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Lord Nazir Ahmed. Solidarity with murderous terrorists

MEMRI reports:

During a recent visit to Pakistan, Lord Nazir Ahmed, a member of the British House of Lords who originally hails from Pakistani Kashmir, announced he was putting up a bounty of £10 million for the capture of U.S. President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush. The announcement, made at a conference held in the Pakistani town of Haripur, came in response to a recent U.S. announcement offering a $10 million reward to anyone providing information leading to the capture of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, founder of the Pakistani jihadi organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and emir of LeT’s charity arm, Jamaatud Dawa.

I’m sure that Bush and Obama are well-protected. But before I discuss his offer, here is a reminder about what Lashkar-e-Taiba is:

LeT has been responsible for numerous terror attacks, including one on the Indian Parliament in 2001 in which 7 people (plus 5 terrorists) were killed. The most well-known was the 2008 incursion into Mumbai in which 150-190 people were murdered (numbers in sources vary; also 10 terrorists were killed).

The Mumbai incident, which continued for 3 days until Indian special forces finally overwhelmed the terrorists, was remarkably vicious, including the random shooting of people at a railway station, an attempt to kill hospital patients, and the invasion of hotels and restaurants.

The group is concerned with far more than the Indian ‘occupation’ of Kashmir. It has a global focus:

a Markaz al-Dawa wal-Irshad [LeT’s parent political organization] publication titled Hum Jihad kyun Kar rahe hain? (Why Are We Waging Jihad?), declares the United States, Israel and India as existential enemies of Islam.  It lists eight reasons for Jihad: 1) to eliminate evil and facilitate conversion to and practice of Islam; 2) to ensure the ascendancy of Islam; 3) to force non-Muslims to pay  jizya (poll tax, paid by non-Muslims for protection from a Muslim ruler); 4) to assist the weak and powerless; 5) to avenge the blood of Muslims killed by unbelievers; 6) to punish enemies for breaking promises and treaties; 7) to defend a Muslim state; and 8) to liberate Muslim territories under non-Muslim occupation. – Husain Haqqani: The Ideologies of South Asian Jihadi Groups, p. 24-25

Their concern with the Jewish occupation of ‘Palestine’ led the terrorists to include the Mumbai Chabad house on their list of targets, where Rabbi Gavriel Holzberg, his pregnant wife Rivka, and four others were murdered. It was not an afterthought, and in an intercepted phone call from Pakistan, the terrorists were told that dead Jews were worth 50 times other victims.

Gavriel and Rivka Holzberg. Murdered because Jews rule "Muslim land"

Baron Nazir Ahmed is Britain’s first Muslim life Peer. Here is an explanation of his reason for supporting this terrorist organization, from a Pakistani newspaper (also from MEMRI):

In an expression of solidarity with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, British parliamentarian of Kashmiri origin Lord Nazir Ahmed has announced a reward for the [capture] of U.S. President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush…

Lord Nazir said that the bounty placed on Saeed was an insult to all Muslims, and [that] by [offering it], President Obama has challenged the dignity of the Muslim ummah.

Even if Ahmed would say that the methods of LeT are too violent — and I have no idea what he would say if asked — his remarks show that it is intolerable to him that infidels like Bush or Obama should place themselves above a Muslim.

This is precisely the ideology of LeT. Haqqani continues:

This list of itself is sufficient to justify a virtual state of permanent jihad. “Have all the obstacles to observing the faith in the world been removed?” the unnamed author asks rhetorically, adding that non-Muslim dominance of the global system makes jihad necessary. “Is the current world order that of kafirs (unbelievers) or of Muslims? Is the global economic system according to the wishes of Allah, which requires the end of interest and usury?” Jihad is described as essential to ensure ascendancy of Islam and to create circumstances whereby non-Muslims would either convert to Islam or pay jizya.

Maybe a good test for whether a Muslim is ‘moderate’ or not is to ask him if unbelievers should have the same rights as believers.

Certainly those who do not accept this, like Ahmed, should not hold a position in a governing body of a Western democracy like the UK.

Technorati Tags: Lord Nazir Ahmed, Lashkae-e-Taiba, House of Lords, terrorism

I want to contrast two widely divergent views of the Jewish people and what the relationship of American Jews toward Israel should be. First, Rabbi Daniel Allen of ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists:

If we take Israel seriously, and if Yom Ha’Atzmaut is a holiday for all Jews, which it should be, then how do we celebrate the success of Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, this April 25/26 as Israel turns 64?

The answer is relatively easy; make a commitment to make Israel an always improving society. In a recent study in the United States by the Public Religion Research Institute, the question was asked: What is most important to one’s Jewish identity? The leading answer, with 46%, was a commitment to social equality. Support for Israel was second with 20%. If the Jews in group one and the Jews in group two could be combined, then 66% of American Jews could work together to create more social equality in Israel.

And Rabbi Daniel Gordis:

[Peter] Beinart’s real problem is that Israel is not, and was never meant to be, a felafel-eating, Hebrew speaking version of the United States. It is not ethnic-neutral. It was created, and our children die for it, not simply so there can be another democracy in the Middle East. Is one more democracy worth my soldier son’s risking his life? No, it’s not. Israel is about the revitalization of the Jewish people. It is, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, “of the Jews, by the Jews and for the Jews,” all while protecting and honoring those who are not Jewish. Are we perfect? Hardly. But do we aspire to America’s ideal of a democracy? Not at all. We’re about something very different.

To be fair, you need to read all of both articles. But — leaving aside the (I have to say it) typically American arrogance in Rabbi Allen’s piece, the idea that we know better than Israelis what their democratic country should be like — there is a fundamental difference in their conceptions of the nature of our people, and therefore of the function of a Jewish state.

Allen writes,

As Reform Jews, we are committed to social equality. As Reform Jews, we are already making Israel an ever more inclusive democratic state.

I think it’s not unfair to say that, like Beinart, Allen believes that the essence of Jewish ethics is equal treatment for all human beings. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he would probably explain the concept of chosenness as being chosen to bear the burden of being a “light unto nations.” He would probably reject the idea that Israel should treat Jews differently in any way than non-Jews.

Gordis emphasizes the tribalism — “a view of the world that says that we are not just like everyone else, that we are distinct and ought to remain that way” — inherent in Jewish tradition. For Gordis, chosenness is about more than just visibly following the same ethical precepts espoused by Unitarians. And he believes that the distinctness, the deliberate separateness, of the Jewish people both informs and is preserved by the Jewish state.

But in order for this to happen, there can’t be equality in every respect between Jews and non-Jews — although it is possible and important to ensure that all of Israel’s residents have civil rights as we understand them (keeping in mind the special circumstances of Israel as a nation under continuous siege).

If you do not believe in an essential difference between Jews and non-Jews, how do you justify giving Jews a right of return to Israel but withholding it from Arabs? Why should the national anthem include the words “a Jewish soul still yearns” when some Israeli citizens are not Jews? How, in other words, can we demand a specifically Jewish character for the state when we we don’t recognize anything special about the Jewish people?

The problem with the identification of Jewishness with a universalist ethics plus some ritual and cultural — food, etc. — baggage, as Beinart and Allen appear to do, is that it leaves no rationale for the existence of a Jewish state.

These are hard questions for progressive Zionists. Maybe Rabbi Allen will answer them.

Technorati Tags: Daniel Allen, Daniel Gordis, Peter Beinart, Judaism, Israel, Zionism

I thought the Günter Grass issue was behind us yesterday, but it isn’t letting up. After Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai announced that Grass would be persona non grata in Israel (on the basis of a law that, understandably, bars former Nazis), a number of voices were raised against the ban, while agreeing that Grass’ poem was obnoxious.

For example, Alan Dershowitz said,

Grass should be debated and defeated in the marketplace of ideas rather than banned from participating in face to face dialogue with Israeli intellectuals and political figures, who are perfectly capable of confronting him in the public arena of debate and dialogue, and even of literature. Israel need not fear poets or polemicists. It should certainly not use its security apparatus, which includes control over its borders, to exclude has-been octogenarian writers with whom it disagrees.

Salman Rushdie, the author with an Iranian death fatwa on his head, tweeted,

OK to dislike, even be disgusted by #GünterGrass poem, but to ban him is infantile pique, the answer to words must always be other words.

Jeffery Goldberg wrote,

With the decision to ban Grass, Israel changed the subject from his feculent poem … to a question of whether the Israeli government is opposed to the free exchange of ideas.

And the Los Angeles Times adds,

…by overreacting to Grass’ criticism, Israeli officials are acting like, well, Iranians.

All are missing the point. His freedom of expression is not being limited by the ban — he can say whatever he wants in Germany, or even Iran, or any other place — just not in Israel. And really, do we need “a free exchange of ideas” like these? Sometimes an accusation is so absurd that even refuting it gives it a status it doesn’t deserve.

Rather than pique, the decision — which as far as I know is purely symbolic, with Grass showing no desire to visit Israel — is an expression of a more important principle, that of Jewish sovereignty.

By shutting the door in Grass’ face, Israel is saying something like this:

We can’t prevent people like Grass from making vicious and hateful statements, but we don’t have to let them in our house.

Jews have been forced to listen to vicious libels and demonization from the mouths of those that hate them for hundreds of years, often trembling in fear at what they portend. Now we have our own house. Here we have the right — and the power — to demand respect.

We don’t have to take abuse, to pretend that disputation with antisemites is simply an “exchange of ideas.” We don’t have to defer to idiots like Grass, nor do we have to beg our powerful enemies to let us live.

Maybe we are a little touchy sometimes, but given our history it is understandable.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Günter Grass

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Günter Grass. Senile dementia and 'celebrity disease'.

I wasn’t going to write about Günter Grass and his ugly poem.  Googling “Günter Grass poem Israel Iran” gets 789,000 hits. It has been covered from almost every imaginable angle. But I was asked my opinion, so I’ll make it short: what I think is that there isn’t much of a story here. A well-known personality enters his dotage. So what?

Grass doesn’t know who is doing what to whom. The proposition that Israel threatens Iran with a nuclear first strike is so impossible that only an idiot could believe it. Grass’ assertion of it tells us that he is completely disconnected from reality. Time to retire from public life and feed the pigeons in the Unter den Linden.

It’s a combination of senile dementia plus the “celebrity disease”: people tell them how intelligent and perceptive they are for so long that their inner editor shuts down, and popular prejudices and clichés bubble up and are emitted as if they were brilliant insights.

So Grass bravely stands up and says “what must be said” despite his certainty that he will be ‘punished’ with accusations of antisemitism. How courageous to join the anti-Israel chorus in a Europe already full to bursting with Israel-haters! Adding nobility to courage, he’s ready to accept the punishment if it will ‘free others from silence’. Pass the barf bag.

More interesting would be to study why younger people, who presumably still have some functioning brain cells, believe similar nonsense.

Just another ex-Nazi closing in on his reward. Nothing to see here folks, move on.

Technorati Tags: Günter Grass, Israel, Iran

Abu Musab al Suri -- the ideology is the enemy

The great humanitarian leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, recently released from prison Abu Musab al-Suri (real name: Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Sitt Maryam Nasar). Thought to be the planner behind the 2005 London subway bombings and the catastrophic train bombing in Spain the previous year, he was turned over to the CIA in Pakistan in 2005 (there was a $5M price on his head), and later transferred to Syria.

Perhaps they thought Assad could be trusted to hold this guy, a radical Sunni extremist who had been imprisoned in the 1990’s for trying to overthrow Bashar’s father. But Assad let him go, probably to punish the West for its (so far, minimal) support of Syrian rebels and as a warning not to intervene in his murder spree. And given evidence of Iranian involvement in the 9/11 attacks, it’s not far-fetched to think that perhaps the Iranian regime gave Assad a push in this direction as well.

Writing in the Wall St. Journal this weekend, David Samuels describes Nasar’s thinking:

What [Nasar] learned from the Afghan debacle and from al Qaeda’s subsequent defeat in Iraq was that jihadists were all but helpless in battle against modern Western armies. In place of old-fashioned hierarchical terror organizations, which had failed, he called for a global struggle in which shadowy motivators and facilitators would prompt jihadists to train and arm themselves in independent, self-generating terror cells that would target Western civilians. His goal: a relentless campaign of exemplary acts of violence under a single ideological banner, culminating in the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Nasar sharply criticized Bin Laden for maintaining a relatively centralized movement which could be (and was) effectively targeted by Western armies and technology.  He wrote a 1600-page book titled “The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance,” which appeared on the Internet, outlining his strategy.

“He is probably the first to spell out a doctrine for a decentralized global jihad,” said Brynjar Lia, a senior counterterrorism researcher at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, who is writing a book on Nasar. “In my humble opinion, he is the best theoretician among the jihadi ideologues and strategists out there. Nobody is as systematic and comprehensive in their analysis as he is. His brutal honesty and self-criticism is unique in jihadi circles.”

There’s no doubt that a guy like Nasar is hugely dangerous. And while he himself was certainly viewed as such by the US — although the decision to send him to Syria seems strange to me — I continue to believe that we are not taking the ideology of radical Islam seriously enough.

Our security apparatus (with notable exceptions, like the NYPD) focuses on card-carrying members of al-Qaeda, while failing to take seriously free-lance jihadists — often presented as ‘crazy’ — who are animated by radical Islamic ideology even if they lack direct connections to terror organizations: vicious murderers like Mohammed Merah, Nidal Hassan (the Fort Hood terrorist), or Naveed Haq, the Seattle Jewish Federation shooter.

Possibly those responsible do understand that democratic West is facing a massive challenge — the greatest since the Nazi and Soviet threats — but they have made a conscious decision to deal with it quietly. Maybe they think that clearly describing the threat as radical Islam in its multitude of incarnations would be counterproductive, because it would stir up too much backlash from the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims.

I don’t know exactly what they think. But it seems likely that the face of terrorism in the near future will be that of the Nasars and those that follow them, activated by means of the anonymous Internet.

The theory that we are primarily fighting al-Qaeda and similar organizations limits us in protecting ourselves from the kind of terrorism that will become all too familiar as centralized terror groups become more and more irrelevant. Today we are trying to preempt terrorism by cutting off its head. But what if there is no head?

Nasar wants to metastasize terrorism. His theory is to build the ideology and the violence will come, from the bottom up. Therefore, the best defense — as the NYPD understands — must also be from the bottom up: it’s necessary to seek out the ideology and those who are prepared to act on it at the lowest levels: mosques, student groups, etc.

What we need to do is exactly what the administration refuses to do: name the enemy, focus on ideology, and profile!

Technorati Tags: terrorism, Abu Musab al-Suri