An article by Gilad Atzmon (was born in Israel in 1963) .. nice to read!!

It's so not nessary to comment.. personally I'm fed up with the "chasing dog's tail" arguments!! :)

EnJoY!!


By Gilad Atzmon

07/04/07 "ICH" -- --- When I came over to Britain some thirteen years ago, I found a very tolerant place. I was amazed to see so many people of so many colours, not just living together in peace, but living in full harmony. At Essex University, the institute where I was doing my postgraduate studies, everyone was enthusiastic about post-colonialism. The Brits, so it seemed to me at the time, were repenting over their embarrassing colonial past. I was mildly impressed but not totally overwhelmed. At the end of the day, it isn’t that difficult to denounce your grandfather’s crimes.

I was amazed to see Turks and Cypriots running grocery shops side by side in Green Lane. My first roommate was a Palestinian M.A. student from Beit Sahour, it all felt natural. It didn’t take long before I fell in love with the town and decided to make it into my permanent home.

At the time, Britain was very different from the place I came from. In my homeland the human landscape was officially reduced into two types. In a manner of crude binary opposition there was always a clear division between the ‘Good’ and the ‘Bad’, the ‘us’ and the ‘them’, the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ or just the ‘Jews’ and the ‘Arabs’. In the place I came from, peace couldn’t even be seen on the horizon. But in the London of the 1990s, there was no such dichotomy. Painfully enough, this has changed. On a daily basis our media outlets repeat the idiotic question: “Why do they hate us so much?” By now it is rather clear, the binary opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has made it into an integral part of the British discourse as well.

When I moved over in the early 1990s, British politics was very boring. John Major was in power. But then, not before long, a young, dynamic, visionary politician removed him from office. This politician is a man who has managed in just ten years to demolish one of the most harmonious societies in the West. Tony Blair, the great new Labour promise, had been running the country for a decade; he managed to drag this country into every possible conflict, and to escalate minor conflict to crisis levels. He has managed to lie repeatedly to his people, his parliament and his cabinet, he has launched an illegal war that cost over 700,000 innocent civilian lives. He obviously failed to see the impact those wars may have on his multi-ethnic society at home.

Blair has just left the PM office, thank God for that, however, this country is now on the brink of moral collapse. Its civil rights system is under severe threat. Politicians of all parties are calling for tougher detention laws. The possibility of mass deportation of new immigrants doesn’t look like a remote nightmare. Yet, most worrying is the role of the ‘free’ media in this country. The leading papers and TV are succumbing quite willingly to the official Government line of thinking. It’s something that reminds me too much of the recruited media in my doomed homeland, the place I left thirteen years ago.

I find myself wondering, how dare the media ask ‘why do they hate us?’ Don’t they know the answer? Don’t we know the answer? Weren’t we the ones who demolished Iraq? Wasn’t it our PM, Tony Blair, who gave a green light to the Israelis to flatten Lebanon? Wasn’t it Tony Blair’s government who dismissed the democratically elected Hamas in Palestine? Wasn’t it Blair who allowed the Israelis to starve Gaza?

For those who still fail to realise, to kill is rather simple, to turn towns into piles of rubble isn’t that complicated either. Yet, to raise a child may take a few years, to build a city takes hundreds of years and to establish harmony between human beings takes thousand of years. We should stop lying to others and to ourselves. We know perfectly well why they hate us, they have some good reasons, as things stand momentarily, we are the ones who are killing them en mass. It is us who demolish their towns and kill their kids.

Thus, rather than raising the pathetic question, ‘why do they hate us?’ we’d better evade our self-righteous mode, and ask ourselves, ‘why do we hate them so much?’ or even, ‘why do we hate so much?’ in general.

To bring peace to London, Glasgow, Britain and the West is to look in the mirror, to look into our severe and devastating wrongdoings, to repair the damage made by Blair, Bush and company, to revise the dream of ecumenical Western society. It is possible. It is within our capacity. We have been just there not that long ago. I remember it very well, it was only thirteen years ago, I felt it when I landed in Britain.

.. JIC >> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17963.htm

Well, that might be so.

But I'm not convinced that just because people hate you, you are at fault.

We bombed the Christian Serbs to save the Muslim Bosnians and Albanians. Should the Serbs hate us? Some of them do. By no means all.

If we hadn't done that, should the Bosnian Muslims hate us for failing to save them?

Should the Kurds of Iraq hate us if we abandon them and let them be reconquered and resubjugated by some new Iraqi dictator? That's millions of people who love us right there.

Many Chinese hate us because we protect Taiwan which they consider theirs. But the Taiwanese don't want to be ruled by them and they have a nice little country, that is free and prosperous. Should we let the Chinese conquer Taiwan to avoid having them hate us? After all that's more than a billion people. I think those that hate us there, hate us for a bad reason. We should just put up with their hate.

On the other hand, my experience with the many Vietnamese in this country is that they love America. If they have a criticisim of us, it's not that we brought war to their country. It's that we gave up and abandoned them rather than seeing it though.

Sometimes people hate you because you are doing something wrong. You should think about it and consider it carefully. But sometimes people hate you because doing what's right is often unpopular.

The key thing is not to try to avoid people hating you. You should just try to do the right thing, whether you are loved or hated for it.

The key thing is not to try to avoid people hating you. You should just try to do the right thing, whether you are loved or hated for it.
I agree with you here .. But How do you know that what you are doing is the right thing ?!

Well, I guess you don't absolutely know! But you have to do the best that you can in your judgments. This is true for people and for countries too...

I find myself wondering, how dare the media ask ‘why do they hate us?’ Don’t they know the answer? Don’t we know the answer? Weren’t we the ones who demolished Iraq?

Umm no.....it's the sectarian militias who are demolishing Iraq.

That's been the daily story for 3 years now.


Wasn’t it our PM, Tony Blair, who gave a green light to the Israelis to flatten Lebanon?

Ummm no....Hezbollah instigated that conflict and only some parts of Southern Lebanon were attacked by the IDF.

But nice embellishment and scapegoating.


Wasn’t it Tony Blair’s government who dismissed the democratically elected Hamas in Palestine?

Dismissed? That's another lie.

You mean the European nations and the USA agreed that they did not want to give HAMAS, the extremist party, any AID money to use to fight their futile holy war which only compounds the conflict.


Wasn’t it Blair who allowed the Israelis to starve Gaza?.

Didn't the Israelies recently withdraw from Gaza? What does Blair have to do with it?


Do you recognize a pattern here? Blaming others, hating others, no accountability, no responsibility.

Hating people based on lies, and then targeting random civillians who just happen to look like those people you hate....that's just plain IGNORANCE.

Don't let the liberal media tell you how to think and feel!

If you have hate in your heart let it out.

Don't let the liberal media tell you how to think and feel!

If you have hate in your heart let it out.


and the best way to do this is via car bombs and suiced belts.

you go girl!

The real deal ...

It's so not nessary to comment.. personally I'm fed up with the "chasing dog's tail" arguments!!

EnJoY!!

I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=465570&in_page_id=1770)


When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network - a series of British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology - I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.


By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this "Blair's bombs" line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: "What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq."

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

Mohammed Sidique Khan met with the author on two separate occasions

Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the July 7 bombings, and I were both part of the network - I met him on two occasions.

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If we were interested in justice, you may ask, how did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting such a (flawed) Utopian goal?

How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?

There isn't enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a model of the world in which you are either a believer or an infidel.

Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same.

For centuries, the reasoning of Islamic jurists has set down rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

But what radicals and extremists do is to take this two steps further. Their first step has been to argue that, since there is no pure Islamic state, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr (The Land of Unbelief).

Step two: since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.

Along with many of my former peers, I was taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief.

In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

The notion of a global battlefield has been a source of friction for Muslims living in Britain.

For decades, radicals have been exploiting the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern secular state - typically by starting debate with the question: "Are you British or Muslim?"

But the main reason why radicals have managed to increase their following is because most Muslim institutions in Britain just don't want to talk about theology.

They refuse to broach the difficult and often complex truth that Islam can be interpreted as condoning violence against the unbeliever - and instead repeat the mantra that Islam is peace and hope that all of this debate will go away.

This has left the territory open for radicals to claim as their own. I should know because, as a former extremist recruiter, I repeatedly came across those who had tried to raise these issues with mosque authorities only to be banned from their grounds.

Every time this happened it felt like a moral and religious victory for us because it served as a recruiting sergeant for extremism.

Outside Britain, there are those who try to reverse this two-step revisionism.

A handful of scholars from the Middle East have tried to put radicalism back in the box by saying that the rules of war devised so long ago by Islamic jurists were always conceived with the existence of an Islamic state in mind, a state which would supposedly regulate jihad in a responsible Islamic fashion.

In other words, individual Muslims don't have the authority to go around declaring global war in the name of Islam.

But there is a more fundamental reasoning that has struck me as a far more potent argument because it involves recognising the reality of the world: Muslims don't actually live in the bipolar world of the Middle Ages any more.

The fact is that Muslims in Britain are citizens of this country. We are no longer migrants in a Land of Unbelief.

For my generation, we were born here, raised here, schooled here, we work here and we'll stay here.

But more than that, on a historically unprecedented scale, Muslims in Britain have been allowed to assert their religious identity through clothing, the construction of mosques, the building of cemeteries and equal rights in law.

However, it isn't enough for responsible Muslims to say that, because they feel at home in Britain, they can simply ignore those passages of the Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers.

Because so many in the Muslim community refuse to challenge centuries-old theological arguments, the tensions between Islamic theology and the modern world grow larger every day.

I believe that the issue of terrorism can be easily demystified if Muslims and non-Muslims start openly to discuss the ideas that fuel terrorism.

Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists.

If our country is going to take on radicals and violent extremists, Muslim scholars must go back to the books and come forward with a refashioned set of rules and a revised understanding of the rights and responsibilities of Muslims whose homes and souls are firmly planted in what I'd like to term the Land of Co-existence.

And when this new theological territory is opened up, Western Muslims will be able to liberate themselves from defunct models of the world, rewrite the rules of interaction and perhaps we will discover that the concept of killing in the name of Islam is no more than an anachronism.

As you said no comments, because what the man said is the truth.

And now Blair is heading toward the ME to complete his destruction to this region.

Tea,

Is the the first time you have believed anything that a Jew has said?

Will this Jew also get killed on the last day - you know when the rocks and trees will tell you that a Jew is hiding behind them, come and kill him ?

(echo)

"Oh Tea.........."

and the best way to do this is via car bombs and suiced belts.

you go girl!

I was quoting a KKK leader if you did not realise that

"I was a fanatic...I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist"
Yes, the moment you hear that word, you stop reading...
'I know their thinking' LOL...The CIA doesn't know their thinking, but this guy does. Awesome

You seem to jump to conclusions based on the initial lines an article.

Maybe if you read the whole article you would have a slightly broader view of the world.

I have read it...And believe me, it narrowed my view of the world.
Especially lines like this one:
"More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology."
"Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same."
"Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists." (As I have repeatedly said on many occasions in the Sabla, my Muslim cousins who form a family, are half-Egyptian, half-British).
"Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers." (There's no part of the Qura'an that instructs on killing unbelievers. If you can't find one verse in which a death of unbelievers is requested from Muslims without a cause that happened in the times of the prophet PBUH).


You can't SEE that this guy is completely and absoloutely biased? You wouldn't interview a madman about a madhouse and say it's the truth. The only part I liked about this article was the final one...But again, he's generalising.

I have read it...And believe me, it narrowed my view of the world.
Especially lines like this one:
"More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology."
"Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same."
"Crucially, the Muslim community in Britain must slap itself awake from its state of denial and realise there is no shame in admitting the extremism within our families, communities and worldwide co-religionists." (As I have repeatedly said on many occasions in the Sabla, my Muslim cousins who form a family, are half-Egyptian, half-British).
"Koran which instruct on killing unbelievers." (There's no part of the Qura'an that instructs on killing unbelievers. If you can't find one verse in which a death of unbelievers is requested from Muslims without a cause that happened in the times of the prophet PBUH).


You can't SEE that this guy is completely and absoloutely biased? You wouldn't interview a madman about a madhouse and say it's the truth. The only part I liked about this article was the final one...But again, he's generalising.


1. "yes, the moment you hear that word, you stop reading..."... So you DID read the article after all ?

2. The guy is a moslem, so maybe he is another who has 'misunderstood' the real Islam.

3. Which parts of his article do you not agree with ? For example, "Formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion: they are considered to be one and the same" - do you disagree ?

1) Yes...
2) Probably...Your point of why this should be read by anyone else is then completely pointless however.
3) No...But comparing Islam and Christianity in that way is waaay too biased. It's showing that combining religion and state is a complete taboo. It's probably just my feeling, I confess.