Over the years the open letter has become a very popular tool for
the Islamists (Hizb
ut-Tahrir on the veil, MCB co-ordinated August 2006 open letter to Tony Blair), and
one which they utilised yet again yesterday in a crass attempt at influencing the Obama administration
to base its foreign policy on how appease Islamists and thus prevent them from
killing people all over the world.
According to the letter, it has been signed by "scientists,
thinkers, intellectuals, political activists, jurists, and academics from the
Islamic nation." These include one of the leading
members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf
al-Qaradawi and head of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Qadhi Hussein Ahmad.
This letter is the latest manifestation
of the now well established method of appealing to those who insist that the
United States has only itself to blame for the rise in international terrorism.
Just as bin Laden and Zawahiri have made public statement that if troops left
Iraq and Afghanistan then Al-Qaeda would call it quits, this letter suggests
that if Obama were to pull the troops out, there would be no more 'resistance':
"the resistance in some Muslim
countries is a result of the aggression, injustice and tyranny practiced or
sponsored by the United States, and such resistance is not the cause of
violence and terrorism as some circles in America like to claim. Therefore, if
such resistance troubles you and you wish peace to spread over, you have to end
occupation and return to the peoples their rights and sovereignty.
This is of course contrary to the words
and actions of this 'resistance', who are not motivated only by the US presence
in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also, to name but a few, by their obsession with
creating an Islamic state, their hatred of the democratic institutions that are now in place in
both of these nations, and their
disgust at the gall that their women are showing
by getting an education.
The letter tries to justify the reasons
for Islamist terrorism as simply a reaction to recent US imperialism in the
Middle East, which does not explain why 9/11 occurred before any US presence in
Iraq and Afghanistan. But wait, they have found an ingenious way of getting
around this tricky subject:
"... the events of the 11th
of September 2001 were nothing but fabricated drama by some influential forces
in America in coordination with Israeli Mossad. They have done all that in
order to find a reason to trigger the third world war that they have already planned for and decided its
goals and targeted fields."
There are a number of references to the
suffering of the Palestinian people, not in itself an unreasonable complaint,
although they do border on the hyperbolic:
"We deeply realize that every sane
person believes deep inside that no other nation in history has suffered
injustice like the one inflicted upon the Palestinian people."
If we were to consider this as a
genuine effort at highlighting to the President the plight of Muslims around
the world, rather than an attempt to further worldwide Islamist causes, then of
course one would expect to see some mention of the hundreds of thousands of
Muslim Darfuris being slaughtered at the hands of the al-Bashir regime.
Why, one might ask, has such a massacre been omitted from this litany of
atrocities being committed against Muslims? A quick glance at some more
of the co-signatories explains it all. They include the former Minister
for Religious affairs in Hassan al-Turabi's National Islamic Front party (NIF),
Esam Ahmed Al-Bashir and one of the founding members of the current Sudanese
regime Abdul Rahman Siwar al-Dhahb.
Although it is unlikely that any of
Obama's people will even see this letter, it is absolutely crucial that they do
not fall for this sort of intimidation, especially when it comes from some of
the leading members of the most powerful and influential Islamist groups in the
world.
