Hey Mutineers – been on the road for last week & a half and I’ve got a couple of posts in the coffer… Still, headlines covering the break up of the suicide bomb cell in Madrid were worth a quick post. Why? Because it’s the first bust-up I’ve seen where all the terrorists were desi –
The judge identified the three alleged suicide bombers as Mohamed Shoaib, Mehmooh Khalib and Imran Cheema. He said they had arrived in Barcelona from Pakistan some time between October and mid-January.
…Moreno identified the ideologues in the new alleged plot as Maroof Ahmed Mirza, 38, and Mohammad Ayud Elahi Bibi, 63. He said the former was the main religious leader and organizer of the cell.
The five other men sent to jail were named as Mohamed Tarik, Qadeer Malik, Hafeez Ahmed, Roshan Jamal Khan and Shaib Iqbal.
Nine are Pakistanis; Khan is Indian.
The implications are interesting and many.
UPDATE: 2 of ’em have been released including the Indian dude(s) –
Authorities in Spain are understood to have released two persons, including an Indian national, who were among 14 persons arrested in that country for allegedly planning to carry out terror strikes there.Roshan Juman Khan, a Mumbai resident, was released on Thursday, sources said though an official word from the Spanish authorities was awaited.
The second person, Sarosh Ali Mohammed, was released yesterday with the Spanish authorities in Madrid saying he hails from Hyderabad. It was not clear whether it is the city in India or Pakistan.
Hat tip to Marl Balou for the pointer…
I can respect that.
there is no reason to fear speaking one’s mind but there is much risk of this topic being hijacked by haters.
We ban for switching handles on the same thread. You may not be aware of that, so I’ll let you have that one, “MKGandhi”.
From the same article:
So the accusation isn’t coming completely out of nowhere. And apparently they have a protected witness. Though the ‘keeping them in jail while waiting to charge them formally’ part has my spidy sense tingling.
49 · SM Intern said
Well played, SM intern. Your ever-so-subtle snarks and competence are remarkable; I am going to urge my intern to emulate you.
Forgot to add- but that’s a far cry from ‘shoot first, ask questions later, ostracize anyone who objects.’ They even let two of the guys go after some dilly-dallying with the Indian consulate. That’s a far cry from the USSR.
We ban for switching handles on the same thread. You may not be aware of that, so I’ll let you have that one, “MKGandhi”.
Who is MKGandhi 🙂
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you.
Are ‘they’ the Islamo-fascists?
43 · Manju said
Hey, lemurians are desi too.
[This is portmanteau, btw.]
I’m confused – I thought wheatish did describe the more lemur-complexioned among us?
48 · nala said
This is true and intersting. if i recall, there was a survey in the UK demonstrating a correlation between income, education, and radical islam…the correlation being the exact opposite of what we would assume.
Do you have a link to this?
once you go wheat…oh never mind, once we get nala stared…
plz manju, there was no need for that particular ruse.
So can anyone tell me WHY these men want to blow up innocent people? What is their justification for it?
There was this report out last year:
63 · nala said
I think the simplest answer is the correct one here.
They want to blow people up because they believe that is what Islam teaches them to do. And indeed there is and extremist establishment within Islam that preaches such ideas. The extremist branch is in control of nations, universities, printing presses, mosques, grassroots militias and even television stations throughout the Islamic world. Does “moderate Islam” have anything comparable?
63 · nala said
Maybe they are tired of others speaking on their behalf and think this is the only way that they’ll be heard. Dunno–just a guess. If you really want to know, you might start by asking them, themselves.
You don’t know that? You’re such a kafir!
true, but holding people on unsubstantiated suspicion is not at all a far cry from the USA. Be careful with that ‘it’s not as bad as x, so it must be okay’ argument. Yes, they let a few suspects go. That doesn’t make everything okay.
The problem with this tactic is that alleged terror cells are now presumed guilty until proven innocent. I think maybe that’s a bit backwards.
And for the love of whatever you hold sacred, can we please, PLEASE stop with the Islam bashing? It’s getting a bit tired.
What? I don’t understand this. But please note that I said ‘men who want to blow themselves up and kill innocent people’ in my question, not ‘Muslims.’ I honestly am curious as to what political/religious/historical/psychological/socioeconomic factors would cause someone to do this.
Well I am a kafir, but I don’t understand the significance of this point either…?
I know, I was just trying to inject some, er, nuance into the discussion. Besides, why you gotta go and demean my beloved Oceania?
69 · nala said
You asked somebody reading this site to explain the motivations of these would-be “terrorists.” I am suggesting that you sidestep the middle-men and ask the would-be “terrorists” themselves. Unfortunately, the infantilizing mainstream media probably assumes that you and the unwashed masses cannot “handle the truth,” so I wouldn’t expect CNN to be broadcasting statements from would-be “terrorists” any time soon (such statements might contain “coded messages” or some other such bollocks, after all.) So your next best bet would be to find out who these guys owe their allegiance to and research their leader’s statements/sermons/etc.
Get it? Seek primary sources. The rest is just conjecture, at best.
I agree, primary sources are a good place to go to. But it’s hard when they’ve blown themselves up… and that would kind of defeat the entire purpose of academia. Aside, why is “terrorists” in quotation marks? I don’t necessarily mean the men in this story, since we don’t know the entire story here yet, but men who follow this general pattern of blowing themselves up and killing innocent people (WTC/Pentagon, Madrid train bombings, Bali, London tube, etc.) for whatever reason(s).
Is a “terrorist” like a “progressive”- something that’s been maligned too often on SM’s comment threads?
Nala, Wherever there is rigidity in the socio-political sphere, intolerance is born. This could be a simple fear of the ‘other’,a loyalty towards inherited prejudices,a deep resentment against perceived historical injustices, a religious duty to dominate and proliferate, or all of the above. In Britain I realized the power of the ‘pan national religion’ against ties of nationality, ethnicity and language, which I used to think always trumped all others. Maybe things are different in America. I hope so. Anyway, I hope sanity prevails.
Regarding why some might attack Spain, Al Qaeda has announced that they want to regain Spain, because it was once ruled by Muslims.
Err–no. Hezbollah consists mainly of Shiite Arabs from southern Lebanon. Plus leadership of Syria are not Sunni and have terrorized Lebanese politicians. Plus, of course, there are non-Middle East terrorist groups if you look around. For example, to name just a few that come to mind, in South America FARC & Shining Path, in Europe IRA, and in east Asia you had the Japanese Red Army faction.
Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often engineers, physicians, architects or scientists. The average age for making an active commitment to violent jihad was 26, and three quarters of the terrorists were married, most of them with children. Only one in a hundred had shown any form of psychotic disorder. Two thirds became drawn towards a terror group while living in a country that was not their homeland. link
Well, I imagine they’d have to be relatively emotionally stable to be trusted to reliably carry out their missions. They’d have to be technically proficient too, so the science background makes sense, and (based on my experience of hard science types) also makes them more likely to be conservative (married), and perhaps rigid in personality than someone in the humanities or social sciences. So, I guess I don’t see those findings as all that ironic – they make sense as selection rather than causal factors.
On the other hand, I’d love to hear a psychoanalyst profile the psyche of the average terrorist. Anyone familiar with philosopher Charles Taylor’s ideas on the impact of modernity, identity politics and loss of honor culture? I feel like that figures in there somewhere because it is a stilted, politicized, identitarian notion of Islam that they parrot.
75 · rob said
Rob, I think JGandhi is just trying to point out that the common link between Muslim terrorists is Islam
Well, their definition of “innocent people” is slightly different from the usuall, for these men non-muslims are not innocent:
Killing of Non-Muslims is Legitimate
Focus: Undercover in the academy of hatred
Zachariah preached that the non-believers were dispensable: They are kuffar. They are not people who are innocent. The people who are innocent are the people who are with us or those who are living under the Islamic state.
He explained that his lament for the innocent applied only to Muslims. It was a linguistic sleight of hand which he summarised as: Yes I condemn killing any innocent people, but not any kuffar.
I hope those links help answer your question.
79 · SBD Well, their definition of “innocent people” is slightly different from the usuall, for these men non-muslims are not innocent:
Yes, true. It’s worth noting too that Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists also kill Muslims that don’t toe their political line–like Hariri in Lebanon, plenty of Iraqi and Algerian civilians and politicians, Sadat, etc.
I guess Hariri wasn’t killed by Islamic extremists, though the Syrian government has ties to such groups. But the Syrian government is more of a European-inspired ideology–Baathism.
I think “progressives” legitimately open themselves to criticisms of stifling debate with the bogey of political correctness if the only acceptable theories are those that venture exclusively non religious claims, and ignore the pathological interpretations of faith and ideology that are responsible for behaviors like these. However, the regressives (no quotes) who lose no opportunity to paint all Muslims with a broad brush stroke of primitivism would be at least a tad more credible if they were willing to look inward to the intolerance of by their co-religionists, without always making apologies and claiming nuance for those behaviors – I mean, your belief and justifications of those behaviors must be really deeply set if you are unable to bring yourself to condemn them even on a web forum where talk is cheap.
And while Islam might be a particularly attractive target right now, I think the long run of history lends itself to a much more non-denominational explanation of these atrocities.
82 · Rahul However, the regressives (no quotes) who lose no opportunity to paint all Muslims with a broad brush stroke of primitivism would be at least a tad more credible if they were willing to look inward to the intolerance of by their co-religionists, without always making apologies and claiming nuance for those behaviors – I mean, your belief and justifications of those behaviors must be really deeply set if you are unable to bring yourself to condemn them even on a web forum where talk is cheap.
Great point, Rahul! While I don’t think you group me with the regressives, I’ll start–I am very much opposed to the LTTE. They terrorize Tamil families by kidnapping children to fight, killing Tamils who dissent from their dictatorial rule, and also kill non-Tamil civilians and politicians. Bad guys.
No, I don’t.
The LTTE is an ethnic-based group, not a religion-based one. Though they are the ones that started it all re: suicide bombing.
So, the Tamil-speaking Muslims they expelled from Jaffna are a different ethnicity? (You can say yes–it’s not a rhetorical question.)
I agree. I only brought up the term “progressive” though, because I didn’t understand why “terrorist” was in quotation marks. The notion that ‘terrorism’ is really ‘freedom fighting’ is repulsive to me.
82 · Rahul said
i agree with you in principle, rahul, and nuance is often the last refuge of the scoundrel…but asking the hindu or christian right to look inward during times like this strikes as equivalent to asking blacks to also address black racism in the early 60’s. context and degree matter.
reminds me of high school when we were taught about communism, immediately followed by mccarthyism to balance things out.
In the 20th Century, it was the Japanese military that refined suicide(Kamikaze) bombing as a combat tactic. The LTTE seems to follow this style too.
I don’t know, I’m not really sure why that happened – I know some members of the LTTE blame ‘organizational mishaps’ or something for that, and have since invited those Muslims back (which very few have done). But I mean that in the general sense that the Tamil Tigers’ root ’cause’ is ethnic, not religious, in nature, i.e. they don’t have anything against Buddhists, but against the Sri Lankan government (/Sinhalese)… I don’t want to say too much about this though, because it’s kind of over my head and I don’t want to upset/anger anyone with my ignorance. (Not that the ‘root’ cause really matters that much, terrorism is terrorism, but if you want to condemn terrorism by your co-religionists that’s done for religious purposes, the LTTE isn’t it, and if you’re aiming to get to the ‘root cause’ of it I don’t think you’d find as much stock in religious-based ideology as you would with Muslim terror outfits).
Nala, You are right for sure that it’s certainly not just a “religious” conflict. But, there’s an overlap of language/religion/ethnicity that makes it simplistic, too, to say it’s “just” ethnic. Maybe more ethnic than religious, ok, but you cert. won’t find too many Muslims or Buddhists in the LTTE–Hindus and Christians, yes. But I like to think of their leaders as European socialist-inspired atheists!
I actually find this kind of funny – in discussions about how Muslims are persecuted in India, some people say things like ‘why don’t you talk about all the Hindus being persecuted in Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, etc.’ Is this the reverse of that? We can’t condemn or talk about terrorist acts condemned by people of different religions without first qualifying that we condemn the attacks committed by people of the same religion as well?
yes – but that was in war. not expressly intended to kill civilians and disrupt public life.
btw – i’m glad you were able to filter out the liberal nonsense being pushed on you by your textbooks, manju. 😉
True… I’m just saying that when it comes to terrorists using religion to justify their actions, I don’t the analogy of Al Qaeda and the groups it supports, like Lakshar-e-Taiba, to the LTTE is really viable, unless you consider ‘Muslim’ an ethnicity.
Fair enough.
I guess my instinct, though, is to wonder why, if we’re talking about terrorism, to limit the discussion to terrorism that’s religiously-inspired? We could, of course, but that seems too arbitrary to me.
Well I know what the grievances of the LTTE are – they want a Tamil Eelam. What I don’t understand about the religious rhetoric of Al Qaeda over the past decade or so, though, is why they recruit men (like this alleged terror cell) from different countries in the Muslim world and send them to kill Westerners. Or why some of those terrorists even grew up in the West (London tube bombers) but still become terrorists. And I thought it was clear that my original question wondering about what would motivate terrorists, that the parameters were already set around those who are influenced by/working with Al Qaeda and similar groups. Part of this also more self-centered – I live in the U.S., and I don’t see groups of men that the LTTE claims as part of them that have expressed anti-Western rhetoric and then proceeded to commit terrorist acts because of it, with the intent of killing civilians and destabilizing those countries.
96 · nala said
Oh, well, that’s easy–LTTE’s goals are modest on a global scale, and Al Qaeda’s/Islamic extremists aren’t–the latter want to take over, for example, Spain, Egypt, Algeria . . . . To do the latter, they think attacks on the west which destabize it helps their cause.
And their claim to sovereignty lies in the notion of an Islamic caliphate – e.g. wanting to take over Spain because it was once ruled by Muslims – and in their religious beliefs, which they believe to be incompatible with Western values/influences…
Yep. If you read their stuff (as per Harbeer!), this is exactly what they say. Not only current Muslim-majority areas, but they also want Spain, Isreal, the Balkans, India. . . .
Therein lies the crux of the matter with regards to this generation of terrorists. To them this is war. They define who are “civilians” in the conflict. When you hear double speak like “we do not kill innocent people” you know that it is they who define your innocence. If you pay taxes to support a government they don’t like, if you are of a religion they detest, if you support a political system they hate, then you aren’t either “innocent” or a “civilian”.