The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim ``Musalmaan ko musalmaan kar diyaa toofan e maghrib ney

Talaatum hai daryaa sey hee hai,gauhar kee shaadaabee``.

``The truth is I became a better muslim when I saw myself the darkness in the west``---Iqbal.

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Posted on: Sunday, November 11, 2001

More in Hawai`i turn to Islam

• Muslim women say head cover is liberating

By Mary Kaye Ritz

Advertiser Religion Writer

Less than three weeks after terrorists struck New York City and Washington, Heather Ramaha stood among a group of women at the mosque in Manoa and recited the shahada in Arabic:



Heather Ramaha, a Navy petty officer, is among those in Hawai`i who have converted to Islam since Sept. 11.

Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser



``Ash-hadu alla illaha illa Allah. Wa-ash-hadu anna Mohamadan rassulu Allah.``

She was testifying that ``I bear witness that there is no God but Allah (one true God), and Mohammed is a prophet of God.``

By doing so, she became a convert to the Islamic faith, extending a recent national trend.

Some Muslim clerics across the country say they are seeing a fourfold increase in conversions since Sept. 11, when stories about Islam jumped from the back pages of the religion section to front pages worldwide.

Hakim Ouansafi, the president of the Muslim Association of Hawai`i, said that prior to Sept. 11, there had been an average of three converts per month.

In the two months since then, there have been 23.

And oddly enough for a religion that is often perceived as one that cloaks its women from head to foot, the newly converted Westerners tend to be female. Ouansafi said the national ratio of converts is 4-to-1, women to men. Here, he said, it`s closer to 2-to-1.

Most Mainland converts are African-Americans, who make up about a third of U.S. Muslims, some of whom found Allah while they were in jail or in recovery from drug or alcohol addiction.

On the West Coast, the men are mainly military, said Ouansafi, and most of the O`ahu converts are former Christians. One`s even a single cosmetics saleswoman.

More people are looking into his religion and liking what they see, he says, despite the relentless media coverage of Muslim terrorists.

``Know you find bad people in every religion, and that religion should not be judged by that extreme minority,`` he said.

One thing Sept. 11 did was remind people that life is too short: ``If I`m going to die, I want die a Muslim,`` a convert told Ouansafi.

Cromwell Crawford, chairman of the religion department at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa, echoed that: The effect of Sept. 11 on the national psyche made all Americans aware of the transience of life.

He described the mood of the country as changing: Singles seek to bond; family members hang together more tightly; and, by extension, the nation`s people reach out to one another.

``People are turning to religion both in the institutional sense and in noninstitutional ways,`` Crawford said, adding that the fallout also is benefiting other religions besides Islam.

Why overwhelmingly women?

``In the expression of this mood, women are moved more readily and more deeply than men,`` he said. ``Go to any church and you`ll find more women than men.``

He also finds the female students in his classes often show greater insight into ethical issues.

``Women are the more religious of the genders for various reasons,`` Crawford said. ``... Women give birth and so they are in touch with the life process, caretakers of the life cycle by virtue of their biology.``

Converting — or ``reverting,`` as Muslims call it since they believe everyone starts life as a Muslim — does not take much besides a sincere belief there is one God, and only one God.

``We believe, as Muslims, once a person reverts to Muslim, all his past sins are forgiven by God,`` Ouansafi said. ``Starts just like a baby that was born.``

The conversion ceremony itself is fairly simple, he said. A convert tells of the converting of his or her own free will; then explains the five tenets of faith.

For the ceremony, two witnesses watch as a convert agrees that Jesus was among the great prophets (Ibrahim/Abraham, Mohammed and Moses are among the others), but not God, then speak the same two sentences that Heather Ramaha recited.

Now, Ramaha is incorporating her Islamic faith into her life as a Navy petty officer stationed at Pearl Harbor since July. She doesn`t wear her hejab to work as a dental hygienist, but she does wear her head covering when attending services at the mosque. While her husband, a Marine, was away recently, she couldn`t quite recite the five daily prayers, all said in Arabic, without his help.

But Ouansafi said the Islamic faith is supposed to be practiced to the best of one`s abilities: It`s forbidden in the Quran, for example, for pregnant people, travelers and people with diabetes to fast at Ramadan, if fasting means harming oneself.

On a recent Friday — the Islamic equavalent of the weekly Sabbath — Ouansafi spoke at the prayer services about the role of women in Islam, and talked at length in an interview at his office with his wife, Michele Ouansafi, herself a convert, about what draws women to a faith some have called oppressive.

Women are revered in their faith, the Ouansafis said. The wearing of the hejab is for a women`s own protection — they are away from the lascivious looks of men. The women pray in different rooms and behind the men so as not to be a distraction when worshippers kneel and place their foreheads to the floor.

``Women are in back because we are the stronger of the two,`` said Michele Ouansafi with a laugh.

And all the major texts of religions — the Bible, the Torah, the Gospels — ``in the Quran, women have more rights,`` her husband said.

He noted that in the Quran (``the word of God, descended directly on the prophet through Gabriel,`` said Ouansafi), Eve and Adam were equally at fault for leaving the Garden of Eden. Eve wasn`t the seductress. Many of the passages in the Quran are gender-neutral.

And, in Islam, Ouansafi said, the money a man makes goes for the family. The money a woman makes is hers, he said. Women are not obligated to work.

The first feminist was a Muslim known as Khawlah, Ouansafi said.

Khawlah argued with prophet Mohammed, taking issue with how easily her husband could divorce her. All a man had to say was, ``You are to be as the back of my mother,`` which was held by pagans as freeing the husband from any conjugal responsibility but didn`t leave the wife free to leave his home or remarry.

Khawlah went to Mohammed to plead her case. He told her to be patient, but she kept arguing. Finally, she took it to a higher authority, and Allah heard and agreed with her.

``Women not only have the right to speak, but to argue with the great prophet,`` Ouansafi said.

Michele Ouansafi converted after meeting her husband-to-be when he tutored her in Rhode Island in 1986, but she said he never asked her to convert.

``Ours is a faith of attraction, not promotion,`` said the French Canadian woman with an MBA who works at Earth Tech, an environmental firm, as a contracts administrator.

For those women who see their place in the home, the Islamic faith can be very attractive, said Tamara Albertini, a UH philosophy professor who specializes in Islam and grew up in an Islamic country. The man is responsible for taking care of the earnings, and the woman rules the home.

``The main problem with Islam is: If things don`t work out, there`s no place to go,`` she said, noting that a woman needs very strong reasons to leave a marriage. However, if a Muslim man leaves the faith, she can divorce him.

Although Ramaha`s husband, Mike, is a lifelong Muslim and a Palestinian who grew up in San Francisco, he was not the reason for her conversion, she said.

``Mike never once tried to get me to convert,`` the 24-year-old `Aiea resident said. ``He said, `If you want to do this, you can research it yourself, but I`ll love you either way.```

Ramaha has been searching for a way to explain her new faith to her family in California. She notes that most of their information about Islam comes from the TV movie, ``Not Without My Daughter,`` a story about an American woman, an abusive Iranian husband and a subsequent fight over their child.

``I haven`t been able to find a way to tell them without them flipping out,`` she said. ``I haven`t told Dad. I tell him I go to the mosque, but I haven`t told him I converted yet.``

To people who ask her why she would choose a religion that some consider oppressive to women, she responds that they`re mixing religion with culture.

``Growing up in the U.S., Islamic faith doesn`t have the culture mixed into it,`` she said.

Ramaha was the first in her family to join a church. At age 5, she befriended the daughter of a non-

denominational pastor and became a Christian. The rest of the family joined later. Her mother is still a churchgoer. But Ramaha said she struggled with the Christian view of the Holy Trinity. In March, she took an online world religions class through a California university.

``I`d been a Christian for 18 years,`` she said. ``There are so many loopholes in that religion. (Islam) opened up so many ideas. ... I felt that in my heart this was the right (one) for me.``

As a follow-up, she took an introductory class on Islam in Hawai`i after Sept. 11, she started reading the Quran, and ``something clicked.`` She converted soon after.

``I`ve always felt drawn to something out there, (otherwise, there`s) an emptiness,`` she said. ``The only way I feel complete is when I have a religion, a God to pray to.``

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``Kitaab e millat e baizaa kee phir sheeraza bundee hai

yeh shaakh e Hashmi karnay ko hai phir burg o bur paidaa``

A Mathematical Genius Rdesikan---10

Thanks for the ``guidance``,but you see there are a lot of non-muslims on this board.Nothing is done here without purpose.

There is an angle to everything!One needs to be multifaceted & well-heeled to appreciate the fine things in life.

Nothing funny here my man!---When I write humour others understand & always convey their appreciation.

America’s Responsibility ali-387

Mea Culpa.

Thank you for correcting the techno.

The two horned dilemma is really a one-eyed & two horned disaster now.

Laanat Lukhh Laanat to the Najadi.

And Yours is a house-hold name.

Khush amdeed.

Your wit never goes unnoticed here.Are you still wondering about the riddle of the big hand & small hand?Wolves cry at midnight,Hyenas laugh at noon.

A Mathematical Genius Thank you Mr.Gill for bringing to our attention a subject which at least I would not have been able to come to know otherwise.

This is the kind of stuff we need more often on CHOWK.I have no use for the usual Indo-Pak sparring where predjudices are flaunted as scholarship & knowledge.

Being in the profession you mention you are in,could you enlighten us about Tesla?

If muslims spend half the time talking & doing science than reminding each other of their past accomplishments,I am sure an encore would be around the bend.

3 Haikus addenda:to post # 95---as a PS.

Before this recedes into the memory bank.

A confession:

I,hamzad afaqui wrote this haiku.Did not take more than 30 seconds.

Heck,even the Japanese name is a concocted one--kind of Japanese sounding.I made that up too---I hope & pray nothing offensive happened to Japani knower.

The Identity Crisis of a Modern Muslim The following might be of interest to some & perhaps somewhat relevant.

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Islam and Modern Science

A Lecture by Seyyid Hossein Nasr

[[The following is a lecture by Seyyid Hossein Nasr entitled, ``Islam and Modern Science’’, which was co-sponsored by the Pakistan Study Group, the MIT Muslim Students Association and other groups. Professor Nasr, currently University Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, is a physics and mathematics alumnus of MIT. He received a PhD in the philosophy of science, with emphasis on Islamic science, from Harvard University. From 1958 to 1979, he was a professor of history of science and philosophy at Tehran University and was also the Vice-Chancellor of the University over 1970-71. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He has delivered many famous lectures including the Gifford Lecture at Edinburgh University and the Iqbal Lecture at the Punjab University. He is the author of over twenty books including ``Science and Civilization in Islam’’, ``Traditional Islam in the Modern World’’, ``Knowledge and the Sacred’’, and ``Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man’’. The verbatim transcript of the lecture was edited to enhance clarity and remove redundancies. We have tried our best to preserve the spirit of what was said. Any errors are solely the responsibility of the Pakistan Study Group. * and * * indicates places where either a phrase or sentence was indecipherable. Words in [ ] were added to improve continuity.]]

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Bismillah hir rahmanir rahim



First of all, let me begin by saying how happy I am to be able to accept an invitation of the MIT Islamic Students Association, and that of other universities and other organizations nearby, to give this lecture here today at my alma mater. I feel very much at home not only at this university, but being the first Muslim student ever to establish a Muslim students’ association at Harvard in 1954, to see that these organizations are now growing, and are becoming culturally significant. I am sure they play a very important role in three ways. Most importantly, in turning the hearts of good Muslims towards God, Allah ta’allah. At a more human level to be able to afford the possibility for Muslims from various countries to have a discourse amongst themselves, and third to represent the views of Muslims on American campuses where there is so much need to understand what is going on at the other side of the world. That world which seems to remain forever the OTHER for the West, no matter what happens. The Otherness, somehow, is not overcome so easily.

Now today, I shall limit my discourse to Islam and its relation to modern science. This is a very touchy and extremely difficult subject to deal with. It is not a subject with any kind of, we might say, dangerous pitfalls or subterfuges under way because it is not a political subject. It does not arouse passions as, let’s say, questions that are being discussed in Madrid, or the great tragedy of Kashmir or other places. But nevertheless, it is of very great consequence because it will affect one way or the other, the future of the Islamic world as a whole.

Many people feel that that in fact there is no such thing as the Islamic problem of science. They say science is science, whatever it happens to be, and Islam has always encouraged knowledge, al-ilm in Arabic, and therefore we should encourage science and what’s the problem? -there’s no problem. But the problem is there because ever since children began to learn Lavoiser’s Law that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, in many Islamic countries they came home that evening and stopped saying their prayers. There is no country in the Islamic World which has not been witness in one way or another, to the impact, in fact, of the study of Western Science upon the ideological system of its youth. Parallel with that however, because science is related first of all to prestige, and secondly, to power, and thirdly, without [science] the solution of certain problems within Islamic society [is difficult], from all kinds of political backgrounds and regimes, all the way from revolutionary regimes to monarchies, all [governments] the way from semi-democracies to totalitarian regimes, all spend their money in teaching their young Western science. I see many Muslims in the audience today, many of you, your education is paid for by your parents or your government or some university in order precisely to bring Western science back into the Muslim world. And therefore we are dealing with a subject which is quite central to the concerns of the Islamic world. In the last twenty years [this subject] has begun to attract some of the best minds in the Islamic world to the various dimensions of this problem.

And therefore I want to begin by first of all by expressing for you, (making things easier, categorizing it a bit), three main positions which exist in the Islamic world today as far as the relationship between Islam and modern science is concerned, before delving a bit more deeply into what my own view is. First of all, is the position that many people re-iterate. I am sure many of you in this room, and especially at a place like MIT, who would not have had much of a chance to study the philosophical implications of either your own tradition, that is Islam, nor of Western science, believe that one studies science and then one says prayers, loves God and obeys the laws of the Shariah, and that there is really no problem. This position itself is not something new. It is something that was inculcated in many circles of the Islamic world during the past century and going back historically, it was the position taken up by Jamaluddin Al-Afghani who migrated to Egypt and called himself Al-Afghani. The famous reformer, a rather maverick [figure], of the nineteenth century was at once a philosopher, political figure, Pan-Islamist and anti-Caliphate organizer *. Nobody knows exactly what his political positions were, but he was certainly a very influential person in the nineteenth century, and was responsible, directly, and indirectly, through his student Mohammed Abduh, for the so-called reforms that took place in the 1880’s and 1890’s of the Christian era, that is the beginning of the fourteenth century of the Islamic era, in Eygpt. Jamaluddin has been claimed, interestingly enough, by both modernists and anti-modernists forces like the Ikhwan-ul-Muslameen in Egypt during the early decades of this century.

Jamaluddin was interested in Western science, [though] he had very little knowledge [of it], and he was also very much interested in the revival of the Islamic world. The character of [Jamaluddin’s] argument is absolutely crucial to the understanding of what I am talking about. He came up with view that science per se is what has made the West powerful and great. And the West is dominating over the Islamic world because it has this power in its pocket. And since this is being allowed, this is being done, there must be something very positive about this science, that science itself is good, because it gives power. This was the first part of his argument. Secondly, [he argued], science came from the Islamic world originally and therefore Islamic science is really responsible for the West’s possession of science and the West’s domination of the Islamic world itself. And therefore, all the Muslims have to do is to reclaim this science for themselves in order to reach the glories of their past and become a powerful and great civilization. This is the gist of a rather extensive argument given by Jamaluddin Afghani which equates, in fact, Islamic science with Western science. Secondly, it equates the power of the West with the power of science. To some extent this is true, but not completely so. And thirdly, it believes that acquisition of this science of the West [by the Muslims] is, no more no less, than the Muslims claiming their own property which has somehow been taken over by another continent and [the Muslims] just want back what is really their own. Now this point of view had a great deal of impact upon the Islamic world, upon the modernist circles, and in order to understand what is going on in the Islamic world today it is important to see what consequences flow from this.

I am really addressing my lecture predominantly to Muslims students and scholars and scientists, discussing in a sense family problems. I am sure there are some Christians and non-Christian Western people present which is fine, which is a way to understand another civilization’s struggle to look at the major problems that it has. But my lecture is really tailored to the internal problems of the Islamic world, as far as science is concerned. I hope other people will forgive me, this is not just a formal lecture on the history of science in last century in the Islamic world by any means. * I want to pursue what happened to Jamaluddin’s thesis in the nineteenth century. The modernists in the Islamic world [are] one of three important groups that came into being in the nineteenth century. The other two being those who are now being dubbed as the fundamentalists, a term which I do not like at all but which is now very prevalent, and third, those who believe in some kind of Mahdiism, some kind of apocalyptic interference of God. These two groups I shall not be dealing with at the present moment. The most important group for us to consider are the modernists.

The modernists took on this thesis of Jamaluddin, and during the last century and a half, they have carried the banner of a kind of rationalism within the Islamic world which will accord well with the simple equation of science with Islamic science and with the Islamic idea of knowledge, al-ilm. [Interestingly,] as a consequence of this, the Islamic world during this one hundred and fifty year period produced very few historians of science and very few philosophers of science. It produced a very large number of scientists and engineers, some of whom very brilliant and studying in the best institutions of the world like here, but it produced practically no major philosopher and historian of science until just a few decades ago. This problem [was just left aside] because it was uninteresting and irrelevant, and all the debate that was being carried out in the West itself about the impact of science upon religion, upon the philosophy of science, [about] what this kind of knowing meant, these were circumvented, more or less, in the Islamic educational system.

There were a few exceptions. Kamal Ataturk came into power in Turkey. Though in many ways a brutal [soldier, he] saved Turkey from extinction. We know what he did to Islam in Turkey. But he had a certain intuition, certain visions of things. The first thing that he did was to say that in order for Turkey to stand on its feet as a modern ``secular’’ state, what it has to do is [to] learn about the history of Western science. So when the program for the doctorate degree in the history of science headed by the late George Sarton, scholar and historian of science, was established at Harvard University which was the first program in this country, Ataturk sent the first student to study the history of science anywhere in America, to Harvard. The first person to enter the PhD program in the history of science at Harvard University is a Turk, Aideen Saeeli. He is still alive, [and] is the doyen of the Turkish historians of science.

There were exceptions but by and large, the modernists forces within the Islamic world, decided to neglect and overlook the consequences of Western science, either philosophical or religious and felt that Islam could handle the matter much better than Christianity. [They felt] that there was something wrong with Christianity [as] it buckled under the pressures of modern science and rationalism in the nineteenth century, and this would not happen to Islam. Certain Western thinkers, in fact, followed this trend of thought. One of the most rabidly anti-Christian, [and] anti-religion philosophers of France in the nineteenth century, Ernst Renan, who was known as sort of the grandfather of rationalism in nineteenth century French philosophy, wrote a book which is now a classical book on Averroes, (Ibn-Rushd), [and] which has been reprinted now after 140 years in France, in which he says exactly the same kinds of things. He says that Averroes represents rationalism which led to modern science. [He] represents Arabic Islamic thought and Western theology, [which] simply did not understand this, has always been an impediment to the rise of modern science. So a kind of psychological and, loosely speaking, philosophical alliance was created between Islamic modernist thinkers and anti-religious philosophers in the West. This is something which needs a great deal of analysis later on. Let me just pass it over. It is not central to my subject, but we must take cognizance of it.

And this attitude continued, gradually proliferating from a few centers who sent [people to the] West to the modern education institutions of the Islamic world such as the Darul Fanooni in Iran, the University of Punjab in Punjab, the Foad I University in Cairo, Istanbul University and so forth and so on, and gradually embraced the whole body of the Islamic world. Today, every Thursday evening when you turn on Cairo radio there are one or two very famous lecturers who are, in fact, very devout Muslims, loved by the people of Egypt, [and] the heart of their message is every single verse of the Quran which deals with either Ta’akul or Taffakur, that is intellection or knowledge or observation or mushahida. These [verses] are interpreted ``scientifically’’, that is, as an attempt to preserve Islam through scientific support for the Islamic revelation, for the Quran itself. And this is a very strong position in the Islamic world today. Therefore [the Muslim] thinks in fact there is no problem as far as Islam and modern science are concerned.

Now this position had a reverse. The ulema, religious scholars of the Islamic world opposed the modernist thesis, [which] was also based on the dilution of the Sharia, as you have seen in Turkey, the gradual introduction of Western political and economic institutions in the Islamic world, the rise of modern nationalism, all of these things which I will not go into right now. The religious scholars of Islam whose names paradoxically enough, meant scientists, in fact, disdained science completely. And so you have this dichotomy within the Islamic world, in which the modernists refuse to study the philosophical and religious implications of the introduction of Western science in the Islamic world, and the classical traditional ulema, and this cut across the Islamic world, all refused to have anything to do with modern science. There are again a few exceptions.

This left a major vacuum in the intellectual life of the Islamic community for which every single Muslim sitting in this room suffers in one way or another. Many people think this was all the fault of the ulema. I do not think this was all the fault of the ulema, this is also the fault of the authorities which had economic and political power in their hands, and the two in fact went together. We must add to this a third element [which] is that while science was spreading in the Islamic world, there had been created within the Islamic world, a reformist puritanical movement, especially within Arabia, associated with the name of Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahab, the so-called Wahabi movement, which is still very strong in Saudi Arabia, which in fact gave rise to [the country] with the wedding of Nejd and Hijaz in 1926-27. Its roots [lie] in the eighteenth century when this man lived, and his way of thinking then proliferated into Egypt and Syria.

[Similarly] the Salafia movement in India and other places, [also] wanted to interpret Islam in a very rational and simple manner and was opposed to ``philosophical’’ speculation and was opposed to the whole tradition of Islamic philosophy. [These movements] all but went along with the more quarrelsome and troublesome dimensions of the impact of science upon the faith system and the philosophical world-view of Islam. It is interesting that the Wahabi ulema in the nineteenth century opposed completely any interest in modern science and technology. It is today that Saudi Arabia of course has one of the best programs for the teaching of science and technology in the Islamic world. The centers at Dhahran and other places are really quite amazing but it is a very modern transformation. In the nineteenth century, those very people stood opposed to the modernists, and the traditional Muslim ulema whether they were Shafis or Malikis or anything else, felt that as far as science was concerned, [opposition was justified].

This changed one-hundred and eighty degrees in our time. Today people of that kind of background, again want nothing to do with a discussion of the philosophical implications of science, but very much identify themselves with the Al-Afghani position, that science is al-ilm and let’s get on with it, let’s not bother with its implications. This is a [very important] position which I have traced for you rather extensively, because it is still very much alive in the Islamic world today.

The second position which is held within the Islamic world today, which is now held by a number of very interesting and eminent thinkers, is that, in fact, the problem of the confrontation of modern science with Islam is not at all an intellectual problem but rather an ethical problem. All the problems of modern science, all the way from making possible the dropping of atomic bombs on people’s heads, to the creation of technologies which create the enslavement of those who receive them, the technological star wars of the last year in the Persian Gulf, all of these are not the fault of modern science, but [rather] of the wrong ethical application of modern science. And one must separate modern science from its ethical implications and usages in the West, take it and use it in another ethical system. As if one were to buy a Boeing 747 from California, then take it to Egypt and paint it Egypt Air, and it would become an Egyptian airplane. This is a view which exists and is rather prevalent in many places. Most of the new Islamic universities which have been established throughout the Islamic world, like the Islamic University in Malaysia, the Islamic University in Pakistan, the Umm-ul Quraa University in Makkah, try to emphasize this point of view. For example, in all Saudi universities, students are taught Islamic ethics with the hope that once they begin to learn science and engineering, they will take these and integrate them within this ethical system.

Now we come to the third point of view. This was discussed for a long time by practically no one, except yours truly. But in the last twenty years, it has gained a large number of followers. And that point of view is that science has its own world-view. No science is created in a vacuum. Science arose under particular circumstances in the West with certain philosophical presumptions about the nature of reality. As soon as you say, m, f, v, and a, that is, the simple parameters of classical physics, you have chosen to look at reality from a certain point of view. There is no mass, there is no force out there like that chair or table. These are particularly abstract concepts which grew in the seventeenth century on the basis of a particular concept of space, matter and motion which Newton developed. The historians and philosophers of science in the last twenty [or] thirty years have shown beyond the scepter of doubt that modern science has its own world view. It is not at all value free; nor is it a purely objective science of reality irrespective of the subject you study. It is based upon the imposition of certain categories upon the study of nature, with a remarkable success in the study of certain things, and also a remarkable lack of success [in others], depending on what you are looking at.

Modern science is successful in telling you the weight and chemical structure of a red pine leaf, but it is totally irrelevant to what is the meaning of the turning of this leaf to red. The ``how’’ has been explained in modern science, the ``why’’ is not its concern. If you are a physics student and you ask the question, `what is the force of gravitation?’, the teacher will tell you the formula, but as to what is the nature of this force, he will tell you it is not a subject for physics. So [science] is very successful in certain fields, but leaves other aspects of reality aside.

In the 1950s, and I hate to be autobiographical but just for two minutes because it has to do with the subject at hand, when I was a student here at this University studying physics, the late Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, gave a series of lectures at MIT. I never forget that when I went to that lecture, he said that modern science has nothing to do with the discovery of the nature of reality, and he gave certain reasons. And I came home, and I couldn’t sleep all night. I thought that I had gone to MIT not because I was rich, or because the Iranian government forced me to go, [but] to learn the nature of reality. And here was one of the famous philosophers of the day [saying this was not to be]. This deviated me from the path of becoming a physicist, and I spent the next few years, parallel with all the other physics and mathematics courses I had to take, [studying] the philosophy of science both here, and at Harvard. It was that which really led me to study the philosophy of science and finally the Islamic philosophy of science and Islamic cosmology, to which I have devoted the last thirty years of my life.

This event turned me to try and discover what is the meaning of another way of looking at nature. And I coined the term, ``Islamic Science’’, as a living and not only historical reality, in the fifties when my book * came out. I tried to deal with Islamic science not as a chapter in the history of Western science, but as an independent way of looking at the work of nature. [This] lead to a great deal of opposition in the West. Had it not been for the noble support of Sir Hamilton Gibb, the famous British Islamicist [read Orientalist] at Harvard University, nobody would ever have allowed me to say such a thing. At that time, [it] was actually blasphemy to speak of Islamic science as an independent way of looking at reality and not simply as a chapter between Aristotle and somebody else in the thirteenth century. But now a lot of water has flown under the bridge. This third point of view, with its humble beginning in books which I wrote in my twenties, has won a lot of support in the Islamic World. And this perspective is based on the idea that Western science is as much related to Western civilization as any Islamic science is related to Islamic civilization. And as science is not a value free activity, it is fruitful and possible for one civilization to learn the science of another civilization but to do that it must be able to abstract and make its own. And the best example of that is exactly what Islam did with Greek science and what Europe did with Islamic science, which is usually called Arabic science but is really Islamic science, done by both Arabs and Persians, and also to some extent by Turks and Indians.

In both of these cases what did the Muslims do? The Muslims did not just take over Greek science and translate it into Arabic and preserve its Greek character. It was totally transformed into the part and parcel of the Islamic intellectual citadel. Any of you who have actually ever studied in depth the text of the great Muslim scientists like Alberuni or Ibn Sina or any Andulusian scientists know that you are living within the Islamic Universe. You’re not living within the Greek Universe. It is true that the particular descriptions might have been taken from the [works] of Aristotle or a particular formula from Euclid’s Elements, but the whole science is totally integrated into the Islamic point of view. The greatest work of Algebra in the pre-modern period is by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam. When we read his book, of course, if when you get [to a] particular formula or equation you could be writing in Chinese or English and could be in any civilization, but the impact that the whole work makes upon you makes you feel that you belong to a total intellectual universe- the Islamic Universe. And this is precisely what the West did to Islamic science. When in Toledo in the 1030’s and the 1040’s the translations of the books from the Arabic into Latin began which really began the scientific changes of the 12th century and again in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries of the West, books were simply being translated from the Arabic into the Latin. The first few decades were very much like what the Islamic world was, or has been, in the last few decades. That is, actual works of, say, Ibn Sina were being read in medicine as if they were in Arabic, but since no one knew Arabic, they were in Latin. They may not have been very good translations but there they were. It only took a century, not longer than that, for the West to make this learning their own. And I always say to Muslims in giving lectures all over the Islamic World, to people in ministries of education, to people who are responsible, that the reason we cannot do this in the Islamic world is that symbolically, and the symbol is important, when the West adopted Islamic science, it even adopted the gown of the Muslim Ulema, * but it never took the turban and put it on its head. The head-dress of the European bishops of the middle ages, * was kept on. Whereas at many Islamic universities today, we have taken both the gown and the cap from the West. We cannot think of ourselves independently. The whole thing has been taken over and has now been made our own. This I am giving as a kind of anecdotal reference but it is symbolic really of the type of processes that are going on.

There are two very good cases: One of Greek science taken over by Muslims, [and the other] of Islamic science taken over by the Latin West and later on the European West. In both cases there was a period of transmission but there was also a period of digestion, ingestion, and integration which always means also rejection. No science has ever been integrated into any civilization without some of it also being rejected. It’s like the body. If we only ate and the body did not reject anything we would die in a few days. Some of the food has to be absorbed, some of the food has to be rejected. You might say what about the case of Japan which is so successful in making Mitsubishis, modern washing machines and so forth, but we haven’t seen the end of the story. Will Zen, Buddhist [and] Shinto Japan be the same centuries from now and at the same time the science totally Western Science [translated into] Japanese or will [Japan] gradually transform the science and technology into something Japanese? We do not know yet.

But the historical cases that we do know- all point to a period of translation, and then digestion and integration and by virtue of integration, the expulsion of something which cannot be accepted, which is not in accord with that particular world view, which is exactly what the Latin West did. The Latin West was not interested in certain aspects of Islamic science which never took hold, which never became central. And some Muslims were not interested in some types of Greek Science which never took hold in Islamic soil. This is also a case which can be proven historically.

Now, all these views which are expressed for you today are not given force in the Islamic world. There are people all the way from Abdus Salam, the only Muslim to have won the Noble Prize in physics, who was asked `what happened to Islamic Science?’ He said `Nothing. Instead what we cultivated in Isfahan and Cordoba is now being cultivated in MIT, Caltech and at Imperial College, London. It’s just a geographical translation of place’. All the way from that position, which is really an echo of what Jamaluddin Afghani [presented in a] new garb by a great physicist, over to the views [of] the so-called ``ajmalis’’ in England who emphasize [the] ethical dimension of Islamic science and who at least realize that modern science is not value-free [and finally], to the position which is held by yours truly and many others in the Islamic world, and which has now given rise to the only institution, Aligarh University in India, which is trying to deal with this subject in a living fashion - I’ll get to that in a moment. As I talk of these three ways of thinking about the relationship between Islam and modern science there are several important phenomena that are going on in the Islamic world which I must describe for you before analyzing them.

First and most powerful, is the continuous flow and absorption of western science and technology into all existing Islamic countries to the extent that [they] can absorb it. * * In every single Islamic country, whatever political regime, whatever economic policy, whatever attitude towards the west [they may espouse], whether they are completely pro-western or have demonstrations in the street against the west, the adoption of western science and technology goes on. Which is a very telling fact for the whole of the Islamic world.



There are some places where some thought is being given to what is the consequence of this. Now there are many questions to ask here. First of all is this [transfer of science and technology] going on successfully? is it not going on successfully? If it is not successful, what is it not going on successfully? And if it is, why? This is a very major issue. The whole question of the transfer of science [is] not really a subject for me to deal with today.



The second phenomenon that is going on [today] is the [gradual] attempt being made to study both the meaning and the history of Islamic science. I think that in this field that Muslims should really be ashamed of themselves to put it mildly. Let me give you some examples. There are now today a billion Muslims in the world. Probably in the first to the second century of the history of Islam, that is the eighth Christian century, no one knows exactly, but there were something like 20-30 million Muslims. Despite that vast [Islamic] empire the numbers were somewhere around there [according to] the demographers. It may be wrong, but [it was] anyway a much smaller number [than the population of Muslims today].



During that 100 year period, more books in quantity, not to speak about the remarkable quality, were translated [about] the basic philosophical and scientific thought of Greek science than has been translated during a comparable 100 year period by all Muslims put together in all Islamic countries. This is really unbelievable. Not to talk about the quality, which is of a very high nature, in the early translations from Greek which made Arabic the most important scientific language in world for 700 years, [whereas today, we have] usually very poor quality translations into modern Islamic languages, oftentimes based on Latin knowledge of classical Arabic.



* * Most the history of Islamic science has been written by western scholars including the great *. His one book, Introduction to the History of Science, has lead to at least 500 or 600 books in Urdu, Persian, Malay, Arabic and other Muslim languages which are sold in the streets as Islamic Science because everybody is too lazy to go do his own or her own research. [Typically in such works] one or two pages are just taken and culled and regurgitated and repeated and so forth and so on in a manner that is really sickening. Compared to the other civilizations of Asia, the Chinese and the Japanese and the Indian, the Muslims have not had a very good record in studying their own history of science despite the fact that this field was of great importance religiously, going back to what I said about Jamaluddin and Mohammed Abduh in the later 19th century, the rise of modernism in the Islamic world, and all of these other very powerful forces.



During the last 20-30 years, there has been a change. Gradually Muslim governments are realizing that it’s very important that if you have 100 students that you have 80 of them study science and technology but it’s also very important that the other twenty study the humanities and to train some people in the history of science, [which] although allied to science, is not really science itself. It is historical knowledge, it is linguistic knowledge, [and] it is philosophical knowledge. The Muslims have not yet developed their own historiography of science. This is a very important field. If you look at all the histories of science written in the west, everything ends miraculously in the thirteenth century- [implying] the whole of Islamic civilization came to an end in the thirteenth century. Islamic philosophy, Islamic science, history of astronomy, history of physics, alchemy, biology, anything you study, miraculously comes to an end in the thirteenth century which coincides exactly with the termination of political contact between Islam and the West. Now Muslims always get angry at why this is so, but Western historians are completely right to study Islamic history from their own point of view. And Muslim thinkers are completely wrong in studying their own history from the point of view of western history.



I said once many, many years ago in a statement in Pakistan 30 years ago, which has been repeated not many times, that any individual that stands in a mirror and looks at his or her own image perceives that image from the point of view of the model or the * behind the mirror * but we’re doing this culturally, much of the Islamic world is doing this culturally and that is nothing less than an insane way of looking at themselves. We should be able to look at ourselves directly and to do that we have to develop a historiography of science.



I think for nine-tenths of the students in this room who are probably the most brilliant young students in the field of science - I’m now addressing the Muslim students - if I were to ask you `what do know about the history Islamic medicine in the 17th Christian century’ you’d probably say nothing. Well, that is a very brilliant period in the history of Islamic medicine and the reason you don’t know anything about it is because E.G. Brown didn’t write about it in his book ``Arabian Medicine’’. That’s the only reason. Because [Brown] was [only] interested in Early Islamic medicine [as it] influenced the great physicians in the west.



Now, therefore this [question of] the historiography of Islamic science is far from being a trivial question. And it has created, in fact, a vacuum within which the integration of western science and technology is made doubly difficult in the Islamic world. That is most young Muslim students have this view which has unfortunately been abetted by Arab Nationalism. I have to be very honest here, the nationalisms in the Middle East, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, are now more or less [over], they are ending one way or the other. That is they’re showing their bankruptcy, not completely, there are nations that still exist of course but their grand days are perhaps over.



Arab Nationalism began with a thesis, propagated by small non-Muslim minorities within the Arab world, that the Islamic civilization began to go down when the Arab hegemony over Islamic civilization came to an end. That is with the Abbasids. If you look, for example, at the history of Arabic literature, everybody talks about the Ummayad and the Abbasid period and there is nothing going on for several hundred years until some poet begins to talk about the lamentations of the war in Iraq or the * tragedies in Palestine. That is, of course, very gripping poetry, but what were the Arabs doing for 700 years in between? That is totally overlooked. There must be some Yemenese students here. Where is there a single book on the history of Arabic poetry in Yemen- one of the richest lands in the Islamic world of poetry. We don’t know that there might be some local book published in Sanaa but certainly in Cambridge we know nothing about it. So Arab nationalism had a lot to do with this * of trying to diminish the contribution that Islamic civilization. after the Mongol invasion and the destruction of Baghdad in 1258, which coincided with the downfall of the political hegemony of the Arabs who did not regain the political hegemony, even over themselves, until the 20th century.



Now, the consequence of that is, first of all, the overlooking of 700 years, not 70 years, 700 years, of Islamic intellectual history during which the Muslims were supposed to have done nothing. They were supposed to have been decadent for 700 years. Now how can you revive a patient that has been dead for that long a time? The idea [which] is propagated in the West [is] that Muslims are very brilliant, that they did science and things like that, [and then] suddenly decided to turn the switch off and went to selling beads and playing with their rosaries in the bazaar for the next 700 years till Mossadegh nationalized the oil and they came back on the scene of human history are now living happily again. This, of course, is total nonsense and it brings about a sclerosis, intellectually, which is far from being trivial. * * Over [the] twenty years I have taught at Tehran University, I always felt, [our students] could never overcome this very long historical loss of memory. Somehow it was very difficult for them. They wanted to connect themselves to Al-Biruni and Khawarizmi and people like that, but this hiatus was simply too long. This hiatus has not been created by history itself. It has been created by the study of history from the particular perspective of Western scholarship, which is as I said, perfectly [within] its right in its claim that Islam is interesting only till the moment that it influences the West. The great mistake is when that objective divides the history of Islam [into a period of productivity and one of degeneration]. In the field of history of science, that is a very important element.



This leads me to the third important activity which is now going on in the Islamic World. [We have] studied Islamic science from our own point of view somewhat [though this study is hardly comprehensive for] it will take a long, long time to get all the [relevant] manuscripts. There are over three thousand manuscripts of medicine in India which have never been studied by anybody. This is [only] the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of manuscripts in Yemen which we don’t even know about. There is a new institution being established in London which is being inaugurated at the end of next month, the Al-Furqan Foundation, which will be devoted to assembling Islamic manuscripts from all over the world. and [compiling] original surveys of where the manuscripts are... places like Ethiopia for example, have treasuries of Islamic manuscripts, many of them in the sciences. The process will take a long time, but at least on the basis of what has been begun, [progress can be made].



But in this field, there is now the third step of trying to further science within the Islamic world under the foundation of an Islamic logic of science. Now this is a very difficult and very tall order. It is not going something which is going to be done immediately, but I want to say a few words about what is being done and where. And we can perhaps discuss this with you during the question-answer period. It is interesting that some of the places where a great deal of the intellectual attention is being paid to the subject are not places which have been known historically as the great intellectual centers of Islamic civilization [which] have really always been between Lahore and Tripoli. About nine-tenths of all famous Islamic thinkers have come from that region, Spain being the one great exception. But today, one of the places, for example, where a great deal of the work is being done is Malaysia .Normally one would think of [Malaysia] as a small Islamic country with only a 55% or a 57% Muslim majority. [However] there is, because of the interest of the government, a great deal of effort being spent in trying to understand what is the meaning of Islamic science and how can science be further [explored for] the basis of an Islamic view towards science. Another place is Turkey. One does not usually think of Turkey these days as being significant as a center of Islamic thought because of the secularism brought by Kamal Ataturk. * * But within Turkey, despite all of this, an incredible amount of intellectual activity [has been] going on in the last few decades bringing things as different, as separate, as the Naqshbandia of Istanbul and the Khizisists of Istanbul University together. The most important journal which is being published in Turkey on this issue, called ``Science and Technology’’ is not, in fact, published by secular Turks. It is published by very devout Muslims, who are extremely interested in the Islamicisty of Islamic science, and I think the Turkish will be able to make some major intellectual contributions in the future to this field.



Perhaps most interesting of all these programs is going on in Aligarh University in India. Aligarh University is of course a major Islamic university whose Islamicisty is now very much threatened, by all that is going on in India, [one of] the great tragedies of the last few decades. * * I was in India, exactly a year ago tomorrow, and I was to give the Best Science awards in Aligarh University. People had come from all over India * but I could not go to Aligarh because it was too dangerous, because the government could not guarantee my safety. Everyday, about seven or eight people were killed just on the road. People pull you off of the car and shoot you, and you cannot do anything about it. So I could not go to Aligarh and I feel very sad about that. But I know exactly what is going on in Aligarh University. There is a new association called the ``Muslim Association for the Advancement of Science’’ which now also publishes a journal called the ``MAAS Journal’’. [MAAS] is a unique institution founded by twenty or thirty scientists, almost all of them, scientists, physicists, chemists, biologists, and some of them very brilliant, who want to absorb, first, Islamic science, then to absorb Western science. There is no way of establishing an Islamic science without knowing Western science well. To talk of circumventing what the West has learnt is absurd. But then the next step that has to be taken on the basis of Islamic world view and the view of nature. Whether they will succeed or not, Allah o Aalim, `God knows best’, but I mention it here as one of the most important attempts that is now being made in the Muslim world. Gradually a network is being created among young Muslim scientists who are concerned with religion and are also quite capable of dealing with the humanities. * I think a great deal of positive result will come from this, if the political situation does not get so bad as to destroy the very physical basis for these activities.



Let me conclude with a word about the future. Of course a person should never be too charmed by futuroligists, otherwise you would never say insha’llah. * Three years ago probably companies [were paying] fortunes to [be told] what the future of the Soviet Union was and [yet] nobody guessed what was going to happen. So, let’s take this with a grain of salt. Only God knows. But from the point of a humble scholar of the situation, I believe that the cultural crisis created by the successful introduction of Western science and technology, successful enough to bring about rapid cultural patterns of change, is going to continue to pose major problems for the Islamic world. The best example of that is what happened in Iran. Iran had without doubt, the most advanced program for the teaching of science and technology and the largest per capita number of scientists. It was the only country in the Muslim world where alternative technology was already beginning to be discussed, but the cultural transformation brought about by the very success of the enterprise, besides all the other political problems that were involved * certainly contributed to the outcome of what happened in the late seventies. The government in Iran today, wants [very much] to go back to implement the very scientific programs and technological programs which were put aside during the ten years after the revolution. But I believe that the impact of the absorption of Western science and more than that, the application of technology, for science today, in the minds of Muslim governments is not separated from application of technology, they are not simply interested in pure science. Pure scientists have a lot of trouble finding money for their work; it is the applied aspect which is emphasized. I think this [cultural dislocation] is going to, without doubt, continue until something serious is done.



I remember in 1983 when the Saudi government decided to found a science museum center in Riyadh, they contacted me and I went several times to Saudi Arabia and spoke to all of the leading people involved. I told them at that time, that a science museum could be a time bomb. Do not think that a science museum is simply neutral in its cultural impact. It has a tremendous impact upon those who go into it. If you go into a building in which one room is full of dinosaurs, the next room is full of wires, and the third full of old trains, you are going to have a segmented view of knowledge which is going to have a deep effect upon the young person who goes there, who has been taught about Tawhid, about Unity, about the Unity of knowledge, about the Unity of God, the Unity of the universe. There is going to be a dichotomy created in him. You must be able to integrate knowledge. * * I mention this to you as an example.

The problem [is] that with the increase of success of both the teaching of science and the technology, will bring with it a cultural dislocation [and] philosophical questioning which have to be answered especially at a time when the Islamic world does not want to play the role of a dead duck. There is not a moment in the history of Islam, when the Muslims like the other great civilizations of Asia are trying to play the game of the West. The Islamic world wants to pull its own weight, wants to finds its own identity, and therefore this problem is going to be acute.

Secondly, I believe that [a] very major crisis [is being] set afoot by the very application of modern technology, that is the environmental crisis. [This crisis is] of course global. You cannot say, `I am drawing a boundary around my country, I do not want the hole in the ozone zone, [to make] the sun shine upon my head’. You have no choice in that. Because of that, and because of the fact that Islamic countries, like Buddhist countries, like Hindu countries, will always eat from the bread crumbs of Western technology in the situation of the world today, more of an attempt is made towards the direction of alternative technologies. [This] began in Iran in the seventies, and thank God, is still going on a little, and [in] other places [like] Egypt where a little [attempt] to spend some of the energy of society towards alternative technology [is being made]. [All of] which also means to try to look upon science as the mother of technology in somewhat of a different way.

And finally, I think, the intellectual effort is now being made. What is called by some people, the Islamisation of knowledge and which is now very popular, [and] which goes back to some of my own humble writings in the fifties, and later on, the treatise written by the late Ismail Al-Faruqui who was assassinated in Philadelphia two years back. This little treatise he wrote called, ``The Islamisation of Knowledge’’, is now being discussed in educational conferences throughout the Islamic World, [which] is finally going to bear some fruit. Although it will require much more concerted effort of the most intelligent and gifted members of the Islamic community, who must know Western science in depth, who must know Islamic thought in depth, the cosmological message of the Quran, not only its ethical message, and at the same time have the energy to pursue this through. The task is a very daunting and difficult one. The problem of the partition of science from Islam is a problem that exists unless Islam is willing to give up its claim to being a total way of life. [If that were so], we must suppress not only what we do on Friday noons, * but what we do and think every moment of our daily lives. It is going to preserve an integrated principle that of course * must also be taken into consideration.

Thank you

America’s Responsibility THE OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT.

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QUETTA (Special Report): It has been reported by a famous Taliban commander, Mulla Muhammad, that Mulla Umar and the rest of the Taliban leadership is absolutely safe, praise be to Allah. He said that Mulla Umar has stressed a great deal that Muslims should not believe any news from the CNN, BBC, and other Western Media organisations, on events in Afghanistan.

Mulla Muhammad stated, ``The aim of the Western Media is to lower the morale of the Muslim Ummah. The Western Media has given many names and claimed that these brothers have been captured, but many of these brothers ars still with us, laughing at these false rumours about them. The Muslims should have their own media, and it is obligatory upon every Muslim that he should spread each and every authentic news report which he receives about this `War Against Islam`.`` The Taliban commander concluded by saying, ``By Allah, this (media effort) is a very significant and beneficial contribution to this Jihad against the enemies of Allah and Islam.``

BRITAIN SUPPORTS US TREATMENT OF PRISONERS IN CUBA. WORLD HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANISATIONS PROTEST

KANDAHAR/ LONDON (Monitoring Desk + Islam News) : Disgraceful and inhumane behaviour has been shown by the US forces towards the 50 Taliban and Arab Mujahideen after they have been shifted to the Guantanamo US Naval Base in Cuba, from Kandahar. According to authentic sources, these Mujahideen were boarded onto the aircraft from Kandahar Airport, bound with chains all over their bodies and beards forcibly shaved. Their faces were covered with black cloth and they were given sedative injections before boarding the aircraft.

Two Mujahideen were handcuffed using a single chain due to which it was harder for the Mujahideen to take a single step. These Mujahideen got down from the aircraft whilst conscious and they were taken to specially made, small 6ft x 8ft prisons on stretchers where they were locked up like animals.

Interational human rights organisations protested this inhumane behaviour of America but British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, supported it, saying that the prisoners deserved to be treated in this way. As well as proving the deep-rooted hatred of Britain and America against Muslims, this also proves that they are in fact the World`s biggest terrorists, who do not carry any concerns for human rights, life or dignity, and even their own laws that are supposed to preserve these.

An International Red Cross representative said that the US should allow a meeting of these prisoners with the Red Cross as soon as possible because it is stated under the Geneva Convention. She said that US should not maintain this behaviour with the Mujahideen prisoners as, according to the Geneva Convention, this is a severe violation of human rights. International analysts have said that the US shifted these Mujahideen to Cuba so that they do not undergo proper trial. According to American laws, if they are shifted to the US, then they have to be presented in courts of justice and they also have the right to lawyers and to appeal. The world human rights organisations also said that the US should accept these prisoners as Prisoners-Of-War (POW`s) according to the Geneva convention and provide them with all necessities of war prisoners. However, the Pentagon firmly refused all these demands and is not ready to accept these prisoners as Prisoners-Of-War.

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America’s Responsibility Something more to ponder upon.

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Skolnick - US Government Had Prior Knowledge Of Emergency

By Sherman H. Skolnick

skolnick@ameritech.net

http://www.skolnicksreport.com

America`s Reichstag Fire

The most massive so-called ``terrorist`` attacks on U.S. soil since the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995, were known, a week ahead of time, by the American CIA. Among the foreign intelligence agencies who penetrated the plots were the French CIA and Israel`s The Mossad, units of both often working with one another.

Foreign intelligence sources confirm the validity of this story. And they state that they informed the U.S. secret police who absolutely failed, neglected, and outright refused to take action as to known prior specifics of which the top-level of the CIA were informed in advance.

As made known to the CIA, were the following, among other details:

[1] That George Herbert Walker Bush, as President, at the close of the Persian Gulf War, 1991, arranged to bring into the U.S. some four thousand Iraqi military officers, some from intelligence units, and their families.

[2] Some 550 of these officers became residents in Lincoln, Nebraska, AND TWO THOUSAND OF THEM took up residence in Oklahoma City. In a watered down story, CBS` ``60 Minutes`` Program did a segment once on this about Lincoln, Nebraska but said NOTHING about the Iraqi military officers in Oklahoma City.

[3] The financial and other provisions for them and their families were arranged by the Elder Bush, and then quietly continued by Bill Clinton as President, and perpetuated by George W. Bush as White House ``resident`` and ``occupant``. The arrangements included financial subsidies, housing, and employment for the Iraqi officers.

[A brave Oklahoma City TV Reporter, Jayna Davis, on their local TV station, put on the air several stories about the Iraqi connection to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, the bombing done with the aid of domestic dissidents as surrogates. A group bought out the TV station and silenced her. Timothy McVeigh`s chief defense counsel for the murder trial, Stephen Jones, on behalf of McVeigh, filed an extra-ordinary petition in the next higher court, just prior to the murder trial. To no avail, Jones tried to force Denver U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch to compel the American CIA to disgorge records held by them showing prior U.S. knowledge of the bombing, as confirmed by other known records, some of them also in secret court records. We have a copy of the 185 page U.S. Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit, petition filed by Jones and almost uniformly ignored by the American monopoly press. The petition raises the Iraqi connection.]

[4] The foreign intelligence agencies informed the American CIA that guns would be planted on-board as many as ten U.S. commercial airflights. This to be done by airplane clean-up crew members who are generally not subject to airport security provisions. These workers most likely did not know the purpose of the gun-planting.

[5] The CIA also was informed prior to the ``terrorist`` attacks scheduled for ``911`` Emergency Day [September 11], that highly skilled Iraqi pilots, among the four thousand Iraqi officers resident in the U.S., would take over the commercial flights, by retrieving the weapons concealed onboard, and then commandeering the flight deck.

[6] The Elder Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush, all were in a position to know that the Iraqi officers that they provided for included some double-agents. The FBI Counter-Intelligence Division at no time was instructed to do anything about these double-agents in a position to commit mischief, murder, and mayhem, on U.S. soil.

[7] As I revealed a week prior to the ``terrorist`` attacks, some foreign television networks were busy preparing lengthy documentaries that would scandalize George W. Bush and other members of the Bush Family, including the Elder Bush and Jeb Bush. The subject matter included how forty million dollars in dope funds were used by the Bush Family to reportedly corrupt South Florida DEMOCRATS to abandon the recount even ahead of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling installing George W. Bush as the ``resident`` and ``occupant`` of the White House. The dope funds came reportedly from Bush Family business partner, Carlos Lehder, co-founder of the U.S./Colombia medellin dope cartel. [Visit our website story, ``Chandra Levy Affair, Part Two``.] I discussed this on radio talk shows.

[8] As part of the targetting of the World Trade Center buildings, a group of surrogates for the Iraqi military officers, reportedly spent considerable time within one of the buildings, with building security officers somehow oblivious of their presence.

[9] As the CIA top officials were informed and had prior knowledge, the purpose of the ``terrorist`` attacks was to effectively paralyze the financial infrastructure of the U.S. Some of the most important stock and bond houses in the world, with their key people having loads of inside knowledge and hard to replace trading tricks and expertise, were located in the known-to-be-targetted twin towers of the World Trade Center, New York City. It was like blowing up the main ``financial factory`` and destroying their inventory. The so-called ``back-up`` records kept parked across the river in New Jersey, are not only inadequate but cannot help reconstruct various accounts and transactions in the works.

Financial experts tell us the ``back up`` records parked in New Jersey, may NOT be sufficient to re-start the American financial apparatus. Some of the experts are loudly grumbling that they should have early on seen Federal Reserve Czar Alan Greenspan on the television explaining about the financial ramifications. Of course, some suppose that Americans would panic and run out of control. So we are dealt with like little children.

[10] It is a serious mistake, according to savvy American and foreign intelligence sources, to blame the Emergency all on Osama bin Laden. As readers of our website are aware, we have long pointed out that bin Laden is reportedly in the Mid-East Construction business. His reputed partners? The family of Sharon PERCY Rockefeller. She is the wife of John D. Rockefeller 4th (D., W.Va.), great grandson of the founder of the infamous Standard Oil Trust that used to bomb their own obsolete buildings to falsely blame onto their competitors. Bin Laden`s so-called ``secret`` accounts, which the White House has said they would like to freeze, are or have been actually reportedly in the Harris Bank, Chicago, joint accounts with the family of Sharon PERCY Rockefeller.

[11] The Saudi Royal Family actually consists of some five thousand members, some of whom actually are for the U.S. and some anti-U.S. Some of them have bankrolled Iraq`s war against Iran, 1980 to 1988, to destroy some oil facilities and keep the price of oil HIGH. The foreign intelligence agencies, that penetrated the plots to be carried out on U.S. soil, are aware that some of the Saudi royals are actually sympathetic to the Iraqis destroying the World Trade Center Buildings and in part, wrecking the Pentagon. [As if the American CIA did not ALREADY have their own knowledge of this.]

Whenever there is a political assassination or some other unusual violent event, what is the key question the oil-soaked, spy-riddled monopoly press ALWAYS fails to ask? WHO BENEFITS. With a scandal about to break against George W. Bush, he and his circle had an interest NOT to stop these things from happening. And to divert attention. The White House has a strong motive to silence critics and urge people TO RALLY AROUND THE PRESIDENT. Simple-minded folks, of course, often poorly informed,do not understand how the ruling classes would shed the blood of thousands if not millions of innocent people, in some instigated war, to avoid dealing with the apparent on-coming economic disasters.

In the midst of this prior-knowledge emergency, who dares now to point to the Bush Family as reputed business partners of the major kingpin, Carlos Lehder, of the U.S./Colombia medellin dope cartel? Or how huge dope money bought the Electoral College trick in Florida and corrupted the U.S. Supreme Court`s ``gang of five``.

This is America`s REICHSTAG fire. Adolph Hitler burned down the German parliament and falsely blamed his enemies and had them rounded up and put in the concentration camps. Has the U.S. Constitution now been revoked? More coming.

Stay tuned.

America’s Responsibility Ali---363

You made your point well too.;)

Lets complete it,for fairness sake.

Desi kukkarr

Hejaazi baangaan

Doojay kukkarr kaafir

The whole Indo-Pak saga can be summed up in the saga of the dog,the rooster & the monkey OR the pig,the cow,& the camel.

Iqbal wrote the dialogue between the Cow & the Camel:

``Mein to badnaam huee toar key russee upnee.

suntee hoon toar dee hai aap ney bhee upnee muhaar``

and:

``Eik muddat sey hai iss bunn mein basairaa upnaa.

Paas kuchh naqd naheen,chaaraa bhee khaatain hain udhhar``

(may not be in exact order)

__________________________________________________

Did you read The Untamed?

author is also---ME!

__________________________________________________

America’s Responsibility

__________________________________________________

DRUMZ----Is this relevant?__________________________________________________

The UNTAMED

Mustangs

Leathery,sinewy,pectoral

rebellious,refusing to be lassoed,

hating to be harnessed,

Dancing,prancing in half-moon light

steaming nostrils,burning brawns

perspiring,sweating,smoking

drawing,calling females in heat

from near & far,

Somewhere in the Sierras,The MISFITS.

Where have the mustangs gone?

Like unicorn,have they become legends?

in their own lifetimes?

kid me not--O kid

You see them everyday

civilised,tamed

nine to fivers,five to niners

week-enders,weakened by illwill

wilted by whips

stopping at red,moving on green

they now know the system

abide by it

to get their oats on time

(and save some for rainy days)

and some more,IN CASE--You know;)

Scared of Death & disease

they spend half of their healthy life

worrying about them,IN CASE--you know;)

And the other half tending to them

as if

all their life

they were embalming their bodies

mummyifying it

to attain immortality

And maybe take it all with them.

__________________________________________________

The Misfits---is a great movie.

America’s Responsibility (Contd from 343)

DRUMZ--337

Lucky to find Auden on net.Here is one of my favourite poem by him.I`m sure most of us must be familiar with it.

__________________________________________________

The Unknown Citizen

(To JS/07/M/378/ This Marble Monument

Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an oldfashioned word, he was a saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn`t a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace; When there was war,he went.

He was married and added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:

Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

W.H. Auden

__________________________________________________

Mr.Hobbyty---344

But don`t we all try?I believe everyone here on CHOWK is very sincere---sometimes to the point of obnoxiousness(myself incl.) but sincere nonetheless.

``Jin ko mutlab naheen hotaa voh sataatay bhee naheen``;)----Thanks anyway!

America’s Responsibility ``Aik hum hain keh liyaa upnee hee soorat ko bigaar

Eik voh hain,jinhain tasveer banaa aatee hai``

tr:

Now here we are;face--contorted,grimaced.

And there are those who create beautiful art.

REPORT BY:Abdul Hamids`(John Walkers`) cousin

__________________________________________________

Published Monday January 07, 2002

By Thomas Maguire

John Walker was captured by US Troops in Mazar-i-Sharif late last year. After being held in a freezing cold, steel shipping container in Kandahar, he was moved to the USS Bataan warship in the Arabian Sea, where he continues to be held in inhumane conditions and solitary confinement. His story puts shame on many Muslims, especially those Muslims in America, who migrated to America from their home countries and lost their religion. May Allah hasten his release from the Crusaders who respect no rights or laws and make him an example to Muslim youths.

This article was submitted to MIRROR by Thomas Maguire, who is the cousin of John Walker.

__________________________________________________

I first met John Walker during a trip to visit his family before my junior year of college, in 1995. Although I was six years senior to him, I found John to be a mature and thoughtful individual whose interests and curiosities closely paralleled my own. We both nurtured a fledgling interest in Islam that chiefly centered on the pseudo-Muslim murmurs within hip-hop music. While my interest in Islam stalled around issues of social freedom and self- gratification, John exhibited a glowing innocence that propelled him to openly investigate the truth of Islam.

After graduating from college in 1997, I moved to the Bay Area, and John and I had a chance to spend more time together. It was then that he finally declared his faith in Islam. Having witnessed various intervals of his journey, it was clear that conversion brought him an inner satisfaction and a sense of completion. John, now Sulayman, introduced me to some knowledgeable Muslims who were able to answer some of my nagging questions about the religion. Soon after, I took the shahada as well and accepted Islam. As I began to meet Muslims in the Bay Area, those who already knew Sulayman spoke of him with admiration and enthusiasm. I can still remember the smiles people offered me when I mentioned that I was his cousin.

Sulayman and I only spent a short time together after we had both become Muslim. I moved to the East coast, and Sulayman eventually left for Yemen to begin learning Arabic. For several years, although I identified myself as Muslim, I dragged my feet in making the necessary changes in life-abandoning haram practices, establishing prayer and fasting. It wasn`t until I got married in 1999 that I began to address my lack of attention to Islam. At this time, Sulayman was in Yemen for the second time, and we began to communicate by email.

Like many Muslim converts, I was disillusioned by the unfortunate factionalism in the Islamic world. When I committed myself to practicing the religion properly, I still worried about navigating the various perspectives and in-fighting among Muslims. Sulayman has been portrayed by the media as impressionable and naïve-easily led into extremism. Yet, when I encountered different groups and schools of thought within Islam, I always found that Sulayman offered a carefully balanced and knowledgeable critique of various perspectives without condemning or damning those with whom he disagreed. In this area, Sulayman has been the most exemplary person I have known in his ability to balance an intense commitment to the purest elements of Islam with a general tolerance of other Muslims. Although he remains in the relatively early stages of Islamic knowledge, his personal qualities-faith, patience, piety, kindness-are like those that I have witnessed among the most learned in religion.

Last Spring, at age 25, I once again went to my 19 year-old younger cousin, for his trustworthy and thoughtful advice about another group of Muslims-the Taliban. With doubts about the validity of Western propaganda against the Taliban, and realizing that Sulayman`s experience in Pakistan may give him more direct knowledge; I asked what he thought of the movement. He explained that his view of the Taliban was built on consistently positive impressions from a series of personal interactions. He wrote that there are ``many things I`ve seen in the Taliban that have led me to believe that they are indeed what they claim to be-the one and only purely Islamic state in the world.``

Sulayman approached the Taliban like he did all Muslims-with tolerance, positive expectations, and the best of manners. Far from being naïve and foolish, Sulayman practiced the often difficult and commonly overlooked etiquette of approaching other Muslims without suspicion. Like any self- respecting Muslim, the Qur’an and Sunnah alone attracted Sulayman to the Taliban rhetoric of ruling. If the Taliban were insincere in pursuing their stated goals, Sulayman cannot be held responsible.

Sulayman`s parents assert that he was always a pacifist. Indeed, Sulayman remains a pacifist. The Qur`an clearly states that Muslims must stand up and defend a just cause, even if their hearts are averse to it. That is exactly what Sulayman did. Newsweek reported that Sulayman first went to fight in Kashmir. While Muslims in America, including myself, are content with making duas (prayers) for the oppressed people of Kashmir, Sulayman risked his life for people he had never met, and only for the sake of Absolute Justice (Al- Adl). Similarly, if Sulayman engaged in any fighting against a band of rapists and thugs neatly dubbed as the Northern Alliance, he maintained a pattern of behavior consistent with any standard of heroism. Moreover, even if Sulayman`s good intentions were wrongly manipulated during his journey in Afghanistan, he entered the country long before the current conflict, never intended to abandon his citizenship, and never actively fought against the U.S.

Sulayman`s grandmother, my aunt, once accused me of ``getting John into this Islam stuff``, but a reasonable assumption considering our age difference. Insha`Allah (God willing), I would be blessed if I was at all responsible for his development as a Muslim. Years ago, when Sulayman was introducing me as a new Muslim at a San Francisco mosque, one person commented that ``his deen (faith) is thicker than blood.`` Yes, Sulayman is my cousin, so I will support him out of family loyalty. But as Sulayman`s brothers and sisters in Islam, Muslims must work to defend him against any unjust prosecution.

__________________________________________________

``Ho agar aaj `Braheem kaa eeman paidaa

Aag kar saktee hai,andaaz e gulistaan paidaa``

America’s Responsibility DRUMZ-----337

The answer my friend....

is ``The Unknown Citizen``--by W.H Auden(I think?)

A re-read might help.

America’s Responsibility CAUTION:

Long post ahead.Please scroll if not in mood.But this is worthwhile stuff.

tahmad:You are really a well-meaning & decent person.So perhaps am I.The alternative view-points simply make us understand the situation with a better perspective.Do not believe in everything I post---I don`t! But it does have merit....& it is to help US too!

________________War On Terrorism__________________

THE GRAND DECEPTION;

A SECOND LOOK AT THE WAR ON TERRORISM

By G. Edward Griffin

Within minutes after the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, my phone began to ring and emails started pouring in asking what was the meaning of it all. I was flattered that anyone thought I would know the answer to that question; but, in truth, I knew little more than what was being shown on television. It was impossible to have a reasoned response until the shock wore off and the facts could be assembled.

The concepts I would like to share with you today were set to paper three days after that event. I printed about a dozen copies and gave them to family and friends. Since then I have added historical data, but the concepts and the message remain unchanged. Many of the predictions I made have already come to pass; but any pride I might have in being right is far offset by the grim substance of those predictions.

After completing The Creature from Jekyll Island, I felt that I still had one more book to write and that it would be called The Freedom Manifesto. I also knew that I would need a dramatic issue in the first chapter to capture attention. Well, the terrorist attack on September 11 was certainly that – and more.

I told those on my email list that I would send them my expanded report on terrorism, but then I became bogged down in structuring and gathering material for the book. By that time, the report had become huge and had to be divided into chapters. All of that took about four weeks. So, what started out to be a four-page report on terrorism metamorphosed into Chapter One of The Freedom Manifesto.

At first, it was my intent to keep the material up to date with late-breaking events; but then it occurred to me that it might have more value in its original form than if it were continually updated. Writing about news events after they happen is not difficult, but writing about them before they happen is another matter. So, I decided to let the overview stand exactly as conceptualized on Friday, September 14, 2001. This is that report.

KNOW THE ENEMY

In the year 500 b.c., a Chinese general and philosopher by the name of Sun Tzu wrote a treatise called The Art of War. It has been translated into just about every language in the world and has become a classic of military and political strategy. In it, Sun Tzu said:

``If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle``.[1]

It is now three days after the attack, and I am haunted by the words of Sun Tzu. America has declared war, but her leaders are not even sure who the enemy is. Is it a man called Osama bin Laden? Is it Afghanistan, the nation that shelters him? Is it the Taliban which rules Afghanistan? Is it a terrorist group called al-Qaida? Is it Muslim Extremism? We commit to war but do not know the enemy.

The meaning of this event is far more complicated than the surface facts would indicate. On the surface, we have a group of people in the Middle East who hate America and have pledged themselves to inflict severe punishment on her, even at the sacrifice of their own lives. If that is as far as we care to look, then the meaning is simple. It is them against us; we are at war; they are the bad guys; we are the good guys; and we must destroy the enemy.

That is the meaning that was given to the American people by their leaders. President Bush summarized it well when he told the nation, Tuesday, that the attack was an act of cowardice and that America was the target because it was a beacon of freedom. If that is the correct meaning of the event, the logical consequences are that we must fight back; we must defend freedom; and we must not stop until the cowards are wiped off the face of the earth. That is the path of war, retaliation, and, of course, counter-retaliation.

There is, however, a deeper understanding of this event, and it has to do with the maxim: actions have consequences. To come to that understanding, we must do the unthinkable in moments of crisis. We must ask questions.

LOYALTY AND PATRIOTISM

Asking questions is not popular with some people. When a nation is at war, there is a tendency for its citizens to rally behind their leaders without questioning the wisdom of their actions. For them, the test of patriotism is conformity. Those who ask questions are called unpatriotic. Life is simple for the conformists. All they want to know is “What side are you on, anyway?”[2]

When we reach the end of this report, there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind about my patriotism or which side holds my loyalty; but, along the way, I definitely will be asking some hard questions about the wisdom of American foreign policy.

Although I may be critical of our politicians and their policies; I want it clearly understood at the outset that I totally support our men and women who will be sent into combat as a result of those policies. When we find ourselves in a shooting war, regardless of how we got into it, at that point we have no choice. We must put all that we have into the fight. But, the other side of that coin is that we must fight to win. Our goal must be victory, not stalemate – and we should achieve it as quickly as possible to minimize casualties on both sides. That does not mean fighting a protracted conflict in which something other than victory is the goal. That is what our politicians forced us to do in Korea and Vietnam and Desert Storm and the Balkan War. After the fighting was over, the tyrannical regimes were still there. We left them in place. Some of them are now supporting the terrorists who have attacked us.

In the days ahead, we must be clear on the difference between loyalty and patriotism. The spirit of loyalty compels us to support and defend our country even when she is wrong. That is necessary in time of war, but patriotism is a higher ideal. It compels us, not only to defend our country when she is wrong, but also to do everything within our power to bring her back to the side of right.

When it comes to patriotism, there is no one who has a greater love for country than I do. That is easy to say; but when you hear someone make that statement, you have a right to know where is the evidence? My evidence is my life. I did not purchase our family’s flag on Tuesday. It is very old and weathered. We have proudly displayed it on every holiday for more than forty years. Often, it was the only flag in the neighborhood. I did not need a terrorist attack to remind me to honor my country and my heritage.

Displaying the flag is important, but patriotism requires much more than that. I have devoted almost the entirety of my adult life trying to mobilize my fellow countrymen to the defense of America from her enemies outside her borders and within. Since 1960, I have left behind me a long paper trail and a mountain of audio and videotapes extolling the virtues of the American system, her culture, her Constitution, and her people. I love America and all that she has stood for in days gone by, but I am saddened beyond words at what has been done to her within my lifetime – and what I fear is yet to be done in the days ahead.

There are those who may say that I am anti-government, but that is not true. I am not anti-government; I am anti-corrupt government. I will do everything possible to defend my government from those who would violate their oaths of office, tear apart the Constitution, or use their positions of trust to oppress our people. To oppose corruption in government is the highest obligation of patriotism.

WHY DO THEY HATE AMERICA?

The first question we need to ask is why? Why do the terrorists hate America?[3]

I am reminded of the story of a young man in medieval times who wanted to become a knight. He obtained an audience with the king and offered his services, explaining that he was an excellent swordsman. The king told him that the realm was at peace, and there was no need for a knight. Nevertheless, the young man insisted that he be allowed to serve. To put and end to the discussion, the king finally agreed and knighted him on the spot. Several months later, the young knight returned to the castle and requested another audience. When he entered the throne room, he bowed in respect and then reported that he had been very busy. He explained that he had killed thirty of the king’s enemies in the North and forty-five of them in the South. The king looked puzzled for a moment and said, “But I don’t have any enemies.” To which the knight replied, “You do now, Sire.”

Do Muslim terrorists hate America because of their religion or their culture? Is it because they are envious of America’s wealth or that American women wear short skirts? Or is it because they really do hate freedom? No one with knowledge of Islam believes any of those answers. Some commentators have quoted the more militant passages of the Koran as proof that religion is, indeed, the basis of this animosity, but a careful reading reveals that violence is approved only in retaliation. Of course, there are groups within Islam that have a very liberal interpretation of retaliation, but the fact remains that the terrorists are attacking only those countries that have previously conducted military campaigns against their people. Their hatred comes, not from the Koran or the ancient traditions or from envy. It comes from a desire for revenge.

AMERICA BECOMES WORLD POLICEMAN

Ever since the end of World War II, America’s politicians have viewed themselves as global leaders with a responsibility to manage the affairs of the world that outweighs or at least equals any obligation to their own country. For over five decades, the nation’s universities and media have extolled the virtues of internationalism. The old tradition of avoiding foreign entanglements was sneeringly called isolationism. We were conditioned to think that the old way was stupid. The wave of the future was shown to us, and it was a New World Order. Over the years, we watched with approval as our leaders increasingly entangled our once sovereign nation into a world community called the United Nations. Treaty by treaty, we watched and approved as we became increasingly subject to international edicts and played the role of world policeman.

It is in that role that our military began to wage wars against populations far removed from our shores and even further from our national interests. To justify those wars, we were told that we were defending victim groups against their despotic neighbors or ridding the world of drug lords; but, after the smoke of battle cleared, we discovered that there were hidden agendas that were much less noble. More often than not, the real purpose of the war was to control oil fields, ports, mineral resources, or military supply lines – or even to distract voters from thinking about scandals in the White House. If you roam around the globe shooting and bombing people, and aligning yourself politically with others who do the same, you cannot expect your victims to like you very much. Some may even be willing to die for revenge.

A MOMENT OF TRUTH IN MEDIA

On Wednesday evening (September 12), Henry Sigman, reported on Nightline: “The U.S. is seen as a sort of an insensitive hegemony with arrogance that seeks to impose it’s own values on the rest of the world. It is seen as an uncritical supporter of the State of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians, and the combination of the two does not make for U.S. popularity in that part of the world.”

Adding to this theme was Magnas Raisdorff, who also appeared on Nightline while Ted Koppel, the show’s host, was speaking from London. Raisdorff, a reporter in the London branch of CBS, and an expert on terrorism, agreed with Sigman. He said:

Many in the Arab world regard the U.S., not as an honest broker, but as protecting and shielding Israel over very important political as well as religious issues. Among these issues are: Israel’s control over holy Islamic sites, like the Dome of the Rock;[4] the presence of U.S. troops near Islamic religious places such as Mecca and Medina; the sanctions the U.S. has placed on Iraq are mostly depriving children of drugs and food they desperately need; and, most importantly, Israel’s attacks on prominent Palestinian militants are using equipment, like helicopter gun ships, provided by the U.S.

Then Jim Ruden, also in London, came on the program to summarize Raisdorff’s report saying: “And that is why what happened yesterday, happened, not because ‘America is the world’s brightest beacon [of freedom].’”

Since the end of World War II, the United States has launched military strikes against Panama, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Iraq, Kuwait, Sudan, Haiti, Granada, Afghanistan, and Somalia – all in the pursuit of stopping drugs, defending freedom, or resisting Communism. In the great majority of cases, these objectives were not achieved. The only measurable result has been the creation of hostility toward America. That is what I call the OOPS Factor that has been a dominant feature of U.S. foreign policy for over five decades.

Politicians never admit that they have made a mistake – especially a big one. To do so would imply that they are not qualified to lead. No matter what errors they make, they find something or someone to blame. Their standard excuse is that they didn’t have enough money or large enough staff or enough authority. If only we will increase their budget and give them more power, everything will be corrected. Typically, they already have spent too much money, hired too many people, and exercised too much authority, so their proposed solution is more of exactly what created the problem in the first place.

In the case of terrorism, the politicians who create U.S. foreign policy cannot be expected to tell the world they made a mistake. It will be a chilly day in Hades when they announce that they, themselves, have any responsibility for these acts. They will not want the American people contemplating the possibility that Tuesday’s attack might have been related to an interventionist foreign policy. They will try to single out a person and then demonize him so he will become the central focus of anger and retaliation. That person probably will be Osama bin Laden, so, let us see what he has to say about this. (Please remember that these words were written just three days after the attack of September 11; and, at that time, bin Laden had not yet been firmly declared as the responsible party.)

FROM THE MIND OF BIN LADEN

In May of 1998, ABC reporter John Miller interviewed bin Laden at his camp on a mountaintop in Southern Afghanistan. This is what he said:

The Americans impose themselves on everyone. … They accuse our children in Palestine of being terrorists. Those children who have no weapons and have not even reached maturity. At the same time, they defend … with their airplanes and tanks, the state of the Jews that has a policy to destroy the future of these children. … In the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, … houses were demolished over the heads of children. Also, by testimony of relief workers in Iraq, the American-led sanctions resulted in the death of more than one million Iraqi children. … We believe that the biggest thieves in the world and the terrorists are the Americans. The only way for us to fend off these assaults is to use similar means. … So, we tell the Americans as a people, and we tell the mothers of soldiers, and American mothers in general, if they value their lives and those of their children, find a nationalistic government that will look after their interests and … does not attack others, their lands, or their honor.[5]

I am not quoting bin Laden because I think he is a nice guy or that I want to exonerate him in any way. In my view, there is never any excuse for terrorism. I include his words only to emphasize what I stated earlier. He and his followers are not motivated by hatred of freedom or by religious zeal but by a desire for revenge. In the days ahead, as we contemplate how to put an end to terrorism, we had better be clear on that. As long as we follow a foreign policy of interventionism, we will create new enemies faster than we can track down the old ones and we will never be able to erect anti-terrorist measures capable of stopping them all. If we retaliate against populations or geographical areas, we will certainly unite all of Islam in a holy war against us, and we will light the fire of hatred in the hearts of a billion Muslims who will have but one purpose in life: to seek revenge against us.

SAGE ADVICE FROM THE PAST

For the past few days, I have found myself thinking about George Washington. At first, I didn’t know why. Then it dawned on me. Hadn’t Washington warned about all this just before leaving office as first President of the United States? So I dug out a copy of his Farewell Address and, sure enough, there it was. This is what he said:

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. … Antipathy in one nation against another, disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. … So, likewise, the passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, … betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and the wars of the latter. … Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or very remote relation. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the cause of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. ... Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

One cannot read those words of wisdom without sadly realizing how far we have drifted from our nation’s moorings. In retrospect, the so-called isolationism of our forefathers is now looking very good.

NO PLACE TO HIDE

In 1982 I produced a video documentary entitled No Place to Hide; The Strategy and Tactics of Terrorism. Immediately after Tuesday’s attack, I began to get inquiries about the program. Friends who possessed copies ran them on public-access cable. Suddenly, the video, which had remained almost forgotten in the back pages of our catalogue, became a best seller. There is good reason for that. When I did the research for this topic, I discovered that terrorism involves a lot more than just blowing things up and killing people. There is a well-defined strategy behind it that has to do with the anticipated reaction of the target government and its citizens. Terrorists themselves phrase it this way: The action is in the reaction. They know that, after repeated attacks, people will become angry with their leaders for not preventing terrorism. This sets citizens against their own government. They also know that terrorist attacks will cause people to curtail travel, business ventures, and the purchase of luxuries, all of which will depress the economy. In our modern age, many people have come to think that the health of the economy is government’s responsibility. So, any decline in the market, loss of jobs or purchasing power will also be blamed on the government, making it even more unpopular. The most important reaction, however, is that terrorism causes the target government to respond with police state measures against its own citizens.

Carlos Marighella, was a former leader of the Communist Party of Brazil. His book, The Mini-Manual for Urban Guerrillas, has been studied by revolutionaries and terrorists worldwide. It explains that the target government must be deliberately goaded into violating the rights of its citizens. Marighella said:

The government has no alternative but to intensify repression. The police roundups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government is unjust, incapable of solving problems, and resorts purely and simply to the physical liquidation of its opponents. … The urban guerilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without letup to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act.[6]

The same strategy was expressed in 1968 by Italian Communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, in a booklet entitled Political Guerilla Warfare. Feltrinelli said that the task of the terrorist was to “violate the law openly … challenging and outraging institutions and public order in every way. Then, when the state intervenes as a result, with the police and the courts, it will be easy to denounce its harshness and repressive dictatorial tendencies.”[7]

In Germany, Ulrike Meinhof, a member of a terrorist group called the Red Army Fraction, explained it this way. She said: “It is necessary to provoke the latent fascism in society, … and then the people will turn to us for leadership.”[8]

Initially, most citizens will not complain about a repressive government if they are convinced it is necessary for their own safety, but eventually it adds to a growing dissatisfaction with the status quo and sets the stage for a revolution – either a violent one or a political one – in which the target system is stripped of its freedoms with the timid consent of the governed. That is the real goal of international terrorism. Let me to repeat that. The goal of international terrorism is a revolution – either a violent one or a political one – in which the target system is stripped of its freedoms with the timid consent of the governed.

Who would want to do that? Certainly, that is not the goal of those who sacrifice their lives in acts of suicidal revenge. They care nothing about changing the structure of the target society. But those who encourage them, who finance them, who train them, and who psychologically program them by enflaming their passions, are quite different. Who are they?

There are two powerful groups today that would like to see what is left of the free world brought under totalitarian control. For many decades they have alternated between competing and cooperating with each other in their quest for world dominance. Together, they constitute the greatest threat to freedom that the human race has ever faced. Yet, less than 5% of the population even knows that they exist. They have worked very hard to avoid using names for themselves that are commonly recognized. Humans think with words, and if we have no words to identify these groups, then we cannot even think about them – which is very much to their liking. If we are to follow Sun Tzu’s advice, if we are to know the enemy, it is obvious that the first thing we must do is identify him.

In the following three chapters, I will identify the names of these groups. From their own records, I will show their ideologies, their goals, and their tactics. By the end of Chapter Four, you will know the enemy.

PERPETUAL WAR

In the meantime, we are told that we are fighting terrorism. But terrorism is not the enemy. It is a strategy of the enemy. That is like saying the enemy is hand-to-hand combat or air raids or missile attacks or espionage. Since terrorism is not the enemy, a war on terrorism cannot be won. It is doomed to drag on forever – just like the war on drugs and the war against crime. It might as well be a war against sin.

Shortly after World War II, George Orwell wrote his classic novel entitled, 1984. It was a satirical prediction of what the world might be like far in the future. Orwell envisioned that, if governments continued to expand their power as they were then doing, eventually, they would evolve into a global police state. He described the methods that would be used to keep the masses from rebelling. Thought control was the primary method, but one of the ways they accomplished that was to be constantly at war. In time of war, the populace will accept any hardship and make any sacrifice to defend the homeland. However, to have war, it was necessary to have an enemy, and that enemy had to be despicable in the eyes of the homeland defenders. Atrocities had to be committed and many lives had to be lost. But it was equally important to avoid winning the war – otherwise, the hardships imposed by the state would no longer seem reasonable to its subjects.

The world was divided into three geographical areas called Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, and the rulers of these regions agreed to war against each other but never to seek outright victory. The object was perpetual war. Orwell described it this way:

In one combination or another, these three superstates are permanently at war and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century. … This is not to say that either the conduct of the war, or the prevailing attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries. … But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at. … In the centers of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may cause a few scores of deaths. … It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. …War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair … waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.[9]

When we look at the facts surrounding the war on terrorism – particularly the impossibility of victory – we cannot miss the striking parallels to Orwell’s satire. His only error, it seems, was choosing the wrong year for the title of his book.

THIRTEEN PREDICTIONS

It is always dangerous to make predictions – especially if they are put into print. If they prove to be wrong, they can haunt you for the rest of your life. Nevertheless, here are thirteen predictions that I fervently hope will be wrong. Unfortunately, I have no doubt that most if not all of them will come to pass.

1. The first prediction is that we will not be given genuine options regarding the war on terrorism. We will have only two choices, both of which are disastrous. It will be similar to the Vietnam War in which Americans were expected to be either hawks or doves. Either they supported the no-win war or they opposed it. They were not given the option of victory. Their choice was between pulling out of the war and turning the country over to the Vietcong quickly or doggedly staying in the war and turning the country over to the Vietcong slowly – which is the way it turned out. Likewise, in the war on terrorism, we will be asked simply to choose sides. Either we are for freedom or for terrorism. The wisdom of U.S. interventionism will not be allowed as a topic for public debate.

2. Most American political leaders are now committed to world government, so the second prediction is that they will crow about how America will not tolerate terrorism, but they will not act as Americans. Instead, they will act as internationalists. They will turn to the UN to lead a global war against terrorism. They will seek to expand the capacity of NATO. and UN military forces. Although American troops will provide the backbone of military action, they will operate under UN authority.

3. The third prediction is that the drive for national disarmament will be intensified. This will not lead to the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, but merely to the transfer of those weapons to UN control. It will be popularized as a means of getting nuclear and bio-chemical weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The internationalists promoting this move will not seem to care that many of the world’s most notorious terrorists now hold seats of power at the UN and that the worst of them will actually control these weapons. This will be documented in Chapters Five and Six.

4. The fourth prediction is that, if any terrorists are captured, they will be brought before the UN World Court and tried as international criminals. This will create popular support for the Court and will go a long way toward legitimizing it as the ultimate high tribunal. The public will not realize the fateful precedent that is being established – a precedent that will eventually be used to justify bringing citizens of any country to trial based on charges made by their adversaries in other countries. Anyone who seriously opposes the New World Order could then be transported to The Hague in the Netherlands and face charges of polluting the planet or committing hate crimes or participating in social genocide or supporting terrorism.

5. The fifth prediction is that the FBI will be heavily criticized for failing to detect an attack as extensive and well coordinated as this. In reply, we will be told that the FBI was hampered by lack of funding, low manpower, and too little authority. Naturally, that will be followed by an increase in funding, additional manpower, and greatly expanded authority.

6. The sixth prediction is that, eventually, it will be discovered that the FBI and other intelligence agencies had prior warning and, possibly, specific knowledge of Tuesday’s attack; yet they did nothing to prevent it or to warn the victims. This will be a repeat of what happened at the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City six years previously. Why they failed to do so is the topic of Chapter Four.

7. The seventh prediction is that much of the war on terrorism will be waged against Americans inside their own country. New laws, international treaties, and executive orders will severely restrict travel, speech, privacy, and the possession of firearms. Americans have consistently