Ahmad Wali Siddiqui is quite a severe Misunderstander of Islam, since we all know that Sharia is a perfectly benign thing, completely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and absolutely nothing like the hellish legal code that oppresses women and non-Muslims (the few that remain) in Afghanistan. And we all know, on pain of charges of “Islamophobia,” that jihad is an interior spiritual struggle, or, at best, a struggle for self-defense, and has nothing to do with terrorism. Somehow Ahmad Wali Siddiqui misunderstood all this, and even more unbelievable, he apparently found quite a few Muslims who were entirely in sync with his point of view. What a shock! How will the learned analysts explain this? Mr. Esposito? Mr. Ernst? Anyone? Anyone?
“Terror suspect went to Afghanistan to fight jihad,” by Claudia Isabel Rittel for the Associated Press, March 20:
KOBLENZ, Germany (AP) “” A German-Afghan man whose information prompted terrorism warnings across Europe in 2010 told a court Tuesday he traveled to the Afghan border region with the intention of fighting there, not of returning home to carry out attacks.
Ahmad Wali Siddiqui told the Koblenz state court in the second day of his trial that he and a group of others bought iPhones, Sony laptops and other electronics on credit in Germany, then sold them on eBay to fund their 2009 trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“We wanted to fly there to live life according to (Islam’s) Sharia law and fight jihad,” he said, using the Arabic word for holy war. “We didn’t want to ever return.”
The 37-year-old faces a possible 10-year sentence, if convicted of membership in a terrorist organization….
Though he never specifically admitted to being a member of either terrorist group, he told the court he had gone to the region with the intention of joining al-Qaida but first encountered two German-speaking members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, so went with them instead.
He did acknowledge, however, he also knew exactly what the IMU was.
“Naturally we knew that this was a jihad group, nothing else,” he said. “They make propaganda and fight against Americans.”….