Al Qaeda and the U.S. Military: Resources For Journalists

On Wednesday, a joint Congressional Homeland Security hearing will examine the threat of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism to America's military on U.S. soil. This is a very large and complex topic. I wanted to share some resources for journalists looking to cover the hearings and the topic more broadly. Please note that I will be in Washington on Wednesday afternoon if you're looking to book someone to discuss the issue.

There are two components to the terrorist threat against the military at home: Internal and external. The current external threat is, in some ways, the simpler one to understand.

Al Qaeda-inspired homegrown terrorists have shown a sharp preference for targeting military facilities in recent years, including Khalid Abdul Latif in Seattle, Yonathan Melaku in Virginia, the Fort Dix Six, Antonio Martinez in Baltimore, and Nidal Hasan and Naser Abdo, both at Fort Hood in Texas.

What's interesting about this is the fact that many of them choose military targets because of explicit discomfort about the morality targeting civilians. I wrote about this dichotomy for The Atlantic.

The internal threat is more complicated and less covered by the media. There's a baseline issue with military personnel who turn against their own, as in the cases of Melaku, Hasan, Abdo and Sgt. Hasan Akbar, all of whom were -- to a greater or lesser extent -- operating independently. They were people serving in the military who allegedly became caught up in the tension between serving in the U.S. military and feeling that they were religiously or morally unable to kill fellow Muslims in theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beyond these cases, which seem to be on the rise inasmuch as a such statements based on the very small sample size, the military has been the subject of deliberate and often very successful infiltration efforts by Al Qaeda and related groups.

These efforts go back to the 1980s. One of the earliest examples is the case of Ali Mohamed, a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who later became a key operational terrorist planner, trainer and security chief in Al Qaeda.

Mohamed's resume also included the position of Staff Sgt. in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Bragg. Current Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri tasked Mohamed to infiltrate U.S. intelligence during the early 1980s on behalf of EIJ, the group Zawahiri led at the time (this was before Al Qaeda even existed). After an unsuccessful run at the CIA abroad, Mohamed moved to the United States, joined the Army and became a U.S. citizen. He was in the Army for four years, during which time he stole military manuals and sensitive information from Fort Bragg, took part in active fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and conducted training for jihadists and terrorists both abroad and in the New York City area. Some of his trainees took part in the World Trade Center bombing and a thwarted plot to bomb New York landmarks and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

Here are some INTELWIRE-exclusive resources on Mohamed:

Who Is Ali Mohamed?

Al Qaeda Spy Crafted 9/11 Network

New Link Between Ali Mohamed And 9/11

Who Masterminded 1993 WTC Bombing?

'Coleman Affidavit' on Ali Mohamed

Ali Mohamed Sourcebook

Nat Geo documentary, J.M. Berger Lead Researcher

Mohamed's case was not the only notable infiltration of the U.S. military by Al Qaeda. During the first Gulf War, an Al Qaeda operative named Tahir was part of a religious team dispatched to Riyadh by the Saudi government in a wildly successful effort to convert U.S. soldiers to Islam.

Tahir, a Vietnam vet who worked for Al Qaeda in Bosnia and Somalia, was one of several team members given wide-ranging access to U.S. personnel as part of an initiative presented by the Saudi government under the pretext of a cultural exchange. Another member of the team was Bilal Philips, an extremely controversial Islamic scholar who has been banned from entering Germany and the UK due to his preaching on such subjects as homosexuality and child marriage. At least hundreds of U.S. soldiers reportedly converted to Islam after the program.

After the war ended, Tahir and Philips attempted to recruit soldiers who had been exposed to the program as jihadist fighters in Bosnia. At least a dozen U.S. military vets went to Bosnia as "trainers" under this program and some stayed as fighters. The same program later recruited and trained the terrorists who attempted to carry out the Landmarks plot. The Bosnia program was funded by the Third World Relief Agency, an Al Qaeda-linked NGO which posed as a charity but in reality ran guns to Bosnia in defiance of a U.N. embargo and supported various terrorist causes.

As part of the recruiting program for trainers of the Bosnian mujahideen, Philips told me that he enlisted the help of Qaseem Uqdah, a vet then affiliated with the organization Muslim Military Matters, and for more than a decade after one of the key figures involved in certifying Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military. Uqdah refused repeated requests to discuss his involvement in the program with me.

For a very detailed account of this complex and nuanced program, which has never been fully exposed before, check out my new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam.

Labels: Al-Qaeda, Ali-Mohamed, Bilal-Philips, Bosnia, Egyptian-Islamic-Jihad, Fort-Hood, lone-wolf, Nasser-Abdo, Nidal-Malik-Hasan, Third-World-Relief-Agency, Yonathan-Melaku

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

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Terrorist acts, terrorist thoughts

By J.M. Berger

On a recent Friday, in Washington, D.C., the New America Foundation issued a report on "Countering Domestic Radicalization." A few hours later, the Bipartisan Policy Commission released a report on "Preventing Violent Radicalization in America." A week later, Google hosted an extravagant "Summit Against Violent Extremism" in Dublin.

You can expect to hear a lot more of this in the days and weeks to come. Ten years after September 11, the conversation has shifted away from traditional counterterrorism and toward "countering violent extremism," known as CVE.

The reasoning behind CVE is fairly easy to understand. Advocates say it's better, for both budgetary and social reasons, to prevent people from becoming terrorists in the first place than to arrest them after they have committed a crime. It's the triumph of Doctor Phil over Jack Bauer.

Traditional counterterrorism targets people who are already taking active steps in pursuit of illegal activities, regardless of their religion, and arrests them before they can do harm.

In contrast, CVE seeks to prevent violent thoughts from taking root in the minds of ordinary people who are not actively pursuing illegal activities. And by ordinary people, everyone taking part in this conversation means Muslims.

This summer's think tank reports are not the worst examples of this kind of approach. Each contains a combination of astute insights and well-intentioned policy recommendations.

Many of those recommendations are oriented toward engaging Muslims rather than alienating them by singling them out for enforcement.

But both reports drive this point home in an unfortunate way, by talking exclusively about Muslim radicalization and not, for instance, white supremacy or the sovereign citizen movement.

Allowing for imperfect data, the percentage of Muslims who have a favorable view of Al Qaeda appears to be no larger than the number of white Americans who characterize themselves as racist.

Yet no one has ever once asked my opinion about how to keep young people from sliding into Odinism, or neo-Nazi beliefs, even though incidents of racist and anti-Semitic violence far outnumber incidents of jihadist terrorism in the United States.

If the first step in making Muslims feel less alienated is to single them out for remedial social engineering, then we have a problem before we even start.

Once you get past this inherent contradiction, the next question is whether government and policymakers have a track record that suggests they can successfully navigate the waters of Muslim politics, ideology and belief in order to discourage radicalism and encourage moderation.

During the Gulf War, U.S. military commanders allowed the Saudi government to run a "cultural exchange program" on base with American soldiers near Riyadh. In reality, the program set out to convert those soldiers to Islam, reportedly with great success.

Leading the charge was a Canadian Muslim named Bilal Philips, who has since become an international pariah, banned from traveling to the U.K. and Germany over controversial interpretations of Islamic law on such issues as homosexuality and child brides.

In my new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, I reveal for the first time that another preacher given full access to U.S. soldiers in Riyadh, an American Muslim known as Tahir, was later discovered to be a member of Al Qaeda.

From the 1990s through 2003, both Republican and Democratic politicians embraced Abdurrahman Alamoudi, then-leader of the American Muslim Council, who was chosen as a partner in a number of government programs, from Muslim military chaplains to State Department goodwill efforts. Alamoudi is today serving a prison sentence for trying to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

The Pentagon even hosted Anwar Awlaki as a luncheon speaker on Islam soon after September 11, according to documents recently uncovered by Fox News. Today, American drones are scouring Yemen in an effort to kill Awlaki, whose preaching has inspired dozens of terrorist attempts by Western Muslims.

Unfortunately, there are not many success stories to offset these spectacular failures. The government has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to parse and evaluate Muslim thought and to identify moderate people and trends.

These failures aren't just embarrassments. When we elevate hucksters like Alamoudi, it dismays and discourages those moderate Muslims who know better, and when we subsequently have to prosecute the hucksters, it alienates other Muslims who feel that the U.S. government is trying to silence the community's most prominent voices.

Even when you move past such large-scale disasters, government efforts to engage American Muslims have fallen flat. Consider the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an occasional partner in the government's efforts to engage the Muslim community over the years.

CAIR has been largely pushed out of those programs over the last couple of years due to its historical links to Hamas, its often unhelpful narrative about the perceived victimization of Muslims in America and its tendency to approach the issue of radicalization with a mix of denial and rationalization.

While it has largely failed to satisfy its government constituents, CAIR also lacks credibility among radical-leaning Muslims, who routinely blast the organization as a snitch, a sellout and a passive collaborator in U.S. anti-Muslim policies.

Similar complications apply for many other American Muslim leadership organizations of the moment. The best-funded (and thus most prominent) organizations get significant money and theological guidance from overseas. They aren't populist and do not offer a particularly comfortable space for less-religious Muslims to participate.

Many of these groups also advance a watered-down version of the "war on Islam" narrative that is most important to violent radicalization, and not many can pass the white-glove test imposed by critics and watchdogs in political and media circles.

But at the same time, these groups are too assimilated and conciliatory to possess credibility with the segments of the Muslim community most vulnerable to violent radicalization.

There are other considerations as well, but all are variations on a single theme: Tackling extremism at the thought level is a complex endeavor with far more pitfalls than payoffs.

So where do we go from here?

Unlike racist radicals, Muslim extremists tend to focus on mass casualty attacks, rather than individual hate crimes. For that reason and others, the government will not let this issue go untended. But history suggests the CVE approach is ineffective at best, harmful at worst.

In contrast, consider the following statistic. More than 180 homegrown extremists have tried to carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since September 11. Only four have succeeded, thanks to old-fashioned counterterrorism. Many of those cases were cracked thanks to cooperation between American Muslims and law enforcement.

That's an impressive track record, and our policy investments should be informed by that success.

The vast majority of American Muslims oppose the acts of violence and terrorism carried out in their name by a handful of self-styled religious zealots who embrace the ideology of Al Qaeda. But the diversity of America's Muslim community makes it a challenge to develop critical mass for a legitimate grassroots movement that has both the credibility and will to fight radicalization directly.

I'm an optimist. I believe that such a movement can and will develop, if Muslims are given space to process this issue from within. When Americans are asked by an indigenous, populist Muslim movement for help counteracting the poison of radicalization, we should give it.

Until then, we should stay out of the way.

J.M. Berger is author of the new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam.

Labels: Abdurrahman-Alamoudi, Al-Qaeda, American-Jihadists, Anwar-Awlaki, Bilal-Philips, CVE, Jihad-Joe

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Jihad Joe Featured On Front Page Of Toronto's National Post

Jihad Joe was featured recently in a story by Toronto's National Post on controversial Islamic preacher Bilal Philips.

When Bilal Philips turned up in Frankfurt in April to address a demonstration organized by a local Muslim leader, German immigration police quickly expelled him for advocating the killing of homosexuals.

“Which is nonsense,” the 64-year-old Canadian Muslim preacher said in an interview this week during a visit to Toronto. “I was not advocating or calling on Germans to rise up and kill homosexuals.”

"Jihad Joe" includes never-before-revealed details about an Al Qaeda-linked program to recruit American military veterans as an "A-Team" to train and assist Bosnian mujahideen fighters, including the U.S. military policy that led to an Al Qaeda operative preaching to U.S. soldiers about Islam on a U.S. base with the approval of Army commanders during the Gulf War.

Read the full story

Buy the book

Labels: American-Al-Qaeda, American-Jihadists, Bilal-Philips, Bosnia, Jihad-Joe

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

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A Conversation About Jihad With Controversial Preacher Bilal Philips

The Islamic preacher Bilal Philips has long been a lightning rod for controversy. Born in Jamaica and raised in Canada, he converted to Islam in 1972 and studied Islamic theology in Saudi Arabia and the UK, eventually earning a doctorate.

During the first Gulf War, Philips ran a sort of Islamic tent revival for U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, which claimed to have converted thousands of soldiers to Islam. Subsequently, he used contacts made during that program to help recruit U.S. military veterans as volunteer trainers in the war in Bosnia starting in 1992. That program is described in great detail in my forthcoming book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, which hits bookstores on May 15.

Philips was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1995 prosecution U.S. v. Omar Abdel Rahman, in which almost a dozen people -- including Clement Hampton-El, an associate of Philips -- were convicted of conspiring to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York City, among other terrorism-related activities. Philips denies any wrongdoing in the case, blaming FBI informant Emad Salem for acting as an "agent provocateur" who actually instigated the plot and drew others into it. The extensive evidence in the case does not support this view.

Philips has not returned to the United States for some time, although he travels to his native Canada occasionally. In recent years, Philips has been banned from entering the UK and Australia on the basis of alleged links to terrorism (which he denies) and remarks at a UK mosque and elsewhere which appeared to say that it was Islamically acceptable for adult men to marry girls as young as the onset of puberty, or even younger. Philips spoke recently in Copenhagen, an appearance that was covered in advance with some apprehension by the local media, but which failed to deliver fireworks.

I contacted Philips during Ramadan last year primarily to discuss the Bosnia program. The results of that portion of the interview are detailed in the book. Afterward, we moved into a discussion of the evolution of the concept of jihad from the days when he was assisting Bosnian jihadists. The conversation took place late at night after a long day for both of us. I've edited the transcript significantly for readability, to remove verbal tics and trailing sentences from both participants, but I have not altered the views or content.

Whether or not one accepts Philips' statements at face value (and he tends to adjust his tone depending on his audience), his views shed an interesting light on one of the more difficult areas of Western-Muslim relations and one of the most challenging problems in counterradicalization -- preachers and opinion leaders in the Muslim world who clearly believe and preach in often stirring terms that Western civilization exists in sharp conflict with Islamic civilization, but who skirt, avoid, evade or simply stop short of openly endorsing violence.

Another example of this is Jama'at Al Muslimeen, a Baltimore-based Muslim organization I wrote about in February's CTC Sentinel (PDF).

Such people and organizations contribute to an environment that is a precursor to violent radicalization while engaging in self-protective qualifications, pitting Islam against the West in a scenario fraught with tension and extremes, while attempting to stop short of uttering the kind of rhetoric or taking part in physical acts which would lead to prosecution. For a long time, Anwar Awlaki was one such public figure, and his pre-radicalization rhetoric is likely more influential than what he has done since openly embracing terrorism.

The process of radicalization is not necessarily a sharp turn toward violence; it often begins in gray areas relating to ways of talking about the world and underlying assumptions about why people in both the West and the Muslim world do the things they do. In that spirit, I think there's a lot of food for thought in this interview. Comments are welcome on Twitter.

Q: How have attitudes about military jihad changed over the last 15 or 20 years? How do you determine what is a legitimate jihad?

Bilal Philips: In my view, much of what has been put under the general heading of jihad doesn't really comply with the shariah, or Islamic legal definitions. And many of the tactics which are being used, desperation-type tactics of suicide bombing, and these kinds of things, are illegitimate from the shariah perspective. So very few of the struggles that are going on are, from my perspective, really endorsable.

In some cases, like Chechnya, it went through certain stages. Afghanistan, in the earlier stages, when they were struggling against the Russians, then that was fine. But then what it evolved into, what it became, you know, is something that went awry.

And people began using techniques or tactics which are unacceptable, Islamically. So in terms of legitimate struggle around the world today, to me one is hard-pressed to identify. When people ask me, because of course, people ask me wherever I go, people may ask, you know, about something of that, "What about this struggle, what about that struggle?" and so on, I usually advise people that these things are confused.

You go there, you may have the best of intentions, but you don't really know what is going on, what is really behind the scenes, tactics and things we see that are not really legitimate, so I advise people to stay away from it. [I prefer] continuing to propagate the message of Islam, try to correct the media distortions, etc., help in that, if it's relief, medical, food, these kinds of things, ok. These can always benefit places, whether it's Chechnya, whether it's Afghanistan, whether it's anywhere.

So, you know, sending and supporting these kinds of things, fine. But to say, getting involved, on a military level, I think things have sort of deteriorated. The best of those struggles, that could come the closest to the definition of legitimate jihad, really have become corrupted. So, people are hard-pressed to find [just] causes, if that's the direction they would be involved in.

I think the effort now is a greater emphasis on community building, developing the kind of infrastructure to protect the Islamic faith, and to help it to grow in places like the U.S., Canada, U.K. Muslim schools have really come up in the last 20 or 25 years, there has been an explosion of Muslim schools. That people realize that this is the area that is really the big area that Muslims need to work on, in Western circumstances, to preserve the Islamic traditions, Islamic way of life, etc.

And it's just going farther and farther away from the military routes. Of course, those that are bent on that particular route, they are still there, trying to recruit people. And there are also agents, you know, causing people to be drawn into different circumstances. I know cases in the, in Canada where youths were drawn into ridiculous projects and ended up in jail.

But I think those are getting fewer and farther between. The overall leanings of the community is more towards community building than it is to going over and fighting, Islamically. This is my feeling in the communities that I have visited in the west.

Q: Have the conflicts changed? Or is it the people involved, who are steering the activity, that have changed? I guess the more direct would probably be, I listened to a lecture of yours from some years back, in which you said you believed in the "clash of civilizations," and that America was the enemy of Islam. Is the west at war with Islam in your view?

Yes, from the clash perspective, I mean, of course, Huntington's argument, and I'm not promoting his whole argument, just one element of it, which was this concept of globalized western civilization as portrayed in secular democracy, you know, being pushed down the throats of the rest of the world.

This is how I see it. Basically all societies have fallen to this. They've accepted it. In some cases it was better than what they had, and it was the best option they had to go with. You know, places like India, etc. But there is a clear conflict between the concept of secular democracy, and I have written a book on this, a book called, "The Clash of Western Civilization and the Islamic View." [...] Basically, it's identifying the elements of the clash, because of course, from a secular perspective, that secular outlook on life, is completely, completely opposite to the shariah perspective, where everything is looked at from the perspective of God and the law of God.

You have another perspective, which is, which is where God doesn't have any role to play in all of this. It's all looked at from humanist or human perspective, you know? Without God having any involvement, or shouldn't be involved. If you want to believe in God, that's your business, so and so. But it shouldn't come into public policy, and etc.

So that obviously is a foundational clash. It's a clash of concepts. I'm not necessarily saying it has to be a military clash, but it's a clash of concepts, right? And then the issue of democracy, you know, where the fundamental concept of human beings making laws for the whole society, in all aspects, again, in conflict with the shariah perspective, where that is the role of God.

That you may have a limited democratic principle, as we call it, shura, in Islamic law, where, you know, in areas that are not already prescribed by God. Through the Quran and through the Messenger, in those common, day-to-day areas, the people can come together and choose what they feel is most appropriate in their given circumstances.

So it this limited scope, which is acceptable. But this other approach, where it is, you know, you have to accept this, you know, "We are the most highly evolved civilization on the earth, and obviously if we are the most highly evolved, our systems must be the most highly evolved. So this is what, this is where mankind is headed, you know? And we need to help you get there. It's our duty to help you reach this point."

So, this attitude fuels the clash. I feel that with the rise in Muslim consciousness around the world, and awareness of the Islamic systems, and people looking to it now as alternatives away from the colonial heritage and legacy, I think that the powers-that-be sees this as the last frontier, the last major threat, the one to standing firm.

Even though governments have been undermined, and the Ottoman empire broken up, and replaced by British, German, French law, etc., still, with this consciousness in the scholarship, Muslim scholars around the world, it's not going away. It's the teachings and those teachings continue to be propagated, and it's reaching a wider and wider audience, in this last 10, 15, 20 years.

So with this heightened awareness, we see things in Algeria, we see things elsewhere, Sudan and elsewhere, where this consciousness is coming to a political arena, you know, even in Turkey, in Indonesia, in different parts of the Muslim world, you know, more and more we see this consciousness and awareness, taking a greater and greater role, a political role. So I feel that obviously, the forces that are behind this promotion of globalized secular democracy and western civilization naturally find this as their enemy.

I mean, America thrives on an enemy, you know, where you can identify the bad guys, and then you can mobilize the military industrialized complex, all this stuff, you know, it works for them.

Q: But does Islam thrive on enemies? I've read 20, 30 years of the Muslim World League's journal, month after month, article after article, about the enemies that are constantly circling, and trying to close in on Islam. Can't the same thing be said about not Islam, but the Islamic world, the Islamic nations, the Muslims?

No. I think you know, when you look at it from the Muslim perspective, it's defense. You know, the sharks are circling, beware. Hey, the sharks are out there, you need to preserve by education, being aware, setting up institutions, whatever. These kind of projects, and things like this, supporting Muslim communities, so they don't get overrun completely, lost in the sauce, as they say.

So it's more a defensive. It's not, you know, an offensive, "We need to go out and make America an Islamic state." This is not what you are going to be finding in those kind of readings, what you've read from there. This is more identifying the problems that the Muslim world face to day. Because we've got to understand that, they came under a concerted attack, which decimated the Muslim body.

The Ottoman empire was the last of the Islamic states, you could say, which had to least a large degree, had that Islamic spirit of unity, of, of territory, you know, the Muslim nation, concepts, where people interacted on the basis that there were Muslims in this area, non-Muslims functioned OK under it, to varying degrees. That unity, which is something found in the Islamic teachings, that Muslims should be one. The state of affairs where Muslims are split up into different countries, this is an unnatural state.

From the shariah perspective, this is unnatural. Because, you've got lines, borders which were drawn, where you have half of people on one hand, and half, like the Kurds, for example, right? You've got Kurds in Turkey, you've got Kurds in Iraq, you've got Kurds in Iran. I mean, who drew these lines?

You know, if this area is without borders and lines, then those people are people of that area, and they can function and move freely back and forth. When you draw, draw those lines and set countries, and nationalities and these kind of things, then this is a formula for disaster. It's a time bomb.

So, I would say that the Muslim World League and others, when speaking of these kind of issues, they're really addressing more this kind of approach, where the Muslim world need to come back together. We should be able to do things together, ultimately come back as one nation.


Q: When you look at Americans who have become radicalized to the point of terrorism, within the last ten years. I'm not talking about a situation like Bosnia or Afghanistan, where the morality and the motivation is more obvious. I'm talking about these, these kids who are getting on the Internet, and then get up to go to Somalia, or who get involved with trying to bomb something. And their narrative starts with, "There is this war on Islam that is being perpetrated by the United States."

Does the narrative precede acts of war? Do you think that the United States is at war? Do you think [radicalized individuals] are just responding to a factual state of affairs, or are they receiving a message from people who want to manipulate them?

Well, I think in their case, you know, most of that is manipulated. The situation of America, America basically being the leading nation in this Western civilization, this globalized role, is that they're the leading force. I mean, they are the force. There's no ifs, ands or buts about it.

To what degree it is a focused, I don't feel that it is focused probably across the nation, that this is our enemy, and we're gonna go fight this enemy, and this. No. But there are powers within the country who are looking at globalized interests from other perspectives, which have to do with economics.

It's not necessarily a religion thing, per se, but these economics are there. Whether it's oil, or it's you know, minerals, or whether it's whatever, they would like to remove whatever will hamper their ability to exploit the resources of the rest of the world.

So Islam, and I mean, we have no end of statements, you know, we can put it under the general heading of Islamophobia, but we have no end of statements by leading figures in the American establishment, from the military and from elsewhere, you know, where they very clearly identified Islam as the enemy.

You do have these things. I mean, I won't say it is on the news, 24-7, but definitely in some circles it is there, it pops out, it comes out from time to time, in individual statements, that perception is definitely there. What I feel, personally, is that the struggle is fundamentally an ideological struggle.

Which, from the Muslim perspective, that's where or how they need to tackle it. You could say, from a Western civilizational perspective, it is ideological also, but the issues of economics and politics play a greater role.

You know, people might go into Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, which were made up, as an excuse to go in. Bin Laden becomes an excuse for Afghanistan, to stop any trends of that nature. I mean, I have my own doubts, though I've heard about bin Laden's things, and what he's involved in, and no doubt he may be dedicated to what he perceives, how he sees it. But I wouldn't be surprised if 50 years from now, it came out that somehow he was connected with the CIA, FBI, whatever. Actually, he was a plant, and this was this. The way things go, I just wouldn't be surprised. I would not be shocked that, wow, that was the case.

Because really, I see him, when I look at his role, in terms of what happened with Afghanistan, he became a reason for the destruction of the Islamic state of Afghanistan. Which, initially, was something which was quite innocent, I felt. It was innocent Muslim people trying to bring that country back together after how many years of destruction, with what happened in the country. And there was a lot of positive, good things happening.

I feel maybe their knowledge, Islamic shariah knowledge base, you know, needed upgrading, whatever, but their intent was good. They were trying to do good things, and then this thing just turned into something else altogether. And it seemed to me that you know, bin Laden played the biggest role in turning it around. He had another agenda; their agenda was Afghanistan. Let's get this thing together, make an Islamic state here, run this country and benefit the country. Whereas his thing was, it's about America, we need to attack America. We need to hit them this way, that way and the other way.

However, when I look back at what happened with Emad Salem, you know, I just hear things like that in the background when I think of bin Laden. So, it may not be him. It may be those around him. Ayman Zawahiri or others, who were the ones that changed the direction. Maybe initially bin Laden wasn't in that direction. From what I heard, he really wasn't.

But that change took place, at the later point, when people from the former Ikhwan, the extremist Gamaat, Al Jihad and all this, came around him, and started to feed. So that changed his direction. So there's that element that does have a desire to want to bring about change immediately and by any means necessary. And by any military means necessary. That is really a very dangerous group which remains, and has its offshoots which continue to pick up innocent, ignorant young people who have no Islamic background.

This is why my philosophy, my encouragement is more in the area of education, because where people are properly educated, and they understand, the Islamic shariah as a totality, and understand what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, they're better able to resist those kinds of attempts to recruit them, and to draw them into these kinds of illegitimate conflicts.

But when they are ignorant, then they become susceptible. So this is why I have tried to, my focus is encouraging the establishment of formal education institutions which would spread knowledge about Islam on a wider scale in the Muslim community.

Labels: American-Jihadists, Bilal-Philips, Bosnia, J-M-Berger, Jihad-Joe

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink