them were plotting the downfall of freedom, democracy and the United States of America. They were even lurking inside the US, as J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy so convincingly demonstrated. For decades the US flourished in the fight against the Red Menace; its forces spread all over the world, its spaceships reached the moon, its best minds engaged in a titanic battle of ideas, the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

And then – suddenly – the whole thing collapsed. Soviet power vanished as if it had never existed. The American spy agencies, with their tremendous capabilities, were flabbergasted. Apparently, they had no idea how ramshackle the Soviet structure actually was. How could they see, blinded as they were by their own ideological preconceptions?

The disappearance of the Communist Threat left a gaping void in the American psyche, which cried out to be filled. Osama bin Laden kindly offered his services.

What was the idea that turned Osama bin Laden into a world figure? A new caliphate in the 21st century is as unlikely as the wildest creation of the imagination. It would have been diametrically opposed to the zeitgeist were it not for its opponents – the Americans. They needed this dream – or nightmare – more than the Muslims themselves

It needed, of course, a world-shaking event to lend credibility to such a hare-brained utopia. The 9/11 outrage was just such an event. It produced many changes in the American way of life. And a new global enemy.

Overnight, medieval anti-Islamic prejudices are dusted off for display. Islam the terrible, the murderous, the fanatical. Islam the anti-democratic, the anti-freedom, anti-all-our-values: Suicide bombers, 72 virgins, jihad.

The US springs to life again. Soldiers, spies and special forces fan out across the globe to fight terrorism. Bin Laden is everywhere. The War Against Terrorism is an apocalyptic struggle with Satan. American freedoms have to be protected; the US military machine grows by leaps and bounds. Power-hungry intellectuals babble about the Clash of Civilisations and sell their souls for instant celebrity.

To produce the lurid paint for such a twisted picture of reality, religious Islamic groups are all thrown into the same pot – the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Indonesian separatists, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere, whoever. All become al-Qaeda despite the fact that each has a totally different agenda, focused on its own country, while bin Laden aims to abolish all Muslim states and create one Holy Islamic Empire. Details, details.

The Holy War against the Jihad finds warriors everywhere. Ambitious demagogues, for whom this promises an easy way to inflame the masses, spring up in many countries, from France to Finland, from Holland to Italy. The hysteria of Islamophobia displaces good old anti-Semitism, using almost the same language. Tyrannical regimes present themselves as bulwarks against al-Qaeda, as they had once presented themselves as bulwarks against communism. And, of course, our own Binyamin Netanyahu milks the situation for all it is worth, travelling from capital to capital, peddling his wares of anti-Islamism.

Bin Laden had good reason to be proud, and probably was.

When I saw his picture for the first time, I joked that he was not a real person but an actor straight from Hollywood’s Central Casting. He looked too good to be true – exactly as he would appear in a Hollywood movie – a handsome man, with a long black beard, posing with a Kalashnikov. His appearances on TV were carefully staged.

Actually, he was a very incompetent terrorist, a real amateur. No genuine terrorist would have lived in a conspicuous villa which stood out in the landscape like a sore thumb. Stern was hiding in a small roof apartment in a squalid quarter of Tel Aviv. Menachem Begin lived with his wife and son in a very modest ground floor apartment, playing the role of a reclusive rabbi.

Bin Laden’s villa was bound to attract the attention of neighbours and other people. They would have been curious about this mysterious stranger in their midst. Actually, he should have been discovered long ago. He was unarmed and did not put up a fight. The decision to kill him on the spot and dump his body in the sea was evidently taken long before.

So there is no grave, no holy tomb. But for millions of Muslims, and especially Arabs, he was and remains a source of pride, an Arab hero, the “lion of lions”, as a preacher in Jerusalem called him. Almost no one dared to come out and say so openly, for fear of the Americans, but even those who thought his ideas impractical and his actions harmful respected him in their hearts.

Does that mean that al-Qaeda has a future? I don’t think so. It belongs to the past – not because bin Laden has been killed but because his central idea is obsolete.

The Arab Spring embodies a new set of ideals, a new enthusiasm, one that does not glorify and hanker after a distant past but looks boldly to the future. The young men and women of Tahrir Square, with their longing for freedom, have consigned bin Laden to history months before his physical death. His philosophy has a future only if the Arab Awakening fails completely and leaves behind a profound sense of disappointment and despair.

In the western world, few will mourn him but god forbid that anyone should gloat.

This article was posted on the website of the peace bloc Gush Shalom on May 7, 2011; http://zope.gush-shalom.org

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2011.Year 17, No.158 – Bin Laden

The post Rejoice not…’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

NEW YORK CITY,
February 12: Returning from six days of making people-to-people contacts at schools, hospitals and universities in Baghdad and Basra, Iraq, family members of September 11 victims challenged world leaders to "use some imagination" to find alternatives to military action in that nation. The four-member delegation represents September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an advocacy group seeking effective, non-violent alternatives to war and terrorism.

"During our trip, I met a lot of people who want their country healthy again, and their children happy," said Kat Tinley, whose uncle, Mike Tinley, perished at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. "Like much of the world, the people of Iraq have known violence entirely too long, and they long for peace."

"We talked with the teachers of a primary school who described the hopes they have for their students," added Terry Rockefeller, who lost her sister, Laura Rockefeller, at the twin towers. "We found a striking commonality in our grief for lost loved ones and our dreams for our children."

The delegation also visited the Amariyah bomb shelter and met relatives of the hundreds of civilians who died after a US missile struck the shelter on February 14, 1991.

"The personal connections we made with the people of Iraq have been very deep and meaningful," said Kristina Olsen, whose sister, Laurie Neira, was aboard Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. "Meeting with sick children and families who have lost loved ones has underscored the importance of the human bond that we share in our mutual suffering."

Colleen Kelly, who lost her brother, Bill Kelly Jr., at the World Trade Center, added, "In Iraq, we have begun to realise our hope of connecting a human face and story to the people of Iraq. This has only deepened our resolve to petition the governments of this world to explore every viable, peaceful alternative to the crisis here, using creative and perhaps non-conventional diplomacy."

In a press conference at the UN Church Center in New York City, the delegation also recognised that January 15 was the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose 1967 declaration that "wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows" provided the inspiration for the group’s name.

(www.peacefultomorrows.org/)

A Grieving Father’s Hope for Peace

JOHN TITUS

I write this letter with sadness in my heart and with a hope that we the people of the United States of America can overcome our differences, put aside our political biases, and open our hearts and minds to greater understanding and compassion. We are standing at the precipice of a war that looms like a dark shadow in the distance and my soul cries out.

Much controversy has resulted as our nation’s leaders move forward with preparation for war. Families, friends, the citizens of our country and the world are divided on the rightness or wrongness of such action. Each of us must search our hearts and souls and come to our own conclusions. I pray for enlightenment for each of us and especially for the leaders of the world as we move forward.

My message is borne of grief but with a clarity that comes from deep soul searching and meditation. When death strikes the heart our view of the world changes profoundly. Clarity finds its way to those who seek truth and understanding born from love.

My daughter, Alicia Titus was murdered by terrorists on September 11, 2001. She was a wizened young woman who lived life with grace, beauty, and compassion. Her whole life was dedicated to loving others, embracing differences, seeking truth and doing acts of goodness. Her joy was a gift she gave freely to all. She was able to see through the outer façade that so many of us maintain to protect our gentle souls. And she communicated at a deep level, beyond the trivial, beyond the mundane, to a level of love and understanding.

She travelled the world with the goal of experiencing all that life had to offer and to meet people from all walks of life. She embraced the sanctity of life. The people of the world were her family. It is a sad irony that she would die so violently at the hands of hate-filled zealots, diametrically opposed to all she stood for and believed in.

My message comes from deep within my soul, a place that feels the connection with all of life, that place where the Divine resides in each of us. The dark forces that took Alicia’s life self-righteously believed that they were fighting evil, ridding the world of the infidels who opposed their core beliefs. They struck at the heart and soul of America and over 3,000 innocent people died. Now we stand ready to use our advanced technology and risk our sons and daughters to fight those whom we believe to be infidels, those who oppose our ideologies and beliefs.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a corrupt, self- centred, egotistic and "evil" person. But, can we justify in our hearts and souls, the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent people to try and get one man? And, like Osama bin Laden, he may elude our efforts and taunt us as the innocent dead lie in the Iraqi streets. Estimates range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 people who will directly or indirectly die as a result of our bombing. Sixty per cent of these are children under the age of 15 whose greatest sin is being born. Please, do not write these human lives off as "collateral damage". This is very dehumanising, extremely callous and it goes against all that is right and good.

We have a choice whether or not to move forward with this war. Unlike the message you have been repeatedly given, this is a war on the Iraqi people, not a war on terrorism. If we systematically kill the citizens of Iraq out of our own sense of self-righteousness and fear, we reduce ourselves to the level of those that we deem as terrorists. Look deep within your soul and seek the truth that longs for expression. There has to be a better way of resolving this conflict other than committing more senseless killing. It is my hope that we can learn from the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001, without perpetuating a world in which violence and unjust killing are accepted as a solution to conflict. This is how our primitive ancestors resolved differences.

Surely, we have grown in love and understanding beyond that. My prayer is that God will be with our world leaders, our troops who would sacrifice their lives for us and to the children of Iraq whose cries will ring out in agony and resound in the soul of America.

(March 2003).
(http://www.peacefultomorrows.org/voices/jt_030903.html)

___________

‘I’m not going to respond to terrorism by becoming a terrorist’

If you had lost a loved one, would you want revenge? As the world edges closer to war, RACHEL SHABI talks to relatives who believe retaliation is wrong.

RITA LASAR, 71

New York, USA

My brother Abe (Zelmanowitz, 55) worked in the north tower of the World Trade Center, on the 27th floor. He could have got out, but his colleague, Ed, a quadriplegic, was trapped with him. My other brother and sister-in-law called him, begging him to leave, but he said he would wait for help to get Ed out. But help came too late.

Then Bush made his speech at the National Cathedral (September 14, 2001). He mentioned my brother’s heroic act, and it became immediately apparent to me that my country was going to use my brother’s death to justify attacks in Afghanistan. That was as horrendous a blow to me as the actual attacks on September 11. I hoped and prayed that this country would not unleash forces in my brother’s name. When it (the bombing of Afghanistan) happened, I was horrified and devastated. I felt so impotent.

Then I got a call from Global Exchange (a human rights organisation), asking me if I’d like to go to Afghanistan. What I saw there changed my life forever. I had been a very privileged, blessed American who had only ever seen war on TV. And then I went to Afghanistan and saw the devastation and horror of what happens to innocent people when bombs fall — anyone’s bombs, anywhere in the world. That my brother’s name had been used to justify attacks on the people I met, became family with, cried and grieved with, brought it to a point where it was emotional and real. I found nothing but understanding, warmth, hugs — they knew all about 9/11 and they grieved for us and apologised to us. Every American should go there — because, if they did, they would stop the plans for war on Iraq immediately.

I did not pay any attention to who was to blame for 9/11 — there was no place left in my mind and heart other than the grief about my brother and the people who were going to be killed in his name. I didn’t feel anger. I didn’t want any other sister or mother to feel this way. It was only later that I began to think about how to bring the perpetrators to justice. I knew that bombing was not the answer. We are no safer now than when we started bombing. We are going to war with a country that had no connection to 9/11, our privacy and our freedom in this country are being slowly whittled away, and Muslims are afraid to go out in the street — in a city that used to welcome everybody.

Revenge for 9/11 is the excuse they are using to bomb Iraq. There are people in Iraq who are alive today and who will be dead next month if we have a war — and my country will say that they have done that to avenge my brother’s death. I will not let my brother, my dear brother’s death, be hypocritically used in this war — the fact that his death is being used cynically hurts me so much, I can’t tell you. Imagine someone who you loved, who died violently, being used insincerely and untruthfully in a political campaign. It is an exploitation.

So I have no intention of touching the subject of revenge. If people ask me why I don’t want retribution, I say that it is the natural human reaction to not seek retribution — or it should be. It cannot accomplish anything. My brother is dead. I privately mourn for him every moment. But I am not looking to atone for his death. I’m looking to prevent the death of others. I don’t want to see other people die to amend a ghastly, unbelievable death. The world is larger than just me. Things don’t have to be done to make up for things that have happened to me. Things have to be done to make things better in the world. I draw from my love of human beings that everyone is the same as I am. That it is possible — not in a dream, but some day — for this to be a peaceful planet. I’ll fight to the day I die against this war on terror. I don’t want my granddaughter to be sitting here at my age, facing the same world that I’m facing now: a world of starvation, war and inequity. Surely we can do better than this.

DAVID POTORTI, 46

North Carolina, USA

His name was Jim Potorti – he was my eldest brother,53. Jim worked on the 95th floor of the north tower, almost directly where the plane hit.

I was surprised at my reaction at the time, which was that I didn’t have a lot of anger in the way that others did. I felt sadness more than anger, because I recognised that these terrible acts were desperate acts reflecting a desperate feeling.

All the radio and TV stations were saying we should kill the people responsible for 9/11, just go and bomb people — and it made me sick in the heart to hear that. I had just lost someone and they were saying we should do the same to others. I never remember being angry at the people who did it, because it was such a political act. It wasn’t like a drunk driver hitting my brother, where I would have been really angry.

I remember being angry that the bombing of Afghanistan was being carried out in my name. Yes, anger is the only word, because I think of what a nice person my brother was, how much he loved his family. I felt we were really dishonouring his memory by throwing our constitution out of the window, that if we really wanted to honour him we should hold on to our principles instead of throwing them all away. I don’t think my brother died for my country, but I hope that my country doesn’t die for him, by rejecting its values and principles.

The goal is always justice, but how you achieve justice is the question. We have all wanted to bring the people responsible for 9/11 to justice. And so another source of anger is that we are not doing that, we are not locating Osama bin Laden or the Al Quaeda network — in fact, we are making it harder to find them. It’s the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Justice for me would be a more equitable world, where people did not live in such misery that they had to hate each other. A world in which the US contributes to a sense of equality, rather than making it worse.

So the rage I felt after 9/11 was rage at the whole system, that people could be so desperate that they would do something like this. The people who flew the planes into the building are dead: what more can you do to them? But this kind of terrorism is like a cancer. The only way you stop it is to stop the cycle, by saying, "I’m not going to respond to terrorism by becoming a terrorist." If you do respond with violence, you are just promoting more and more terrorism.

I don’t make any connection between Iraq and 9/11, because I’ve never seen any. I would only justify an attack on Iraq if the Iraqi army attacked the continental US. Not a terrorist attack, but the official Iraqi army. I got a vicious e-mail today in which someone claimed that Saddam killed my brother. How do you respond to someone who’s so out of touch with reality? My brother’s death was a nightmare, and I feel like it just gets worse every time it’s used to justify more terror and more pain. I just want this to be over. I just want people to stop being so angry. I want people to stop dying.

No one has ever asked me how I feel about anything. That’s where the feeling of violation comes in — speaking for me, instead of asking me how I feel. We had a baby about a month ago, and I’m realising that she will never know my brother. How could I possibly wish that kind of loss on anyone else’s brother, or daughter, or parents?

The thing to atone my brother’s death would be for there to be more honesty in the world, for America to start being more honest about the repercussions of its world policy. Over the past year, I have really educated myself about foreign policy – I wanted to know why this happened. What I wish now is that people in the US would do the same. I want people to just shut their mouths and read – stop talking until they know something. We all have to do that, including me. 

(Excerpted from a report in The Guardian, UK, Saturday February 22, 2003).

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 2

The post ‘Win without war’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

I am also very troubled by the way Bush officials have tried to justify this war on the grounds that Saddam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is simply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie.

— Thomas Friedman, New York Times, February 19, 2003.
 

I stand here today as a member of Military Families Speak Out. We are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters and other relatives of military men and women on active duty who will be in harm’s way if the United States launches an illegal and immoral first strike war against the people of Iraq. I have two points to make today. The first has to do with feelings about my stepson. The second has to do with the true roots of this proposed war with Iraq.My stepson is in the U.S. Army and will be a participant if war is launched. I am of course concerned about his safety. While he will be assigned command and control duties in Kuwait in support of ground combat troops, away from front lines, he still may find himself under attack with biological or chemical weapons, and may be carrying one of those defective suits we have been talking about today.

But even more than that, deeper than that, I am concerned about the defective mission upon which President Bush is sending him. His dedication to country is being abused by a President hell-bent on an unjustified, unnecessary and – it is fair to say – a triumphalistic religious war being waged by a fundamentalist Commander in Chief who seems to believe he is on God’s own mission to save the world from the evil doers and heathen.

So I am concerned that this patriotic young man willing to sacrifice for his country, along with many other honourable soldiers, will see his military career squandered and corrupted.

I am also concerned because I know – from the evidence of history, from the past Gulf War and the slaughter of 400-1,500 women and children at the Amariyah bomb shelter in Baghdad – that if we go to war in Iraq, the loss of innocent civilian lives will be high and horrific, and that our government will never tell us the whole truth about that. They are basing this war on a big lie that Iraq threatens us now, and they will surely lie as to its consequences for the innocent. However, the soldiers in the area will know what they have done. They will see it with their own eyes, or they will see it in the eyes of their fellow soldiers.

So I pray every day. I pray for my son’s safety, for his family, his wife and three children. I pray for the safety of Iraqi children and their families. I pray that this war can be averted. I cry out to God to grant all these prayers, because I fear that my son, if this war goes forward, may carry in his heart for the rest of his natural life the burden of innocent lives he helped to destroy. And he has such a good heart.

That’s my first point. Secondly I want to say there is something I fear for more than the dangers our soldiers face from a government throwing them into a war with faulty equipment.

My deepest fear is for America, as we have known it, as it has been handed down to us and protected and defended by people like my father and many millions who fought a true threat of tyranny in World War II. I fear for America and its hard-won democracy, its precious freedoms, because our government has been seized by far right zealots who wish to impose upon the rest of the world what they call a "benevolent global hegemony." They won’t call it "empire" because that’s not good PR. They are zealots who are willing to run roughshod over American freedoms to get their way. They are willing to push aside the Constitution and the Bill of Rights if necessary to achieve their agenda. They are right now cooking up Patriot Act II – which as an executive order, not even a law, could strip any one of us of our citizenship and send us into a "disappeared" status as terrorist sympathisers if the Attorney General decides to call us such.

When they were out of power, these people pushed their ideas though a think tank called the Project for the New American Century. The white papers of that think tank have formed the basis of our current national security policy that calls for a worldwide "constabulary" role for the American military. It was within the Project for the New American Century that the doctrine of pre-emptive war was first hatched. Who are they? They are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Jeb Bush, among others – and of course George W. Bush, although he is not the leading intellectual light of this group by any means. To these we can add a bevy of Iran-Contra principals who participated in illegal acts and human rights abuses in Central America: Admiral Poindexter, who sits in the Pentagon still working to launch fully a Total Information Awareness Program to watch over us all; Elliott Abrams, also of the New American Century group, whose professional contempt for and assault upon human rights has earned him a position inside President Bush’s inner circle; and even our ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte. These are people willing to destroy the UN to get their way. They are willing to destroy historic alliances, bribe and coerce small nations, and do whatever else is needed to achieve a war in Iraq that will set the terms for their New American Century.

I’ll tell you this. It outrages and saddens me that my son and many others are being called to duty to carry out the agenda of these right wing zealots, and I will not stand by silently and let that happen. It outrages me that as they are thrown into harms way they are being told to duct tape the cracks in their suits. It saddens me that fear has gripped our land to the point we are asked to duct tape ourselves into our homes and cower there.

I share the view of an Italian peace activist who said on February 15, "You fight terrorism by creating more justice in the world." For me that starts with fighting this unjust war, and the fight will not end until we have removed from power the people who are ruining my beloved America.

(Stephen Cleghorn is a member of military families speak out).
http://www.mfso.org/

‘Our voice will not be silenced’

NACY LESSIN AND CHARLEY RICHARDSON

(Statement at a press conference at the National Press Club on January 15, 2003.)

Charley and I are here today to speak out against war in Iraq. Speaking out against war is not new for us. What is new is the very personal stake we have in this current conflict.

My stepson, Charley’s son Joe, is 25 years old and in the Marines. I helped to raise this extraordinary young man since he was five years old. He shipped out at the end of August 2002. He is now in the Persian Gulf, being prepared for battle.

As military families we have both a special voice and a special need to speak out against the rush to war. For this reason, Charley and I were co-founders of Military Families Speak Out, an organisation of people who are opposed to war in Iraq, who have loved ones in the military.

We notice that those who say, "We gotta go to war" aren’t going anywhere – nor are their loved ones. It’s other people’s children who are being sent – our loved ones.

We invite others across the country in a similar position to contact us, to help build the voice of Military Families against this war. Together we will not feel so alone; collectively, we can make a difference. Visit our website at www.mfso.org or call us at 617-522-9323.
We worry about Joe. We don’t want him to be wounded or die. We don’t want him to be forced to wound or kill innocent Iraqi civilians. That would kill a part of him – and a part of us.

We are not pacifists. As Joe’s grandfather, a World War II veteran, said when talking about his own opposition to this war: "War is never a good thing, although sometimes it is necessary. This is not one of those times." Those who say war in Iraq is necessary, is defence of the US, is a blow against terrorism, need to look harder at the facts and think again. The cost will be high. Despite the talk of drones and smart bombs, there will be men, women and children dying.

If the United States engages in a unilateral war on Iraq (or a war with a few, arm-twisted allies), the Marines (including Joe) will not be defending this country. They will be there serving the interests of oil companies, financiers and power brokers.

They tell us that this war is about making the world safe from terrorism. What we know is that if tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are killed or injured, we will not be safer. If the U.S. leads the way into Iraq, we will be more, not less, of a target.
Some say that opposing this war is unpatriotic, and unsupportive of Joe and the others who are preparing for battle. But we know that the epithets "unpatriotic" and "unsupportive" are being used to silence voices of protest. Our voice will not be silenced.

We know that the most loving and supportive thing we can do for Joe is to keep writing him, sending him cookies and brownies, and fighting to stop this war from ever happening – to keep yet another generation from being put in harm’s way for the wrong reasons.
So we will continue to protest. And we will love Joe, hold him close in our hearts, and anxiously await the day when we can hold him close in our arms.

(http://www.mfso.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 5

The post On the wings of a lie appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Tuesday’s terrorist attacks have saddened and maddened millions — and raised questions for many about Islam. Speculation abounds that the hijackers were inspired by terrorists like Osama bin Laden, who teach that violent acts can pave the way to paradise. But what does Islam really say about such matters? About jihad and martyrdom?

We asked Hamza Yusuf, an Islamic scholar in the East Bay, who said the attackers were "enemies of Islam.’’ Not martyrs, but "mass murderers, pure and simple.’’

Yusuf, whose articles about Islam are published internationally, talked about the attacks, the hysteria that he fears could grip the United States, and the role that Muslims and others must play in opposing violence. "We’ve got to get to some deeper core values that are commonly shared," he said.

Why would anyone do what the hijackers did?

Religious zealots of any creed are defeated people who lash out in desperation, and they often do horrific things. And if these people indeed are Arabs, Muslims, they’re obviously very sick people and I can’t even look at it in religious terms. It’s politics, tragic politics. There’s no Islamic justification for any of it. It’s like some misguided Irish using Catholicism as an excuse for blowing up English people.

They’re not martyrs, it’s as simple as that.

Because?

You can’t kill innocent people. There’s no Islamic declaration of war against the United States. I think every Muslim country except Afghanistan has an embassy in this country. And in Islam, a country where you have embassies is not considered a belligerent country.

In Islam, the only wars that are permitted are between armies and they should engage on battlefields and engage nobly. The Prophet Muhammad said, "Do not kill women or children or non–combatants and do not kill old people or religious people," and he mentioned priests, nuns and rabbis. And he said, "Do not cut down fruit–bearing trees and do not poison the wells of your enemies." The Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, say that no one can punish with fire except the Lord of fire. It’s prohibited to burn anyone in Islam as a punishment. No one can grant these attackers any legitimacy. It was evil.

What role should American Muslims have in opposing this brand of violent Islam?

I think that the Muslims — and I really feel this strongly — have to reject the discourse of anger. Because there is a lot of anger in the Muslim communities around the world about the oppressive conditions that many Muslims find themselves in. But we have to reject the discourse of anger and we have to move to a higher moral ground, recognizing that the desire to blame others leads to anger and eventually to wrath, neither of which are rungs on a spiritual ladder to God. It’s times like these that we really need to become introspective.

The fact that there are any Muslims — no matter how statistically insignificant their numbers — who consider these acts to be religious acts is in and of itself shocking. And therefore we as Muslims have to ask the question, "How is it that our religious leadership has failed to reach these people with the true message of Islam?" Because the acts of these criminals have indicted an entire religion in the hearts and minds of millions. Ultimately, this is a result of the bankruptcy of these type of people who claim to be adherents to the Islamic religion. These people are so bankrupt that all they have to offer is destruction.

If there are any martyrs in this affair it would certainly be those brave firefighters and police that went in there to save human lives and in that process lost their own.

Why do some people regard the hijackers as martyrs?

That’s an abomination. These are mass murderers, pure and simple. It’s like Christians in this country who blow up abortion clinics or kill abortion doctors. I don’t think anyone in the Christian community, except a very extreme fringe, would condone that as an acceptable Christian response. In the same way, there’s no Muslim who understands his religion at all who would condone this. One of the worst crimes in Islam is brigandry — highway robbery, or today we’d say armed robbery — because it disrupts the sense of well-being and security among civilians.

Suicide bombers have cited a Qoranic verse that says, "Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord."

That is meant for people who are legitimately defending the lands of Islam or fighting under legitimate state authority against a tyrannical leader. There is no vigilantism in Islam. Muslims believe in the authority of government.

Imam Malik, an early Islamic legal authority, said that 60 years of oppression under an unjust ruler is better than one hour of anarchy.

Then why is there such strong support in parts of the world for the attacks?

Because we’re dealing in an age of ignorance and an age of anomie, the loss of social order. And people are very confused and they’re impoverished. What Americans are feeling now, this has been business as usual for Lebanese people, Palestinian people, Bosnian people.

What about Israeli people?

Certainly the fear element is there for Israeli people — that’s true, and the terror that they’ve felt. And there are still a lot of Jewish people alive who remember the fear and terror of what happened in Europe, so that’s not far from people’s memories.

It seems at some point, the cycles of violence have to stop. It’s a type of insanity, especially when we’re dealing with nuclear power. People are saying that this was an attack on civilization and that is exactly the point. And I think the question we all have to ask is whether indiscriminate retaliation is going to help preserve civilization.

The perpetrators of this and, really, all acts of terror are people who hate too much. There’s a verse in the Koran that says do not let the hatred of a people prevent you from being just. Being just is closer to piety. The evil of wrath is that justice and mercy are lost.

How do you explain Palestinians and others celebrating the attacks in the streets?

When you see ignorant people in the streets, rejoicing — the Prophet condemned it. It’s rejoicing at the calamities of your enemies, and Islam prohibits that. They do have a lot of anger toward America, because America produces much of Israel’s military hardware and so many American tax dollars go to support Israel. You have a lot of animosity in the Arab world. But the vast majority of Arabs are horrified by what’s happened. There’s animosity in the Muslim world toward American foreign policy. This is the unfortunate price of power and its exercise in the world, that you incur the resentment and animosity of a lot of people. But the majority of Muslims who I know don’t have anger toward individuals or the American people.

The concept of jihad has been widely used to justify violence.

Jihad means struggle. The Prophet said the greatest jihad is the struggle of a man against his own evil influences. It also refers to what Christians call a "just war," which is fought against tyranny or oppression — but under a legitimate state authority.

What is the Arabic word for martyr?

Shaheed. It means witness. The martyr is the one who witnesses the truth and gives his life for it. There are people in this country like Martin Luther King who would be considered a martyr for his cause. Also, if your home, your family, your property or your land or religion is threatened, then you may defend it with your life. That person is a martyr. But so is anybody who dies of terminal illness; it’s a martyr’s death. Because it’s such a purification that whatever wrongs they once did, they’re now in a state of purity.

And the greatest martyr in the eyes of God is the one who stands in the presence of a tyrant and speaks the truth and is killed for it. He is martyred for his tongue.

What does Islam say about suicide?

Suicide is haraam in Islam. It’s prohibited, like a mortal sin. And murder is haram. And to kill civilians is murder.

What is a martyr’s reward?

The Prophet said that a martyr who dies doesn’t have a reckoning on the Day of Judgment. It’s an act through which he is forgiven. But the Prophet also said that there are people who kill in the name of Islam and go to hell. And when he was asked why, he said, "Because they weren’t fighting truly for the sake of God."

If there are any martyrs in this affair it would certainly be those brave firefighters and police that went in there to save human lives and in that process lost their own. 

(Imam Hamza’s interview by the San Jose Mercury News was posted on the latter’s website, http://ww.mercurycenter.com/local/center/isl0916.htm on Sept. 15, 2001)

(Hamza Yusuf, 42, started life as Mark Hanson, son of two US academics, only converting at 17. Thirty years ago, he seemed destined not for Islamic scholarship, but for the Greek Orthodox priesthood. Then, a near-death experience in a car accident and reading the Koran diverted him towards Mecca).

Islam and the enlightenment tradition

"I came out of the enlightenment tradition and I still believe in the best of the enlightenment tradition and I think that Islam confirms and enhances
that tradition and really doesn’t detract from it".

"In some ways the Muslim world is undergoing a protestant reformation right now and unfortunately because people don’t know about colonialism, about the shutting down of traditional Muslim universities all over the Muslim world with rare exception, and the fact that Islam has very few scholars at very high levels. Most of the brilliant students in the Middle East now go into medicine and engineering, they go into other things, they don’t go into philosophy. One of the interesting things you should think about, almost every one of these terrorists that are identified — and I will guarantee you that you will not find amongst them anyone who did his degree in philosophy, in literature, in the humanities, in theology — you’ll find that almost all are technically trained. And one of the tragedies in the Muslim world is that technical schools now, from an early age they identify students that are very brilliant in mathematics and they direct them towards only studying the physical sciences to the neglect of what makes us human, which is humanity, is poetry, it’s literature, as well as philosophy and theology, so these things are absent now".

(From transcript of CBC interview with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf aired on September 23, 2001)

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 3

The post ‘Muslims have to reject the discourse of anger’ — Hamza Yusuf appeared first on SabrangIndia.

( Hamza Yusuf, during his interview to the Guardian, London):

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 4

The post ‘If you hate the West, emigrate to a Muslim country’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

And I thought about the issues being raised especially hard because I am from Afghanistan, and even though I’ve lived here for 35 years I’ve never lost track of what’s going on there. So I want to tell anyone who will listen how it all looks from where I’m standing.

I speak as one who hates the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were responsible for the atrocity in New York. I agree that something must be done about those monsters.

But the Taliban and Bin Laden are not Afghanistan. They’re not even the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban are a cult of ignorant psychotics who took over Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden is a political criminal with a plan. When you think Taliban, think Nazis. When you think Bin Laden, think Hitler. And when you think "the people of Afghanistan" think "the Jews in the concentration camps." It’s not only that the Afghan people had nothing to do with this atrocity. They were the first victims of the perpetrators. They would exult if someone would come in there, take out the Taliban and clear out the rats nest of international thugs holed up in their country.

Some say, why don’t the Afghans rise up and overthrow the Taliban? The answer is, they’re starved, exhausted, hurt, incapacitated, suffering. A few years ago, the United Nations estimated that there are 500,000 disabled orphans in Afghanistan — a country with no economy, no food. There are millions of widows. And the Taliban has been burying these widows alive in mass graves. The soil is littered with landmines, the farms were all destroyed by the Soviets. These are a few of the reasons why the Afghan people have not overthrown the Taliban.

We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that’s been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They’re already suffering. Level their houses? Done. Turn their schools into piles of rubble? Done. Eradicate their hospitals? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Cut them off from medicine and health care? Too late. Someone already did all that.

New bombs would only stir the rubble of earlier bombs. Would they at least get the Taliban? Not likely. In today’s Afghanistan, only the Taliban eat, only they have the means to move around. They’d slip away and hide. Maybe the bombs would get some of those disabled orphans, they don’t move too fast, they don’t even have wheelchairs. But flying over Kabul and dropping bombs wouldn’t really be a strike against the criminals who did this horrific thing. Actually it would only be making common cause with the Taliban — by raping once again the people they’ve been raping all this time.

So what else is there? What can be done, then? Let me now speak with true fear and trembling. The only way to get Bin Laden is to go in there with ground troops. When people speak of "having the belly to do what needs to be done" they’re thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people.

Let’s pull our heads out of the sand. What’s actually on the table is Americans dying. And not just because some Americans would die fighting their way through Afghanistan to Bin Laden’s hideout. It’s much bigger than that folks. Because to get any troops to Afghanistan, we’d have to go through Pakistan. Would they let us? Not likely. The conquest of Pakistan would have to be first. Will other Muslim nations just stand by? You see where I’m going. We’re flirting with a world war between Islam and the West.

And guess what: that’s Bin Laden’s program. That’s exactly what he wants. That’s why he did this. Read his speeches and statements. It’s all right there. At the moment, of course, "Islam" as such does not exist. There are Muslims and there are Muslim countries, but no such political entity as Islam. Osama Bin Laden believes that if he can get a war started, he can constitute this entity and he’d be running it. He really believes Islam would beat the West. It might seem ridiculous, but he figures if he can polarize the world into Islam and the West, he’s got a billion soldiers. If the West wreaks a holocaust in those lands, that’s a billion people with nothing left to lose, that’s even better from Bin Laden’s point of view. He’s probably wrong, in the end the West would win, whatever that would mean, but the war would last for years and millions would die, not just theirs but ours. Who has the belly for that? Bin Laden does. Anyone else?

(Courtesy: znet.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 6

The post ‘Think Taliban, think Nazis’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
The US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists

"Throughout the world … its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive — on the moral defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements arise and assert themselves. They’re doing so on almost every continent populated by man — in the hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America … (They are freedom fighters.)"

Is this a call to jihad taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden’s notorious fatwas? Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?

In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today’s supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the evil empire, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on March 8, 1985. The evil empire was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.

How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities, the most despicable being the mass murder of more than 6,000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11, bin Laden the freedom fighter is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a terrorist mastermind and an evil-doer.

Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden, the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt and perhaps the disaster that befell New York.

The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.

Mujahedin

In April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a crackdown against the party by that country’s repressive government.

The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also supported strengthening Afghanistan’s relationship with the Soviet Union.

Such policies enraged the wealthy semi–feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government’s progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.

Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government’s radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan Mujahedin, as the contra force was known.

Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan’s leader, thousands of Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government’s fall. This only galvanised the disparate fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a national liberation struggle in the eyes of many Afghans.

The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the Mujahedin captured the capital, Kabul, in 1992.

Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20 billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the Mujahedin factions. Other Western governments, as well as oil–rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided millions more.

Washington’s policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.

Brzezinski’s grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia–ul–Haq’s own ambitions to dominate the region. US–run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the Islamic revolution that toppled the pro–US Shah of Iran in 1979).

Washington’s favoured Mujahedin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The West’s distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury freedom fighter. Hekmatyar was notorious in the 1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.

After the Mujahedin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar’s forces rained US–supplied missiles and rockets on that city killing at least 2,000 civilians until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister. Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.

Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the Mujahedin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the Afghanistan–Pakistan border was the world’s single largest source of heroin, supplying 60 per cent of US drug users.

In 1995, the former director of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the flow of drugs: Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets… There was a fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime

Made in the USA

According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1986, CIA chief William Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000 attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).

John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the Mujahedin were sent to Camp Peary, the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and Jordan, and even some African-American black Muslims were taught sabotage skills.

The November 1, 1998, the British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained bin Laden’s operatives in 1989.

These operatives were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar’s forces. Mohammed was a member of the US army’s elite Green Berets.

The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called Operation Cyclone.

In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the Mujahedin factions by an organisation known as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services, MAK).

MAK was a front for Pakistan’s CIA, the Inter–Service Intelligence directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.

Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel–Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with the CIA’s approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was partly culpable for the 1993 World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.

Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in 1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training the estimated 35,000 non–Afghan mercenaries who joined the Mujahedin. The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and political ties to that country’s pro–US royal family.

Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia’s minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam’s holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world’s largest private construction company.

Osama bin Laden’s father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill–gotten business empire.

(Bin Laden junior’s oft–quoted personal fortune of US$200–300 million has been arrived at by the US State Department by dividing today’s value of the bin Laden family net worth estimated to be US$5 billion by the number of bin Laden senior’s sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama and took control of his share.)

Osama’s military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully aware of his activities.

Milt Bearden, the CIA’s station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, "Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did… [Guys like] bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And that is a lot of money. It’s an extra $200–$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did."

In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built training camps, some dug deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.

These camps, now dubbed terrorist universities by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.

Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the Mujahedin told the August 13, 2000, British Observer, "The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism, car bombing and so on so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns…" Many of them are now using their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.

Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden’s organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business enterprises. It is a tightly–run capitalist holding company albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary force and related logistical services with legitimate business operations.

Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s — fund, feed and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes, the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.

Bin Laden only became a terrorist in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden’s anger turned to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes such as Egypt in the Middle East were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.

He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there were frozen.

After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services and thousands of his mercenaries to the Taliban, which took power that September.

Today, bin Laden’s private army of non–Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.

Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.

In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the Mujahedin, as saying he would make the same call again, even knowing what bin Laden would become.

"It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."

Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation. Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano, described as a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism operations.

Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their work. He was in charge of the CIA–backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid to the Afghan Mujahedin for the US National Security Council.

The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: "What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" 

(This article has been put out by the Forum of Indian Leftists (FOIL).

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 7

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The objection to the selective ban on SIMI may be valid. But Muslim religious and political leaders cannot run away from the question why never in the nearly 25-year-old history of SIMI, have they spoken out publicly against an organisation that is a declared enemy of ‘democracy, socialism, nationalism and polytheism’.

Most Muslim religious and political leaders from India have condemned the September 11 terrorist attack on the US as "un–Islamic" but there is a widely held perception among non-Muslims that the public pronouncements notwithstanding, Osama bin Laden is a "hero" for a very large number of Muslims, whether globally or in India. The near universal protest of Muslim religious and political leaders against the September 26 decision of the government of India to ban the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), has, if anything, reinforced that feeling even among many secular non–Muslims.

On the face of it, this seems really unfair to India’s Muslims. For, after all, hasn’t their objection — if SIMI is banned, why not the Bajrang Dal, a Hindutva outfit all too ‘similar’ to the former in its aims, objectives and activity — also been voiced by Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, communist parties and, lately, even Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, apart from any number of human rights groups.

But the moulvi sahibs and the siyasi netas among Muslims cannot wish away the problem.

The politicians’ objection to the ban against SIMI has largely to do with politics (both Mulayam and Mayawati have their eyes on Muslim voters in the coming UP elections, just as the BJP–led government’s selective ban on SIMI has more to do with its wanting a communal polarisation on poll eve than with SIMI’s alleged link with international terrorist outfits). Human rights groups protest has primarily to do with their objection, in principle, to the banning of any organisation so long as it does not cross constitutional bounds. Besides, there is the additional and legitimate concern over the implications of this singling out of SIMI (as against a simultaneous ban on the Bajrang Dal) for a religious minority that is already feeling battered and bruised. (See the accompanying piece by Teesta Setalvad).

The objection to the selective ban on SIMI may be valid. But Muslims religious and political leaders cannot run away from the question why never in the nearly 25–year–old history of SIMI, have they spoken out publicly against an organisation that is a declared enemy of ‘democracy, secularism, nationalism and polytheism’.

For at least 10 years now, SIMI has been pasting stickers in large numbers in Muslim shops and homes, a thick red ‘NO’ splashed across the words, DEMOCRACY, NATIONALISM, SECULARISM, POLYTHEISM’. ‘ONLY ALLAH!’ exclaims SIMI’s punch line on the same sticker. The sticker leaves no doubt that for SIMI, any one who subscribes to the principles of democracy, secularism and nationalism, or believes in peaceful co–existence with polytheists, is not a Muslim, a follower of Islam.

You only have to visit SIMI’s website, to be greeted by the following message on its homepage: ‘Jihad our path’, Shahadat our desire.’ This is followed by the stern message for Muslims who are comfortable ‘Living under an un-Islamic order’ and a surah (Al-Nisa: 97) is quoted from the Quran: ‘Such men (read Muslims) will find their abode in Hell. What an evil refuge’.

The commentary on the above surah that follows reads: "Those people who had willingly submitted to living under an un-Islamic order would be called to account by God and would be asked: If a certain territory was under the dominance of rebels against God, so that it had become impossible to follow His Law, why did you continue to live there? Why did you not migrate to a land where it was possible to follow the law of God?"

In other words, an organisation that has had an impressive growth among India’s Muslims (see box) is teaching its youth that any idea of living in peace with Hindus and other non–Muslims in a secular–democratic India (‘un–Islamic order’) is a sure passport to Allah’s hell!

Very many Muslims in India and elsewhere will quote the saying of Prophet Mohammed that the ‘struggle against self for self-improvement’ is the highest form of jihad. But you have to be a fool to imagine that that is what jihad means for SIMI. Bear in mind that for this outfit, Osama bin Laden is "not a terrorist" and Kashmir is not an "integral part of India" and the picture is as clear as should be.

Around December 6, 2000 (the eighth anniversary of the demolition of Babri Masjid), SIMI plastered coloured posters in Muslim pockets throughout the country, praying to Allah to send another Mahmud Ghazni down to India. Whatever historians might think of Ghazni, SIMI is without any shred of doubt praying for a new destroyer of temples to be dropped over India!

While announcing its ban on SIMI, the Union government has claimed, among other things, that SIMI is linked to extremists and terrorists who are enemies of India. Given Hindutva’s dubious agenda, Union home minister LK Advani’s motives in the selective ban on SIMI are understandably suspect. But what about the fact that the Congress governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra had asked the Centre to ban SIMI and Bajrang Dal simultaneously?

But Advani’s motives and evidence before the government apart, should anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the origin, worldview and activities of SIMI be in the least surprised if it turns out that SIMI has strong links with Islamic extremists?

Whatever historians might think of Ghazni, SIMI is without any shred of doubt praying for a new destroyer of temples to be dropped over India!

As Sajid Rashid, editor of the Hindi eveninger Hamara Mahanagar published from Mumbai, pointed out in a recent searching and scorching column, SIMI was created by Jamaat–e–Islami (Hind) to carry out its work among students and youth. What does the Jamaat–e–Islami stand for? Sajid Rashid: "the core belief of the organization revolves around the proposition that Muslims should propagate Islam throughout the world and struggle to establish the Kingdom of Allah globally. The Pakistani and the Kashmiri wings of the Jamaat–e–Islami are fully committed to conduct such a jihad to meet their objective".

What about the Indian wing of the Jamaat? "The Jamaat–e–Islami (Hind) is non–committal on the jihad question, and claims to be against violence," writes Rashid. How is it that Jamaat India resembles its Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi counterparts in every respect except on the jihad imperative? One view says that the circumstances of India compel the Jamaat wing here to adopt a different tactical position.

Interestingly, those convinced of the Indian Jamaat’s bonafide distaste for extremist tendencies, point out that it is for this reason that over 10 years ago it snapped its relations with SIMI and created a new outfit – Students of Islamic Organisation (SIO). But the opponents of the Jamaat among Muslims claim ask why the Jamaat is content keeping the SIO as purely a paper organisation and point to the surprisingly cordial and fraternal equation that obtains between the rivals (SIMI and SIO) at the ground level. The Jamaat in Pakistan, as is well known is the ideological parent of all kinds of Islamic terrorist outfits in Pakistan, including the Taliban. The detractors of the Jamaat (Hind) claim that having given birth to SIMI, whose perspectives and programmes increasingly resemble that of Muslim extremist outfits in Pakistan, the public posture of "ideological difference" between the Jamaat and SIMI is merely meant to hoodwink the Indian state and public.

Within India and globally, too, an as yet small group of Muslims have started going backwards tracing the lineage of the Jamaat–e–Islami to the Deoband school (in India) that is rooted in the not more than 250–years–old rigid, and orthodox Wahhabi sect, and forward to claim that today’s ‘Islamic terrorists’ are nothing but the most extreme version of Wahabbism.

Within days of the attack on America, the British Muslim, Hamza Yusuf (see his interview earlier in this issue) had declared, from the lawns of the White House soon after a meeting with President Bush: "Islam was hijacked on that September 11 2001, on that plane as an innocent victim". But, others like the American Muslim Nuh Ha Mim Keller are arguing that in fact Islam got hijacked nearly 250 years ago. To recall Keller’s piece (see earlier in this issue): "Muslims have nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to hide, and should simply tell people what their scholars and religious leaders have always said: first, that the Wahhabi sect has nothing to do with orthodox Islam, for its lack of tolerance is a perversion of traditional values; and second, that killing civilians is wrong and immoral".

Every culture, every religion, every society has its lunatic fringe. Indian Muslims can no more be blamed for the SIMI types in their midst than Hindus held responsible for the Bajrang Dal and Shiv Sena. But as Ziauddin Sardar puts it in his piece (see earlier in this issue): "All good and concerned Muslims are implicated in the unchecked rise of fanaticism in Muslim societies. We have given free reign to fascism within our midst, and failed to denounce fanatics who distort the most sacred concepts of our faith".

It will not do for Indian Muslims to speak out against the ban on SIMI. Fairly or otherwise, the entire community will get implicated if Muslims fail to denounce the fanatics and the ‘fascism’ in our midst.’ 

Archived from Communalism Combat, October 2001 Year 8  No. 72, Cover Story 8

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