Kinder, Gentler Jihadis
My friend Johnny from Costa Rica is in town to do the visa renewal thing, and I've been waiting all morning and now well into the afternoon for him to show up. I'm guessing by now the rude bastard is out on a walking or riding tour and has blown me off. This means I get to take it out on you, gentle reader, with another essay of penetrating insight into our mutual and equally rude friends; the jihadis.
The caption to this picture reads:
The assassination of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 by Islamic militants, a key moment in the development of jihadist groups. Photograph: Makram Gad Alkareem/AFP/Getty Images
Here's the article that goes along with it from the Guardian.
A short background:
You might remember Anwar Sadat as he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for signing a peace treaty between their respective countries. Another prize winner, former American President Carter was said to be involved.
But after that it gets a little murkier with all the peace prize winning as one of the heroes of the 'anti-peace' initiative, indeed the not unsung hero of said jihadists named above, won a peace prize in 1994 after he was recognized for 'ending' the 'intifada,' a stone throwing fest for Palestinian youth that begun somewhere around 1987, Yasser Arafat.
Six short years later, shortly after another historic 'peace' process involving yet another American President, Yasser's kids threw away their stones and began using their own bodies as bombs to initiate the so-called 'second intifada,' which seems to currently be on hiatus since the Israelis had a wall built to keep them from exploding around the women and children. Mr. Arafat has since gone onto his just rewards in the afterlife.
I reference the article and the photo above because it shows two things. First is that it shows Muslim on Muslim/ Arab on Arab violence by people upset that Sadat was making it harder for them to blame the Jews for their sorry lot in life; the second is that the anger toward Americans has always been because they have tried to make peace, not war.
The subject of the article, in keeping with our recent news theme of medical jihadis, is Sayid Imam al-Sharif:
, 57, […] the founder and first emir (commander) of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organisation, whose supporters assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and later teamed up with Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviet occupation.Sharif, a surgeon who is still known by his underground name of "Dr Fadl", is famous as the author of the Salafi jihadists' "bible" - Foundations of Preparation for Holy War. He worked with Ayman al-Zawahiri, another Egyptian doctor and now Bin Laden's deputy, before being kidnapped in Yemen after 9/11, interrogated by the CIA and extradited to Egypt where has been serving a life sentence since 2004.
But the Guardian presents a man-bites-dog story here as Dr. Fadl has written a book in prison renouncing his former murdering ways, and now criticizing those of his legion followers. Isn't that special? The name of his soon to be published 100 page book is:
Advice Regarding the Conduct of Jihadist Action in Egypt and the World.
The tome is a product of a jailhouse "counter-radicalisation programme" popular with Arab regimes. Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan all have them, and they grant special privileges to those jihadis that participate.
Before everybody in the West gets all a twitter about it all, these programs were instituted by the regimes because of domestic terrorism. In Egypt the big success is in getting written "25 volumes of revisions in a series called Tashih al-Mafahim (Corrections of Concepts)" by former members of:
the Gama'a Islamiyya (Islamic Group), once the largest jihadist organisation in the Arab world, and which mounted countless armed attacks starting in the 1980s until calling a ceasefire after massacring 62 foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997.
Diaa Rashwan, of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies claims the program is a success because "there has not been a jihadi incident in the Nile Valley since Luxor." Of course the rubes trying to make a buck out near the Red Sea may disagree with his assessment. And in Cairo.
But, as with most things in the Middle East we can only expect baby steps, and baby steps they are as these 'revisions' are basically 'opinions' of current 'interpretations' of "Islamic law." Anybody can issue opinion, as Dr. Fadl demonstrated with his original Egyptian "bible." That he's taking it back is important, but it's also important to understand why. Of the previously released 25 volumes:
Their authors are neither secular nor liberal: their self-criticism includes observations that the wrong path to jihad benefits only the Jews, the US and Egypt's Christian minority.
We wouldn't want that now, would we?
