EGYPT: Former militant condemns Zawahiri as 'bloodthirsty'

Babylon & Beyond
LA Times Blog

—Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo
Photo: Ayman Zawahiri. Credit: Wickimedia

Al Qaeda second in command Ayman Zawahiri is a bloodthirsty militant who exerts all possible effort to justify the killing of innocent civilians, according to his former partner with whom Zawahiri co-founded a notorious Islamic militant organization in Egypt three decades ago.

“Zawahiri finds it legitimate to kill anybody whose country fights Muslims,” said Sayed Imam, an iconic ideologue of the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, on Monday in his new jailhouse treatise quoted in the independent daily Al Masry al Youm. Imam added that Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri are “bloodthirsty and remain determined to commit mass killings.”

The scathing treatise, published in sequels in the local press, seeks primarily to renounce violence and bash Al Qaeda. In today’s installment, Imam, who is serving a 25-year sentence, tears apart the logic of the religious fatwas Al Qaeda uses to rationalize the killing of civilians.

“The killing of civilians in blocks, trains, markets, mosques or elsewhere is a declaration of impotence to face armies of enemy states and cowardice. Their impotence drew them to kill civilians who Islamic Sharia said should not be killed,” said Imam.

Imam also criticized Al Qaeda’s condoning attacks on tourists visiting Muslim countries: “Zawahiri and his friends call for the killing and kidnapping of tourists; however, Zawahiri himself went to a number of European countries and the U.S. and came out of these countries safe and nobody harmed him there. Nobody kidnapped or killed him.”

In the 1970s, Imam and Zawahiri formed the first cell of Islamic Jihad, which orchestrated the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and the attempts on the lives of many Egyptian ministers in the 1990s. Last year, the number of jailed Islamic Jihad members was estimated at 2,000.

State retribution forced many militants to flee the country to Pakistan and Afghanistan. From there, the group is believed to have plotted several terrorist operations, including the bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad in 1995 and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

In the late 1990s, many Islamic Jihad leaders including Zawahiri joined Al Qaeda in a fatwa, or religious edict, against Americans that was issued under the banner of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders.

Imam’s treatise marks the latest in the ongoing war of words between him and Al Qaeda. Imam threw himself in a head-on confrontation with Al Qaeda leaders after he drafted his first treatise from his prison cell last year announcing the departure from the group’s initial ideology, renouncing the use of violence and opening fire on Al Qaeda for its killing of civilians. His words elicited a prompt response from his former partner Zawahiri, who released a rebuttal alleging that “crusaders and Jews” inspired Imam’s treatise.

Al Qaeda greets Obama victory with an insult

International Herald Tribune

by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

WASHINGTON: In Al Qaeda's first response to the American election, Osama bin Laden's top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a "house Negro" who will continue a campaign against Islam begun by President George W. Bush.

Appealing to the "weak and oppressed" around the world, Ayman al Zawahiri sought in a video to dampen enthusiasm for Obama's election around the globe by saying that the "new face" of America only masked a "heart full of hate."

American officials dismissed the new video as spin control and a desperate tactic by a terror group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas when the United States elected a black president with a Muslim name.[...]

[...] in a blunt personal attack on the new president, Zawahiri painted Obama as a hypocrite and traitor to his race, unfavorably comparing him to "honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s black Muslim leader.

The Qaeda video drew extensively on archival footage of Malcolm X, and much of the message juxtaposes a still picture of Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a photo of Malcolm X kneeling in prayer at a mosque.[...]

Lawrence Wright, the author of a book on Al Qaeda, "The Looming Tower," called the tape an attempt by Al Qaeda at "spin control" as it struggles to assimilate an election that challenges its worldview.

Wright said both radical and mainstream Muslim commentators had predicted that Senator John McCain would win the presidential election and that little would change. "I'm sure Al Qaeda has been struggling over how to react to the Obama election, and this is the result," he said.

Wright said that for more than a year, messages from Qaeda leaders had included positive messages about Malcolm X in what he described as "a desperate and ineffective strategy" to appeal to African-American Muslims.

Wright, [...], said Qaeda leaders closely followed Western news and polling, and he said he believed they might be reacting to a Pew Research Center poll last year showing that African-American Muslims are the subset of American Muslims least hostile to Al Qaeda. The poll showed that 63 percent of foreign-born Muslims in this country had a "very unfavorable" view of Al Qaeda, compared with 36 percent of African-American Muslims.[...]

Walters said that if the tape was an attempt to reach black Americans or the Third World, it was "ham-handed" and futile.

"You're talking about someone who looks like the rest of the world, and that's got to be threatening to them," he said. "On 9/11, Al Qaeda didn't make any racial distinctions in who it killed, and people remember that."

(The Full Article)

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Snop's Commentary:

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Zawahiri is really grasping for straws with this outrageous insult. The election of Barack Obama threatens Al Qaeda's designs on power undercutting many of its arguments against the West and could prove to be the antibiotic that kills the Al Qaeda bacteria.

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The goal of the ideological battle is to win the support of the undecided and uncommitted in the world. Al Qaeda depends on radicalizing the young and impressionable to fill their ranks. The radicalization process is dependant on stoking a sense of grievance, pitting one race against another, one class against another, one religion against another. Al Qaeda operates on the seams of humanity provoking, manipulating and inspiring young and impressionable people to follow their murderous path.

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Regardless of internal US politics, President elect Obama offers a unifying symbol with a powerful narrative wrapped in the flag of hope and freedom pitting itself against the anti-narrative of despair and subjugation.

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This makes for the perfect eschatological battle between light and darkness.

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Who in the West will pursue the counter-narrative?

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Will President elect Obama use his media prowess to engage militant Islam ideologically on the flat planes of the Internet and open skies of transnational TV?

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Can he turn the legions of digital-warriors and cyber-evangelists into a counterveiling force to push back militant Islamic inspired hate and nihilism?

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Will YouTube, Twitter, the blog sphere and Web 2.0 virals become the 21st century swords and shields smashing and slashing across resurrected virtual battle fields from Acre to Poitiers?

Obama: Surfing the Internet Tsunami

Picture by Andrew Buckley/Reuters

Web sites foretell a YouTube presidency

Washington Times Christina Bellantoni Friday, November 7, 2008

CHICAGO The Web address won't change, but WhiteHouse.gov will never look the same. The Chicago-based team that made the Internet such a force in helping Barack Obama win the presidency is moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.[...]

Mr. Obama communicated with his supporters directly via e-mail and text messaging before claiming victory Tuesday night, an early indicator that the first YouTube candidate will become the YouTube president.[...]

"The most interesting thing to watch will be what do they and how do they reinvent the way a president speaks to the American people... [...]Mr. Obama will inherit a Web operation that has improved over the years but is sterile - a press release clearinghouse with no blog and which shares little in common with the vibrant graphics- and video-heavy BarackObama.com that attracted millions of supporters.[...]

The size of the president-elect's e-mail and text message list is a closely guarded secret in Chicago, but a source said it was large enough to mobilize people into taking action.[...]

The frequent communications helped his supporters remain engaged in the election and inspired more than 1 million people to volunteer and help the senator from Illinois win the White House on Tuesday. It also creates the potential to get Americans to participate in multiple ways. During the campaign, Mr. Obama encouraged people on his site to aid hurricane victims, a request that yielded an impressive response. [...]

The Internet has transformed dissent as well, and members of the netroots think they are one reason Mr. Obama did not select Sen. Evan Bayh, Indiana Democrat, as his running mate. They organized to tell the campaign that Mr. Bayh was sending the wrong message. [..]

Mr. Rosenberg noted the president-elect can communicate with the world through the Internet in a way the Bush administration has not, saying that he hoped and thought that Web videos coming out of the White House would be translated into Mandarin, Spanish, Farsi and Arabic. [...]

Through the course of the campaign, the Obama team communicated directly with supporters from specific demographic groups, from college students to Jewish voters using new media. [...]The Obama blogger thank-you note concluded: "You shattered every record and expectation, and you changed our politics."

(The Full Article)

Snop's Commentary:

Surfing the Internet Tsunami, Barack Obama is the first national political leader to tap into and successfully harness the power of Internet driven new wave media politics. He bypassed the traditional centers of Black Democratic Party power by anglin away from the negative pull of of civil rights veterans like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

To his credit, he was also able to ride the barrel wave past the Clintons once and for all leaving Billary to crash on the rocks.

Obama: The Cognetic President