It’s amazing how in the US all this is against Islam, but so many Muslim leaders elsewhere don’t seem to have gotten the message. From Aftenposten, with thanks to Ali Dashti:
The director of The Islamic Association in Norway has defended suicide bombing under certain circumstances in a question and answer page at the web site islam.no. Progress Party leader Carl I. Hagen said in a press release that the comment did not surprise him, and renewed his offensive against sectors of the Muslim community.
“If the war is legal, seen from an Islamic viewpoint, and if one has does not have the possibility to harm the enemy with other means than offering one’s own life, then this is legal,” said Basim Ghozlan in reply to a young boy’s question about suicide bombing, radio station Kanal 24 reports.
Ghozlan also emphasized that such actions could not harm the innocent.
“The necessity of not harming innocents must not be forgotten. Unfortunately we see many places where suicide bombers hurt far more innocents than those they wish to harm. In Iraq innocent people are killed nearly every day by such blind bombs. This is not jihad. The prophet would never encourage such a thing,” Ghozlan wrote.
The problem with this caveat, of course, is that Muslim leaders have shown again and again how elastic their idea of “innocent” is. Osama would not have brought down the Towers if he had thought the people in them were “innocent.”