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Sabah Arar/AP
A fierce battle for the hearts and minds of international jihadists is being fought online.
Notwithstanding last week’s bloody carnage in Mumbai (and there is no proof yet of Al Qaeda’s involvement there), positive signs have recently emerged of internal conflicts within Osama bin Laden’s global murder machine.
A fierce battle for the hearts and minds of international jihadists is now being fought in cyberspace.
Dr. Fadl said Al Qaeda “killed more Muslims since its establishment (in 1988), than the Israelis did in nearly 60 years of conflict.”
Two leading intellectuals of the jihadist movement—the Palestinian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and the Egyptian Sayyid Imam Sharif (aka Dr. Fadl)—have issued a damning condemnation of Al Qaeda’s brutal tactics, which they blame for the defeat of jihadists in Iraq, the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the huge setback suffered by the global jihadist movement.
Dr. Fadl, a former Al Qaeda propagandist who recently turned against bin Laden, has published a book, which is currently being serialized by the leading pan-Arab newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat. Fadl lambasts Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence and blames it for giving jihad a bad name. In an installment published last week, Fadl said Al Qaeda “killed more Muslims since its establishment (in 1988), than the Israelis did in nearly 60 years of conflict.”
Fadl accuses Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, of “inviting the American war on Afghanistan and Iraq by launching the attacks of 9/11.” He charges that the two leaders “were also the first to flee (the battlefield) after the war started in Afghanistan in 2001…before they offered a truce, and desperately sought to negotiate with the U.S.” Fadl calls Zawahri a liar for claiming that Islam sanctions the use of violence against innocent civilians.
Al Qaeda’s other critic is Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who mentored the former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Maqdisi has published an essay in which he blames Zarqawi for breaking with the tenets of jihad and “taking the fight in the wrong direction.”
The split between Maqdisi and Zarqawi goes back to 2005, when the former issued an open letter from his prison cell calling on Zarqawi to stop targeting Shiite and Christian civilians in Iraq, which threatened to ignite a civil war in that country. Maqdisi also stressed that the leadership of jihad in Iraq should be in the hands of Iraqis, not Zarqawi, a Jordanian.
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Salameh Nematt is the international editor of The Daily Beast. He is the former Washington bureau chief for the international Arab daily Al Hayat, where he reported on US foreign policy, the war in Iraq, and the US drive for democratization in the broader Middle East. He has also written extensively on regional and global energy issues and their political implications.
Salameh Nematt is the international editor of The Daily Beast. He is the former Washington bureau chief for the international Arab daily Al Hayat, where he reported on US foreign policy, the war in Iraq, and the US drive for democratization in the broader Middle East. He has also written extensively on regional and global energy issues and their political implications.
Salameh Nematt is the international editor of The Daily Beast. He is the former Washington bureau chief for the international Arab daily Al Hayat, where he reported on US foreign policy, the war in Iraq, and the US drive for democratization in the broader Middle East. He has also written extensively on regional and global energy issues and their political implications.
What no comments from the Beastosphere? That's ironic. Now if Islamic followers, of which about 120 million are jihadists, lay down their jihadist dreams, Islam would be better off. And would that nut job with the Airbus 380, please return it. The rednecks are even getting pissed off at mid east oil barons, or maybe not; oil is what ; shy of $50. Let's break'em, just like we did the soviets. Why can't out of control spending be a weapon? We've been broke since Eisenhower. I don't think the Khamenei's, Putin's, Il's, Saud's, and their European and leftist apologists can keep up. I am taking a short position on anti-Americanism. Once America faces up to this new war (energy/jihad/leftist/finance) and Obama starts to govern from the right, and he will, that is when we will recover and not before.
You're right, how strange no comments to this. Perhaps the difference between jihadist philosophies is a nuance to subtle to grasp for Westerners. Jihad I guess still sounds like "war against America" no matter who bears the title or what their actual agenda is.
The lesson in this is that people do what they perceive to be in their best interests, so the best way to win the war on terror is to change the impression that asymmetrical violence will result in positive, long-lasting political achievements.
This is the kind of Islamic reporting fostered by Steve Emerson!
"asymmetrical violence" is asymmetrical because those on receiving end are not fighting back.
Well, let us be clear then. Jihad is not war against America. Jihad is the Islamic struggle to convert others to Islam by force, using any means of warfare they can. It isn't that they hate us. They hate us and want to kill us, if we don't bow. Doesn't have anything to do with the west or anything we have done or haven't done. Jihadists regardless of any variation in their philosophies only understand and avoid a stronger tribe.
I've only heard of Zawahri's repudiation of Obama. I didn't hear anything in the news about al-Baghdadi's extended olive branch.
I think that's telling enough by itself.
Thank you.
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