He was depressed, you see, and unskilled, and that led him to Misunderstand Islam. The judicial rulings in "Provisions of the Rules of Jihad"? Ignore them. They are of no importance. He was depressed, remember. He was unskilled. And he doesn't believe any of it, either. "Jihad book editor 'renounced terrorism,'" by Katelyn Catanzariti for AAP, July 31 (thanks to all who sent this in):
A Sydney man who produced a do-it-yourself jihad book did not realise he was committing a crime but has since renounced terrorism and violence, his sentencing judge has been told.
Whew! What a relief!
In September last year, a NSW Supreme Court jury found Belal Khazaal guilty of making a document - between September 20 and 23, 2003 - connected with assistance in a terrorist act and knowing about that connection.The 110-page book, in Arabic, entitled Provisions of the Rules of Jihad - short judicial rulings and organisational instructions for fighters and mujahideen against infidels, contained advice about terrorist acts such as exploding bombs, shooting down planes and assassinating people such as former US president George W Bush.
The jury could not reach a verdict on a second charge, that by posting the book online, Khazaal attempted to incite others to engage in a terrorist act.
During sentencing submissions on Friday the court was told Khazaal had no concept that what he had done was considered illegal.
"His explanation was he didn't understand it was a crime but he understood he'd been convicted," psychiatrist Dr Olav Nielsen told Justice Megan Latham.
Lawyers for the 38-year-old from Lakemba in Sydney's southwest told the judge that as soon as Khazaal realised that what he had done was a crime, he removed the information from the website.
"That he removed it from the site should mitigate the offence," George Thomas said.
"If he was so obsessed and extremist in his position, do you think he'd care enough to take it off? Of course he wouldn't."
Why not? An obsessed extremist can't try to save his own skin?
"He completely renounced terrorism and violence."However, crown prosecutor Peter Neil SC argued Khazaal had shown no remorse whatsoever.
"There is a complete failure on the part of the offender to acknowledge having done anything wrong at all," he said.
A psychologist gave evidence to the court that it was "highly likely" Khazaal had been suffering from depression brought about by a car accident many years before and separation from his parents as a child.
"This was the behaviour of a person who was living an isolated life ... he was not educated in a formal sense ... he is a person who took to religion and it was conservative Islam ... necessarily extremist in its nature ... and he lost his way," Mr Thomas said.
"He did exercise very poor judgment.
"If perhaps he was more skilled, more educated, if his life had developed differently - if he was more alive to the changes in the law that had taken place, perhaps there would have been a different outcome ... things may well have been very, very different."...
Comments originally made to this article, during the IntenseDebate era.
Part the first.
CORNELIUS - (quoting lawyer George Thomas) "This was the behaviour of a person who was living an isolated life ... he was not educated in a formal sense ... he is a person who took to religion and it was conservative Islam ... necessarily extremist in its nature ... and he lost his way"
- What an extraordinary admission! Rabid Islamophobe!
SHIVA said - Most people when depressed turn to booze, but moslems cannot find relief with booze so they turn to bombz
DUHSWAMI said = "He completely renounced terrorism and violence."
This comes under the 'yeah', 'sure' dept...I will tell you a secret...I have heard 'I'll be good, I'll be good, I wont do it anymore', so many times, that if I had a dollar for each one, I could buy one really fine Havana cigar...
And this line: "If perhaps he was more skilled, more educated, if his life had developed differently - if he was more alive to the changes in the law that had taken place"
There's a lot of 'if''s in there...The problem with all those if's is that they don't take into account Allah's predestination...He would not have turned out differently unless Allah willed it, and apparently Allah did not. Belal Khazaal is right where Allah put him and wants him, and he will stay there until Allah changes his mind and wills something else...Allah is not a very good friend...
JETCAL said - "If perhaps he was more skilled, more educated.."
And he could still put together a 110 page [book] and smart enough to post it on the internet?
I can buy the remorse, I can buy him admiting he made a mistake....except for,
"....contained advice about terrorist acts such as exploding bombs, shooting down planes and assassinating people such as former US president George W Bush...."
How could he not know that was illegal?
-DOGWITHOUTSLIPPERS - with the aid of a lying lawyer!
-GYMGAL - that was my first thought too! Uneducated but computer savvy, literate and smart enough to lie when caught.
More BS.
-DUMBLEDORESARMY told GYMGAL - Crown Prosecutor Peter Neil SC seems to have his commonsense button switched ON, and to be equipped with a fully-functioning BS detector - "crown prosecutor Peter Neil SC argued Khazaal had shown no remorse whatsoever.
"There is a complete failure on the part of the offender to acknowledge having done anything wrong at all," he said."
-GRAVENIMAGE, citing another poster above "' - If perhaps he was more skilled, more educated..'
And he could still put together a 110 page and smart enough to post it on the internet?"
.....................
Just what I was thinking. For most people, *writing a book* would not be their first response to being poorly educated. And how did you like the reference to his being depressed because he was separated from his parents as a child? The man is 38 years old!
DJRZ - /sarc
OK, so we're ALL agreed that this POOOOORRR, victimized, formerly depressed, . . . rabid jihadist, jew-hating . . . NO, WAIT . . . I mean, peaceful, spiritual, honest Muslim is COMPLETELY reformed and non-violent.
. . . I mean, after all, he SAID he has renounced jihad, so we HAVE to believe him.
Right?!?
Ok, then.
/sarc off
COMERCIO said - We probably have to feel guilty and pay a monthly fee for the unfortunate terrorist.
It wasn't him, it was the society that alienates people like him and pushes then to become terrorists! Poor assassins, please accept our apologies!
BOAKAI NGOMBU - (quoting)" ... a complete failure ... to acknowledge having done anything wrong at all...."
said - that's because he adhered to Koranic teaching, by which he was made aware of himself behaving correctly.
the lawyers argue as if conscience cannot be seared and behavior modified
PERSIKAS -(quoting) "During sentencing submissions on Friday the court was told Khazaal had no concept that what he had done was considered illegal."
said - If so , he's a danger and should be locked away from peole who do have some idea of right and wrong
ALARMED PIG FARMER said - "He completely renounced terrorism and violence".
Then he gave a court room speech in which he explicitly denounced Allah, Mohammed, the Koran, the Hadiths, and sacralized histories, right?
*** Bukhari:Vol 1 Bk 2 No 25 ***
Mohammed was asked, "What is the best deed?" He replied, "To believe in Allah and His Apostle Mohammed." The questioner then asked, "What is the next best in goodness?" He replied, "To participate in Jihad, religious fighting in Allah's Cause."
For my part, if the good Mr. Khazaal pronounced and denounced and announced and renounced Jihad, then I have no respect for him as a Moslem.
*** 2:106 ***
But then again, maybe this dude has a whole new take on Islam. He should hit the beach and surf and hit on white girls in thongs and loosen up a little bit. That'd be edifying."
(END FIRST PART OF ORIGINAL COMMENTS TO ARTICLE)
Comments as originally made: part the second.
Mr Fitzgerald re-posted one of his excellent essays, from 2006, still perfectly relevant to the case in hand.
HUGH - "In Islam there is only Islam. Everything is in Islam, even Mandelbrot's fractals and Witten's string theory and the helix of DNA. It's all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Oh, there are Muslims -- inattentive or slightly lapsed Muslims, the kind we like to call "moderate Muslims -- who may not wish to cut out entirely all of human knowledge, but that attitude flies in the face of true-blue Islam, the Islam taken most to heart by the most primitive of Believers.
"And, let's face it, since most Muslims, like most people, are primitive, and since Islam helps to keep people mentally submissive, and encourages a much higher degree of tolerated or accepted primitiveness (intellectual and moral), we should not be surprised to learn that in the past 1350 years the number of books translated into Arabic is smaller than the number of books translated into Spanish in Spain every year. Of what use is the stuff produced by Infidels? How can they be expected to come up with anything of value?
Three years ago I wrote an article ("Last Thoughts About Cathy Young") about someone who, though the child of refugees from Soviet Russia, though liking to think of herself as a supreme rationalist, in her writing about Islam seemed suddenly stripped of such a faculty, and excerpts from that article are relevant here:
"She [Cathy Young] does the same with this business of Muslims simply "snapping." [How often is it merely a matter of "snapping"?] Here is how she puts it:
" Because, as we all know, non-Muslims never snap and go on shooting sprees at work or at school. But, of course, when Muslims do it, it's different".
'Well, in fact it is different. And let us explain why. When non-Muslims, Infidels, "snap," they have any number of people or things to blame, and they may, or may not, seek to wreak revenge, to "even the score," with all kinds of people.
'But Muslims have been provided [with] the mental grid of Islam, and on that grid the world is laid, uncompromisingly divided between Believer and Infidel, between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.
'And if a Muslim "snaps," or is simply depressed, then he has the Infidel to blame, to find fault with. For the Nazis, it was Treitschke's "Die Juden sind unser Ungluck." For Muslims, it is, in a less hideously violent key, the Infidels who are "unser Ungluck." Cathy Young, knowing almost nothing of Islam, but presumably having plausible, friendly, affable, possibly ignorant-of-Islam Muslim friends (raised in the United States, unfamiliar with the texts, unfamiliar with what effect those texts ordinarily have on people who take them seriously and are raised in Muslim societies where nothing else gets through), prefers not to see this.
'The problem is that in any society, millions and millions of people at one time or another fall into depressions. In the United States, more than 15 million people at any one time are said to be severely depressed.
'When this happens to Infidels, they can blame all sorts of things: their parents, their children, their siblings, Amerika, The System, the Republicans, the Democrats, immigration, affirmative action, lack of affirmative action, crooked financial analysts, Wall Street speculators, Chinese and Indian competition, Fate, the stars in their alignment, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level -- even, at times, themselves.
'What happens when a Muslim finds himself in disarray? You are Muhammad Atta, and things are not working out in Hamburg, where you set off to study urban planning, and you are not the great success you were supposed to be, and the Western world is so baffling, so confusing. You are Albanna, dancing the night away in cocaine-soaked clubs of West Hollywood, and you are piling failure upon failure, for you failed to establish a practice as a lawyer in Jordan, and you need to find a solution more permanent and steady than that offered by that cocaine, those girls, that music by Nine Inch Nails.
'When "Mike" Hawash, an Intel engineer with an American wife and three American children, earning $360,000 a year and the respect of his colleagues, turned to Islam, and more Islam, and then to deed over his house to his wife, and to make plans to fight the Americans in Afghanistan, after the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, was he a "nut case"?
'Or was he someone who, in his recent return to Islam, only reflecting his need for Islam and more Islam as a stay against confusion and depression?
'And if the Answer for Muslims, even those who are not especially observant, those who seem to be thoroughly Westernized and to have been the recipients of the best the West has to offer, is Islam and more Islam, then the Western world, the world of Infidels, owes it to itself to protect its own legacy, and to keep out those who, in moments of the kind of doubt or depression that come on all of us, will always and everywhere turn, or re-turn, to Islam.
'And who are these Muslims who, in Cathy Young's phrase, simply "snap"?
'Did "Mike" Hawash "snap"? Or did he over a very long time become more religious, and then systematically deed over his house to his wife, write his will, and make other plans before going off, hoping to kill Americans in Afghanistan? Did Richard Reid simply "snap"? Did Jose Padilla? Did the people in Lackawanna, or in Texas, or in Oregon, or in Virginia, "snap" in their plotting? How many of the attacks planned, or then carried out, are those of Muslims who simply "snapped"? Did Taheri-azar, the student who had been raised in the United States by parents who had fled Iran, and who by all accounts were largely indifferent to Islam? Taheri-azar in his mental disarray and ill-digested bits of philosophizing (in his pages of handwritten explanation explaining his motivation, in between his perfectly doctrinaire citing of Islamic tenets and Qur'anic passages, he also manages to repeat, as if to show he was a deep thinker, a single phrase from Descartes, no doubt picked up in some Intro to Western Phil. course -- "clear and distinct ideas.") Did he "snap"? No. He planned for quite a while.
'But let us posit that the single case Cathy Young describes as unfair to mention -- that of the man who killed fellow workers because they teased him about being a Muslim.
'Does this tell us anything? How many people are teased about this or that, and how many of them "snap" and then try to kill those teasing them? And is it not important to note that the target of Muslim blame for all possible setbacks, of the kind we all experience, is always and everywhere the Infidel?
This is one point that Cathy Young fails to grasp. There are so many others."
[Posted by Hugh at July 8, 2006]
And now for part the third.
TSCOTTME said - "I wasn't there. If I was there I didn't shoot anyone. If I did shoot anyone it was in self-defense.
CZECH6 said - (quoting) "If perhaps he was more skilled, more educated, if his life had developed differently ..."
- Yes, perhaps he could have become a chemist, and devoted his energy to designing and building car bombs and efficient methods for poisoning the infidel water supply.
Or, perhaps he could have become an electrical engineer, and designed triggers for Islamic nuclear bombs in Iran to better terrorize the Europeans and the Jews of Isreal.
Or, perhaps he could have become a doctor, and learned how to inject infidel patients with blood thinners so they bleed to death, or how to prescribe the wrong medication so the infidel patients suffer and then die prematurely.
Think of the endless possibilities for jihad against Dar al Harb.
Economic status of the perpetrators has nothing to do with the sociopathic evil we are witnessing across the globe every day--Islam has everything to do with it."