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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| The Overlooked Case Of Mohammed Afroze |
| 2005-08-11 |
| AFTER A STRING OF BOMBINGS in London, the British media began peppering Tony Blair and John Howard with questions about the effects of Britain's presence in Iraq on suicide-bomber recruitment. During the hastily-arranged press conference the day of the second series of attempted bombings, journalist Paul Bongiorno noted that one Australian injured in the July 7 blasts had blamed the Iraq War for the attacks, prompting a tough response from the Australian prime minister. The unnamed victim is not alone; an ICM poll for the Guardian showed that two-thirds of Brits believe that the bombings have some linkage to military action in Iraq. Today the political situation remains unchanged for Blair and the British. George Galloway, the Scots MP who recently declared his sympathy with the Iraqi "insurgents," told Syrians on July 31 that the British, Americans, and the West needed a cure for their imperialism, not the Arabs for their radicalism and oppression. In fact, Galloway told Syrians that the Arabs appeared to be doing nothing but standing by while the West raped their "daughters": Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners--Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. Galloway this week referred to Iraqi terrorists conducting suicide attacks as "martyrs" and told the BBC that Tony Blair and George Bush were the real terrorists. Even though pundits consider Galloway a voice from the fringe, when he says that Islamist terror arose from the first Iraq War and the occupation of Jerusalem, he speaks for a not-insignificant number of Brits, and Yanks as well. All of which makes the forgotten case of Mohammed Afroze all the more significant. On the day after the failed July 21 bombings in London, an Indian court in Delhi sentenced Mohammed Afroze to seven years in prison for his participation in a wider plot which had been planned for September 11, 2001. Afroze led another al Qaeda cell which planned to use commercial airlines as missiles to destroy several international targets. The Islamist terrorists intended to send a global message through coordination with the attacks on America. Their plan failed when the terrorists lost their nerve and fled Heathrow. Afroze and his compatriots from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan had planned on flying their Manchester-bound flights into the House of Commons and the Tower Bridge in London. Attacking Parliament would have sent a message to the British government about the continued sanctions on Iraq. Blowing up the Tower Bridge would kill a slew of British civilians, with the intent of terrorizing them into demanding a withdrawal of British troops from the Middle East and a halt to support of American actions in the region. But Afroze had other targets as part of his plan--and these reveal something much deeper and broader than Galloway and the media wish to contemplate. AFROZE HAS ALSO ADMITTED to targeting the Rialto Towers in Melbourne, Australia. Australia has a long history of courageous alliance with Britain and the United States, of course, but Australia never set foot in Iraq before the 2003 invasion. They had provided a naval support contingent of three ships with 600 sailors and their own air defense squad. Their mission consisted of interdiction on shipping in the Persian Gulf to ensure no arms made their way into Saddam Hussein's hands during the blockade that preceded the war. Australia had helped free East Timor from a military occupation by Indonesian paramilitary forces two years earlier. The Portuguese pulled out of Timor in 1976, and the Indonesian military invaded the island nine days later, annexing the territory and imposing an increasingly brutal regime on the Catholic Timorese. In 1999, Indonesia president B.J. Habibie unexpectedly offered a referendum to East Timor, and an overwhelming majority backed independence. This touched off a revolting nightmare of murder and terror by Indonesian paramilitary forces which only ended when an Australian-led U.N. force took control of East Timor and effectively liberated it from the Indonesians. Clearly the notion that an attack on Melbourne would send a message about Iraq and Jerusalem, therefore, hinges on shaky ground. It seems much more likely that al Qaeda harbored a grudge against the Aussies for their efforts to free East Timor (now Timor Leste) from primarily Muslim Indonesia. However, that doesn't square with the critics who insist that Western policies about Iraq and Jerusalem lie at the heart of Islamofascist terror, especially when some of those same critics--such as Noam Chomsky, Mother Jones, and organizations like Common Dreams--insisted on Western nations intervening in East Timor to free the Timorese from Indonesian tyranny. In fact, Chomsky sounded themes in his essay demanding military action remarkably similar to those George W. Bush would use five years later while demanding action to free the Iraqi people from the grip of Saddam Hussein: Not long before, the Clinton administration welcomed Suharto as "our kind of guy," following the precedent established in 1965 when the general took power, presiding over army-led massacres that wiped out the country's only mass-based political party (the PKI, a popularly supported communist party) and devastated its popular base in "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century." According to a CIA report, these massacres were comparable to those of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao; hundreds of thousands were killed, most of them landless peasants. The achievement was greeted with unrestrained euphoria in the West. The "staggering mass slaughter" was "a gleam of light in Asia," according to two commentaries in the New York Times, both typical of the general western media reaction. Corporations flocked to what many called Suharto's "paradise for investors," impeded only by the rapacity of the ruling family. For more than 20 years, Suharto was hailed in the media as a "moderate" who is "at heart benign," even as he compiled a record of murder, terror, and corruption that has few counterparts in postwar history. . . . The picture in the past few months is particularly ugly against the background of the self-righteous posturing in the "enlightened states." But it simply illustrates, once again, what should be obvious: Nothing substantial has changed, either in the actions of the powerful or the performance of their flatterers. The Timorese are "unworthy victims." No power interest is served by attending to their suffering or taking even simple steps to end it. Without a significant popular reaction, the long-familiar story will continue, in East Timor and throughout the world. Somehow Chomsky's--and much of the left's--concern for "unworthy victims" would disappear when the Iraqis, afflicted with a similarly genocidal tyrant, received the same round--or more accurately, sixteen rounds--of indifference from the United Nations. BUT AFROZE HAD ONE MORE TARGET in mind for his suicide attacks: the Indian Parliament. Again, anyone with a sense of history understands the long antagonism between Muslims and Hindus on the Asian subcontinent. The division of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh after the British withdrawal in 1947 touched off a religious and political conflict that persists to this day. Any aggression against India by al Qaeda would hardly seem surprising given this well-known dynamic. What would seem surprising is the notion that an al Qaeda attack on India's Parliament would have anything to do with Iraq or Jerusalem. India followed its historical precedents in the month before the March 2003 invasion, in a letter to the United Nations. India argued that they wanted more time before the Security Council authorized military action and that they opposed the invasion of Iraq. More to the point, India had a long history of trade with Saddam's Iraq, right up to the first Gulf War. The Indian government restarted trade with Iraq in June 1991 (almost immediately after the war), working within the sanctions but clearly supportive of trade with Saddam Hussein. Nor has India expressed any solidarity with Israel. India joined the Non-Aligned Movement, which has repeatedly and publicly sided with the Palestinians. India's U.N. voting record shows that it remains essentially sympathetic to the Palestinian claims over the occupied territories, and its rhetoric shows that it considers the plight of the Palestinians analogous to the struggle of India against the British Empire. THE CASE OF MOHAMMED AFROZE puts all claims that Western opposition to reasonable goals of Muslims caused September 11, the London bombings, or any of al Qaeda's other attacks going back into the early 1990s. The goal all along has been for Osama bin Laden and his Islamofascist terrorists to seize control of the region that produces the world's energy in order to bring the infidels under their heel--and to be sure we stay there, regardless of our previous sympathies. Edward Morrissey is a contributing writer to The Daily Standard and a contributor to the blog Captain's Quarters. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #1 It's always been questionable how serious the Mohammed Afroze story actually was, certainly the Australian government seemed to imply that he had been forced into making the confession while in Indian custody. |
| Posted by: Paul Moloney 2005-08-11 20:15 |