[(Continued from p.3)]
much of the populace in most Muslim countries reacted with jubilation to the disaster that befell the West following the attack against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. This is, of course, not necessarily indicative of the Islamic doctrine as such, but it is certainly reflective of the depth of hostility toward the West, its wealth and values. There is no way to gauge the predominant sentiment among the masses throughout the length and width of the entire Islamic world, but judging from press write-ups, public demonstrations where pictures of Bin Laden were displayed, slogans were brandished or shouted, and American (and Israeli) flags and effigies were trampled and then burned by crowds in delirium, one could make no mistake about the intensity of the feelings.
Terrorism, in the eyes of the venerated Sheikh, who is looked up to in vast sections of Sunni Islam, is not absolutely forbidden under any circumstances, but it all depends who does the killing and against whom.
This should come as no surprise when one bears in mind, on the one hand, the harsh, even fanatic reaction of Muslims worldwide to what they perceive as the profanation of their holy sites or any slur to their culture, or the enthusiastic and self-assured way they go about spreading their faith and imposing it on others, and on the other hand, the ease with which they deny others' religious rights. It escapes nobody's scrutiny that their dead in their clashes with non-Muslims are immediately dubbed shahid (martyr). Their funerals are tumultuous, emotional, vindictive and replete with shouts of revenge, even when the deceased had engaged in an aggressive and unprovoked act of terrorism. The death and destruction of others is jubilantly celebrated by dance, distribution of sweets and outright delight in the misery and havoc they have wrought. It is as if human happiness were a zero-sum game, where someone's glory must come at the expense of others' misfortune, and where any success of the West is regarded as a Muslim failure, and vice versa.
Mosques can be and are erected throughout the Christian and Jewish worlds. Muslim clerics are invited to officiate in national ceremonies of Western countries as a matter of course. But no church can be built anywhere in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, Buddhist symbols were torn down by the Kabul government, and existing churches are torched or blown up in Indonesia, Egypt, the Sudan, Kosovo, and elsewhere. In the Islamic world, the state religion is invariably Islam. Moreover, Muslims around the world have grown accustomed that their rampages against other faiths go unpunished, and this encourages their belief that persecuting others is the natural state of affairs. For example, during the first year of the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000-1), Muslim immigrants in Western democracies were involved in hundreds of cases of vandalism, desecration and assaults against Jewish sites and Jewish individuals and worshippers, the scope of which has been unprecedented in Europe since Kristallnacht.
In short, there is a world of difference between Western values and Muslim ones, at least those articulated by the fundamentalists among them. In 1994, Abdallah Shami, head of the Islamic Jihad group in Gaza, when questioned by an Israeli journalist about indiscriminate "suicide bombing" of civilians, answered: "We do not possess the military hardware our enemy possesses. We do not have planes, missiles, or even a cannon with which we can fight injustice. The most effective tool to inflict damage and harm with the least possible losses is operations of this nature. This is a legitimate method based on martyrdom. The martyr gets the privilege of entering Paradise and frees himself from pain and misery."
This is the world of values of these terrorists and this is the Islamic rationalization of these values.
Sheikh Yussef al-Qardawi, one of the senior spiritual leaders of the Muslim Brothers, and an authoritative doctor of the Holy Law in Sunni Islam in general, who was one of the first to sanction "suicide" bombing, after the horror of September 11 was prompted to effectuate some fine tuning to this rule: he said that the Shari'a Law was against indiscriminate killing, that only enemy combatants who carried weapons were free prey for the Muslim jihad fighter. He even stated that those who commit this sort of atrocity cannot be called Muslims. However, this ruling is mitigated by so many caveats as to make it ineffective. (It is the West which turned Islam into its enemy; the Shari'a law forbids collaboration with non-Muslims against other Muslims; it is prohibited by Islamic Law to surrender a Muslim to non-Muslims; it makes no sense that Pakistan should assist foreigners to invade its Muslim neighbor; there is no doubt the Zionist entity is the one which stood the most to gain from this crime and Israel is the greatest terrorist in the world; the terrorism pursued by people who defend their rights and homeland--that of Hamas, Fatah and other Palestinian movements--is sanctioned by the Koran, because it is for the sake of Allah.)
In other words, terrorism in the eyes of the venerated Sheikh, who is looked up to in vast sections of Sunni Islam, is not a mode of operation that is absolutely forbidden under any circumstances, but it all depends who does the killing and against whom. When Muslims fight for their "rights," which they alone are authorized to determine, then a "human bomb" is permissible even among innocent civilians; if the enemy of Islam defends himself against Muslim onslaught, it is he who is the terrorist, even when he uses more discriminatory modes of fighting than the Muslims would adopt.
What is appalling is that these points of view are not only shared by Muslim journalists who shape
[(Continued on p.5)]
Outpost - 4 - February 2002