Other recent examples of sweeping generalizations, and stereotypical language in regards to Islam.
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***NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL FEB 19th
A SPREADING ISLAMIC FIRE***
Islamic extremists hate America and have designs for world conquest. But
the threat is more diffuse than it might seem. The many sides of a movement
—By Christopher Dickey and Carla Power,
IS THE ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALIST threat a kind of clash of civilizations—a permanent struggle that feeds on deep-seated resistance to Western values? So it might seem, at first. Osama bin Laden, who clearly knows what resonates with his legions, likes to cast his struggle in such stark terms. He has claimed that it is “an individual duty” for Muslims to kill Americans, civilian and military, wherever they are found. Counterterrorism officials say bin Laden’s grand plan is to drive the United States out of the Muslim world entirely, then replace moderate governments with fundamentalist Islamic states. And ultimately? Well, one bin Laden-inspired cell in Chechnya has posted a global map of Islamist power on the Internet—and it projects a world that in 100 years will be entirely Muslim green (the religion’s traditional symbolic color).
This is obviously a fanciful ambition. Bin Laden operates more like a venture capitalist than the head of a conquering army. Think of him as the chairman of Jihad Inc., together with its subsidiary, Jihad.com. The question is how powerful this multinational force has become. In the occupied West Bank, in devastated Chechnya and embattled Kashmir, in parts of Indonesia and the Philippines, even in areas where Muslims make up large majorities, Islamist extremists are on the move and in contact with each other, however tenuously. They are increasingly linked together by the Internet—the flip side of the all-too-rosy American view that the Web is quickening Western-style globalization. For many Islamic extremists, their main obstacle is the lone superpower: America the Evil Empire. “The Muslims have global thoughts just as much as Americans,” says Maj. Ehsan ul-Haq, an ex-officer of the Pakistani Army who trained with U.S. Green Berets, and who is now a commander in the Muslim jihad in Kashmir. “There’s the American New World Order, and this world order,” he says, putting his hand on the Qur’an. “The whole of the globe belongs to Allah, and the whole of [Allah’s] law has to be executed on the globe.”
THEY ARE EXPLOITING ISLAM’
Yet the Islamists’ goals are often diverse. And what may look to the West like an uprising of the entire Islamic world is, in fact, still disowned by the vast majority of Muslims around the globe. “We don’t believe in these people,” says Tahira Shamsher, a fervently devout Muslim housewife from Lahore, Pakistan. “They are exploiting Islam, these groups.” When Islamist firebrands call for Holy War, or jihad, it’s in the language of victims fighting for justice against repressive governments, against despised Hindus or Christians, Jews or Muslims from other sects. Washington is often portrayed only as a shadowy bugaboo behind it all, one that is interested in maintaining the status quo they despise. There is even some evidence that antiglobalization sentiment, the kind that has set off protests from Seattle to Zurich, is feeding Islamic fervor—especially in Southeast Asia, where several economies are still in recession. To poor, uneducated Muslims, radical Islamic groups can seem to be the only ones fighting for their interests.
Certainly the spread of jihad today is nothing like the Islamic revolution that Iran tried to launch throughout the Middle East in the 1980s. A second surge of fundamentalist violence came in the 1990s, when Arab veterans of the Afghan war went home to Egypt and Algeria vowing to turn them into Islamic states. Tens of thousands of people died. But the insurrections failed. All of which helps explain why bin Laden is today hiding out with almost no place to run. Bin Laden, who helped train and fund many of those Islamic revolutionaries, was cornered in Afghanistan when he began his most vehement diatribes against the United States in 1996. Having failed to back winners in clashes with Arab governments, he started talking about the clash of civilizations. Yet when agents allegedly linked to bin Laden bombed the U.S. embassies in Africa, the carnage appalled even other Islamic fundamentalists.
In the last few years coordination among Muslim militant and terrorist groups, to the extent that it exists, appears more a matter of loose, casual networking than of tightly linked networks. Radicals have stepped up their activities among the Uighurs of China, in the Moluccas of Indonesia and on Mindanao in the Philippines. Juma Namangani’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is cutting a wide swath through some of the exhausted Central Asian republics. Some members of these groups may have met in the camps of Afghanistan; even taken money and counsel from bin Laden. But they are trading on old grievances, with their own local agendas. If there were no overarching issue to pull them together, the threat of global jihad might continue to slowly fade, as French academic Gilles Kepel predicted last year. But as long as Pax Americana continues—and that is likely to be a long time—they may all be united in their resistance to it. They see American power everywhere—in their politics, economics, culture and daily lives—and they resent it deeply.
GROWING INFLUENCE
While the extremists probably do not speak for the majority of Muslims, the field is tilting in their direction. Even Saddam Hussein is steadily exploiting the Palestinian unrest to break down sanctions against his regime. Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Party of God responsible for blowing up the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, was hailed by the whole Arab world for driving Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon last summer. The Hizbullah satellite television station is one of the most popular in the region. More ominously, many moderates also applaud the suicide attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden’s harbor last October. The operation, which killed 17 American sailors, suggests a new level of technical sophistication among the terrorists. The attack came during the first weeks of the Palestinian uprising, at a moment when outrage over the deaths of young Arabs was intense. Hutheifa Azzam, a Jordanian merchant who once fought with the mujahedin in Afghan war and has known bin Laden for almost 20 years, says “the timing chosen for the Cole was excellent. Public opinion was all with this.” Condemnations by the Arab press and Arab governments were muted. “If Osama is responsible for the Cole, then we can say he changed his way and will go only for military targets,” said Azzam. “Now people who prayed against him after Nairobi and Dar, they are saying, ‘We pray for him’.” Bin Laden may be acquiring his most deadly weapon yet—broad popular support.
*With Melinda Liu in Indonesia, Brook Larmer in Hong Kong, Martha Brant in Washington and Christian Caryl in Moscow
© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.*
**In the Realm of the Angels
* A holy warrior’s own story***
Feb. 19 issue — Maj. Ehsan Ul-Haq would be outraged if anyone called him a terrorist. For 10 days every month, the former Pakistan Army officer runs a garment factory in Lahore, a business profitable enough to keep him and his family in luxury.
ON THE OTHER 20 DAYS, he commands a camp for fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas on his country’s side of the line that divides the contested state of Kashmir between Pakistan and India. The Indians call Ehsan and his militiamen terrorists, but the 50-year-old ex-officer says he is on a jihad, a crusade to protect Muslims from their Indian oppressors. He is waging a holy war, fighting for Allah under Allah’s rules.
Ehsan came to the jihad in a roundabout way. He served in Pakistan’s Army for 20 years, training with the elite Special Services Group along with Pervez Musharraf, now a general and Pakistan’s ruler. (“He is a very brilliant strategist and very determined,” Ehsan says of his former colleague. “But he is a secularist, so he is weak.”) In the mid-1960s, Ehsan was trained by American Green Berets in Pakistan. “They taught us to plan and execute maneuvers, given whatever resources we have,” he says. “But they only believe in three dimensions: whatever we can see, we believe. When you are fighting for Allah, you believe in the unseen.”
In 1986, Ehsan volunteered for service in Afghanistan. There he fought the Soviet invaders alongside the Islamic mujahedin—a cause encouraged and aided by the United States. Now, to Ehsan and his supporters, the struggle against Indian control of predominantly Muslim Kashmir is more of the same. “What is the difference between the jihad in Afghanistan and the jihad in Kashmir?” asks Hafiz Saeed, head of the Lashkar-i-Taiba, one of the largest groups fighting in Kashmir. “That was for freedom, and this is for freedom.” Ejaz Haidar, a Pakistani journalist who is no friend of the guerrillas, asks: “If America can use jihadis for their own cold-war purposes in Afghanistan, then what’s wrong with an Islamic state using them for its own purposes in Kashmir?”
Ehsan’s conversion to the jihad came when he led 125 of his men through a minefield to attack a position held by about 1,000 Afghan allies of the Russians. Miraculously, as he sees it, only one of his men was lost to the mines. He says that fighter was instantly shahid , a martyr headed for Paradise. “When a shahid dies, the body smells very sweet,” says Ehsan. “And insects don’t eat the body, as they normally do in death.” Attacking the position on the other side of the minefield, Ehsan’s men put the enemy to rout—aided, he claims, by angels in white gowns riding on horseback in the air. In both Afghanistan and Kashmir, he insists, “I have seen corpses where the heads were chopped off—not by man, but by angels.”
For devout Muslims like Ehsan, random violence is not a proper jihad. Allah’s rules are clear: no women, children or old people are to be killed. Prisoners are to be treated with respect and invited to embrace Islam. Standing crops are to be left intact. Trees may not be cut down. (Ehsan even drinks his tea in the manner prescribed by the Qur’an: in three slow sips, not blowing on the tea, but waiting for it to cool naturally.) “It’s not that the Pakistan Army says we have to fight,” he explains. “It’s that Allah says we have to fight when people are oppressed, and so we do.” The fight, he adds, could take place anywhere in the world where Islam is threatened.
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© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.*
[This message has been edited by Girl from Quraysh (edited February 21, 2001).]