Its pretty simple were not extremist Muslims. They even attack Muslims who arent fanatical enough. Wake the F up.Quote:
Why do they attack the western world, especially the USA?
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Its pretty simple were not extremist Muslims. They even attack Muslims who arent fanatical enough. Wake the F up.Quote:
Why do they attack the western world, especially the USA?
that is both a vague and unsupported answer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
Its totaly clear and the evidenceis right in front of your eyes should you choose to look.Quote:
that is both a vague and unsupported answer.
The big difference between Bin Laden and Bush is when Bin Laden says your either with us or against us hes deadly serious.
Wrong organization there Jag - it was the fighters in Afganstan during the Soviet Invasion that we funded and help set up.Quote:
Originally Posted by JAG
sounds like Jag is advocating invading more countries.Quote:
We get rid of these groups by specific targeted attacks, using intelligence better and getting rid of the base support the terrorists thrive on and live off.
The real question is:
If in fact there are very clear objectives that AQ has, for example the US leaving Saudi Arabia, what will that do? How will that help us fight them? Do we intend to change our way of life and our foreign policy to appease them?
Well I prefer to fight AQ without making things easier for them in the meantime. I doubt AQ has less recruits since the Invasion of Iraq.
Before 9/11 it was much more abstract ideological struggle but we just keep on giving Muslims more reasons to get pissed off. AQ got mostly Saudis to do the 9/11 attacks because of US troops there. Now Iraq is like a beacon that attracts even more attention.
It will be more difficult for our intelligence services to control local groups as the extremism is spreading beyond the few known radicals.
CBR
They used mostly Saudis because they wanted to drive a wedge between the US and Suadi Arabia. They certainly have seemed to accomplish that at least as far as US public opinon goes.Quote:
AQ got mostly Saudis to do the 9/11 attacks because of US troops there.
We gave them a free pass in 1993. We gave them a free pass in 1996. We gave them a free pass in 1998. We gave them a free pass in 2000. Clearly, shaking your fist and saying "This will not stand" and doing nothing did nothing but embolden them.
We've tried reasoning with them. We've tried bribing them. We've tried apologizing to them. What did they do? They turned up the heat. I have no issue with Islam or muslims, this isn't about that. This is Wahabism, and whether or not unbelievers (of Wahabism) have a right to exist.
You forget about Russia Chchen's rebels ( as far as I know ) are sponsored by Al Queda ...Quote:
Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
Edit : it was an answer to the quetion why do they attack western world ( wrong quote ) ...
Specific target: IraqQuote:
Originally Posted by Jag
To get rid of base support we spread democracy and economic prosperity in the Middle East.
Your view of Iraq is too short term.
And also a country where Wahhabism is very strong, so easy to get people who were willing to die for a rather abstract cause. The AQ propaganda machine has had an easy job the last two years because of Iraq.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gawain of Orkeny
CBR
Agreed. While I think that this problem cannot get better until the Middle Eastern people have fair and just lives, we can't just ignore Al Quedia, or try and talk with them. It's one thing to negiotate with Iraq loyalisty fighters, it's another to try and negiotate people who have no goals other than to destroy everyone that isn't Muslim enough.Quote:
Kill, Osama Bin Laden. Its that simple, infiltrate AQ and kill every single major leader. Trace their accounts and cut of their money, find the government officials that support them in countries and have them assasinated using untraceable methods. Destroy the support and leadership mechanisms of the organisation.
Then pour money into the ME and rebuild that areas economy, rich and content men do not want Jihads. Poor unemployed disaffected men with no hope do.
I agree when it's said that the West has a hand in the cause and that until the Middle Eastern people's lives improve, nothing is going to change, but we can't improve their lives and earn their respect when insane orginizations that have no real motive exist. The fact that we may have had helped cause it doesn't mean that the radical Islamic terrorist would never allow peace.
They didn't have any problems finding volunteers prior to us doing anything in Afghanistan or Iraq.
And who said thow money at them, that people with money don't want Jihad? Bin Laden was a millionare when this all started and none of the hijackers on September 11th came from poor families. All were at least 'well to do'.
I always assumed that the leaders were the rich ones who wanted more power, while the grunts (at least now) were the poorer desprate people willing to blow themselves up.
But then again, as the Crusades showed, religous fervor is hardly limited to the poor.
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I always assumed that the leaders were the rich ones who wanted more power, while the grunts (at least now) were the poorer desprate people willing to blow themselves up.
There you go assuming again
Here read about the 911 hijackers. They werent poor desperate people as you assume.
LINK
Islam might be the problem
I was reading excerpts from the koran once and there was a passage that said
"And Allah said kill all of the infidels." Now this was an english translation so I have no clue how accurate that is but if it is what it really says we have a bigger problem.
Islam is not the problem. The Wahabist sect of it is.
Thank you Don. :bow:
Gawain, surely numerous poor and desprerate people are also joining the terrorist groups?
I'm sure they are, but they're not joining because they're poor. They're joining to put the world under Sharia. Rich, poor, young, old, there's only two things that unite these people 1) They're Wahabbist and 2) They want the rest of the world to be.
Well at least Don gets it.
LINKQuote:
June 30, 2003, 11:20 a.m.
Wahhabism & Islam in the U.S.
Two-faced policy fosters danger.
By Stephen Schwartz
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the text of testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on Thursday, June 26, 2003.
hairman Kyl, other distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for your invitation to appear here today.
I come before this body to describe how adherents of Wahhabism, the most extreme, separatist, and violent form of Islam, and the official sect in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have come to dominate Islam in the U.S.
Islam is a fairly new participant at the "big table" of American religions. The Muslim community only became a significant element in our country's life in the 1980s. Most "born Muslims," as opposed to those who "converted" — a term Muslims avoid, preferring "new Muslims" — had historically been immigrants from Pakistan and India who followed traditional, peaceful, mainstream Islam.
With the growth of the Islamic community in America, there was no "Islamic establishment" in the U.S. — in contrast with Britain, France, and Germany, the main Western countries with significant Islamic minorities. Historically, traditional scholars have been a buffer against extremism in Islam, and for various sociological and demographic reasons, American Islam lacked a stratum of such scholars. The Wahhabi ideological structure in Saudi Arabia perceived this as an opportunity to fill a gap — to gain dominance over an Islamic community in the West with immense potential for political and social influence.
But the goals of this operation, which was largely successful, were multiple.
First, to control a significant group of Muslim believers.
Second, to use the Muslim community in the U.S. to pressure U.S. government and media, in the formulation of policy and in perceptions about Islam. This has included liaison meetings, "sensitivity" sessions and other public activities with high-level administration officials, including the FBI director, that we have seen since September 11.
Third, to advance the overall Wahhabi agenda of "jihad against the world" — an extremist campaign to impose the Wahhabi dispensation on the global Islamic community, as well as to confront the other religions. This effort has included the establishment in the U.S. of a base for funding, recruitment, and strategic/tactical support of terror operations in the U.S. and abroad.
Wahhabi-Saudi policy has always been two-faced: that is, at the same time as the Wahhabis preach hostility and violence against non-Wahhabi Muslims, they maintain a policy of alliance with Western military powers — first Britain, then the U.S. and France — to assure their control over the Arabian Peninsula.
At the present time, Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques are under Wahhabi control. This does not mean 80 percent of American Muslims support Wahhabism, although the main Wahhabi ideological agency in America, the so-called Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that some 70 percent of American Muslims want Wahhabi teaching in their mosques.1This is a claim we consider unfounded.
Rather, Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching — including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational solicitation. Similar influence extends to prison and military chaplaincies, Islamic elementary and secondary schools (academies), college campus activity, endowment of academic chairs and programs in Middle East studies, and most notoriously, charities ostensibly helping Muslims abroad, many of which have been linked to or designated as sponsors of terrorism.
The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and CAIR. Support activities have been provided by the American Muslim Council (AMC), the American Muslim Alliance (AMA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, its sister body the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and a number of related groups that I have called "the Wahhabi lobby." ISNA operates at least 324 mosques in the U.S. through the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). These groups operate as an interlocking directorate.
Both ISNA and CAIR, in particular, maintain open and close relations with the Saudi government — a unique situation, in that no other foreign government directly uses religion as a cover for its political activities in the U.S. For example, notwithstanding support by the American Jewish community for the state of Israel, the government of Israel does not intervene in synagogue life or the activities of rabbinical or related religious bodies in America.
According to saudiembassy.net, the official website of the Saudi government, CAIR received $250,000 from the Jeddah-based Islamic Development Bank, an official Saudi financial institution, in 1999, for the purchase of land in Washington, D.C., to construct a headquarters facility.2
In a particularly disturbing case, the Islamic Development Bank also granted US$295,000 to the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center, for the construction of the Bilal Islamic Primary and Secondary School in California, in 1999.3 Hassan Akbar, an American Muslim presently charged with a fatal attack on his fellow soldiers in Kuwait during the Iraq intervention, was affiliated with this institution.
In addition, the previously mentioned official website of the Saudi government reported a donation in 1995 of $4 million for the construction of a mosque complex in Los Angeles, named for Ibn Taymiyyah, a historic Islamic figure considered the forerunner of Wahhabism.4 (It should be noted that Ibn Taymiyyah is viewed as a marginal, extremist, ideological personality by many traditional Muslims. In the wake of the Riyadh bombings of 2003, the figure of Ibn Taymiyyah symbolized, in Saudi public discourse, the inner rot of the regime. An article in the reformist daily al-Watan was headlined, "Who is More Important? The Nation or Ibn Taymiyyah"? Soon after it appeared, Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan and former deputy editor of Arab News, was dismissed from his post.)
The same official Saudi website reported a donation of $6 million, also in 1995, for a mosque in Cincinnati, Ohio.5 The website further stated, in 2000, "In the United States, the Kingdom has contributed to the establishment of the Islamic Center in Washington DC; the Omer Bin Al-Khattab Mosque in western Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Islamic Center, and the Fresno Mosque in California; the Islamic Center in Denver, Colorado; the Islamic center in Harrison, New York City; and the Islamic Center in Northern Virginia."6
How much money, in total, is involved in this effort? If we accept a low figure of control, i.e. NAIT ownership of 27 percent of 1,200 mosques, stated by CAIR and cited by Mary Jacoby and Graham Brink in the St. Petersburg Times,7 we have some 324 mosques.
If we assume a relatively low average of expenditures, e.g. $.5 million per mosque, we arrive at $162 million.
But given that Saudi official sources show $6 million in Cincinnati and $4 million in Los Angeles, we should probably raise the average to $1 million per mosque, resulting in $324 million as a minimum.
Our view is that the number of mosques under Wahhabi control actually totals at least 600 out of the official total of 1,200, while, as noted, Shia community leaders endorse the figure of 80 percent Wahhabi control. But we also offer a number of 4-6,000 mosques overall, including small and diverse congregations of many kinds.
A radical critic of Wahhabism stated some years ago that $25m had been spent on Islamic Centers in the U.S. by the Saudi authorities. This now seems a low figure. Another anti-extremist Islamic figure has estimated Saudi expenses in the U.S., over 30 years, and including schools and free books as well as mosques, near a billion dollars.
It should also be noted that Wahhabi mosques in the U.S. work in close coordination with the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Saudi state entities identified as participants in the funding of al Qaeda.
Wahhabi ideological control within Saudi Arabia is based on the historic compact of intermarriage between the family of the sect's originator, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and the family of the founding ruler, Ibn Saud. To this day, these families divide governance of the kingdom, with the descendants of Ibn al-Wahhab, known as ahl al-Shaykh, responsible for religious life, and the Saudi royal family, or ahl al-Saud, running the state. The two families also continue to marry their descendants to one another. The supreme religious leader of Saudi Arabia is a member of the family of Ibn al-Wahhab. The state appoints a minister of religious affairs who controls such bodies as MWL and WAMY, and upon leaving his ministerial post he becomes head of MWL.
The official Saudi-embassy website reported exactly one year ago, on June 26, 2002, "The delegation of the Muslim World League (MWL) that is on a world tour promoting goodwill arrived in New York yesterday, and visited the Islamic Center there." The same website later reported, on July 8, 2002, "During a visit on Friday evening to the headquarters of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) [Secretary-General of the MWL Dr. Abdullah bin Abdulmohsin Al-Turki] advocated coordination among Muslim organizations in the United States. Expressing MWL's readiness to offer assistance in the promotion and coordination of Islamic works, he announced plans to set up a commission for this purpose. The MWL delegation also visited the Islamic Center in Washington DC and was briefed on its activities by its director Dr. Abdullah bin Mohammad Fowaj."8
In a related matter, on June 22, 2003, in a letter to the New York Post, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, a civic lobbying organization, stated that his attendance at a press conference of WAMY in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been organized by the U.S. embassy in the kingdom. If this is true, it is extremely alarming. The U.S. embassy should not act as a supporter of WAMY, which, as documented by FDD and the Saudi Institute,9 teaches that Shia Muslims, including even the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, are Jewish agents.
This is comparable to Nazi claims that Jewish business owners were Communists, or Slobodan Miloševic's charge, in the media of ex-Yugoslavia, that Tito was an agent of the Vatican. The aim is to derange people, to separate them from reality completely, in preparation for massacres. We fear that official Saudi anxiety their large and restive Shia minority, aggravated by Saudi resentment over the emergence of a protodemocratic regime in Iraq led by Shias, and consolidation of popular sovereignty in Shia Iran, may lead the Saudi regime to treat Shias as a convenient scapegoat, making them victims of a wholesale atrocity. The history of Wahhabism is filled with mass murder of Shia Muslims.
There is clearly a problem of Wahhabi/Saudi extremist influence in American Islam. The time is now to face the problem squarely and find ways to enable and support traditional, mainstream American Muslims in taking their community back from these extremists, while employing law enforcement to interdict the growth of Wahhabism and its financial support by the Saudis. If we fail to do this, Wahhabi extremism continues to endanger the whole world — Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Thank you for your attention.
Thanks for the articale. It makes me wonder even more why the hell we are still friends with Saudi Arabia...
No argument here. Of all the criticisms that I hear leveled against the US as partially responsible, this is the only I give any weight to. Thankfully, it's a mistake from which we're in the process of disentangling ourselves.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steppe Merc
Any ideas on how to pacify the Wahhabism? As it seems to be the soil from were the terroirists come from.
Yeah, it's number one defender of the faith said exactly what will pacify them. Gawain posted it in another thread. Aside from that, there's very little, as that's all they want.
I think I know: give me an "o", give me an "i".............. you know the rest.Quote:
Originally Posted by Steppe Merc
Well I did mean pacify as in threat netrulizer. To remove the reinforcement capacity of militant, fanatical, western hating, fundamentalistic Islamists usually help to keep the simular terrorist type down in numbers. At the same time you capture the terrorists.Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Corleone
Doing only one thing doesn't help enough.
Or do you leave the enemies armies or production centers intact when playing wargames? ~;) I admit I do the second, but only because those centers are "soon to be mine" ~D and I don't like rebuilding infrastructure.
Too be honest, would they actually win (Allah's younger brother helped ~D ), they would still fight eachother.
i understand the point some are trying to make about proximate cause vs ultimate cause (and believe me, some people will never get their head around such a simple concept); terrorism must be treated like a disease. to eradicate the disease, one must deal with the ultimate cause, not just the symptoms.
unfortunately, trying to analyze and distinguish between proximate and ultimate causes when dealing with the interactions among complex sociopolitical entities is not easy. is it worth the effort?
some would say the causes need to be understood as well as possible if the symptoms are to be identified properly. and that it's important to do this because simply treating the symptoms of a disease is too expensive and ineffective in the long run.
i would tend to agree with that. i think, in the long run, less people will die and the so-called 'war on terror' will have been more effective if effort is put into delineating and addressing, as best as possible, the ultimate cause and proximate causes of this specific brand of terrorism we're dealing with at the moment. but, forethought has never been as potent a force as reflex.
You know, its amusing (almost) when you hear the same people say that AQ is the USA's fault because we gave them money and then almost in the same breath they say we could solve everything by giving them more money. :dizzy2:Quote:
Originally Posted by Don Corleone
Ironside, I think I understood what you meant, and I thought I answered you.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironside
People don't turn to Wahabism because they're poor. There's plenty of middle and upper class extremists.
They don't turn to it because they're isolated. Many of these guys have families.
They don't turn to it because of the structure of your government. Members run the whole gamut between republic (as in Indonesia) to monarchy (Saudi Arabia) to military dictatorship (Syria).
I believe you're looking for sociological root cause, and this is my point... there isn't one. Any social vector you look at, you'll find representatives at either end of it.
In the end, the only thing that is common among these people is a desire to implement Sharia worldwide. This is the only thing they all have in common, their cause. You can argue that people are turning to Wahabism in response to perceived ills by the West, but let's face it, there's no direct correlation here. They've had recruits as long as they've had people. People claim it's a response to America's support of Israel, and while this might have exacerbated the situation, that's a tangential affect at best. I say this because this phenomenon LONG predates any concept of a nation of Israel and that's not the only area they're intersted in. How do you think the people in Bosnia wound up Muslim in the first place?
But, Don, I am not sure saying AQ are Islamic extremists gets us very far. It seems to imply they are just born like that - that this is just a continuation of the Islamic expansion that brought Muslims to Bosnia hundreds of years ago. In reality Islamic terrorism is a fairly recent phenomenon and one that appears to be growing. The causes of this is important question to answer - they may not be sociological, but they may give us a handle on how to prevent it gathering more recruits.
We can look at Bin Laden. He was not always waging war against the West. A very specific event sparked his antagonism - US troops in Arabia. We can look at the Chechen leader who was behind the Beslan school massacre - he was not always a fundamentalist fanatic, but changed while fighting a vicious war against Russia. We'll probably find similar "epiphanies" if we look at Algerian, Egyptian or Jordanian/Palestinian terrorists. Specific political or other situations that ignite a powder keg of frustrations and grievances. Knowing this does not necessarily mean we mustn't do anything to light the fire - using Western troops in Saudi Arabia to kick Saddam out of Kuwait was justified regardless of OBL's sensibilities, IMO. But keeping the bases after the war might have been a mistake, with the benefit of hindsight. Much of the opposition to the war in Iraq - at least within the West - has been that it may prove to have been the biggest such spark to Islamic terrorism in the future.
Then there are more fundamental explanations for Islamic terrorism - for why much of the Islamic world appears a powder keg. The Wahabi sect has been mentioned here. Its sponsorship by Saudi Arabia to divert potential opposition to the monarchy there must surely be a major factor. More generally, oppressive regimes - especially when combined with dismal economic performance - are likely to frustrate the ambitions of well educated young men who know they should be able to achieve more. Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan - maybe even parts of Indonesia - these places seem full of discontents. If it were not Wahabism or whatever you want to call it, in another age, it might have been nationalism or communism.
Even if we can identify the causes of Islamic terrorism, counteracting them may not be easy. Supporting political and economic reform in the affected areas would be a start. But I am not sure it is something best done at the barrel of a gun as the neocons think. Engaging in dialogue with and building bridges with non-extreme Muslims in these countries would be another. When the US starts sending politicians to speak on Al-Jazeera rather than firing missiles at its offices, then I'll start to have some confidence about how it's handling the war on terror.