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, :
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.