...Here's how the rain of brimstone forecast
looked at the turn of the 21st century. Iran, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Sudan
were already in Islamic Fundamentalist hands. Though the fact had gone largely
unpublicized in the West, by the end of the 1990s the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front had established what it called The Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao
on the second largest island of the largely Catholic Philippines, had appointed
its own governor, Nur Misuari, and was fighting to gain even more territory.**
Afghanistan's Taleban had stripped women of their jobs and rights, required that
they cower in their homes wrapped in black with their windows curtained and painted
over, wear no shoes a man could hear, and possess no reading material outside
of pamphlets promoting official religious views. Ladies of learning and skill
who transgressed were beaten with rifle butts in the streets. The Taleban's Ministry
for the Propagation of Virtue and Suppression of Vice--modeled on Saudi Arabia's
religious police--was known for its stonings, its amputations, its hangings from
mobile cranes so a body could be paraded high above a city's roofs, its deaths-by-crushing-under-a-wall,
and a long list of other "divinely-ordered" atrocities. Citizens deemed guilty
of perjury had their tongues cut out. Even men were allowed an education in only
one subject: the Taleban version of Koran.
Using the slogan "film and music leads to moral corruption," the Taleban Ministry
of the Fostering of Virtue ordered that Afghanistan's citizens destroy their televisions,
VCRs, satellite dishes, and other devices of depravity. Meanwhile, Taleban troops
pursued a war of extermination against heretics, specifically the Hazara Shiites
in their northern territories. The slaughtered were victims of Allah's order to
eliminate unholiness. Human Rights organizations reporting on this murder of women
and children saw it differently--they called it simple genocide.
Said one Taliban secret police commander, "I
want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible
that the screams will
frighten even crows from their nests
and if the person survives he will never
again have a night's sleep."
For more, click here..
All predictions were that Pakistan's 130 million people (more than the population
of England and France combined) would be the next to experience fumigation á la
Taleban. Pakistan's new leader, it was said, would be someone like the bomber
of U.S. embassies and financier of worldwide Holy War Osama Bin Laden--the man
who had issued this simple order about Americans: "kill them wherever they are."
Money had reportedly been sent from Saudi Arabia to finance Pakistan's Fundamentalist
coup. Its probable source was none other than Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who,
according to British reporter Robert Fisk, was turning Saudi Arabia, the allegedly
"moderate" American ally, "into an anti-American nation in front of our eyes.
Of course," added Fisk, "we're not told about that." Nor were we told that Saudi
Arabia had long been yet another Fundamentalist theocracy.
for more Islamic views on Osama bin Laden
and the Taliban
see The Afghanistan Peace Organization
Meanwhile,
the groups who would purge Pakistan of its sinners were hardening their homicidal
skills through bloodbaths in the Punjab, Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, and East
Africa, where they chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Democracy." Between
guerilla raids, these holy warriors headed out to spray graffiti slogans on the
town walls in their training camps' vicinity: "democracy leads to secularism"
and "Jihad [holy war] leads to dominance of Islam." North of Pakistan's capital,
Lahore, was Muridke, home to the Army of the Pure, which daily drilled recruits
in slitting throats, dynamiting bridges, and rocket-attacking with precision blows.
The Army of the Pure's goal was death to heretics--Indians, Russians, Americans,
and Jews. John Stackhouse of the Toronto Globe and Mail delivered the following
message from this arm of Allah's will made real:
Should Pakistan fall to the Fundamentalists this would give
Islam's ultra-militants a heroic Roto-Rooter with which to extirpate American
impiety. Zealots would control Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, called by its cheering
supporters when it was first tested in 1998, "The Islamic Bomb." The result, said
Australian journalist Greg Sheridan, could be "devastating."
Then there was the Saudi-backed Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), which had turned
the hinterlands of Egypt into a killing field, slaying tourists, assassinating
policemen, stabbing moderate writers, and massacring Christians who'd been in
the land of Egypt since long before Mohammed's birth. Russia, China, and the Central
Asian Republics--Turkmenistan, Dagestan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan--feared they
were next on Allah's hit list. Those fears turned real in 1999 when Chechen guerrillas,
led by a Jordanian and reportedly financed by the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden,
opened a war to establish a Fundamentalist Islamic state whose borders would range,
as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin put it, "from the North Caucasus to the
Pamirs." On a Western internet discussion group, an Islamic militant who spoke
for many laid out the Word as he sees it: "The oppression and aggression of the
United States of America and its protectorates has no end. So it is time that
they pay, and it is time that their people taste... torment...."
for
notes and key hyperlinks, see below
for
more on militant Islam,
the economic jumble of 2004,
and other perils
of the 21st century
see
THE KIDNAP OF MASS MIND
Fundamentalism, Spartanism
and the Games Subcultures Play
in
Global
Brain
The Evolution of Mass
Mind
From the Big Bang
To the 21st Century
click
here to order from Amazon.com
howardbloom.net
home
________
NOTES
** Mindanao has a population of over thirteen million and includes fourteen Filipino
provinces.
* Even moderate Moslems living in the West were enjoined by their
would-be spiritual leaders to adopt key aspects of this powerfully intolerant
point of view. Said the imam of Jerusalem's Alaqsa
Mosque during a Friday sermon reprinted for worldwide distribution:
"Surely, the Muslim in this world has a mission. This mission is to
guide humanity to Islam. Therefore, it is inconceivable for a Muslim to accept
to coexist with non-Muslims without working to guide them. It is also prohibited
for a Muslim to be in a non-Islamic society without actively working to remove
its evil and replace it with the mercy of Islam.
"As the hadith
clearly indicates, Islam is a unique entity and hence it has no correlation with
other entities. In other words, Islam is the Haq (truth) while everything else
is Batil (false) and not that Muslims should isolate themselves. However, the
concepts of Muslims and there [sic] actions should be molded Islamically as to
function for the removal of evil from the society without integrating into it."
Fortunately the peaceful can interpret this call to action as a mandate
for persuasion, not for violence.
.. The age of extremist outsiders armed
with atomic, biological, and chemical weapons had already come upon us as early
as 1998, declared no less an authority than Foreign
Affairs--the journal of America's statesmen. (Ashton Carter, John Deutch,
and Philip Zelikow. "Catastrophic Terrorism." Foreign Affairs, November/December
1998: 80-94.)
.. Ian MacKenzie. "Philippine negotiators agree on peace accord."
Reuters, August 29, 1996; n.a. "Manila Extends Truce in Southern Philippines."
Xinhua News Agency, China: July
10, 1997.
.. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
"Background Paper on Refugees and Asylum Seekers from Afghanistan." UNHCR
Centre for Documentation and Research, Geneva, June 1997. http://www.unhcr.ch/refworld/country/cdr/cdrafg.htm,
November 1998.
.. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs. "Humanitarian Report 1997: Gender issues in Afghanistan." http://www.reliefweb.int/dha_ol/pub/humrep97/gender.html,
November 1998; Shadaba Islam. "International campaign for Afghan women." Dawn,
Pakistan Herald Publications, Ltd. http://dawn.com/daily/19980204/top12.htm, November
1998; Feminist Majority Foundation. "Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan." Feminist
Majority Foundation Online. http://www.feminist.org/afghan/facts.html, November
1998.
.. In addition to chronicling the incidents cited here, Amnesty International
reported that the Taleban had forced a father and brothers to shoot their own
family member before an audience of 30,000 gathered in a stadium. Toppling walls
was a means of execution for those deemed guilty of sodomy. In the opinion of
Amnesty International, none of the accused were given access to a true court proceeding,
hence their alleged crimes were highly questionable. (Amnesty International News
Service. "Afghanistan: Public executions and amputations on increase." AI INDEX:
ASA 11/05/98 21 May 1998. http://www2.amnesty.se/isext98.nsf/eb4dea1ac25099c4c12565b70
05b76ae/debc87e79452a698c125660a0063e0a8?OpenDocument, November 1998.)
..
Agence France Presse. "Taleban: 'Film and music leads to moral corruption,'" July
8, 1998.
.. Amnesty International News Service. "Afghanistan: Thousands of
civilians killed following Taleban takeover of Mazar-e Sharif." AI index: ASA
11/07/98 3 September 1998. http://www2.amnesty.se/isext98.nsf/eb4dea1ac25099c4c12565b70
05b76ae/598fd5236b885a2fc125667b003a63d5?OpenDocument, November 1998.
.. Independent
Television Network News. ITN World News, September 4, 1998.
.. The Commonwealth
Business Forum. "Pakistan--Society." http://www.tcol.co.uk/pakistan/pak2.htm#society,
November 1998; Government Statistical Service--The Office for National Statistics,
United Kingdom.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/stats/ukinfigs/pop.htm, November
1998; Information Please. "World's Twenty Most Populous Countries: 1998 and 2028."
infoplease.com.
Information Please LLC
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004391.html.
.. Robert Fisk. "Anti-Americans of Saudi Arabia." Independent on Sunday. Reprinted
in World Press Review, October 1998: 16.
.. John Stackhouse. "Will Karachi
Be the Next Kabul?" Toronto Globe and Mail. Reprinted in World Press Review, October
1998: 17.
.. n.a. "The Friday speech from Alaqsa Mosque in occupied Muslim
Land." January 28, 1988. Ramadhan/Alaqsa Islamic Website. http://www.ramadhan.org/hadith/hbody12.txt,
August 1998.
.. It was Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who first
popularized the slogan "the Islamic Bomb." (Kathy Gannon. "New capability meant
to bring pride to Islamic world--Pakistani Nuclear Testing." Associated Press,
31 May 1998.)
.. Greg Sheridan. n.t. The Australian. Reprinted in World Press
Review, October 1998: 15.
.. n.a. "Fear along the Silk Road: The Taleban Virus."
Middle East. London, October, 1998, reprinted in World Press Review, December
1998: 6-7.
.. Carlotta Gall. "Dagestan Skirmish Is Big Russian Risk." New
York Times, August 13, 1999.
.. Gareth Jones. "Russian minister briefs FBI
boss on Dagestan." Moscow: Reuters, September 8, 1999.
.. Martin Nesirky.
" FOCUS?CIS faces international terror menace?Putin." Moscow: Reuters, September
15, 1999.
.. abusulaymaan@my-dejanews.com. Posting to misc.activism.militia,
3 Sep 1998. When I asked abusulaymaan for information on his (or her) identity
and background, I received no reply.
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