And here is an illustration of the articles on moderation by Fitzgerald and Spencer below. For there is no doubt that easygoing Ziad Jarrah's new Hamburg friends played upon his self-identification as a Muslim and plied him with Qur'an and Hadith to convince him that he should, and indeed must, pursue the way of jihad. Muslim spokesmen who identify themselves as moderates have yet to mount any coherent response to this phenomenon, and some even insist that to do so is unnecessary -- as if Islamic radicalism will somehow evanesce and leave only the benign and peaceful Islam of their imaginings and of fast-disappearing cultural habit.
From Expatica, with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:
HAMBURG - A former fiancee described to a German court on Wednesday how an easy-going Lebanese student became into an Islamic extremist, and let her sit in a Florida flight simulator as he trained for the 11 September 2001 suicide attacks.She said Ziad Jarrah, who crashed one of four hijacked airliners in a Pennsylvania field, had been lured into extremism by the circle of friends he made when he moved to the German city of Hamburg.
The witness, who is Turkish by birth, said she had no inkling of the terrorist attack.
"When I first met Ziad in 1996, he was pretty easy-going," she told the court trying Mounir al-Motassadeq, a Moroccan student accused of membership in the terrorist group.
The change began in 1997, when he moved from Greifswald in provincial Germany to Hamburg.
"His Hamburg acquaintances led to him changing," she said. Jarrah had been studying aircraft-building in Hamburg when he fell in with the group, dominated by Mohammed Atta, apparently the lead suicide pilot.
She said Jarrah decided in spring 2000 to undergo pilot training after he had been absent for several months.
Investigators say he spent that time in Afghanistan doing military training in an al-Qaeda camp where he was recruited to become a hijack pilot. She said he would not say where he had been, telling her it was better for her not to know.
OT:
I've posted about this before,but since we are getting a steady influx of new "regulars" it seemed like a good time to repeat it.
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CGW
Seems to me that to *properly* read the koran and the hadith is in itself an act of or a gate to extremism. If so, the only way to counter extremism would be to 'sanitize' these texts and drastically tone-down their interpretations.
With greater awaremeness of what mosque sermons can belch out, there are proposals in Germany and holland for conducting sermons only in the local languages and not in Arabic.
Also, a law that says all religious literature should have a local language translation alongsaide would go a long way in redressing the imbalance in the first. Faulty and misleading translations can be grounds for a lawsuit etc. Just as all cigarette packets have to containh mandatory warnings, so must all religious literature in foriegn languages contain a mandatory local language translation.
Think of it as the same way a con artist first hooks the mark to become involved and begins a slow conditioning to achieve objective of relieving that person of all his earthly possessions or to participate in some criminal activity. The same procedure in being used, but the outcome is conditioning that person to commit crimes in the name of religious feeling, desensitizing to the value of human life and overcoming early ethical training.
A greater and more dangerous conditioning is done to the very young that have not had the time in their young lives to develop the moral sense that some Muslims say is given to Muslim youth, and the reason they claim that extremists have "hijacked the religion." The young that are conditioned in this way are almost always lost causes as violence and murder is the only ethical behavior that has been taught.
The Koran, Sira and ahadiths back up the validity of this training. Until Muslims refute those parts of these documents and declare that Mohammed is not the perfect man, then, even with protests to the contrary, extremism will resurge at intervals to them and us.
Islam and Muhammed are the true paths to Allah and the faith is based on peace,Love,and tolerance
for all of Gods children.
They'll even behead or slaughter anyone that says is isn't so,this is the proof of how loyal Muslims are to the tenets of Islam.
No Muhammed - Know peace