Saturday, April 14, 2007

More Connection — the 1998 Fatwa   [Andy McCarthy]

Can't help but belabor this point.  Over the years, the media, the Intelligence Community, the Justice Department, the Congress and various investigative bodies like the 9/11 Commission have repeatedly pointed to Osama bin Laden & Co.'s infamous 1998 fatwa, the summons to "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders," calling for the murder of all Americans, whether civilian or military, anywhere on earth where they are found.  That, of course, is the command — the direction about what is to be done.  But very little has been said publicly about bin Laden's stated rationale for this command.

Below is al Qaeda's justification for the command to kill all Americans.  As you read this — recalling the meetings and exchanges of funds between Iraq and al Qaeda in 1998, the Clinton administration's retaliation against the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory (believed to be a joint Iraq/Qaeda weapons operation) that followed the embassy attacks, the Clinton administration's fear that bin Laden would move his operation to Baghdad — note how focused bin Laden was on Iraq in the months before bombing our embassies.  Note also his allusions to the "rulers" of countries in the Arabian Peninsula, including Iraq — there is no trace of the hostility that the Intelligence Community often maintains was a constant between jihadist bin Laden and secular Saddam.  All italics are mine:

No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries....  On that basis, and in compliance with Allah's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah."

So said Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and their Sunni jihadist confederates, who, according to today's congressional leadership, had no real interest in Shiite-majority, secularly-ruled Iraq until the United States invaded five years later.

04/14 10:44 AMShare