Muslim group takes responsibility for 9-11: 'We are so sorry'

[igloo]

Muslim group takes responsibility for 9-11: 'We are so sorry'

Special to World Tribune.com

http://www.freemuslims.org/

Friday, September 10, 2004

We Are So Sorry for 9-11

This September 11 marks the third unforgettable anniversary of the worst mass murder in American history.

After September 11, many in the Muslim world chose denial and hallucination rather than face up to the sad fact that Muslims perpetrated the 9-11 terrorist acts and that we have an enormous problem with extremism and support for terrorism. Many Muslims, including religious leaders, and “intellectuals†blamed 9-11 on a Jewish conspiracy and went as far as fabricating a tale that 4000 Jews did not show up for work in the World Trade Center on 9-11. Yet others blamed 9-11 on an American right wing conspiracy or the U.S. Government which allegedly wanted an excuse to invade Iraq and “steal†Iraqi oil.

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As to apologizing, we will no longer wait for our religious leaders and "intellectuals" to do the right thing. Instead, we will start by apologizing for 9-11 . . .

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After numerous admissions of guilt by Bin Laden and numerous corroborating admissions by captured top level Al-Qaida operatives, we wonder, does the Muslim leadership have the dignity and courage to apologize for 9-11?

If not 9-11, will we apologize for the murder of school children in Russia?

If not Russia, will we apologize for the train bombings in Madrid, Spain?

If not Spain, will we apologize for suicide bombings in buses, restaurants and other public places?

If not suicide bombings, will we apologize for the barbaric beheadings of human beings?

If not beheadings, will we apologize for the rape and murder of thousands of innocent people in Darfour?

If not Darfour, will we apologize for the blowing up of two Russian planes by Muslim women?

What will we apologize for?

What will it take for Muslims to realize that those who commit mass murder in the name of Islam are not just a few fringe elements?

What will it take for Muslims to realize that we are facing a crisis that is more deadly than the Aids epidemic?

What will it take for Muslims to realize that there is a large evil movement that is turning what was a peaceful religion into a cult?

Will Muslims wake up before it is too late? Or will we continue blaming the Jews and an imaginary Jewish conspiracy? The blaming of all Muslim problems on Jews is a cancer that is destroying Muslim society from within and it must stop.

Muslims must look inward and put a stop to many of our religious leaders who spend most of their sermons teaching hatred, intolerance and violent jihad. We should not be afraid to admit that as Muslims we have a problem with violent extremism. We should not be afraid to admit that so many of our religious leaders belong behind bars and not behind a pulpit.

Only moderate Muslims can challenge and defeat extremist Muslims. We can no longer afford to be silent. If we remain silent to the extremism within our community then we should not expect anyone to listen to us when we complain of stereotyping and discrimination by non-Muslims; we should not be surprised when the world treats all of us as terrorists; we should not be surprised when we are profiled at airports.

Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against terror, we need to take the lead in this war.

As to apologizing, we will no longer wait for our religious leaders and “intellectuals†to do the right thing. Instead, we will start by apologizing for 9-11.

We are so sorry that 3000 people were murdered in our name. We will never forget the sight of people jumping from two of the highest buildings in the world hoping against hope that if they moved their arms fast enough that they may fly and survive a certain death from burning.

We are sorry for blaming 9-11 on a Jewish or right wing conspiracy.

We are so sorry for the murder of more than three hundred school children and adults in Russia.

We are so sorry for the murder of train passengers in Spain.

We are so sorry for all the victims of suicide bombings. We are so sorry for the beheadings, abductions, rapes, violent Jihad and all the atrocities committed by Muslims around the world.

We are so sorry for a religious education that raised killers rather than train people to do good in the world. We are sorry that we did not take the time to teach our children tolerance and respect for other people.

We are so sorry for not rising up against the dictators who have ruled the Muslim world for decades.

We are so sorry for allowing corruption to spread so fast and so deep in the Muslim world that many of our youth lost hope.

We are so sorry for allowing our religious leaders to relegate women to the status of forth class citizens at best and sub-humans at worse.

We are so sorry.

For more information visit our website at: http://www.freemuslims.org/

[italia23]

I have a great deal of respect for this Kamal Nawash and his organization. Whenever the statement came up that "We shouldn't blame all Muslims for terrorism." I would answer with the fact that I had never seen a Muslim leader stand up and condemn such attacks to a greater Muslim audience. (I apoligize if there has been an instance that I have missed) But I will be sure to take this into account whenever a future discussion arises and I definitely plan on relaying the idea of this organization and their website as well.

[igloo]

Where is the Muslim outrage?

Jeff Jacoby (archive)

September 10, 2004 | Print | Send

They are still burying the victims of the latest atrocity committed by evildoers professing Islam -- the slaughter of hundreds of children, teachers, and parents in an elementary school in Beslan, Russia. And from Muslims the world over, as usual, has come mostly silence.

There have been no public demonstrations by Muslims anxious to make it clear how outraged and sickened they are that anyone could commit such unspeakable deeds as an act of Islamic faith. There has been no anguished outcry by Islam's leading imams and sheiks. Prominent Muslim organizations in the West have not called press conferences to express their disgust and anger. Once again the world has witnessed a savage episode of Islamist terror, and once again it strains to hear a convincing rejection of the terrorists from those who should care most about Islam's reputation.

That is not to say there has been no criticism at all. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin to assure him that "this terrorist act . . . goes against religious teachings and violates human and moral values." Syria's official news agency decried the massacre as "a terrorist, cowardly action." Sheik Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi of Al-Azhar University in Cairo lambasted the murderers for "taking Islam as cover" and said that "those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims."

But these are boilerplate denunciations, practically meaningless -- particularly when they come from sources that sustain Islamist fanaticism (Saudi Arabia), shelter and support terrorists (Syria), or defend suicide bombers as praiseworthy "martyrs" (Tantawi). They condemn no terrorists or terror organizations by name. They offer no help in destroying the infrastructure that recruits, funds, and trains them. And they contain no hint that the global scourge of Islamofascist jihad is a cancer eating away at the Muslim world.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which issues dozens of press releases every month, had nothing to say about the bloodbath in Russia until I requested a comment on Tuesday -- four days after the mass-murder occurred and nearly a week after the terrorists, shouting "Allahu akbar," first seized the school. The statement CAIR then issued doesn't even acknowledge that the killers were Muslim:

No words can describe the horror and grief generated by the deaths of so many innocent people at the hands of those who dishonor the cause they espouse. We offer sincere condolences to the families of the victims and call for a swift resolution to the conflict in that troubled region that will let all people live in peace and freedom.

At least CAIR went through the motions of condemning the butchery. Other voices preached a different message altogether.

Ali Abdullah, an Islamic scholar in Bahrain, announced that the bloodshed in Beslan "is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims." In London, Islamist cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed said he would support hostage-taking at British schools if it were done for a good reason. "If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain," he told the Daily Telegraph, "it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq."

Fortunately, a few Muslim commentators have denounced the evil being done in the name of Islam, and have done so courageously and unambiguously. (The Middle East Media Research Institute has compiled their reactions at www.memri.org.) One in particular stands out: an extraordinary column in the pan-Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat by Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the Al-Arabiya news channel. (An English translation was published in the Telegraph.)

"It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists," he begins, "but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.

"The hostage-takers of the children in Beslan were Muslims. The hostage-takers and murderers of the Nepalese chefs and workers in Iraq were also Muslims. . . . The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses, and buildings all over the world were Muslim. . . . "What a pathetic record. What an abominable `achievement.' Does all this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies, and our culture?. . .

"We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses; we cannot accept them as related to us. . . . They are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image. We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly implemented by Muslim men and women.

"We cannot redeem our extremist youths, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the sheiks who thought it ennobling to re-invent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges."

When it is no longer astonishing to encounter such sentiments in the Muslim world, we will we know that the corner has been turned in the war against Islamist terror.

[igloo]

Muslim writer: 'We are all bin Laden'

Islamic world's inability to condemn leaves impression of support

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Posted: September 11, 2004

1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

A former top Kuwaiti official says the Islamic world's inability to criticize Osama bin Laden leaves the impression Muslims universally support the al-Qaida terrorist leader.

Dr. Sa'd Bin Tefla, a journalist and former Kuwaiti minister of information, wrote an article in the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat titled "We are all bin Laden," reports the Middle East Media Research Institute.

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Tefla said much damage has been caused to Muslims because the world is contrasting Muslims' tepid approach to bin Laden to their overwhelming response in the 1980s to British author Salman Rushdie and his controversial book "The Satanic Verses."

Against Rushdie, Tefla wrote, "We rattled and sharpened all of our rhetorical sabers, our religious legal rulings [fatwa], [alerted] our guards, our ports, our airports and our border crossings in order to prevent his entering [our countries] and the distribution of his book, since it does damage to Islam."

Protests erupted at British embassies all over the Islamic world and Rushdie dolls were burned along with copies of his book, he recalled. In a protest in Pakistan, nine people were killed and others were injured by police.

"Religious legal rulings were disseminated one after another banning Salman Rushdie's book and calling for him to be killed," Tefla said. "Iran earmarked a reward of one million dollars for whoever would implement Imam Khomeini's fatwa and kill Salman Rushdie."

But where are the fatwas against bin Laden? he asked.

"Despite the fact that bin Laden murdered thousands of innocents in the name of our religion and despite the damage that he has caused to Muslims everywhere, and especially to innocent Muslims in the West whose life is much better than the life of Muslims in Islamic lands, to this date not a single fatwa has been issued calling for the killing of bin Laden, on the pretext that bin Laden still proclaims 'there is no God other than Allah,'" Tefla wrote.

He points out no protests have been held to condemn bin Laden, though "perhaps there were some that demonstrated in his favor."

Muslim satellite television channels "competed amongst themselves in broadcasting his sermons and fatwas, instead of preventing their dissemination as they did in the case of Rushdie's book," Tefla wrote.

"Have we earmarked a reward for anyone who kills bin Laden as we did for anyone who kills Rushdie on account of his book?

"With our equivocal stance on bin Laden, we from the very start left the world with the impression that we are all bin Laden."