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| Arabia |
| Yemen also sees success with dialogue |
| 2005-02-07 |
| The Christian Science Monitor is impressed When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen's Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster. Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland. "If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence." The prisoners eagerly agreed. Now, two years later, not only have those prisoners been released, but a relative peace reigns in Yemen. And the same Western experts who doubted this experiment are courting Hitar, eager to hear how his "theological dialogues" with captured Islamic militants have helped pacify this wild and mountainous country, previously seen by the US as a failed state, like Iraq and Afghanistan. "Since December 2002, when the first round of the dialogues ended, there have been no terrorist attacks here, even though many people thought that Yemen would become terror's capital," says Hitar, eyes glinting shrewdly from beneath his emerald-green turban. "Three hundred and sixty-four young men have been released after going through the dialogues and none of these have left Yemen to fight anywhere else." To be sure, the prisoner-release program is not solely responsible for the absence of attacks in Yemen. The government has undertaken a range of measures to combat terrorism from closing down extreme madrassahs, the Islamic schools sometimes accused of breeding hate, to deporting foreign militants. Seated amid stacks of Korans and religious texts, Hitar explains that his system is simple. He invites militants to use the Koran to justify attacks on innocent civilians and when they cannot, he shows them numerous passages commanding Muslims not to attack civilians, to respect other religions, and fight only in self-defense. If, after weeks of debate, the prisoners renounce violence they are released and offered vocational training courses and help to find jobs. Hitar's belief that hardened militants trained by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan could change their stripes was initially dismissed by US diplomats in Sanaa as dangerously naive, but the methods of the scholarly cleric have little in common with the other methods of fighting extremism. Instead of lecturing or threatening the battle-hardened militants, he listens to them. Only after winning the militants' trust does Hitar gradually begin to correct their beliefs. He says that most militants are ordinary people who have been led astray. Just as they were taught Al Qaeda's doctrines, he says, so too can they be taught more- moderate ideas. Yet despite the apparent success in Yemen, some US diplomats have criticized it for apparently letting Islamic militants off the hook with little guarantee that they won't revert to their old ways once released from prison ..US diplomats have also approached the cleric to see if his methods can be applied in Iraq, says Hitar. "Before the dialogues began, there was only one way to fight terrorism, and that was through force," he says. "Now there is another way: dialogue." |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #3 The Anti-Christian Lawyer's Union has proven that it's one of many groups that are a domestic enemy to the US Constitution, and need to be treated as such. I demand that every judge who hears one of their cases where they attempt to restrict the "free exercise thereof" of religion put them in jail for about 20 years. It's time, da$$it, to quit playing games, and get tough against our enemies, or we won't be a nation much longer - just a bunch of blind idiots guiding other blind idiots into disaster. Maybe it's even time for a second revolution against the "secularists" - better known as socialists, communists, and just plain idiots (Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, and ??????). We can't fight our foreign enemies effectively if we continue to allow domestic enemies to sabotage us from within. That goes for a lot of LLL judges, too. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2005-02-07 4:36:59 PM |
| #2 It would be wise to keep the threat of The Big Club nearby, just in case.... |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2005-02-07 10:39:13 AM |
| #1 An extremely significant article that needs wider dissemination. It shows that the Islamist terrorist grunts are motivated by religion, while the upper echelons are merely using religion to motivate the grunts. It's the promise of Paradise if one dies in Jihad that's the main motivator. Take that away, by showing that terrorism is not conducting Jihad in the proper manner, and the grunts lose interest. The job-skills training program has been shown to reduce recividism (sp?) world-over, and shows a relatively enlightened attitude on the part of the Sudanese. The skepticism of the US diplos is very understandable: some of the methods used to reform prisoners seem counterintuitive, if not downright coddling of prisoners, but the statistics speak for themselves. Use what works and discard what doesn't: Only idiotarians insist on using methods that don't show REAL results. This methodology will NOT work in the United States: The ACLU has sworn they'll sue any government that uses faith-based methods to rehabilitate prisoners, despite the stellar record racked up in other countries using them that are not afflicted by similar legal "watchdogs". Hitar's the moderate Muslim we should be looking for, supporting, and protecting bodily. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-02-07 10:06:44 AM |