Quote:
Originally Posted by doncalypso
The way I see it, terrorism can happen anywhere and isn't limited to Islamic fundamentalist as the US media would like to portray it. For cryin' out loud, Timothy McVeigh was a home-grown All-American terrorist but yet nobody mentions his name when they talk about terrorism.
As far as I'm concerned, the Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, and any other militias in the US that are gearing up for an "inevitable war" against the federal government and the United Nations are terrorist groups but yet nothing is being done about them. Honestly, as long as Americans see terrorism as an outside threat it'll still be a problem. If terrorism is to stop then every nation on this planet should start doing some cleaning in their own proverbial backyards and stop the domestic terrorist groups before trying to go abroad and stop terrorists in other countries.
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Really? And as soon as it stops being an outside threat, that's how it will be treated.
Home-grown groups are pretty much ineffectual due to investigative infiltration. Do a search on it. You'll find enough articles to make you grin.
The primary domestic threats are twos and threes of freaking whackos who think they have the solution.
At this time, the threat is the one noted in the article:
Muslims' painful truth The main perpetrators of terrorism are Muslims, says leading Arab writer
CAIRO
IMAGES of dead, wounded and traumatised Russian children being carried from the scene of a school siege horrified Middle-Eastern Muslims, prompting forthright self-criticism yesterday.
Images of terrified kids hurt during the crisis have sparked a flood of outrage at the terrorists' inhumanity, not least from the Muslim world. -- AFP
It also sparked fresh concerns about an international backlash against Islam and its followers.
Arab leaders, Muslim clerics and parents across the Middle East denounced the school siege that left more than 320 people dead, many of them children, as unjustifiable.
Some warned that such actions damage Islam's image more than all its enemies could hope for. Even some supporters of Islamic militancy condemned it, though at least one insisted Muslims were not behind it.
'Holy warriors' from the Middle East have long supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed when commandos stormed the Beslan school in southern Russia on Friday to end a siege that began on Wednesday by rebels demanding Chechen independence.
Middle East security officials, speaking on condition of anony- mity, said it was too early to know the nationalities of the Arabs among the dead militants. However, a prominent Arab journalist wrote that Muslims must acknowledge the painful fact that Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism.
'Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,' Mr Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.
It ran under the headline, The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!
Mr Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups - in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of Al-Qaeda terror network.
'Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,' he wrote.
Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless 'we admit the scandalous facts', rather than offer condemnations or justifications.
'The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us,' he said.
Arab TV stations repeatedly aired footage of terrified young survivors being carried from the school siege scene, while pictures of dead and wounded children ran on the front pages of Saturday's Arab newspapers.
Mr Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper Al-Ahram that the images 'showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families'.
'If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it... they wouldn't have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations and misunderstanding of the nature of this age,' Mr Bahgat wrote.
Other Islamists were more cautious in their criticism.
Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said the siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war, but took care not to characterise it as terrorism.
'What happened...is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings,' he said. 'Real jihad should target occupiers of our lands only like the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance.'
Mr Ali Abdullah, an Islamic scholar in Bahrain who follows the ultra-conservative Salafi stream of Islam, condemned the school attack as 'un-Islamic' but insisted Muslims were not behind it.
'I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya,' said Mr Abdullah, reviving an old conspiracy theory altered to fit any situation.
Salafism and its similarly conservative kin, Wahhabism, which is widely observed in Saudi Arabia, are accused by critics of fostering extremism.
Some contributors to Islamic websites known for their extremist content praised the separatists and predicted that the Islamic fighters across Egypt would avenge the killings of Muslims elsewhere.
Heads of state from around the region condemned the attack. It struck a chord with parents, including Jordan's King Abdullah II, who denounced it on state-run television.
'As a father, I can tell you that all the fathers and mothers in Jordan pray humbly to God to stand by their counterparts in Russia in their grief,' said the king, whose wife is expecting their fourth child.
Mr Mohammed Saleh Ebrahim, a 31-year-old Bahraini, described the hostage-takers as 'worse than animals'.
'It's because of these people Muslims and Arabs are getting a bad name around the world,' he said. -- AP
'If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it...they wouldn't have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations and misunderstanding of the nature of this age.'
- MR AHMED BAHGAT, an Egyptian Islamist
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/new...271049,00.html