Iffy at best

This post may piss many of you off but this is what I'm thinking about.

This article in the Washington Post (requires registration) caught my eye the other day but it's taken me a while to process it. It's based on an interview with a Syrian jihadist named Abu Ibrahim.

There are a few things about the article that I wanted to point out. The first is that this quote is a bit misleading:

"Since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, the notion of jihad has "had a galvanizing impact on the imagination and reflexes" of many young Muslim men, especially those with the means and resources to travel, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group, based in Brussels."

What it implies is that Muslisms just weren't interested in Jihad before the U.S. invasion. The naivite in that implication is ridiculous. I could be misreading it, but I don't think so.

The article then goes into the kind of fundamentalist beliefs that many of the jihadists are following:

"His father was a Sufi Muslim, devoted to a tolerant, mystical tradition of Islam. But Abu Ibrahim said he was born a rebel, gravitating early in life to the other end of the spectrum of Islamic belief.

Salafism, or "following the pious forefathers," is a fundamentalist, sometimes militant strain of the faith grounded in turning back the clock to the time of the prophet Muhammad."

Now, that statement means that instead of advancing at their own pace like so many people would like to think fundamentalists are want to do, these people are trying to take society back a couple thousand years.

I remember something a conservative writer wrote a while ago, just after Sept. 11th and it was something like this (if I butchered it, apologies to the author):

'After only 200 years of existence, the United States created airplanes, tanks, smart bombs, nuclear weapons and instant sattelite communication. After a few thousand years of existence, Middle Eastern countries have to sneak their soldiers dressed as civilians onto our passenger planes in order to attack us.'

How any one could idealize that kind of evolutionary stagnation and still resist the teachings of the Bible is beyond me.

"The Koran is a constitution, a law to govern the world," he said.

That quote alone should send shivers down your spine. This is what I think a lot of people (including the French, who have been living with the threat of terrorism right under their noses since they opened their borders after the French-Algerian War) just don't understand about Islam. It's not just a religion. A Christian state can still exist without involving the Bible or Christianity in specific aspects of government. The Bible is more of a moral text book that guides a followers decisions about life and death and how one should act. The Koran is a map for a functioning society. Islam isn't just a religious philosophy, it's also a political and social philosophy. As a fundamentalist Muslim you're guided not only in how to pray, but how to vote, how to eat, how to speak, how to treat your wife...the list goes on.

"No one knew about us," Abu Ibrahim said. "But September 11 gave us the media coverage. It was a great day. America was defeated. We knew they would target either Syria or Iraq, and we took a vow that if something happened to either country, we would fight."




Two weeks after the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, the group felt bold enough to celebrate in public in Aleppo with a "festival," as it was called, featuring video of hand-to-hand combat and training montages of guerrillas leaping from high walls.

Afterward, Abu Qaqaa was arrested by the Syrian authorities, but he was released within hours. By 2002 the anti-American festivals were running twice weekly, often wrapped around weddings or other social gatherings. Organizers called themselves The Strangers of Sham, using the ancient name for the eastern Mediterranean region known as the Levant, and began freely distributing the CDs of the cleric's sermons.

Really, I wish the media did a better job reporting on this stuff when it's actually happening.

Jihad was being allowed into the open. Abu Ibrahim said Syrian security officials and presidential advisers attended festivals, one of which was called "The People of Sham Will Now Defeat the Jews and Kill Them All." Money poured in from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

"We even had a Web site," Abu Ibrahim said.

The young men around the cleric found themselves wielding a surprising amount of power. They were allowed to enforce their strict vision of sharia , or Islamic law, entering houses in the middle of the night to confront people accused of bad behavior

The next time I hear someone refer to the Republican's as Nazis, I think I'm just going to hand them a copy of this article.

"Once the Americans bombed a bus crossing to Syria. We made a big fuss and said it was full of merchants," Abu Ibrahim said. "But actually, they were fighters."

Oh, so maybe the military knows what it's doing?!

In January, shortly after Abu Ibrahim returned to Syria, he was summoned to Amn Dawla headquarters along with scores of fellow jihadi cell leaders. The security agents said the smuggling of fighters had to stop. The jihadis' passports were taken. Some were jailed for a few days. Abu Ibrahim's jailers shaved his beard.

The shaving of the beard is the interesting thing here. In the false story about the flushing of a Koran down a toilet at Guantanimo, there were 'accusations' of the shaving of beards. The beards represent leadership in a clandestine batter for worldwide religious supremacy. Why not shave it off? It's not inhumane and all it does is take the guy down a notch.

Alright, that's if for now. Piss on me in the comments section if you feel the urge.

--MANTHISSTUFFSTINGS!--