Hamas TV

Lebanon’s Hezbollah has had a TV station for a while, al-Manar, now so too does Hamas in Palestine. The Hamas station is following in their footsteps to have a wider societal role in Palestine. The location of the station is a highly guarded secret, since Israel destoyed its earlier radio station. No doubt the TV station will probably help Hamas out in the polls as well. I imagine Fatah, like Israel, is not too happy with this development either. Like al-Manar, I don’t think it will be carried by satellite providers in Europe or North America any time soon.

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Gaza Journal
Warm and Fuzzy TV, Brought to Yoy by Hamas
By Craig S. Smith
New York Times

Published: January 18, 2006

GAZA, Jan. 13 – Hey kids, it’s Uncle Hazim time!

Khalil Hamra for The New York Times

Hazim Sharawi, also known as Uncle Hazim, with two of the animal characters from his new children’s show on Al Aksa TV in Gaza.

Khalil Hamra for The New York Times

A Palestinian family watching Al Aksa TV at home in Gaza City. The television station, owned by Hamas, began broadcasting this month.

Hazim Sharawi, whose stage name is Uncle Hazim, is a quiet, doe-eyed young man who has an easy way with children and will soon preside over a children’s television show here on which he’ll cavort with men in larger-than-life, fake-fur animal suits on the Gaza Strip’s newest television station, Al Aksa TV.

But Captain Kangaroo this is not. The station, named for Islam’s third holiest site, is owned by Hamas, the people who helped make suicide bombing a household term.

“Our television show will have a message, but without getting into the tanks, the guns, the killing and the blood,” said Mr. Sharawi, sitting in the broadcast studio where he will produce his show.

“I will show them our rights through the history,” he said, “show them, ‘This is Nablus, this is Gaza, this is Al Aksa mosque, which is with the Israelis and should be in our hands.’ ”

Ed: Full article below

Interview with Olivier Roy

Globalized Islam – Interview with Olivier Roy
Religioscope
8 Nov 2004

In 2002, after years of work on political Islam, French scholar Olivier Roy published a major book on “globalized Islam”. A revised and updated version of this work has now been published in English.

According to Roy’s analysis, contemporary Islamic projects are becoming increasingly disconnected from a particular territory, partly as a consequence of the failure of all attempts to build an Islamic state. This means that trends are likely to move more and more toward an Islamization of individuals within the context of a global, de-territorialized ummah. This applies to both pietistic movements and radical, political forms of Islam, according to Roy.

Islam is not immune to trends found across all other religions, such as individualization. Islam is more and more often becoming disconnected from a specific culture, as evidenced by the growing number of young Muslims in the West who define their identities primarily or merely as Muslim, instead of defining themselves according to their parents’ origins.

In this interview, Olivier Roy shares some of his observations, as well as developments in his analysis, with the readers of Religioscope.
Ed: Full article below

Hassan Turabi’s Return

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

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Key Sudanese Islamist Sets His Sights on Return to Political Stage; Hassan Turabi, who has been in and out of power, and jail, for decades, is back on the scene, challenging the regime he once backed

Los Angeles Times
December 9, 2005
Pg. A12 – Home Edition

A turbaned Hassan Turabi sinks back into a large, plush sitting- room sofa, his stockinged feet barely touching the floor.

It’s hard to comprehend that this aging former law professor with a chipmunk grin is the same man condemned by Western leaders as a terrorism-loving extremist and jailed repeatedly by Sudanese dictators he once helped empower.

“I’m an old man,” the white-bearded Turabi, fresh out of his latest stint in prison, says with unconvincing modesty.

But behind the glinting teeth and rectangular spectacles is one of Africa’s most influential Islamists, a man who has arguably had more impact on Sudan than anyone else.

Nicknamed “The Fox” at home and “The Pope of Terrorism” abroad, Turabi is climbing his way back onto Sudan’s political stage, forging an opposition alliance, preparing candidates for the next election and criticizing the recently formed unity government as a failure.

Insiders in the Sudanese capital predict, some with a touch of dread, that even at 73, Turabi may have one more act to play out in his career.

Ed: Full article below

The Truth About Jihad

The New York Review of Books covers five recent works on Islamism.

“We say outright: these are madmen, yet these madmen have their own logic, their teaching, their code, their God even, and it’s as deepset as could be.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ed: Full article below

Indonesia’s Holy War

INDONESIA’S HOLY WAR

Talking to Jihadis

By Michael Scott Moore

As the United States tries to spread democracy throughout the Muslim world, a rare meeting with Islamic radicals in Indonesia shows the downside of the country’s post-Suharto representative politics: It has allowed fundmentalists to openly thrive in a country where they were once suppressed. Are there lessons to be learned here for Iraq?

AP An Indonesian soldier guards a Christian prayer service beside a church destroyed in religious fighting several years ago in Poso, Central Sulawesi province, Indonesia.

As people shopped for groceries at an open-air market on New Year’s Eve in the Indonesian coastal town of Palu, a homemade bomb loaded with nails killed at least eight people and ripped apart a kiosk selling pork. Christians on the island of Sulawesi eat pork on New Year’s, but devout Muslims, of course, don’t. Indonesian police believe the bombing is the latest tragic installment in a long-simmering religious struggle, like the decapitation of three Christian girls on another part of the island last October. Militants with machetes attacked the girls in a cocoa plantation while they walked to a Christian school, and — just to make sure they made their point nice and clear — they left one of the heads lying outside a church.

The message was war: Sulawesi is half-Christian, but jihadis there think the island should be sanitized for Islam. The idea is to win a limited war for shariah law in an area where radicals think they can set up an Islamic government. Scattered “secure areas” for shariah have existed in other countries, like the Philippines. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front built base camps there in the early ’90s, for example, and within a few years a network of Muslim villages on Mindanao Island answered to “the Bangsamoro Islamic government” instead of Manila.

This war has been mentioned by US President George W. Bush. Lately he’s been on the lecture circuit to refresh everyone’s memory about the war on terrorism. “The terrorists’ stated objective,” he has said recently in a handful of cities, “is to drive US and coalition forces out of Iraq and gain control of that country and then use Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that reaches from Spain to Indonesia.”

The Hamas Acronym

The name Hamas is derived from the acronym HMS, which is short for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, literally “Islamic Resistance Movement.” “Hamas,” in addition to being the name of the group, is also an Arabic word and means “zeal” or “courage.”

Given the proper full name, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, shouldn’t the acronym instead be HMI?

Wikipedia has a fairly informative article on Hamas.

How To: The Al-Qaida Guide to Kidnapping

The more Der Spiegel I read the more I’ve fallen in love with it; If only American magazines could come near the quality of Spiegel America would be far better off…assuming anyone reads it.

In this piece they cover a document which is a veritable “How To” on kidnapping by an Al-Qaida affiliate. Its equally fascinating and disturbing.

Kidnapping is okay — so long as it serves political or financial goals for a terrorist organization. It’s also fine if it draws attention to a political issue like, say, Chechnya. You should also stay distant from hostages — literally — lest you get to close to them, both physically and mentally. These are just a few of the parting tips offered by a top al-Qaida strategists before he was killed in 2004.

Ed: Full article below

Why are all al-Qaida captives “No. 3”?

How many “No.3″s are there in al-Qaida? Apparently the media stopped counting a while back as Timothy Noah writes in this article.

Al-Qaida’s Rule of Threes
Why are all al-Qaida captives “No. 3”?
By Timothy Noah
Updated Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 7:07 PM ET

Some jobs just seem impossible to keep filled. Hollywood studio head. United States ambassador to Iraq. Editor of the New York Daily News. Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

To these we must now add “al-Qaida’s No. 3 official.” John Crimmings, proprietor of the New York-based Blogenlust, has been keeping track of al-Qaida third-in-commands captured or killed by our side, and counts no fewer than four.

There’s Hamza Rabia, reportedly killed Thursday by an American missile. According to MSNBC, Rabia is said by two unidentified counterterrorism officials to be

head of al-Qaida’s foreign operations, possibly as senior as the No. 3 [italics Chatterbox’s] in the terrorist group, just below al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri. They are believed to be hiding in a rugged area along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

Before Rabia there was Abu Farraj al-Libbi, who as of May 5 was reported by Fox News to be held in Pakistani custody. Libbi (no relation to the recently indicted White House aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby) was said not to be “head of foreign operations,” as Rabia reportedly was, but rather to be plotting attacks on the United States. Perhaps it amounts to the same thing. At any rate, al-Libbi, Fox reported, was “believed by U.S. counterterrorism officials to be Usama bin Laden’s No. 3 man.”

Before al-Libbi there was Abu Zubaida, whom Ruth Wedgwood of Yale Law School called “the number three in al-Qaida” on PBS’s NewsHour. We don’t seem to know much about Zubaida’s job description beyond the fact that he was, as the Washington Post put it, “involved with the Sept. 11 plot,” which is a bit circular; of course the No. 3 guy in al-Qaida would be involved in the Sept. 11 plot.

Before Abu Zubaida there was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the “alleged mastermind” of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Fox News, and also “Al Qaeda’s No. 3 figure.” Mohammed is also apparently al-Qaida’s treasurer, having disbursed cash to Mohammed Atta. In one respect, Mohammed’s job description is identical to Zubaida’s: It apparently requires that the employee be subjected by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators to “water boarding,” a form of torture—ahem, I mean interrogation—in which the subject is made to think he is drowning. No doubt the pension benefits have been adjusted upward to compensate.

The obvious question here is whether these four people successively held the position of No. 3 in al-Qaida—in which case, as Jon Stewart has observed on The Daily Show, the job would appear to be “sort of a raw deal”—or whether counterterrorism officials are inclined to call any reasonably high-ranking Tom, Dick, or Harry “al-Qaida’s No. 3” simply for the purposes of propaganda. Another possibility is that our side does this for the purposes of psy-ops, to create confusion among the al-Qaida rank and file about their own organization’s true hierarchy. (It isn’t like you can get Bin Laden to adjudicate turf wars every time confusion arises over the chain of command.) Yet another possibility is that al-Qaida’s management hierarchy is ludicrously top-heavy, and that “No. 3” is a position held simultaneously by many people who in a similarly top-heavy corporation would be labeled “vice president.” No matter what the explanation, it’s clear that the sweet spot in al-Qaida management is No. 1 and No. 2. After that, job security seems only slightly better than that enjoyed by suicide bombers. My advice: Go with Procter & Gamble instead.

Timothy Noah writes “Chatterbox” for Slate.

Questioning the Iraqi Resistance

Arab world, Iraq and al-Qaeda
Unfamiliar questions in the Arab air

Nov 24th 2005 | CAIRO
From The Economist print edition

As al-Qaeda scores own-goals in its backyard, many Arabs, including some Iraqis, are beginning to rethink their position on violence in the name of resistance

Getty Images

OF ALL the films to extol the fight for freedom from imperialism, one of the most cheering to Arab hearts is the rousing 1981 epic, “Lion of the Desert�?. A richly bearded Anthony Quinn plays the role of Omar Mukhtar, the simple Koran teacher who became a guerrilla hero, and for 20 years, from 1911-31, harassed the Italian forces bent on subduing Libya. In one memorable scene his Bedouin warriors, armed only with old rifles, hobble their own feet to ensure martyrdom as Mussolini’s tanks roll inexorably towards them.

Such imagery, mixed with big doses of schoolbook nationalism and more recent real-life pictures of stone-throwing children facing Israeli guns, has bolstered a common Arab perception of “resistance�? as an act that is just and noble. The romanticism is understandable, and not much different from how, say, the French view their own underground in the second world war. Yet the morphing in recent years of resistance into terrorism, and the confusion in Iraq, where a humiliating foreign occupation also brought liberation from Baathist tyranny, has increasingly called this iconography into question.

The undermining of entrenched myths is a slow and halting process. But it is subject to sudden, shattering jolts, such as the November 9th suicide bombing of three hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman. In the minds of the killers, American-allied Jordan had become a rear base for the “crusader�? invaders of Iraq, and so its hotels, the sort of places where crusaders and their minions congregate, were legitimate targets for the resistance.

Yet it is perhaps more than incidentally ironic that among the 60 people they killed was Mustapha Akkad, the Syrian-born director who created “Lion of the Desert�?. His film, glorifying the bravery of Muslim resistance fighters, happened to be one of the few productions explicitly endorsed on jihadist websites, albeit in a version that replaced the musical soundtrack with religious chants, and cut out all scenes showing women.

Inside the Madrasas

William Dalrymple reviews some books for the New York Review of Books in “Inside the Madrasas.” Many of Dalrymple’s works can be found here.

“Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrasas.”