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Whose side are they on?

February 29, 2012 - 4:42 am - by Roger Kimball

This is really unbelievable.  Jihad Watch is reporting that, according to Al-Arabiya, the United States is in talks with the Egyptian government about release Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “blind Sheikh” who helped mastermind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as well as 49 other imprisoned Egyptians in exchange for the 19 Americans the Egyptians are holding. If the blind Sheikh is freed, writes Jihad Watch,  “it will be the apotheosis of Obama’s policy of appeasement toward the Islamic world.”

I’m not sure I would use the word “apotheosis.” But I know, and you know, what they mean.  When it comes to Islamic terrorists, the blind Sheikh is right out of central casting, like Sheikh Abu ( Cap’n Hook) Hamza, late of the  Finsbury Park Mosque in London, or indeed Osama bin Laden.

Sheikh Abu Hamza

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Here is Adbel Rahman on jihad (Andrew McCarthy helped prosecute him and I quote from his indispensable book Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad):  “Jihad is not merely a duty.  It is, as [the blind Sheikh]  ceaselessly counseled his disciples, ‘the peak of a full [embrace] of Islam . . . [T]here is no work that equals jihad.’ “  And what is “jihad”?  Please don’t say “an internal struggle for betterment.” As the blind Sheikh put it at his trial:

 

Jihad is jihad. . . .  There is no such thing as commerce, industry and science in jihad.  This is calling things . . . other than by [their] own name. If God . . .  says, “Do jihad,” it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades and with the missile.  This is jihad.  Jihad against God’s enemies for God’s cause and his word.

The sword. The cannon. The grenade. Had the trial been held a few years later, he might have added, “the stolen Boeing airliners.” And the Obama administration is contemplating releasing this mass murderer, along with 49 others?

I said it was unbelievable.  Alas, it is all-too-believable. What it really is is unconscionable.

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3 Comments, 3 Threads

  1. 1. Random Blowhard

    Here’s how the negotiations should go –

    1) The sheikh and his 49 followers should be executed by firing squad and a video of the execution sent to the Egyptians.

    2) Tell them to release the prisoners within 12 hrs or we will pries them from their cold dead fingers.

    3) Once the prisoners are secure, announce the foreign aid is being cut to zero.

    4) Tell them any reprisals against the United States or our interests in the Middle East will result in a tactical nuke going off at the base of the Anwar dam at ~ 2am in the morning Egyptian time.

    Only strength and ruthlessness is respected.

    What would Reagan do?

  2. 2. EscondidoSurfer

    This can’t happen. Are the Egyptians now our enemies? Are they openly in bed with this terrorist? The outcry will and should be to high heaven. It would show that Obama is committing political suicide and taking the Dems with him.

  3. 3. David W. Lincoln

    The spirit of Amalek isn’t only found in the Middle East.

    I have a question, that some don’t want answered: Why aren’t pipelines being built in the Arabian Peninsula, so that there isn’t as much oil tanker traffic going through the Straits of Hormuz?

    The last time I checked, the Indian Ocean borders the southern portion of that peninsula, and there is a lot more space there, rather than either on the eastern or western portions of the Arabian Peninsula.

    Makes you want to go, “hmmmmm”!

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