Ramadan bombs along nicely: nearly 1000 dead so far

* and they didn’t die from fasting: most of them were murdered by their co-religionists. But because islam ‘is not a synonym for terrorism’- as our resident sharia advocate Yusuf Irfan hastens to assure us, we have nothing to worry about except global warming, right? Lets all go back to sleep; nothing to see here!

                                              

Congratulations to the Religion of Peace for another successful Ramadan!

                         *  225 women killed for honour in six months

This year’s numbers:  903 dead and 1638 injured across 16     countries during Islam’s holiest month!  

                                     Latest Offerings from the Religion of Peace: 

                                          

Ramadan bombings in Iraq kill 32

Ramadan: The month of jihad. “Ramadan bombings kill 32 people,” from Agence France-Presse, September 29 (thanks to JW):

FOUR bombs killed at least 32 people and wounded scores in busy districts of Baghdad overnight as Iraqis shopped and broke their fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, police said.

* Next conflict is already in the making: Sheikh Qaradawi claims “Shia are Heretics”

A car bomb exploded in a car park in central Baghdad’s busy Karrada shopping district, followed quickly by a roadside bomb nearby. The double strike killed at least 19 people and wounded 72, police said.

A short time earlier a bomb exploded in a parked car in Baghdad’s Shurta neighbourhood in the early evening, killing at least 12 people and wounding 35, police said.

At about the same time another bomb attached to a car in the nearby Hay al-Amil neighbourhood killed one person….

 

Irfan Yusuf: “Islam isn’t a synonym for terrorism”

4:00AM Friday Sep 26, 2008
Irfan Yusuf

Another deadly terrorist attack killing up to 60 people has struck a Pakistani city.

A truck laden with a tonne of explosives crashed into the front entrance of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel.

The hotel was packed with Pakistanis attending various meals to break their Ramadan fasts.

The timing of the attack – during the last 10 nights of Ramadan – could not have been more sacrilegious. Even pre-Islamic Arabs regarded the month of Ramadan as sacred, a time when tribal wars would cease.

Yet for Islamist terrorists, no time is too sacred to pursue their ends through bloodshed. Thus far this year, Pakistan has been the subject of more suicide attacks than Afghanistan or Iraq.

In the West, too many self-styled terrorism “experts” want us to forget that this latest attack is yet another reminder that the vast majority of victims of Islamist terror are themselves ordinary Muslims.

Allegedly conservative cultural warriors often claim that law enforcement and anti-terrorism agencies maintaining good relations with representatives of ethno-religious communities and preventing acts of terrorism are mutually exclusive.

The recent conclusion of Australia’s largest terrorism trial in Melbourne showed the evidence of these community members proved crucial in the prosecution’s case.

In fact, if a recently leaked British intelligence report is any indication, it seems Muslim extremists drawn to terrorism have as little knowledge of Islam as their non-Muslim (and too frequently anti-Muslim) cultural warrior equivalents.

British media recently detailed a leaked briefing report by MI5’s behavioural science unit which contradicts many widely held assumptions on why some young people are attracted to fringe theologies and extremist violence. The report looked at several hundred people “involved in or closely associated with violent, extremist activity”.

Most had secular upbringing, lacked religious literacy and engaged in irreligious behaviour including drinking and taking drugs. It said “we cannot make assumptions about involvement in terrorism based on the colour of someone’s skin, their ethnic heritage or their nationality”.

Sadly, broader community discussion is less nuanced, advocating a “King Herod” approach influenced by a tiny number of cultural warriors and sectarian bigots.

Such voices cast negative aspersions on some 1.3 billion Muslims that they would never cast on any other faith or cultural group. By marginalising ordinary Muslim citizens, the cultural warriors are helpful to the likes of Osama bin Laden.

Still, we mustn’t live in denial. So much of today’s terror happens in the name of Islam. But we must always ask the question, whose Islam?

Is it the religion of the first London bombing victim to be buried, the 20-year-old bank clerk Shahara Islam who bore the name of the religion in whose misguided service terrorists killed her and 51 other innocents?

Modern theocratic Islamist ideologues promote worshipping a political ideology, not a divine being. They occupy the theological fringe, most knowing little of 14 centuries of development in the theological, spiritual and legal sciences forming the corpus of mainstream Islam.

To claim men like bin Laden represent mainstream Islam is as ridiculous as alleging Christianity is represented by the likes of Radovan Karadzic.

As congregations, communities and nations, we must join hands to fight the cancer of terrorism. Terrorist bombs don’t discriminate on the basis of race or religion.

* Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer based sharia advocate currently writing Once Were Radicals, a book exploring how young Australian Muslims of his generation navigated into and out of political Islam.

 

 

“He who fights that Islam should be superior fights in Allah’s cause” 
                                Muhammad, Prophet of Islam

9/28/2008 (Kandahar, Afghanistan) – A top policewoman is gunned down by the Taliban, who also put her young son in a coma during the attack.

9/28/2008 (Tizi Wazu, Algeria) – Two security guards are brutally slain by Muslim fundamentalists at a fake checkpoint.

9/27/2008 (Matta, Pakistan) – Sunni extremists kill three house servants when they blow up several homes.

9/27/2008 (Mogadishu, Somalia) – Islamic militia fire mortars into an airport, killing at least nine.

9/27/2008 (Damascus, Syria) – A suicidal Sunni bombs a Shia shrine, slaughtering seventeen innocents.

9/27/2008 (Delhi, India) – A young boy and an old man die following a bombing by Muslim radicals at an outdoor market.