Terrorism and the Muslim World

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_15-9-2005_pg3_1

This is what President Musharraff has said....

[The next question from the newspaper was not late in coming: What about the travel-ban he had personally placed on the Pakistani rape victim, Mukhtar Mai? He said she was free to travel now and that he had no regrets about stopping her earlier because she had “come under the sway of organisations determined to harm Pakistan’s image”; and he did not think Pakistan “should be singled out when the curse is everywhere in the world”. Then he launched into a misguided reference to rapes being committed in “the United States, Canada, France and Britain”. He said: “It is happening everywhere”, adding “You must understand the environment in Pakistan. This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.” These remarks are most unbecoming. They demonstrate unwarranted arrogance and ignorance at the same time and reflect terribly on his commitment to the cause of women in Pakistan.]

What an enlightened President?

As always, respectfully submitted,

B

ahmedmadan #39 {``May be you carry a bomb yourself. This has not happened in the past.
Two totally different strangers have not carried a bomb in the same
aircraft at the same time. The chances are almost Zero according to
statistics.````}

Madani Sahib,
That was indeed very funny. HA HA.
I really enjoyed the fish n chips cum video store. You are pulling my leg right? :)

#40 by taqat-e-parvaaz on September 13, 2005 10:00pm PT

hello porky....long time no see... flying lessons keeping you busy?

speaking of enforcing the write of the govt, what`s up with the paki army not being able to enforce it`s writ in the tribal areas and in balochistan? what`s up with using helicopter gunships against civilian targets?

#34 by FawadR

[(Some, like India, are even unable to enforce their writ inside their borders.)]

A more apt example would be Pakistan. Isn`t it the reason why Jihadis are teeming inside Pakistan`s borders, yet there is nothing the ``world-famous`` army can do? Heck, one of them even almost got Mushy, and that, just outside the GHQ.

[OTOH, militant groups fighting in Kashmir have not been prosecuted. They didn`t break any US laws and are not subject to US sovereignty. As long as Pakistan considers these people freedom fighters, these people will not be prosecuted.]

Forgetting the JeM and LeT? FYI, they were banned by the State Department quite a while ago. Which cave have you been hiding in all these days?

Re: # 34

``Sovereignty is bound by geographical boundaries.
No state can enforce its laws outside its borders. (Some, like India, are even unable to enforce their writ inside their borders.)``

HAHAHAHA!!!! masterful!!

Re: # 38 Thank you Mr.Beharam1 for telling story how terror is affecting nonterrorist good citizens of Pakistan.
This creating extreme hardships to normal nonpolitical peaceful citizen.
Recently grandson of my friend from United Kingdom got married. He is settled in england and had come for getting married and and he had successful outcome. He is some type of manager /night shift supervisor in fish and chip come video rent establishment. He mentioned to me he is worried while returning by misfortune some body can blow him up with his new bride in air.

He asked me about his chances of being in
an aircraft with some one else carrying a bomb and blowing up..

I explained to him that the chances were very thin may be one in one
million.

He wanted to know how to have Zero chance and what he can do.
You can travel by PIA . PIA is pakistani airline and we pakistan govt know terrorist best will not try to do any such problems. He said he can not go by PIA. He said his boss will fire him if PIA plane reaches 24 hours late as normal schedule. I said tell you boss you are late as you were in H M mood. ( HM= Honeymoon mood) and could keep account of time. He said the owner is pakistani gentleman of hard attitude. He does not believe such things and frowns on such things. I again told him do not worry just donot think of such unlikely matters. He said I am older gentleman and he said we have become a must visit country in jehadi elements. He told me most I.T. specialist do not consider worthy unless they have visited Pakistan at least once at minimum. He said visit to Pakistan carries some thing like post graduation in IT. Now this was going beyond limits. Again he asked can you suggest any way his chances of IT encounter will be zero or -infinity. Again I explained to him know little like normal probablity, also told him how his chances of getting blown with new bride are absolutely zero. Also told him up to now newly married pakistani (Pr1=1/10,000), chip and fish night shift manager+video rental ( Pr2=1/100,000), with new bride who is more educated than him (pr3=1/10000) , person wanting zero probality (Pr4=1/1000,000) and bomb carrying ITE ( international Terrorist Expert getting in plane (Pr5=1/1000000000).
Probability is PR for our hero getting blown up= Pr1xPr2Xpr3Xpr4Xpr5

I assured him he and his bride have no problem but he should be weary of his employer hardcore pakistani.

He wanted to know how to have Zero chance and did bother me a lot.
I got fed up and told him

``May be you carry a bomb yourself. This has not happened in the past.
Two totally different strangers have not carried a bomb in the same
aircraft at the same time. The chances are almost Zero according to
statistics.``

He said he will think about this.


Respectfully submitted
Ahmed Madani

Dear Friends:

Let us all read this editorial from the daily times, and hopefully learn something from it.

[http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_14-9-2005_pg3_1

EDITORIAL: Our media is scaring the world and hurting our national interest

Many discussions on Pakistani TV channels or comments in the Urdu press are downright scary. For example, a retired chief justice of the Sindh High Court recently denied on TV that the boys who did the 7/7 bombing in London were really involved or had anything to do with Pakistan. Similarly, several editorials written in Urdu on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 cast doubt on Muslims ever being involved in the act. Now consider the latest threat delivered to the cities of Melbourne and Los Angeles through an Al Qaeda tape received by a TV channel in New York. The boy pictured in it was identified by his parents in California, who told the TV channel that he had converted to Islam at an Orange County mosque and “come under the influence of militants who took him to Pakistan”.

As the retired chief justice of the Sindh High Court railed against the West in a September 10 telecast, the news that he had not read was that the leader of 7/7 bombers, Siddiq Khan, had appeared in an Al Qaeda video, made somewhere in Pakistan prior to the attack, and declared his terrorist intent in the name of Islam. The honourable judge on the other hand was trying to prove “on the strength of my vast judicial experience” that the 7/7 deaths were stage-managed by “the West” to punish Pakistan and the Muslim world. He ignored the fact that Shehzad Tanvir, one of the London-bombers, had visited a madrassa in Lahore run by the banned terrorist organisation, Sipah-e-Sahaba. (The madrassa is still functional.) Of course, we have the right to hold free discussions in which facts can be quoted to prove our point but mere fulminations spoil the atmosphere in Pakistan by creating hatred and scare the outside world.

How the world is scared was demonstrated on Monday when an airliner carrying British tourists from Cyprus back to Manchester, UK, had to be delayed because the passengers refused to take off with two Pakistanis on board “who looked like terrorists”. Alarm was raised when one of the Pakistanis entered the plane toilet and did not come out even after 10 minutes. The airline had to suffer thousands of dollars of loss as 230 passengers had to be rescheduled after a lay-off in a local hotel and the two Pakistanis had to be sent on a different airliner. The two poor Pakistanis suffered because their dress was shalwar-qamees and their faces were covered with beards. The bad reputation of Pakistan is linked to facts that most of us insist on denying, but also to the kind of opinion we express whenever we get a chance to do so.

Now Australia is reported as getting ready to secure itself against possible Al Qaeda attacks. But if any new legislation is passed the expatriate Pakistani community in Australia will be the one to suffer. The 9/11 attack which was carried out by Arabs with no Pakistani involved was planned in Pakistan and Afghanistan and the attackers of the “Hamburg Cell” had all visited Pakistan. If Australia is attacked, which country are the terrorists likely to have visited before the attack? If the Australians say Pakistan, they can’t be blamed, because of what has happened in the past and what our press has been saying and reporting about Australia. This year, a leader of Ahle Sunnat Muslims in Australia, Sheikh Muhammad Imran, said that Osama bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 bombings, nor had the Muslims done the 7/7 bombings. Osama, he said, was a great (azeem) Muslim and there was no proof that he had carried out acts of terrorism.

It may be recalled that newspapers had reported the former interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, on August 17, 2004 as saying that in 2003 an Australian member of Al Qaeda named Terry was arrested from the house of former national hockey player, Shahid Ali Khan, in Karachi, whose wife was a member of Jamaat-e-Islami. Similarly, an Urdu weekly reported as recently as August 1, 2005 that Hizb al Tahrir was recruiting Muslims for Al Qaeda from the Green Acres area of Sydney. It stated that Muhammad Atta, the 9/11 pilot, had contacted the Hizb in Germany and that the 7/7 London bomber, Shehzad Tanvir, also had contacts with Hizb Al Tahrir. The organisation was found distributing pamphlets among the Muslims of Australia. Meanwhile, the head of the Islamic Teaching Institute in Australia, Sheikh Khalid Yaseen, has asked the Muslims not to make friends with non-Muslim Australians. And although banned, Hizb al Tahrir is very active in Pakistan with full public and, alas, judicial sympathies.

Apart from “defending” Islam, our duty is to protect our economy and also protect a very important factor of our economy, namely, the expatriate Pakistani community. We can prevent the radicalisation of the expatriate Muslims by toning down our rhetoric and controlling our madrassas. We can surely stop adding to the international alarm by tempering the inflammatory discussions that affect our economy and our travel abroad. We cannot miss the point behind even the Gulf states’ deporting hundreds of Pakistanis suspected of Al Qaeda sympathies and extreme views. We should not forget that foreign investment is still shy and an Arab buyer of our privatised electricity corporation (KESC) only recently abandoned the deal with the forfeiture of his preliminary deposit after looking at what was happening in Karachi on the terrorism front.

The terrorists who blow up our public facilities and kill our citizens are roaming around in Pakistan and the daily news confirms their presence, but why should the rest of us join verbally in their enterprise? Everything written and spoken on TV in Pakistan eventually gets reported abroad. Our “free” media must raise the standard of dialogue and discussion in the national interest. The world is already scared; we don’t have to play on this scare any further. ]

Pakistan and Pakistanis should wake up and behave appropriately in today`s world.

As usual, respectfully submitted,

Behram B. Atashband

re: posts by FawadR
Here is the definition of terrorism and related issues as applied to US justice systen:
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/Section802.html
Is there a definition of terrorism in Pakistan?
Other than pleading with the UN and world community to come up with a new definition of terrorism Pakistan itself has not defined what its version of terrorism is. Legally i mean. It would like the Kashmiri terrorists labelled as freedom fighters and perhaps would want to see Dawood Ibrahim declared a saint!

I think the best definition of terrorism came from Israelis.
Statement by Ambassador Yehuda Lancry, Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations - 4 October 2001
``Let us be clear: the indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians to advance political or religious objectives is terrorism, not matter how its apologists seek to label it.`` (http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/political/1com/terror.html)
Sridhar

Kulharee #33 {``I am a big believer in that we don’t need to jump up-down-sideways when fingers are pointed towards Islam in the context of terror. It is only a phase and it will pass, just like hoola and long side-burns and Che Guevara T-shirts.``}

Axe Bhai,
Very well stated. Thank you for being so rational. Yes, today Muslims are identified with terrorism and not with alcoholism. Tomorrow it could be the other way around. We would have Muslim alcholics, and who knows - Irish terrorists? :)

But I like your attitude. :)

#34 by FawadR on September 13, 2005 11:03am PT


As long as Pakistan considers these people freedom fighters, these people will not be prosecuted.


Pray tell...why were the LeT and JeM banned? Isn`t it because Uncle Same leaned on mushy and got his tushy to ban what were before 9/11 freedom fighting groups?

#31 by arjun_m

++
Legality bound by sovereignty....
++

Sovereignty is bound by geographical boundaries.
No state can enforce its laws outside its borders. (Some, like India, are even unable to enforce their writ inside their borders.) But terrorists can incubate in one part of the world and attack in another. Terrorism is a global threat, not a regional/national one. Think about it.

++
what matters, in the US, is that the US courts look at it as terrorism..hence the prosecution of the virginia jihad network and other groups you only gave ``moral and diplomatic support`` to...
++

Get your facts straight first. The Virginia Jihad Nework was never accorded `moral or diplomatic support` by Pakistan. These people were jailed because they broke US laws on US territory. OTOH, militant groups fighting in Kashmir have not been prosecuted. They didn`t break any US laws and are not subject to US sovereignty. As long as Pakistan considers these people freedom fighters, these people will not be prosecuted.

Re: # 32

Yaar, viewing issues thru historical perspective is fine, but present day conflicts require present day blueprint. I was just being sarcastic and don’t mean half of what I said. What I wholeheartedly believe is that if tomorrow some other moron starts a campaign of terror, the focus will shift from “Islam” to “somethingelse”. I am sure there will be a day when Confuciusism will be synonymous with terrorism considering how Chinese treat Tibetans and their Ughars.

I am a big believer in that we don’t need to jump up-down-sideways when fingers are pointed towards Islam in the context of terror. It is only a phase and it will pass, just like hoola and long side-burns and Che Guevara T-shirts.

Peace.

#30, {``The way Islam promotes and encourages terrorism is thru it’s constitution that clearly defines the world into two entities: (a) Muslim people with Penis and (b) the rest of the world. The rest of the world includes Muslim women and everyone else. All the rights are granted to Muslim men and the rest of the world is there to serve them. When are they done enjoying this life, it continues with each of them getting 72 bytches in paradise too. Do you think it is fair?``}

Mr. Axeman,
And what is wrong with that? :) As a member of the first set, I am OK with this definition. :)


{``Yaar, this intellectually sad piece of an article is titled “Terrorism and the Muslim World”… therefore, I think the discussion should focus on current day Islam and how it is the cause of all evil without divulging into historical accounts of Hellenic conquests into Troy.``}


Seriously, in order to address current day symptoms it is imperative that we address yesterday`s mistakes. OK, maybe you don`t have to go all the way back to Helen, but you must admit that she was worth visiting. :)

#29 by FawadR on September 13, 2005 7:09am PT


That`s acceptable as a layperson term. But it has no legal significance. You can`t prosecute anybody on the basis of this definition.


Legal in what court? Legality bound by sovereignty....

As an example, you pakis may say the ``indigenous kashmiri freedom fighters`` are not terrorists... you could present all kinds of self-serving arguments you want..

what matters, in the US, is that the US courts look at it as terrorism..hence the prosecution of the virginia jihad network and other groups you only gave ``moral and diplomatic support`` to...

so split hairs all you want...What the US considers terrorism, it will prosecute as such...same thing goes for India, Israel and Russia...

Re: # 18

Yaar, this intellectually sad piece of an article is titled “Terrorism and the Muslim World”… therefore, I think the discussion should focus on current day Islam and how it is the cause of all evil without divulging into historical accounts of Hellenic conquests into Troy.

The way Islam promotes and encourages terrorism is thru it’s constitution that clearly defines the world into two entities: (a) Muslim people with Penis and (b) the rest of the world. The rest of the world includes Muslim women and everyone else. All the rights are granted to Muslim men and the rest of the world is there to serve them. When are they done enjoying this life, it continues with each of them getting 72 bytches in paradise too. Do you think it is fair?

It is true that 99% of Muslims are neither terrorists nor their sympathizers and the reason for that is that they have rejected that filthy constitution that creates hierarchical divisions among humans.

#21 by arjun_m

++
How can we discuss terrorism, when we can`t even define terrorism. Who is a terrorist? Can anyone answer that question on this forum?
++
It`s like pornography...I know it when i see it...

That`s acceptable as a layperson term. But it has no legal significance. You can`t prosecute anybody on the basis of this definition. For that you need a legal definition. And voila! There actually is a legal definition for obscenity:

Legal definition of Obscenity
U.S. Supreme Court, Miller vs State of California, 1973:

For a work/act to be deemed obscene, it must meet a 3-part test:
(a) the average person, applying contemporary community standards finds the work/act taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest
(b) the work/act depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law
(c) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

All 3 tests must be met. A substandard test would be miscarriage of justice.

Regards