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| Down Under |
| More on the Aussie al-Qaeda member |
| 2005-08-10 |
| THE Aussie accent is as distinct and as portentious as the threats the demented, black-robed, AK-47-carrying terrorist is screaming against the West. "The Muslim world is not your backyard," he shrieks. "The honourable sons of Islam will not let you kill our sons. It is time for us to be equals. As you kill, you will be killed. As you bomb, you will be bombed." Apart from a slight tonal inflection which would indicate that the speaker is from an immigrant community within Australia, the impassioned words could be those which renegade Adelaide Taliban fighter David Hicks wrote to his parents of his desire to see Islam conquer the world. Not surprising, really, since Hicks was an enthusiastic convert to al-Qaeda's bloody philosophy of Islamic world domination. "Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan [will] join together in a true Islamic state. The Islamic state is nearly completed," he wrote in a letter to his parents. "As a Muslim, I believe in destiny. I will always fight for the truth, Islam." And on al-Qaeda's video, Hick's doppelganger, his features covered in a black balaclava, howls: "The animals under Islam will not just let you kill our families in Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir and the Balkans, Indonesia, the Caucasus and elsewhere. "Oh people of the West, don't be fooled by the lies of Blair and Bush that you are free nations, for the only freedom that you have is the freedom to be slaves of your whims and desires." The image of the shrouded terrorist appears in a three-part two-hour al-Qaeda recruitment video titled The War of the Oppressed People, sections of which have been aired by Dubai's al Arabiya television network. It includes blurry footage purporting to show a rocket attack on a US Chinook helicopter in which 16 Americans were killed in June, a wounded US serviceman and a US laptop computer, and the planting of a roadside bomb which killed an Afghan security chief. It also seems to show al-Qaeda terrorists examining weapons and preparing bombs packed with bolts in Afghanistan, before attending a briefing by an instructor on "Operation to Defeat the Crucifix", a campaign targeting US and allied forces. Senior al-Qaeda figure Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi is featured warning that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created "two fronts" for recruiting terrorists to the cause of Hicks' heroes, Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and a Pakistani recruit says: "If this is terrorism and fundamentalism, then OK, we are terrorists and fundamentalists." Which seems to undermine the argument put forward by Hicks' civil libertarian lawyers and anti-Western supporters that he was just a well-meaning dope who strayed into bad company. The film is subtitled in Arabic, with interviews in English, French, Pashto and Urdu, as well as Arabic spoken with Yemeni, Saudi and Iraqi accents, according to linguistic experts. Its evil doctrine needs no translating, however. It is the doctrine that Hicks says he was destined to fight for, and if necessary, die for. Perhaps he even knows the Australian-accented terrorist who wants to extend the terrorist campaign against innocent men, women and children. In recent weeks The Daily Telegraph has revealed that bookshops associated with radical Muslim groups in Sydney and Melbourne peddle books filled with anti-Western, anti-Semitic hate. Perhaps the masked terrorist began his journey to Afghanistan fuelled by the poisonous lies contained in such garbage? Or perhaps he was a student of the self-styled clerics and leaders like Australian-born Muslim Wassim Doureihi from the extremist Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, who have called for the defeat of Western civilisation and its replacement with a medieval theocracy, a religious government under which women are subjugated, homosexuals and adulterers are put to death, and thieves mutilated? But whoever he is, it is a fair bet to suggest that he doesn't care that al-Qaeda has killed more innocent Muslims than Christians since it began its campaign of global terror, or that the Islamic nations are gradually moving away from the feudal fundamentalism he represents. He may, like Hicks, find some sympathy among the Lunar Left and the skinheads of the Ultra-Right, but won't win any from decent Australians of any religion concerned about maintaining a law-abiding liberal democracy for their children to inherit. Just as Hicks has condemned himself by his words and deeds, so too has the anonymous braggard behind the balaclava identified himself with al-Qaeda's nihilistic Islamist death cult. Moderate Muslims must disown these monsters and their particular perverse stream of Islam and the fifth column apologists for such evil-doers should join them in branding all those who proclaim their support for terror as outlaws. Those within Australia who encouraged Hicks and his Aussie-accented brother-in-blood to take the path of violence and terror must be hunted and captured with the same energy used by allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to restore peace in those nations. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |