Posted on 10/17/2001 3:02:17 AM PDT by sarcasm
Douab, Afghanistan -- A cherub-faced foot soldier for Osama bin Laden and radical Islam, Obaidur Rahman paused to consider whether more than 6,000 people deserved to die when hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside last month.
"There were no innocent people in those skyscrapers," said Rahman, with chilling earnestness.
The hijackers who carried out last month's catastrophic attacks are dead. Their accomplices are under arrest or on the run. Yet here, in a remote prison in rebel-controlled northern Afghanistan, Rahman and other inmates provided clues to their thinking.
For these Islamic militants, the guilt or innocence of Americans and hundreds of other foreigners killed in the attack is no issue.
In a world they view as a battleground between believers and infidels, there are no shades of complicity, only good versus evil. The Sept. 11 assault on the United States was a victory in a war, and an occasion only for rejoicing.
"When I heard the news, I was happy. I thought, Muslims are becoming strong," Rahman said, fingering a string of brown prayer beads, his legs shackled in thick iron manacles.
And if his fellow Muslim extremists are responsible for mailing anthrax-treated letters to U.S. journalists and lawmakers? "All the better," he said.
If Rahman, 22, shows little ability to parse guilt and innocence, it is because the world as he knows it has been sharply divided into believers and non-believers ever since he can remember.
Born in Yemen, on the Arabian peninsula, to parents who were farmers, Rahman attended an Islamic religious school. There, he was imbued with the fiery teachings of Abdul Majid Zandani, the head of Yemen's Iman University who advocates a return to an austere, early brand of Islam. Rahman and other students were urged to wage war against infidels for the survival of their faith.
First, however, they had to go to Afghanistan for military training.
Few exhortations were needed. While most non-Muslims know little, if anything, about Afghanistan, Rahman and many other Muslim youth viewed it as a shining symbol of empowerment.
In the 1980s, up to 25,000 Arab and Muslim young men had answered the call to converge on Afghanistan and help expel the occupying Soviet Red Army. With the aid of Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia, they succeeded brilliantly.
Ten years later, Afghanistan beckoned another generation of Muslim youth -- this time not to fight Soviet soldiers but to help establish "pure" Islamic states worldwide.
"There was no question of becoming a farmer like my father. My decision was to fight pagans," Rahman said.
With the financial help of local businessmen, Rahman says, he traveled first to Karachi, Pakistan, then to a military training camp operated by bin Laden's al-Qaida network near the Afghan city of Khost. After he learned to shoot a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, he was deployed alongside his religious kinsmen, the ruling Taliban militia, to fight the opposition Northern Alliance.
After only three months, he was captured. He was just 17 years old.
Five years later, Rahman's contempt for the United States is unabated, his scorn rooted in what he says are America's evil policies toward the Islamic world -- its persecution of Iraq, its support of Israelis over Palestinians and the presence of 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the site of the Prophet Mohammed's birth and death.
The ambition that burns inside remains unquenched: to wage holy war against infidels, free Islamic countries from the grip of U.S. influence and help fundamentalist Muslims from the Philippines to Chechnya establish true Islamic governments. The source of his inspiration is simple, he said: "The Prophet Mohammed and the Koran tell us to wage jihad against pagan peoples."
Rahman believes ordinary Americans are guilty because they are accomplices of anti-Muslim policies carried out in their name. But not all of his fellow prisoners believe the calculus is quite that straightforward.
Mistakes have been made, said Salhuddin Khalid, a 27-year-old Pakistani who also fought on the side of the Taliban until he was taken captive by Northern Alliance forces five years ago.
The deaths of at least 229 Kenyans and Tanzanians in car-bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 were an "accident," the bespectacled Khalid said. Twelve Americans were killed in the blasts, which U.S. officials say were masterminded by bin Laden.
As for last month's attacks, Khalid said the complicity of the victims in anti-Islamic policies was insignificant compared to the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military.
Still, he insisted, the deaths of Americans in the Twin Towers and on hijacked planes were merely the moral equivalent of a landmark event in another war. "Lots of innocent people were killed by the atomic bomb that America dropped on Hiroshima," he said.
In the deadly serious world of Rahman and Khalid, the end justifies the means. Both said they would once again join the holy war if they are ever released.
At that time, they said, no exceptions would be made for unsympathetic Muslims, let alone acquaintances who fall on the wrong side of their rigid view of life and pious mission.
That was evident as Rahman's visitor prepared to leave the prison and asked him a final question, this one hypothetical.
If he were piloting a hijacked civilian airliner bound for an attack on the World Trade Center and were told that his visitor, an American, were working on the 82nd floor of the skyscraper, would he still crash the airplane into the building?
"Yes, of course."
"Nothing personal, right?"
"Right."
My Jewish people can call themselves "chosen". And then what do we do? We don't recruit, convert by force or proselytize.
But Islam tells you right to your face how "chosen" (they don't use this word of course!) they feel Islam is. How superior Islam is. How they submit to Allah and how you in turn will submit to them .......fancying themselves as mini Allah's. How you must convert or eventually be destroyed. Islam is involved in about 10 different wars at the moment and the Jews just one. One they don't even want....While Islam actively seeks war for it's always higher birthrate populations.
Moslems Slam FDNY Chaplain Choice
After years of pressure from the Muslim community, the fire department finally appointed a Muslim chaplain.
But now, the department's selection is being rejected by Muslim groups.
They sued to get a Muslim chaplain.
But now that the New York City Fire Department has relented, Muslim firefighters are criticizing the FDNY's choice for the job.
"This is retaliatory," said Kevin James of the FDNY Islamic Society. "It's vindictive, and we're not going to tolerate it."
James, a firefighter and a Muslim, started the department's Islamic organization in 1997. One of the goals of the Islamic Society of Fire Department Personnel was to have a Muslim chaplain.
It took years of pressure and a lawsuit, but the city finally appointed one - Imam Abd'Allah Adesanya, who started Monday.
But James says his organization had recommended another - Imam Muhammed Abdulmalik, who was also endorsed by the Islamic Leadership Council of New York.
"This is an issue of the fire department and the way that their actions have caused a holy mess by pitting one chaplain against another chaplain vying for this position," said James. "They didn't acknowledge us in this process."
The Islamic group alleges that the fire department traditionally approves the chaplain recommendations of the New York Archdiocese and the Board of Rabbis.
Said Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid of the New York Islamic Leadership Council: "The fire commissioner has chosen to disrespect the organized Muslim leadership of this great city by implementing a different selection process for the Muslim chaplain than those of other faiths."
The Islamic Society sued last year, claiming the FDNY fails to provide the same accommodations - like a prayer room - to Muslims as they do for other religious groups.
While the suit prompted some changes, the group said it now plans to take more legal action.
"We're also going to allege a retaliation claim," said Robert Perry, a lawyer for the FDNY Islamic Society. "I'm sure that one of the principle reasons why our candidate wasn't chosen is because our guys, the Islamic Society, brought this lawsuit and the fire department chose this way to retaliate against them."
The fire department said it's not a matter of retaliation, saying the Muslim chaplain it chose was most qualified.
Islam is a religion, not a country. If you consider it collectively on a national basis, then all 52 Moslem countries are each involved in 10 separate wars.
Sadly, I just don't see that every happening. We have so overcivilized ourselves that we can no longer defend ourselves when the only defense is an active and brutal offense.
It is going to take a lot of hardship for Americans to work up the kind of resolve needed to settle this.
When you are dealing with people who are so very willing to die for their cause, the only way to defeat them is to oblige them in as large a numbers as possible.
That is a dirty, ugly thing and we have no stomach for dirty ugly things.
Ddan-BbibCChr
He can only be referring to the Fire Dept chaplain who was killed at the scene by falling debris, while administering last rites.
Don't call jwsmith88 innocent. He's just plain psycho.
They are shackled and imprisoned. Very effective pacification technique.
Another thing I despise about the practice of this religion is that it recommends that people become liars as well as murderers.
Every person who died that day was killed by Muslim extremists.
So I still say nobody but a psychopath or a disruptor could have come up with garbage like that. And jwsmith88 maligned a murdered Catholic priest for no reason. That's outrageous.
We'll never forget what they've done.
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