I still can’t get over the inflammatory article I read yesterday. I e-mailed the editor-in-chief of the paper and complained. I encourage everyone else to do so as well. As somebody who has worked in different newsrooms over the last seven years, trust me when I tell you that feedback has an impact. Also, upon hubby’s suggestion, I translated the article into English for those who couldn’t read it in Arabic. Part of the article is below, the rest is in the extended section of this post.
Al-Banna family in al-Salt received greetings for son Raed’s martyrdom in an Iraqi resistance operation
Al-Banna family in al-Salt organized a martyr’s wedding yesterday for their son Raed Mansur al-Banna who blew himself up in an explosive-laden car that he was driving in Baghdad in al-Hilla on March 1.
The father of the martyr proudly received the well-wishers in the tribe’s reception hall in central Jada in the center of the city of Salt. The story of Raed is similar to that of many youth from the city that left for Jihad across the globe. Raed’s appointment with martyrdom came on March 1, when he blew himself up inside an explosive-laden car that he was driving in al-Hilla in Baghdad that resulted in the killing of over 133 people, the majority of whom were Americans.
Raed left his house three months prior to the incident and told his parents he was going to Saudi to perform al Umra (lesser Haj). Raed had just returned from Umra a few weeks before, as he went to take part in the anti-terrorism course organized by the Saudi government, according to his bother Ahmad Mansur al-Banna.
Raed, who was born in 1973, got his BA degree in Law from Muta University in 1995. During the events of September 11, 2001 he was working in California, said his brother. He noted that this incident [Sept. 11] changed him from a normal guy to a religiously devoted one, who committed himself to praying in the mosque while standing side by side with the Egyptian preacher Wajdi Ghanim in the mosques of California.
The news of his martyrdom came two days after he committed the martyrdom operation when someone claiming to be part of the guys of Aljazeera called Raed’s brother and told him the news of the Raed’s martyrdom along with another person from Jordan named Safwan al-Abbadi. He said Raed had been martyred two days previous in an operation executed by the Iraqi resistance.
The caller said that in order to prove that Raed did the operation he would tell his brother the names of Raed’s relatives and that Raed had traveled to the US and UK and had earned a BA in Law and had worked as a lawyer for three years in Jordan. He also said that Raed had requested a payment of $100 be made to someone that had business dealings with him in the US. But the caller said that they should wait before they announced his martyrdom just to make sure.
I am hesitant to step into these conversations, but:
1. I think the key point is that this press report said that the majority of those killed were Americans, which appears to be an outright distortion that nobody has disputed. I recently read an interview with King Abdullah where he was critical of the quality of the press, and perhaps he was talking about this.
2. hubby, maybe the bomber blew up those Iraqis to save them from occupation? Seriously, that is an odd way to strike at America, and I suspect would simply alienate the insurgents from most Iraqis. The analogy between this and Palestinian execution of collaborators does not hold. That I am familiar with. Individual collaborators are identified by armed groups and killed for allegedly assisting Israeli operations. They do not kill large numbers of Palestinians who they consider to be vaguely coopoerating with the Israelis. They take great pains to avoid open civil war, and if one of the armed groups for example blew up a meeting of a peaceful Fatah faction (a much more specific attack than the Iraqi one in question) I believe they would be ostracized. Also, I think most reasonable that look at that process would argue that since there are no trials, it is an arbitrary and often misused excuse to kill people. It sometimes is used for personal grudges, and sometimes just to silence dissent.
3. I think that MetalorDie is right in that these types of attacks are usually counterproductive. Victor Hanson did an interesting study of Japanese suicide tactics used at Okinawa in “Ripples of Battle” and one of his conclusions was that the tactics used by the Japanese were fierce, and they contributed in two results to the outlook of Americans: 1) a reduced value of Japanese (and he thinks this carried over to other Asian wars) lives, thinking “well, if they don’t care if they die, why should we take pains to care” – a kind of send send them to Allah mentality, and 2) rather than making the Americans rethink their goals (of defeating Japan) it made them change tactics from a ground invasion to nuclear weapons. I think another example of this sort of result is the decline (political decimation) of the Israeli Labor Party after the current Intifadah.
I think many of the people here arguing against the suicide bomber are not people who accept occupations. WE just dont believe in using suicide bombings, while taking innocent lives with you, as a smart form of resistance. It just does not work, and will never work.
Resistance is good. One should always resist an evil occupying force, whom ever it may be. BUt if you are going to resist, resist the occupier. In the case of Iraq, the resistance should fight the occupying force, not kill innocent people. And it is not like most of them were innocent by standards. This guy went to the funeral to do this. HE was standing outside a military compund. It was a funeral for gosh sakes.
In the case of Palestine and ISrael, palestinians who want to resist and physically fight for their cause, should fight the resistance, not murder innoncent Israelis. NOw i know you are going to say, well the IDF kills innocent palestinians all the time. But i think one thing we have learned in the past years, an eye for an eye does not work.
LIke i have said, resist the occupation. That is fine. But do it in a brave way. Dont be a coward and hide among a big crowd and blow yourself up taking innocent people with you.
hubby, what i said about the particulars is that it is difficult to judge an incident given that we have known. do u know what i mean?
i agree, this was a terrible act and as unjust as zarqawi’s beheadings or bin ladnins 911. even if it was just one person killed and not 47. the quran states that the killing of one innocent life is as if u have killed all of humanity.
think of it this way. is it the social norm to murder people? do you personally go out and kill people? i doubt it. because u are part of the social fabric which says it is wrong, perhaps u are part of a religion which states the same, but all in all you do not do so because you are both socially conditioned that way and personally believe it to be immoral. yet there are still murders happening in whatever society you join right? if i am jordanian and a jordanian kills someone im not going to assumer all jordanians are therefore murderers. same here. there is a resistance fighting the good fight and there are those that are not. there are those such as zarqawi taking advantage of the chaos, playing both teams on another. They are our “abu-ghriebs” so to speak. and then there are those going after the americans. what i said about particulars applies here, its difficult to know which is which. hence the generalizations.
how many reports since 2003 have we read in which information was false. even some american news sources dared to correct themselves. the media is feeding us what we need to know. we listen to CNN, an american news channel passing as the world’s news.
how can i trust that this person which blew himself up was part of the resistance? there have been reports on the internet that some men work with the americans to blow themselves up under the condition that their families be looked after. a deal that is appealing to some in a nation where money and food is becoming rapidly scarce. how can i trust what i hear on the news when several of the beheadings were staged by americans and their video cameras in their homes?
very much like the x-files…..trust no one
except for logic of course 😉
Well following your occupation yields resistance model and the “you do not see Shiites and Sunnis killing each other” theorem I offer this:
And before you go suggesting things like “we just don’t know all the particulars” on this one, I’d ask you what particulars would you suggest might justify such an action? Do you suppose all those gathered were culpable vis-à-vis the American occupation? If you suggest that they are now martyrs for the cause, I’d ask how you can say that? It seems to me they were targets.
jareer, people will kill each other, its inevitable. Being a muslim does not save you from the essential human flaws anymore than putting ure hand on the bible in a court of law will render you unable to tell a lie. But ask yourself this…
why did those events take place? was it over religion? was darfur over religion or politics, land and power? was iran vs. iraq, saddam vs. kurds, over religion or politics, land and power? ah so the obvious has become clearer now. once you remove religion from the equation other variables will dominate, and those variable tend to be brutal as you said. not unprecedented, i think you exaggerated a bit. There have been massive civil wars, holocausts, and mass murders in numerous unislamic countries. if we added them up im sure the score would be quite clear.
and no you do not see shiites and sunnis killing each other, there is a common enemy at hand here. especially in the begining of this mess.
but as you can see now, other variables have come into play.
Hubby, i think u misunderstood what i said to linda, im assuming the logical choice is that you will use the machine gun to protect your life, your family and your home until it is no longer viable to do so.
Iraq and Palestine are part of the same problem. They are both arab and muslim nations, both historically holy, and both occupied by foreign forces. The fight is the same.
Now as for “travel the world” part. This tends to sidetrack to the alqueda mentality. But realistically this is the Islamic duty, to fight for their brothers and sisters when they are occupied. The crusades is one analogy, but perhaps a tad outdated for this discussion.
Iraqis that get killed in the process of the resistance are bystandards and their death is the equivelent of a martyr. Again, i refrain from calling on specific incidents as neither of us has the adequate knowledge to pass judgement.
sa7, everyone agrees on america’s departure. do i think continued unrest will solve it? who knows. the vietnamese brought their nation to the brink of destruction before the americans left, and they were well funded. The truth is america is not leaving, it has no intention to leave with or without the resistance. That was clear to even the americans from day 1. They are going in to implement their agenda and thats that. if the resistance put up its arms and said u know what, we’ll stop if you promise to leave.
what would america’s next move be? withdrawl does not come to mind.
as for invitations, it’s not really a party, they dont have to send an rsvp to fight. yes some are saying they wern’t, i’ve read some articles as well. Again, who is saying this? who is writing this? The shi3a mahdi army in 2003 called for muslims from all over to come. There have been numerous call to arms since day 1.
I just want to make something clear to everyone, i am speaking in generalities, we’re not sitting down here to analyze each attack one by one. None of us has the accurate information on what’s going on, but we can conclude the obvious…newton’s 3rd law…to every action there is an equal and proportionate reaction…
occupation……….resistance
How about Saddam killing moslems pre-American wars. Sudanese moslems killing moslems in Sodan. Iraki moslems against Iran in 70s and 80’s. You do not seem to see when you kill each other in an unprecedented brutal way, even these days you still do not see shiites and sunnis killing each other. Its only when america attacks; and I am not justifying it either.
Are you suggesting that given a choice for defending your home between a machine gun and killing yourself you’d choose the latter? I think, as suggested and argued a bit before, you’ll find that suicide missions are generally a bad policy all around. The ideology and tactics of the Palestinians and their near half century of occupation should not be cast upon the Iraqis. I don’t know the whole history of suicide missions, but it’s been suggested here — by an Iraqi — that such missions are foreign.
And I don’t buy the whole “we’ll travel the world in search of Muslims under occupation and kill for them,” particularly when that fight often results in two things: those that are supposed to be helped being killed “in the resistance” and then those occupying upping the ante, resulting in still more of those in need of help being killed. Everyone here, I believe, agrees, the best thing for Iraq is to get the Americans out sa7? Do you think continued unrest, attacks and so forth encourages such an action? Doesn’t it just justify continued presence?
There is also an ebb and flow of eras in your argument. The ancient world is no longer, you are right. And equally true is the fact that wandering jihadis shouldn’t be traveling the world trying to right the wrongs of people in nations they don’t belong to, particularly if they are uninvited. And a great deal of the press in Iraq is saying, the resistance we speak of here, in this al-Ghad article, was not invited at all.
Linda, the weapons are not enough. If you were to defend your very home at this very moment and could choose between a machine gun or killing yourself, what is your logical choice? apply the same results here.
As for who they kill, again it’s very difficult to diffrentiate what the hell is going on. I am not justifying the killing for every single soul, i have no power in accountability. Like I told hubby, right now its a war with a media reporting countless inaccuracies.
I saw a tape once about Saddams military tactics in the gulf war. They would show you how he would have fake desert tanks as decoys to draw heat seeking missles and moments later CNN would report an american military successful operation. if a civilian was killed it was the iraqis who did it.
I’m sure there are many incidents when someone will go astray and kill innocent people. such fine example include bin laden, alqueda, and zarqawi’s home-made chopping block. but all in all there are many reasons why some attacks occur and we, sitting miles away sipping our lattes, have no idea about it. we’re told it was a funeral, we’re told it was a police station, or we’re told this and that. but by whom? and why?
i’m not saying it was no-mans land, what i am saying jareer is that the world was completly different back then. now you have globalization and internationalism and diplomacy, things that did not exist in those days. historically nations were conquered by other peoples for the sake of enslaving them just as imperialism did up to the 20th century. Islam did not come to enslave, it came to unite under a common umbrella. if the palestinians had been conquered i assure u it wud not have been a pretty sight, as we saw with the romans.
this is a different scenerio from america being in iraq or israel in palestine. both are occupying forces, no more no less.