Charge_7 said:
Back that statement up with concrete figures. Saying it doesn't make it so. Also terrorist is a very broad catagory. There are many ways of interpreting the word. KKK people are terrorists for example. Plenty of those. The splinter groups of the IRA are terrorists. Quite enough of those. I could go on and on, but I suspect those of you who think otherwise will do that yourselves so. I'll bow out of this "discusion" if that's what you want to call it. It's just too much intolerance to me.
Well,
http://www.asharqalawsat.com/view/ said that. Influential Saudi newspaper.
Friday, September 10, 2004
All the Terrorists Are Muslims
"The Painful Truth Is That All the Terrorists Are Muslims"
By Abd-al-Rahman al-Rashid, former Chief Editor
Asharq Al-Awsat
Saturday, September 4, 2004
(Translated by the FBIS)
Certainly, not all Muslims are terrorists but we say with deep regret that the majority of the world's terrorists are Muslims. The kidnappers of the school children in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese cooks and workers are also Muslims. Those who are raping and killing in Darfur are Muslims and their victims are Muslims too. Those who bombed the civilian compounds in Riyadh and Al-Khubar were Muslims. Those who kidnapped the French journalists are Muslims. The two women who blew up two planes before one week were also Muslims.
Bin Ladin and Al-Huthi are Muslims. Most of those who carried out suicidal operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings all over the world during the past 10 years were Muslims too.
What a bad record! Does it not tell us something about our society, our culture, and us?
These images are harsh, shameful, and humiliating for us when we collect them and put them in one album. But instead of denying and justifying them, we have to admit first of all that they are true and not embellish articles and make speeches claiming we are innocent. It will become easier for us to treat ourselves once we have acknowledged this disease. Self-treatment starts with the acknowledgment and then we have to chase our terrorist sons because they are the natural outcome of a malformed culture. Listen to what the television shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi had said. He issued a fatwa (religious legal ruling) sanctioning the killing of American civilians in Iraq. Imagine a cleric urging the killing of civilians, a decrepit shaykh inciting young children to kill civilians when he has two daughters studying in the infidel United Kingdom under British protection. How can a father like him face the mother of Berg whose son was slaughtered because he came to Iraq to work on engineering projects? How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and tolerance and then turns it into a religion of blood? Before this era of extremists, we considered the leftists and pan-Arabists the source of corruption because of their adoption of the principle of violence and the easy way with which they killed. The mosque was the safe haven and the clerics were the advocates of peace and their sermons revolved around good morals.
Islam is wronged because of the neo-Muslims. It is clear in its texts that bans the cutting of trees to cause damage, calls killing the worst of all crimes, condemns the one who treads even on an insect, and rewards the one who quenches the thirst of a cat. This is the Islam that we knew before the repudiationist groups and their tools appeared, groups, curricula and teachers infested with the ideas of the political groups that corrupted their religion and minds.
We are certainly not honored to be related to those who hold up students in a school, those who kidnap journalists, those who kill civilians, those who bomb buses whatever pains the avengers are suffering from. These are the ones who have distorted and harmed Islam.
We cannot clear our reputation until after we admit the clear and glaring fact which says that Muslims have carried out most of the terrorist actions in the world today. We must understand that we cannot reform our youths who are carrying out these atrocious crimes until we have treated the minds of our shaykhs who have turned into revolutionaries at the pulpits and are sending the sons of other people to wars while sending their children to European and American schools.
(Description of Source: London Al-Sharq al-Awsat in Arabic -- Influential Saudi-owned London daily providing independent coverage of Arab and international issues; editorials reflect official Saudi views on foreign policy)