DAR AL HARB - U.S.A.: A FORMER TERRORIST SPEAKS OUT AGAINST THE ISLAMIC WORLD

Cut & paste: A former terrorist speaks out against the Islamic world

One-time Jemaah Islamiah member Tawfik Hamid, in The Wall Street Journal, on the trouble with Muslim teachingTHERE is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of sharia, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach three-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints but, less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defence.

These progressives frequently cite the need to examine root causes. In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiah, a group led by al-Qa'ida's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know first-hand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it.
Progressives need to realise that radical Islam is based on an anti-liberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realise that Islamism spells the death of liberal values.


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1) Cut & paste: A former terrorist speaks out against the Islamic world