Redwingtom
Freaking Lunatic

Posts: 60,911
Joined: Dec 2003
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I Root For: B-G-S-U !!!!
Location: Soros' Basement
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RE: What ISIS wants
Have you read the New York Times Magazine piece on the professor from 2001? It's really quite interesting...and it really points out the dangers of Trump's plan to further alienate Muslim-Americans with his reckless rhetoric.
Some highlights:
Quote:Beyond the gothic confines of Yale, he was becoming one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam
Quote:an Internet conference call with more than 150 of his AlMaghrib students. “I want to be very frank here,” Qadhi said, his voice tight with exasperation. “Do you really, really think that blowing up a plane is Islamic? I mean, ask yourself this.”
None of the students defended the plot, but some sympathized with the suspect, said several students who participated in the call, one of whom provided a recording to The Times. Was it not possible, they asked, that he had been set up? And how could they trust the F.B.I. after all they experienced — the post-9/11 raids, the monitoring of mosques, the sting operations aimed at Muslims? A few went as far as to say that they could not turn against a fellow Muslim who was trying to fight the oppressive policies of the United States.
Qadhi paced the worn, gray carpet. “There were even Muslims on that plane!” he said. “I mean, what world are you living in? How angry and overzealous are you that you simply forget about everything and you think that this is the way forward?”
Quote:In the spectrum of the global Salafi movement, Qadhi, who is 36, speaks for the nonmilitant majority. Yet even as he has denounced Islamist violence — too late, some say — a handful of AlMaghrib’s former students have heeded the call. In addition to the underwear-bomb suspect, the 36,000 current and former students of Qadhi’s institute include Daniel Maldonado, a New Hampshire convert who was convicted in 2007 of training with an Al Qaeda-linked militia in Somalia; Tarek Mehanna, a 28-year-old pharmacist arrested for conspiring to attack Americans; and two young Virginia men held in Pakistan in 2009 for seeking to train with militants.
Qadhi said that none of those former students had approached him for counsel. But in recent years, countless others have come to him with questions about the legitimacy of waging jihad. “We’re finding ourselves on the front line,” Qadhi said. “We don’t want to be there.”
During the months I spent in the insular world of young American Salafis, it became clear how pressing those questions are for many conservative Muslims who have come of age after 9/11. They have watched as their own country wages war in Muslim lands, bearing witness — via satellite television and the Internet — to the carnage in Iraq, the drone attacks in Pakistan and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo. While the dozens of AlMaghrib students I interviewed condemned the tactics of militant groups, many share their basic grievances. They are searching for the correct Islamic response, turning to the ancient texts that guide their American lives. Their salvation, they say, hangs in the balance.
Quote:Arguably few American theologians are better positioned to offer an authoritative rebuttal of extremist ideology. But to do that, Qadhi says he would need to address the thorny question of what kinds of militant actions are permitted by Islamic law. It is a forbidden topic for most American clerics, who even refrain from criticizing their country’s foreign policy for fear of being branded unpatriotic.
For an ultraconservative cleric like Qadhi, the picture is more complicated. Engaging in a detailed discussion of militant jihad — a complex subject informed by centuries of scholarship — risks drawing the scrutiny of law enforcement and, Qadhi fears, possible prosecution. If he were to acknowledge that Islamic law endorses the legitimacy of armed resistance against Western forces in Muslim territory, he could give a green light to the very students he claims he is trying to keep off the militant path. Yet by remaining silent, Qadhi says he is losing the credibility he needs to persuade them of his ultimate message: those fights are not theirs, as Westerners, to fight. “My hands are tied, and my tongue is silent,” he said.
Militant clerics abroad have filled the void, none more than Anwar al-Awlaki, the American preacher who is now believed to be in hiding in Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki has been linked to numerous plots against the United States, including the botched underwear bombing. He has taken to the Internet with stirring battle cries directed at young American Muslims. “Many of your scholars,” Awlaki warned last year, are “standing between you and your duty of jihad.”
Why Yasir Qadhi Wants to Talk About Jihad
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