Stupidity, Thy Name is Abu Hamza al-Misri
When he isn't inciting supporters to combat their humiliation with arms and martyrs (and then accidentally blowing his own limbs off with home-made explosives), Abu Hamza "Captain Hook" al-Misri casts a blind eye to the
resolve of those "soft, weak" Brits who do not subscribe to his mad delusions of grandeur:
Hamza is said to have been so convinced by a British undercover investigator posing as an extremist website operator that he allegedly sent him several secret propaganda films designed to attract new recruits. The videos were used, say investigators, to convince British Muslims to undergo jihad training at camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia.
The tapes and e-mails were obtained by Glen Jenvey, a 38-year-old freelance counterintelligence investigator from Wiltshire, over a period of more than a year. As the evidence flowed in, Jenvey forwarded it to the FBI, which is now building a case to extradite Hamza to America.
Ah, these plucky infidels and their personal home computers. This is playing dirty, and I advocate it strongly.
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According to statements given to the anti-terrorist branch in March, Jenvey set up an internet site called islamic-news.co.uk in 2002 using the fictitious name Pervez Khan. He published news items on the site from Kashmiri extremist groups and other hardline Islamic propaganda.
Once established, he sent the material to Hamza’s website — supportersofshariah.org, which is now shut down. “He was so pleased with this he decided to put a link to my site from his site. That was his first big mistake,” said Jenvey last week.
It gets better. Once Jenvey was able to quietly track visitors to the SOS website, Hamza then sent Jenvey a whole stash of
jihadi-propaganda goodies to recruit new supporters and thus "prepare them for jihad".
One tape given to Jenvey has already made an impact. It shows Hamza at a meeting sharing a platform with the US terrorist suspect James Ujaama.
Ujaama designed Hamza’s internet site under the name Abu Samaya, but denied knowing Hamza when first arrested by the FBI. However, his defence crumbled when the tape was produced. He is now the key witness against Hamza in the grand jury investigation.
As I write, British intelligence authorities are still, maddeningly, somewhat lax about charging Islamists like Abu Hamza for their tacit complicity in taking up arms against sovereign states. Apparently, unless
jihadi cults drag their turf wars onto British soil, the police are obliged to keep some distance.
Ori Golan reports: In a collection of papers entitled The New Antisemitism? published by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, Prof. Robert Wistrich of the Shalem Center and head of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Hebrew University, attempts to tackle the question. It is possible, he writes, that the British government has a tacit understanding with certain Islamist groups not to interfere with them so long as they don't strike on British soil. This may also explain why the Universities UK - the successor to the Council of Vice Chancellors and Principals - are reluctant to interfere with the activities of Islamist radicals on campus.
Golan further cites Michael Whine of the Community Security Trust (CST) as saying: "I don't think [the British authorities] really understand the Islamist thing, and the underlying ideology. They're interested in names and addresses, but not in what motivates these issues."
I tend to agree. A strident Islamist cult like, say, Hizb-ut-Tahrir or al-Muhajiroun, thrives in Britain because every minute spent operating relatively freely further vindicates their deep feeling of contempt for the British authorities. In my encounters with these Islamists, I strongly believe that this growing sense of contempt towards careless authorities is probably the most important aspect of what invigorates their sense of solidarity and spurs them to action. Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Al-Muhajiroun, as well as many others, are cults that see fulfilment of their will through sedition, not simply as an end, but as the only means to that end. Muslims who want to be recruited into the ranks of Hizb-ut-Tahrir or al-Muhajiroun are required to pass tests where proof of loyalty to the group’s cause is predicated almost entirely on proof of disloyalty to the out-group. But it is their astonishing degree of adaptability to their environment, by openly exploiting tolerance to insidiously preach intolerance, that demonstrates how central their ideology of contempt is in mobilising them.
Muslims who bewail the fact that Islam today wears the face of militancy in the eyes of the world should understand that when those who call themselves "moderate" do not speak as loudly as the militants, the militants speak for them too. But when it comes to waging war against Islamists, the track record of Muslims has never been enough to inspire much confidence. It is far too late, and already too dangerous, for the British authorities to wait for British Muslims to "police" their own. In the meantime, that correction must come from the outside. Cults like al-Muhajiroun and Hizb-ut-Tahrir need to have their illusions of contempt ripped away, and to thus tear away at the very fabric that holds them together.
UPDATE: Glen Jenvey himself responds, in the Comments section over at the Command Post.
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Where Vengeance is Written in Blood
In a remarkable book, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, the Morroccan scholar Fatna Sabbah writes these daring words:
"I would like to say to the young men formed in our Muslim civilisation that it is highly improbable that they can value liberty - by which I mean, relating to another person as an act of free will, whether it be in bed, in erotic play, or in political debates in party cells or parliament - if they are not conscious of the political import of the hatred and degradation of women in this culture."
I recalled these fine words when reading a recent article highlighting the continuing atrocities taking place in the name of patriarchal and tribal honour. It describes the intense anguish of a Ms. Khouri, whose newly-released book recalls how her childhood friend, Dalia, was brutally killed at the hands of her own father.
"At the age of 26, Dalia became a victim, both of the power of unbidden love and the determination of her culture to crush it. She could not help herself. Through elaborate deceptions with the complicity of Ms. Khouri she held secret, though chaste, meetings with a young Catholic man named Michael.
In retrospect, the outcome was inevitable. As with other unmarried women, it was the job of her brothers to monitor her movements like detectives.
The final chapters of Ms. Khouri's book accelerate with grief and passion.
Dalia was stabbed 12 times in the chest, Ms. Khouri writes, and her father stood over her to be sure she was dead before calling an ambulance.
"I've cleansed my house," he shouted when Ms. Khouri ran in through the door, just a block away from her own home. "I've cut the rotten part and brought honor back to my family name."
"Tears flooded my eyes and I began wailing, as so many centuries of grieving Arab women had done before me," Ms. Khouri writes.
Then, in language that went well beyond traditional grief, she shouted at him: "Dalia never shamed you, you shamed yourself. You've turned your home into a house of murder. The spilling of her innocent blood has stained your name, your hands and your soul forever.""
I never cease to be astonished and repulsed at the virulent and pervasive nature of such evil deeds in the Arab and Muslim world. That Dalia's case was not in any way untypical only serves to show how premeditated killings are encouraged and abetted by the twin problems of severe cultural authoritarianism and the embarrassingly weak state of government tenacity in countering such vicious practices.
The article continues:
"Now, with the publication of her friend's story, "Honor Lost" (Simon & Schuster), this dark-haired woman with even darker eyes is stepping forward as a public face for all the women who risk death for violating a brutal desert code of behavior.
"I want the world to know Dalia the way I knew her," Ms. Khouri said in an interview here. "And I want them to know that she represents thousands of women who are still dying, and who had brothers and sisters and friends in their lives who are missing them the way I am missing Dalia.""
Ms. Khouri is truly courageous. That one would need to be in the first place is a sad and telling indication of just how rampant is the totalitarianism that she fights against. Ideally, an individual should not have to delve deep to find her inner courage to criticise those aspects of Muslim culture she disagrees with, but only a supreme confidence that the institutions of her nation will unapologetically defend her rights as an individual human being to the end. But this is not the state of affairs in Jordan at the present time, let alone in the wider Arab and Muslim world. Those under the aegis of a modern, liberal nation must not therefore feel guilty in actively condemning such practices, identifying their roots, and calling for them to be purged forever. Our human rights and freedoms are far too important for us to ignore their stark absence elsewhere.
UPDATE: Zack Ajmal also chimes in with some interesting observations. See Joe's post for a full set of links.
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Taliban: Destination UK
Imagine that you are somebody who has fought for the Taliban forces in the rugged, dusty hills of Afghanistan against American and British forces. After the fall of Kabul, you decide to leave for Britain where you intend to apply for asylum. Once in Britain, permission is granted for you to stay, and you are let loose into the country, with the help of legal aid - thanks to those kind British taxpayers:
Lawyers representing the 32-year-old fighter have disclosed that the Home Office has given him permission to stay after accepting that his life would be at risk if he returned to Afghanistan.
It is the first known case of a Taliban soldier being granted asylum in this country. The disclosure last night sparked outrage and raised concerns that the successful application may open the doors to hundreds of other similar requests.
More and more, it seems the Home Office has gone quite mad.
Nick Bourne, the leader of the Conservative Group in the Welsh Assembly, intends to raise the case with David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. "This is an extraordinary kick in the teeth for our troops," he said.
"I think most people would agree that anyone who has fought against Britain and our allies should not be granted asylum."
How does a Taliban fighter reconcile what he has done in the recent past - in this case, actively fighting against British troops - with a decision to apply for permission to stay in the lands of the infidels, the very target of his venomous hatred?
Is it out of repentance? No, because humiliated and defeated fighters in retreat - Taliban or otherwise - are not stupid. The strength of the application for asylum lies in that claim that this Taliban lunatic is escaping from reprisals back home - in which case, repentance is more likely to be a tactical ploy rather than genuine. But why did he choose to come halfway around the world to Britain? Says The Economist:
[S]uspected terrorists whose claims for asylum are rejected cannot be returned to their home country if it is deemed they would be at risk there. They can be deported to a third country but, not surprisingly, few want to take them in. Then the only option is detention. But the authorities are eager not to repeat the mistakes they made in Northern Ireland—where widespread internment without trial inflamed Catholic sentiment—by appearing to target Muslim men.
In other words, our Taliban fighter travels to Britain
precisely because of his contempt for British infidels in particular. When the Brits are not seen to be forthright with returning Taliban fighters whence they came, that breeds contempt for a pathetic British policy, not respect. How else would a Taliban fighter justify his action to apply for asylum to like-minded colleagues? It is crucial to understanding Islamic fundamentalism that it is primarily sustained by intense peer pressure, which tends to translate into reinforced opportunism - certainly not genuine penitence from past sins - a fact that seems to be little understood in the Home Office. And there is certainly
no absence of groups that take advantage of this
appalling lack of British bluntness towards Islamist capacity to
incite and justify violence elsewhere without having to say it explicitly to members.
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Sunday Shenanigans
Sunday Shenanigans
Today's Blogs:
* Taliban: Destination UK
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When Ibn Warraq met Edward Said
It is commonly supposed that pursuing knowledge in a systematic, scientific manner is good scholarship. There is an excellent reason for this - the frontiers of human understanding are advanced only by modifying or discarding theories that fail to explain reality in favour of those that do. In other words, it takes a theory to beat a theory. In intellectual circles, this has become the obvious standard against which the quality of scholarship is held.
And yet, in some cases, it isn't so obvious. In an important sense, such scholarship is regarded as more valuable in some cultures than in others. In a culture driven by a sense of justice that derives itself from positional authority, as opposed to a rational authority, extending scholarship to its logical conclusions can fraught with problems. Good scholarship does not allow itself to be subordinated to issues of shame and honour – it carries on regardless. But in cultures where the claims of the community against its members take unconditional priority over individuals against the community, the costs of renegade scholarship are considerably greater than the short-term benefits. In other words, works that cross the boundaries of defection exact a very high price.
In the U.S., as well as Britain, Middle Eastern Studies seems a
culture unto itself. Since the publication of
Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by Edward Said, the study of the Middle East has been driven more by insidiously shaming scholars into harbouring particular viewpoints, rather than analysing the intellectual merits of the subjects under scrutiny. Never has an established academic field so widely degenerated into emulating what is meant to be the remote object of its study. And the recent, albeit timely, advent of
Campus Watch reflects an overwhelming need to readdress such unwarranted bias in an era where silencing critics of Said and his followers has become more widely institutionalised ever since the days when
Orientalism was first published.
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Said's book was purportedly aimed at "deconstructing" the writings of past and present Orientalists, who served, according to Said, only to justify and advance the New Imperial Order, where Europe’s and America’s mighty armadas moved to subjugate the stupid and hapless Oriental.
Orientalism ignited a whole field of “post-colonial studies” which reiterated the standard quasi-Marxist accusations towards Western nations, especially America, for having hijacked the Orient for its own evil ends, thus taking much of the blame for the present pathetic and humiliating state of the Arab world. And yet, in spite of claiming to “deconstruct” Orientalists whose fallacious writings, Said believed, were seen to be always infused with an air of contempt directed against the Oriental, nowhere did Said introduce a new way of thinking about the Arab world; nowhere did he provide an alternative, superior theory and framework that contained none of the alleged defects of Orientalist theories.
As Martin Kramer has
pointed out, Said admitted in the afterword of the 1994 edition of
Orientalism that "I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are." In other words, Said was not interested in advancing scholarship, but only anti-Western polemical screeds, being mostly content with hurling vitriolic and malicious invective against past and present Orientalists, such as Silvestre de Sacy and Bernard Lewis.
Despite his Arab heritage, there is also a peculiar condescension towards Arabs and Muslims that runs throughout many Said’s works. This is disturbing, given that many Arabs and Muslims share much of Said’s conclusions of who is to blame for their mess. And yet for Said to place much of the blame on Western shoulders strongly implies that Arabs and Muslims are inherently incapable of beginning to sort out their societies; that such people are pathetic, downtrodden children, utterly bereft of any capacity for being instrumentally rational, aside from a talent simply for acting to gain attention the way a two-year-old child throws a tantrum to get Mommy's attention.
Surely this is condescension of the worst kind. Despite what the Arab world has been through, no reasonably sane person could believe that of Arabs and Muslims. And yet it is there hidden away, couched beneath Said’s heavy denunciations of the Western “rape” of the Orient. It is, in fact, not surprising that this is so. In implying such a contemptible viewpoint – whether consciously made or otherwise – Said is forced to necessarily raise the intensity of abuse hurled against his Western targets in order to increasingly obscure the obvious insinuation made within. This also acts as a useful relief mechanism for assuaging such pent-up guilt from such condescension by releasing it elsewhere, much of it at the usual suspect – the West. Incidentally, this is common practice among quasi-Marxist interpretations of history.
Said's writings have received rebuttals in the past, of which among the most notable are by
Bernard Lewis and
Keith Windschuttle. More recently, Ibn Warraq of the Institution of the Secularisation of Islamic Society (ISIS), has also joined the fray. Ibn Warraq, an ex-Muslim who is no stranger to defecting from established conventional wisdom having written and edited some
excellent books on the
origins of Islam, has now turned his attention towards the Saidian polemicists and penned a rather
exhaustive essay decrying the pretensions of Edward Said towards harbouring any conceptions of intellectual scholarship.
Ibn Warraq’s dissection of Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient is a masterfully written, albeit long, catalogue of Said’s errors and misconceptions. Indeed, one of the most absurd charges made by Said was one levelled against Bernard Lewis. In an essay, Lewis had discussed the etymological root of the classical Arabic term thawra [revolution] as follows:
bq. “The root th-w-r in Classical Arabic meant to rise up (e.g. of a camel) , to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage, to rebel. It is often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent sovereignty; thus, for example, the so-called party kings who ruled in eleventh century Spain after the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordova are called thuwwar ( sing. tha’ir ).”
Said responded thus:
bq. “Lewis’s association of thawra with a camel rising and generally with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints much more broadly than is usual for him that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being. Each of the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is tinged with sexuality: stirred, excited, rising up. But for the most part it is a ‘bad’ sexuality he ascribes to the Arab. In the end, since Arabs are really not equipped for serious action, their sexual excitement is no more noble than a camel’s rising up. Instead of revolution there is sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty, and more excitement, which is as much as saying that instead of copulation the Arab can only achieve foreplay, masturbation, coitus interruptus. These , I think , are Lewis’s implications ....”
To which Ibn Warraq has this to say:
bq. "Can any rational person have drawn any conclusion which even remotely resembled that of Edward Said’s from Lewis’s scholarly discussion of Classical Arabic etymology? Were I to indulge in some prurient psycho-biography, much in fashion, I would be tempted to ask, “What guilty sexual anguish is Said trying to cover up? Just what did they do to him at his Cairo English prep school?”. Lewis’s concise and elegant reply to Said’s conclusions is to quote the Duke of Wellington: “If you believe that, you can believe anything”."
And that is not all. Ibn Warraq’s essay is full of delightful rejoinders at Said’s expense. In reading this piece, one recalls the apt words of Stephen Schwartz on Said's book:
bq. "Said's Orientalism, a ridiculous imposture from its first page to its last, is now a standard text in Anglo-American universities, but reads like the product of a rather dense college student who has just discovered Marxism; there can be no more telling condemnation of the present state of the American academy than the ascendancy of Said.”
Indeed.
JK UPDATE: More Said-related resources.
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Welcomes From The Team: Adil Farooq
Joe asked us to use our first posts on Winds of Change.NET for introductions, starting with the reason we're here. A few of you may already be aware of who I am from my blog Muslimpundit.com. But it's probably more likely that many don't.
Although my background training is in economics and maths, my interests also extend to history and religion, especially when relating to questions of Islam. Needless to say, the main reason for this interest owes to the resurgence of local and global Islamism that has especially come to light after September 11. I have often encountered strident Islamists in the past, and have increasingly become intrigued by the remarkable power this political ideology wields over its adherents, who otherwise seem to be normal, even rational people. The outward behavioural paradoxes that one frequently observes in these Muslims suggest that Islamism is able to tap into something deep into the behavioural psyche. One of my jobs, as I see it, is not simply to help shed some light on these paradoxes, but, most importantly, to learn from others who know more about this than me. Joining the intrepid Wind of Change.NET team allows me to spend more time exploring this fascinating area.
Another reason for my interest in this immense subject owes to the damning behaviour displayed by a disproportionate number of Muslims in response to September 11, and their ambivalent responses to issues of terrorism towards non-Muslims and the spread of totalitarian ideologies in general. Exploring the implications of such behaviour will be another issue that I hope to learn more about while I am here. By the way, you won't find apologetic tracts unconditionally excusing aspects of Muslim culture here. I find such self-pity to be beneath contempt and irredeemably fallacious; I don't support it, and I don't excuse it. Indeed, my first name*, in Arabic, means "to be just, honest", and my surname means "one who distinguishes between good and evil". Assuredly, they are not pseudonyms. My parents gave me this name in the hope that I would live up to it, and I fully intend to see it through, even if Muslims elsewhere don't. Nothing to me is more sacred.
Welcome back, and thanks for reading!
[*] Contrary to popular opinion in some parts, this doesn't mean I'm from the Balkans. (Yes, I know, I saw that episode of The Simpsons too!)
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