These are the guys that must be denounced!
At a weekend meeting in Istanbul, 200 religious scholars and clerics met with senior Hamas officials to plot a new jihad centered on Gaza. Disingenuously, they called it the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign, a meeting where they called for violent and aggressive jihad against Israel and regimes in the Arabic world. How is that anti-aggressive?
"Gaza is a gift," the Saudi religious scholar Mohsen al-Awajy told me. He and other delegates repeatedly referred to the Gaza war as "a victory".
"Gaza," he continued, "gives us power, it solves our differences. We are all now in a unified front against Zionism."
In closed meetings after sessions delegates focused on the creation of a "third Jihadist front" - the first two being Afghanistan and Iraq. The intensity of the Israeli attack had "awakened all Muslims," Mr. Awajy claimed.
These guys want nothing more than violent conflict leading to Islamic theocracies everywhere. They don’t care about the people; their own people.
Mohammed Nazzal, a senior Hamas leader based in Damascus, told his audience: "Don’t worry about casualties."
The 23 days of bombardment of Gaza, in which some 1,300 people, many of them civilians and nearly 300 of them children, are believed to have died, was "just the beginning" of the struggle, Mr Nazzal said.
To laughter in the audience, another speaker noted that twice as many babies were born as children were killed during the war.
Every death, I was told, was a martyrdom on the road to liberation.
It is well past time that these sorts of meetings were denounced by the rest of the Islamic world or risk suffering the same fate as them, when the rest of the west really begin to believe the message of the films Fitna and “What Islam is not”. It is only if the majority of Islam distances itself from these sorts of activities that the western world will perceive their innocence. They need to be repeatedly, publically, and vigorously denied by the general body of Islam or Islam risks being identified exclusively as these radicals.
What western authorities need to do is to hold Syria to task for the actions of Hamas, as they are the one granting Hamas leadership succor.
For the hard-line sheikhs, it was an opportunity to underline what they see as the growing gulf between Arab regimes who are hesitant to back Hamas and the people of the region who, they say, embrace Hamas as heroes fighting against overwhelming odds.
More importantly, this conference represented something of a coup for Hamas. They were promised weapons, money and fighters.
Which is what this Anti-Aggression convention was really all about, in the end; how to aggress against everyone else.
If I were to start a peace movement, for the purposes of raising money, arms, and recruits, either here 1 or in the US 2 then I would, at the least, be watched if not arrested. Turkey let these guys get away with it. To some, that is tantamount to tacit assent and I am sure that it weighs in on the EU accession talks. Many in the EU are already nervous about Turkish secularism 3 and hosting meetings like this does not make anyone feel more comfortable.
Footnotes:
Originally posted on The Slamlander:
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