“Southeast Asian radicals” — radical Muslims, that is, not Maoists — “are divided over the wisdom of attacking hotels, nightclubs and other ‘soft targets’ where Muslims may be killed alongside Westerners — an internal split that could weaken the terrorist enterprise, authorities told The Associated Press.”
This is because a Muslim must not kill another Muslim: “If a man kills a believer intentionally, his recompense is Hell, to abide therein forever” (Sura 4:93). Radical Muslims get around this by considering the Muslims they’re killing to be essentially unbelievers (i.e., “infidels like the Turks,” to use a phrase from Osama bin Laden’s meeting with a Saudi sheikh shortly after 9/11). Obviously this justification can’t be used everywhere.
But anyway, no one has any trouble with killing non-Muslims: “Some militants inside the al-Qaida-linked Southeast Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiyah want their jihad, or holy war, to focus on fighting Christians in certain regions of Indonesia rather than bombing Western targets where Muslims die, too, according to government officials, defense attorneys and an intelligence adviser to Indonesia.
“The debate among Indonesian militants appears to have intensified after the Aug. 5 bombing of the JW Marriott in Jakarta – whose 12 fatalities were mostly Muslim. A prominent group of Muslim defense lawyers told AP they would not accept any Marriott bombers as clients.
“After the Marriott bombing, several senior militants close to Zulkarnaen, Jemaah’s Islamiyah’s purported operations chief, expressed displeasure because most the victims were Muslim, said the senior intelligence adviser who asked that his name not be used.”