Because of course, they trusted us soooo much on 9/11 when they were cheering in Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, etc.
Religion of peace my ass! Here's what Kfo's buddies are doing: http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050710/wl_afp/afghanistantalibanattacks_050710065204 Six Afghan police beheaded, four killed by suspected Taliban insurgents Sun Jul 10, 3:12 AM ET KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AFP) - Six missing Afghan police were found beheaded after they were snatched away from their convoy in a Taliban attack which left four other police killed and three wounded, officials said. The convoy of about 30 policemen was on a routine patrol when it came under attack Saturday in the Bahramcha area of Deshu district in Helmand province, some 690 kilometers (431 miles) south of the capital Kabul. "Four police were killed in the two-hour exchange of fire and six other missing police were later found beheaded with their heads atop their chest after a long search for them," Mohammed Rasoul the border brigade commander of Deshu district told AFP. Initially 16 police went missing soon after the fighting, six police were found immediately, four were killed on the spot and six police were taken by Taliban, Rasoul said. The headless bodies of the captured six were later found close to the Pakistani border, he added. Provincial governor Mullah Shir Mohammed blamed the attack on Taliban insurgents and said they had crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistani soil, quoting local witnesses. "The Taliban attacked our border police in four vehicles, they came from Pakistan and escaped back into Pakistan and left the beheaded bodies close to the border," said Mohammed. On Saturday a man claiming to be speaking on behalf of the ousted Taliban regime called AFP from an unknown location and claimed responsibility for the attack. The Taliban, who were ousted from power by US-led forces in 2001, have stepped up their attacks in the run up to parliamentary elections in September. The violence has left about 600 people, most of them militants, dead since the start of the year.
Religion of Peace in da' house. How best to blow up people on a bus - the chilling video circulating on terrorist websites By Colin Freeman (Filed: 10/07/2005) A DIY video showing how to make a "suicide-belt" bomb for use on a crowded bus is being circulated among terrorist websites. The 26-minute tape gives a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to pack the belt with shrapnel and high explosive, and then detonate it on board for maximum loss of life. Images from the video that can be downloaded In a grim reminder of the blast that devastated the Number 30 in London's Tavistock Place on Thursday, the film's final section shows the device being blown up in a specially arranged "test site", with rows of metal targets designed to simulate passengers on a bus. A voice-over explains exactly where the would-be bomber should sit on the vehicle in order to maximise the blast. A second test-bombing shows how the same bomb will impact on a crowd of people in a street. The film, a copy of which has been obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, is among a wide range of terrorism training manuals available on internet message boards dedicated to supporting Islamic terrorism. Little is known about the film's origins, although it is thought to have been shot in the Palestinian territories, where Arab militants have frequently used suicide belts in attacks on Israeli citizens. It has slick production values that give it the feeling of a corporate video. As music plays in the background, a voice in Arabic explains, Blue Peter-style, how to manufacture the belt with the help of household items such as glue and Scotch tape. The video's availability on the internet was disclosed by the Washington-based Search for International Terrorist Entities (Site) Institute, a research establishment which monitors and analyses terrorist websites. It acts as a consultant to several Western intelligence agencies. "The quality of the video is unbelievable," said Rita Katz, Site's director. "It is more like a production from National Geographic. We think it is the work of Hizbollah from some years ago, but it is being circulated on message boards." Scotland Yard has tried to play down speculation that Thursday's explosion on the London bus, in which 13 people died, was the work of a suicide bomber. However, detectives say they are keeping an open mind until a forensic analysis of the bus's wreckage is complete. Even if the inquiry rules it out, the fact that al-Qaeda has used such devices in the past means that it could be a tactic in any further attacks in Britain. The video gives a detailed demonstration of how to make the belt from start to finish, and has a single-minded emphasis to how to kill and maim as many victims as possible. The voice-over notes: "When the person who will be wearing this explosive vest goes on the bus, and wants to blow himself up, he must be facing the front with his back toward the back. "There is a possibility that the two seats on his right and his left might not be hit with the shrapnel. However, the explosion will surely kill the passengers in those seats." The video is among dozens of terrorist self-teaching aids circulating on jihadi message boards and websites, alongside manuals on the manufacture of poisonous chemicals and bacteria, urban guerrilla warfare tactics, and the use of rocket-propelled grenades and missiles. © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms & Conditions
For those of you in the reality-challenged community: ****http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1525172,00.html Face up to the truth We all know who was to blame for Thursday's murders... and it wasn't Bush and Blair Nick Cohen Sunday July 10, 2005 The Observer The instinctive response of a significant portion of the rich world's intelligentsia to the murder of innocents on 11 September was anything but robust. A few, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, were delighted. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was 'the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,' declared the composer whose tin ear failed to catch the screams. Others saw it as a blow for justice rather than art. They persuaded themselves that al-Qaeda was made up of anti-imperialist insurgents who were avenging the wrongs of the poor. 'The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?' asked Dario Fo. Rosie Boycott seemed to agree. 'The West should take the blame for pushing people in Third World countries to the end of their tether,' she wrote. In these bleak days, it's worth remembering what was said after September 2001. A backward glance shows that before the war against the Taliban and long before the war against Saddam Hussein, there were many who had determined that 'we had it coming'. They had to convince themselves that Islamism was a Western creation: a comprehensible reaction to the International Monetary Fund or hanging chads in Florida or whatever else was agitating them, rather than an autonomous psychopathic force with reasons of its own. In the years since, this manic masochism has spread like bindweed and strangled leftish and much conservative thought. All kinds of hypocrisy remained unchallenged. In my world of liberal London, social success at the dinner table belonged to the man who could simultaneously maintain that we've got it coming but that nothing was going to come; that indiscriminate murder would be Tony Blair's fault but there wouldn't be indiscriminate murder because 'the threat' was a phantom menace invented by Blair to scare the cowed electorate into supporting him. I'd say the 'power of nightmares' side of that oxymoronic argument is too bloodied to be worth discussing this weekend and it's better to stick with the wider delusion. On Thursday, before the police had made one arrest, before one terrorist group had claimed responsibility, before one body had been carried from the wreckage, let alone been identified and allowed to rest in peace, cocksure voices filled with righteousness were proclaiming that the real murderers weren't the real murderers but the Prime Minister. I'm not thinking of George Galloway and the other saluters of Saddam, but of upright men and women who sat down to write letters to respectable newspapers within minutes of hearing the news. 'Hang your head in shame, Mr Blair. Better still, resign - and whoever takes over immediately withdraw all our forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,' wrote the Rev Mike Ketley, who is a vicar, for God's sake, but has no qualms about leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban and al-Qaeda or Iraq to the Baath party and al-Qaeda. 'Let's stop this murder and put on trial those criminals who are within our jurisdiction,' began Patrick Daly of south London in an apparently promising letter to the Independent. But, inevitably, he didn't mean the bombers. 'Let's start with the British government.' And so it went on. At no point did they grasp that Islamism was a reactionary movement as great as fascism, which had claimed millions of mainly Muslim lives in the Sudan, Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan and is claiming thousands in Iraq. As with fascism, it takes a resolute dunderheadedness to put all the responsibility on democratic governments for its existence. I feel the appeal, believe me. You are exasperated with the manifold faults of Tony Blair and George W Bush. Fighting your government is what you know how to do and what you want to do, and when you are confronted with totalitarian forces which are far worse than your government, the easy solution is to blame your government for them. But it's a parochial line of reasoning to suppose that all bad, or all good, comes from the West - and a racist one to boot. The unavoidable consequence is that you must refuse to support democrats, liberals, feminists and socialists in the Arab world and Iran who are the victims of Islamism in its Sunni and Shia guises because you are too compromised to condemn their persecutors. Islamism stops being an ideology intent on building an empire from Andalusia to Indonesia, destroying democracy and subjugating women and becomes, by the magic of parochial reasoning, a protest movement on a par with Make Poverty History or the TUC. Again, I understand the appeal. Whether you are brown or white, Muslim, Christian, Jew or atheist, it is uncomfortable to face the fact that there is a messianic cult of death which, like European fascism and communism before it, will send you to your grave whatever you do. But I'm afraid that's what the record shows. The only plausible excuse for 11 September was that it was a protest against America's support for Israel. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden's statements revealed that he was obsessed with the American troops defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein and had barely said a word about Palestine. After the Bali bombings, the conventional wisdom was that the Australians had been blown to pieces as a punishment for their government's support for Bush. No one thought for a moment about the Australian forces which stopped Indonesian militias rampaging through East Timor, a small country Indonesia had invaded in 1975 with the backing of the US. Yet when bin Laden spoke, he said it was Australia's anti-imperialist intervention to free a largely Catholic population from a largely Muslim occupying power which had bugged him. East Timor was a great cause of the left until the Australians made it an embarrassment. So, too, was the suffering of the victims of Saddam, until the tyrant made the mistake of invading Kuwait and becoming America's enemy. In the past two years in Iraq, UN and Red Cross workers have been massacred, trade unionists assassinated, school children and aid workers kidnapped and decapitated and countless people who happened to be on the wrong bus or on the wrong street at the wrong time paid for their mistake with their lives. What can the survivors do? Not a lot according to a Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He told bin Laden that the northern Kurds may be Sunni but 'Islam's voice has died out among them' and they'd been infiltrated by Jews. The southern Shia were 'a sect of treachery' while any Arab, Kurd, Shia or Sunni who believed in a democratic Iraq was a heretic. Our options are as limited When Abu Bakr Bashir was arrested for the Bali bombings, he was asked how the families of the dead could avoid the fate of their relatives. 'Please convert to Islam,' he replied. But as the past 40 years have shown, Islamism is mainly concerned with killing and oppressing Muslims. In his intervention before last year's American presidential election, bin Laden praised Robert Fisk of the Independent whose journalism he admired. 'I consider him to be neutral,' he said, so I suppose we could all resolve not to take the tube unless we can sit next to Mr Fisk. But as the killings are indiscriminate, I can't see how that would help and, in any case, who wants to be stuck on a train with an Independent reporter? There are many tasks in the coming days. Staying calm, helping the police and protecting Muslim communities from neo-Nazi attack are high among them. But the greatest is to resolve to see the world for what it is and remove the twin vices of wilful myopia and bad faith which have disfigured too much liberal thought for too long.
Dumbest thing I've heard in quite a while. The OKC bombers didn't do their work in the name of their God, and weren't quitely accepted/supported by Christians. I don't even think they claimed to be Christian for crying out loud.
Can't they condemn both? What is causing Americans to have that attitude? I don't think that argument will win many over. If they do nothing, more Americans etc. will hate the extremists and the ones who share their religion and do nothing to stop them.
It was supposedly a rightwing reaction to Waco. McVeigh had a mind of his own. His accomplices were probably right wing organizations that abandoned him when he took all the credit of martyr. I wouldn't take Gore Vidal too seriously, but Timmy claimed his analysis was the most accurate, so take it for what it's worth. Vanity Fair reprint
I don't why people do not understand the anti-American sentiment is not a Muslim versus Christian question, but rather a political one. Why is it that prior to 1948 and the creation of Israel, Muslims and Jews lived in peace in the Holy Land? Why is it that Palestinian Christians have historically overwhelmingly supported the PLO over Israel? You mention Lebanon. Lebanon is 50% Christian and 50% Muslim. When they were cheering in Lebanon, how do you know that it was only the Muslim half that was cheering? Please understand that the issue is political. It is not religious.
Heck under that reasoning by extension we hate freedom too since we support regimes like Musharraf's that are far less democratic than Iran. Yes I totally agree the Taliban and Al Quaeda want to impose tyrannical backward regimes, in Islamic countries, but that's quite a stretch to imply that they hate our freedom or freedom as some sort of abstract idea.
To Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and even Syria's credit they have been arresting terrorists. Egypt in the mid-90's fought essentially a low grade civil war with the Muslim Brotherhood who were responsible for several terrorists acts. Unfortunately the repression and corruption with in their regimes and the heavy handedness with how they deal with problems like that end up increasing support for radicals.
Haha ... hard to believe that it was about 10 years ago though, eh? I vividly remember coming home from school and watching it. Here I am about to graduate college ... time flies.
Tom Friedman's take: If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: July 8, 2005 Yesterday's bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In part, that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally, England, is almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it's because one assault may have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this terrible jihadist weapon into the heart of a major Western capital. That would be deeply troubling because open societies depend on trust - on trusting that the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway is not wearing dynamite. The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers take their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies are never again quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little freedom yesterday. But maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations. That, too, is deeply troubling. The more Western societies - particularly the big European societies, which have much larger Muslim populations than America - look on their own Muslims with suspicion, the more internal tensions this creates, and the more alienated their already alienated Muslim youth become. This is exactly what Osama bin Laden dreamed of with 9/11: to create a great gulf between the Muslim world and the globalizing West. So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be easy. Why? Because unlike after 9/11, there is no obvious, easy target to retaliate against for bombings like those in London. There are no obvious terrorist headquarters and training camps in Afghanistan that we can hit with cruise missiles. The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells. Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent. And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village. What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. Many people said Palestinian suicide bombing was the spontaneous reaction of frustrated Palestinian youth. But when Palestinians decided that it was in their interest to have a cease-fire with Israel, those bombings stopped cold. The village said enough was enough. The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden. Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider. The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst.
I agre with Tom Friendman and with the idea that is ultimately up to Muslims to reform themselves the problem I see is as outsiders to Islam and Muslim societies is what do we do to encourage that. We've said we are out to win hearts and minds and I still think that's a good policy. While we're under attack by Islamic radicals demonizing Islam and bashing Islamic societies isn't the way to win hearst and minds. One of the central pieces of Al Qaeda rhetoric is that the West wants to destroy Islam and Al Qaeda's Jihad is really about defending Islam. To the point that poltical, religious, or cultural leaders in the US make statements demonizing Islam, Muhammad, the Qu'ran and Muslims in general that just feeds into Al Qaeda's target market and strengthen's their rhetoric. And yes of course Al Qaeda and Muslim leaders routinely demonize us but I don't get to vote on whose the leader of Al Qaeda and the spiritual leader of Hezbollah doesn't present himself as representing America unlike Pat Roberts. The next problem is that the war on terror is psychological and assymetric so we're already handicapped in the battle for hearts and minds when we're held to totally different standards. Since we're the big dog and we also clam to be civilized we've got to tread far more carefully than our enemies. So while yes we have to fight terrorism and Islam should reform I don't think we as outsiders can force them to reform. In my view the fight against terrorism needs to be done religiously neutral with the clear unambiguous message that this isn't a war on Islam and terrorism conducted by Muslims is no better or worse than terrorism conducted by Christians, Hindus, Buddhists or Atheists. As to reforming Islam IMO the best way to do it is to leave them alone. To the point that we are seen as taking sides in a religious debate within Islam that just gives credence to the fundamentalists who then say. "Look those reformers are really in the service of America."
Does the Muslim world consider Al Qaeda as a Islamic political group, a political group who calls themselves Islamic but do not live up to Islamic ideals, or just a good ol' psychopathic cult?
