The unrest reflects growing disquiet at the authoritarianism of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Riot police clashed with tens of thousands of May Day protesters in Istanbul this month. There have also been protests against the government’s stance on the conflict in neighboring, a tightening of restrictions on alcohol sales and warnings against public displays of affection.
The battle is also important politically and psychologically. For the regime, al-Qusayr offers a chance to display its strength to allies and enemies alike. A victory would boost its resilience and affirm the commitment of its supporters.
Given the brutal dictatorship on one side and Islamofascist zeal on the other, I can’t assign Jeffrey White’s fine military analysis any emotional valence. With more than 92,000 dead in Syria and 3.5 million homeless, one may only hope the civil war resolves; however, I suspect even if Assad defeats rebel forces at al-Qusayr, that won’t happen.
Less involved Syrians — noncombatants, innocents, old men, women, and children, etc. — will never forgive the Assads for bombing the living daylights out of their business and residential digs and for heightening their suffering in ways far beyond and far different from what may have been required to suppress a revolution.
Not that I’m cheering rebels who may have indulged in some share of atrocity, battlefield obscenity — that’s about where I would put cutting out a man’s heart and biting it — and massacre. Add: firing line execution to that shame. At least with that, the troops who have taken no prisoners may not expect to be merely captured themselves should the fortunes of war turn against them.
I’ve gone to the trouble to look this up, so I’m going to share it with you:
“After U.S.-backed mujahideen forced Soviet troops to end their almost decade-long occupation in 1989, Washington turned its back on Afghanistan as it collapsed into a ferocious civil war. Five years later, as local legend has it, members of a warlord’s militia kidnapped and gang-raped two teenaged girls at a checkpoint in his home village of Singesar, in the dust-blown badlands an hour’s drive from the southern city of Kandahar. It was a common crime, one that normally would have faded into the brutal monotony of violence that was strangling Afghanistan in 1994. but this time the atrocity changed the destiny not only of a country, but the world.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, an obscure country cleric and mujahideen veteran who lost an eye to shrapnel during the war against the Soviets, decided he had had enough. He mustered a small group of fighters, attacked the checkpoint, and then hanged the militia commander from a tank barrel. He then fled across the Pakistan border to the province of Baluchistan, where with the help of military intelligence, he recruited fighters fired up for a new jihad by the puritanical Wahabi theology exported from Saudi Arabia and taught in hundreds of Pakistan’s madrassas, or Koranic schools.”
Does that legend not fit with the assortment of bits and pieces everyone here knows?
While it would seem perfectly rational of me to have become computer literate — I was probably the last graduate student to run an 80-column card set through the Univac at the University of Maryland — to keep up with computers, to acquire broadband, to leave the virtual shore by exploring foreign news on English-language web sites (first stop: Somalia; second: Pakistan), to become involved with blogging (first), and to open a Facebook account (second), there is nothing rational about my sharing the curiosity of 2007 and a book purchased then with virtual friends on a growing forum in Islamabad.
For years I have remembered the story but not whether it was written by Paul Watson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photojournalist, or Dexter Filkins, who most certainly ranks among the best war journalists ever.
What I wonder about today is not what motivated Mullah Omar, of course, of what the movement has led to in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the world itself, but rather what possessed the warlord and his crowd to rape two village girls: from whence came that evil?
The “heavy half” of readers seem most often to want to get their eyes on the latest first edition, but I cannot too highly recommend revisiting Paul Watson’s 2007 reflection and remembrance of the wars he had covered to that time — and God has blessed him: he is still out in the field.
The daughter of an American woman killed in a firefight in Syria today denied that her mother was a “terrorist” and was a “regular american woman who was misguided.”
The body of Nicole Lynn Mansfield, a Muslim convert from Flint, Mich., was recovered this week following fighting near the rebellious Syrian city of Idlib. The Syrian government labeled her a terrorist.
Young American men continue to slip through a terrorist recruiting pipeline from the homeland to join the ranks of jihadists half a world away in East Africa, with two going as recently as three months ago, according to federal officials.
What’s a nice mom from Flint doing in a firefight in Syria?
Well, it ain’t no sucker punch: the recruitment of Americans into Islamist fighting organizations hit the news big time in 2009 when the bodies of boys from St. Paul, Minnesota showed up in Somalia and associated with the fighting there.
“One day after Masri’s arrest, the FBI charged 14 naturalized U.S. citizens from Minnesota, California and Alabama with providing material support to al-Shabab, a group the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist organization.”
OVER A COFFEE : Holocaust of common sense — Dr Haider Shah
In the face of overwhelming archival evidence, when one denies the occurrence of communal violence, it can be an early warning sign of more sinister things to come
Of late, in the backdrop of the blasphemous movie outrage, there has been a rising chorus of equating Holocaust denial with blasphemy-related offences. Mimicking some honourable media juggernauts, our young e-jihadis have also been citing it profusely over social networking sites. The Holocaust-related discourse, however, took a very serious turn when even our worthy prime minister used the catchphrase of ‘Holocaust denial’ while announcing a national day for rioting, pillaging and killing with impunity. Ignoring the historical context of laws and usages is a dangerous pursuit and must be corrected to purge our discourse of overheated utterances. With this in mind, let us examine why Holocaust denial is a sensitive…
Iran has also helped the Assad regime crack down on social media. In February 2011, Syria allowed access to social media websites such as Facebook and YouTube for the first time since 2007. At the time, some viewed this as a positive attempt at reform in order to allow freedom of expression. By May there was a 105 percent increase in the number of Facebook users in Syria, but it also became clear that the regime was using social media to track dissidents.16 US officials reported that in
addition to providing weapons, riot gear, and training, Iran was also supplying sophisticated surveillance equipment to the Syrian government. The Syrian regime used it to track down leaders of the protest movements and arrest them.
What one may see on the web of Syria’s civil war may belie what either the Assad regime or the collection of rebel forces, group by group, have kept hidden even though the standards for propriety as regards online publishing could not be lower.
While Matthew Levitt’s report reaches back to the 2003 arrest in Iran and subsequent torture of journalist Zahra Kazem to provide its most graphic description of the kind of pain meted out by way of the regime’s paranoid fantasia, it may leave to YouTube and the future to describe what horrors behind the curtains became the lot of captured Syrian dissidents in recent times.
“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby expand the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13338 of May 11, 2004, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13399 of April 25, 2006, and in Executive Order 13460 of February 13, 2008, finding that the Government of Syria’s human rights abuses, including those related to the repression of the people of Syria, manifested most recently by the use of violence and torture against, and arbitrary arrests and detentions of, peaceful protesters by police, security forces, and other entities that have engaged in human rights abuses, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and I hereby order . . . .”
The “Government of Syria” described in executive orders between 2004 and 2011 is the same as that supported by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
It would appear the ghosts of the Cold War continue to haunt the politics in the Middle East.
Carol M. Highsmith’s photograph shows not only those towers but a sense of the site’s proximity to the Beltway, which is about 1,000-ft. The mosque complex under construction today will be about twice that distance (judging from the Google map).
About that visual impression off what is called the “outer loop of the beltway”, we shall see, literally.
* * *
Here is my question at the moment: how do Americans who are not Muslim feel about Islam today?
* * *
While the news gets around the terrorism-inspired “anti-Jihad” and “Islamophobe” communities, it also provides a moment for very loose social science measurement.
“It will be a place that will help counter an epidemic of “Islamophobia” in the United States, according to Turkish government officials who recently visited the construction site. The delegation was led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose goals include increasing Islamist influence in America.”
“The leaders of two U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entities in attendance included Naeem Baig, is the president of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo lists ICNA as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The memo says its “work in America is “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” The memo even refers to meetings with ICNA where there was talk about a merger.”
From YouTube poster “Joseph Rudyard Kipling” whose attitude (with what sounds like the music from Platoon) needs no interpretation of the fine points:
“This monument will be a symbol of our understanding of culture and civilization,” Erdogan said.
The center will be a good way to show how wrong Islamophobia is by giving messages of Islam’s brotherhood and tolerance, Erdogan noted.
With the completion of the center, the state of Maryland will have a different richness, Erdogan said.
“With its multi functional character, the center would be a source of pride for the Turkish nation,” Erdogan indicated.
The Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center would be an expression of co-existence based on love and tolerance, Erdogan also said.
On the other hand, a blog titled “Stop Turkey” has a page devoted to remarks made by the state sponsor of the Turkish Culture and Civilization Center, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — “Favourite Erdogan Quotes” — and those are not so friendly.
Ramp it up, as may The Thinking Mom — “Imagine a $100 million facility devoted to Nazi-ism on American soil with the complicity of the American government. The Turkish American Culture and Civilization Center is every bit as dangerous as that” — or wind it down as so many of decent and good conscience — and without reference to race, creed, color, or religion — may try, that mosque is under construction in my backyard.
If it were a synagogue of similar scale with some houses planted around it, no one would bat an eyelash.
* * *
“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture – [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”
I repeatedly drag in Quran 9:29 for its being unambiguous and sticky, at least, and may be representative of the conversation that it will take great courage to have as regards the goodness and validity of an Islamic civilization clinging to the above and other off-putting and seemingly explicit instructions.
Here’s David Wood marching up to and through the talking points in relation to the recent beheading in Woolwich, UK:
When are we going to have this conversation?
My Muslim friends all over the world may approach this line in a different way, all of them well noting the persecuting character of the Taliban, Al-Nusra (an Al-Qaeda group in Syria today) and others around the fringes of their own lives and, tragically, sometimes in close and direct.
In the more central areas of the Islamic Small Wars, events like the “Boston Marathon Bombing” — an insult to all civilized hearts globally — hit the newspapers on a daily to weekly basis, and the same are similarly repudiated en masse, and yet . . . the text remains embraced, even if passively.
“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
Ali preferred the term “subdued” to merely “humbled”.
May one of the “People of the Book” or other “kafir” ask why not “conquered”, “enslaved”, or “subjugated”?
May an insider, a believer, ask, “Why attack the autonomy and dignity of another on the basis of faith at all?”
* * *
Maryland has a reputation as a deeply liberal and moderate state, one in which Catholics and Protestants learned to get along right quick, and so I have no doubt the citizenry will welcome the new mosque and regard it as a good sign of the power of development and investment in keeping life around the Capitol Beltway ever affluent, hopeful, and pleasant.
In the face of overwhelming archival evidence, when one denies the occurrence of communal violence, it can be an early warning sign of more sinister things to come
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