Date: 9/10/2004
Tomorrow is the 11th of September 2004, The third anniversary of the day when the Jihad reached America. We bring you selected articles on that day which was the defining moment for the future of humankind. ________________________________________
Ex Muslims speak - We Are So Sorry For 9-11
This September 11 marks the third unforgettable anniversary of the worst mass murder in American history.
After September 11, many in the Muslim world chose denial and hallucination rather than face up to the sad fact that Muslims perpetrated the 9-11 terrorist acts and that we have an enormous problem with extremism and support for terrorism. Many Muslims, including religious leaders, and “intellectuals” blamed 9-11 on a Jewish conspiracy and went as far as fabricating a tale that 4000 Jews did not show up for work in the World Trade Center on 9-11. Yet others blamed 9-11 on an American right wing conspiracy or the U.S. Government which allegedly wanted an excuse to invade Iraq and “steal” Iraqi oil.
After numerous admissions of guilt by Bin Laden and numerous corroborating admissions by captured top level Al-Qaida operatives, we wonder, does the Muslim leadership have the dignity and courage to apologize for 9-11? If not 9-11, will we apologize for the murder of school children in Russia? If not Russia, will we apologize for the train bombings in Madrid, Spain? If not Spain, will we apologize for suicide bombings in buses, restaurants and other public places? If not suicide bombings, will we apologize for the barbaric beheadings of human beings? If not beheadings, will we apologize for the rape and murder of thousands of innocent people in Darfour? If not Darfour, will we apologize for the blowing up of two Russian planes by Muslim women? What will we apologize for? What will it take for Muslims to realize that those who commit mass murder in the name of Islam are not just a few fringe elements? What will it take for Muslims to realize that we are facing a crisis that is more deadly than the Aids epidemic? What will it take for Muslims to realize that there is a large evil movement that is turning what was a peaceful religion into a cult?
Will Muslims wake up before it is too late? Or will we continue blaming the Jews and an imaginary Jewish conspiracy? The blaming of all Muslim problems on Jews is a cancer that is destroying Muslim society from within and it must stop.
Muslims must look inward and put a stop to many of our religious leaders who spend most of their sermons teaching hatred, intolerance and violent jihad. We should not be afraid to admit that as Muslims we have a problem with violent extremism. We should not be afraid to admit that so many of our religious leaders belong behind bars and not behind a pulpit. Only moderate Muslims can challenge and defeat extremist Muslims. We can no longer afford to be silent. If we remain silent to the extremism within our community then we should not expect anyone to listen to us when we complain of stereotyping and discrimination by non-Muslims; we should not be surprised when the world treats all of us as terrorists; we should not be surprised when we are profiled at airports. Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against terror, we need to take the lead in this war.
As to apologizing, we will no longer wait for our religious leaders and “intellectuals” to do the right thing. Instead, we will start by apologizing for 9-11. We are so sorry that 3000 people were murdered in our name. We will never forget the sight of people jumping from two of the highest buildings in the world hoping against hope that if they moved their arms fast enough that they may fly and survive a certain death from burning. We are sorry for blaming 9-11 on a Jewish or right wing conspiracy. We are so sorry for the murder of more than three hundred school children and adults in Russia. We are so sorry for the murder of train passengers in Spain. We are so sorry for all the victims of suicide bombings. We are so sorry for the beheadings, abductions, rapes, violent Jihad and all the atrocities committed by Muslims around the world. We are so sorry for a religious education that raised killers rather than train people to do good in the world. We are sorry that we did not take the time to teach our children tolerance and respect for other people. We are so sorry for not rising up against the dictators who have ruled the Muslim world for decades. We are so sorry for allowing corruption to spread so fast and so deep in the Muslim world that many of our youth lost hope. We are so sorry for allowing our religious leaders to relegate women to the status of forth class citizens at best and sub-humans at worse.
We are so sorry. The Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism is a nonprofit organization made up of American Muslims and Arabs of all backgrounds who feel that religious violence and terrorism have not been fully rejected by the Muslim community in the post 9-11 era. For more information visit their website at: www.freemuslims.org. Contact President Kamal Nawash directly at his email: president@freemuslims.org. _____________________________________________________________________________
A first hand account of 9/11
Lee Ielpi gazes out of a window twenty stories above New York's World Trade Center. It offers an unobstructed view of the emptiness where the Twin Towers once stood. He speaks of his son Jonathan, often in the present tense as he relates the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Jonathan, along with 2791 others, was murdered that day by religious fanatics convinced that God would reward their cruelty. Ielpi relates, in great and often gruesome detail, the events of that day and of the following nine months spent picking through wreckage searching for his son while helping recover the remains of other victims. While Ielpi speaks, it is at times hard to separate past from present. His powerful, evocative narrative brings listeners close to the events and meaning of the darkest day in recent American history.
In his words I could almost hear the brief roar of the first jet, then the tremendous explosion as it crashed into the North Tower at 500 mph. He narrates and in my mind's eye I watch in horror as those trapped above the impact zone are driven towards the windows by the intense heat and flames. I watch as they begin jumping to their deaths, sometimes in twos and threes, holding hands in a last desperate attempt to hold onto something. This single vision of 9/11 disturbs me most. I think of young men and women, looking forward to an evening out on the town. I think of wives and husbands, tired at day's end looking forward to comfort and warmth and home and family. I see old men, years on the job, retirement's rewards within their grasp, more time to spend with the grandchildren…Then, the instant horror of being forced into choosing between immolation or a leap to one's death.
Ielpi speaks and I hear the second jet, a brief subsonic howl and then a shattering impact. Death reaching through office walls. Frantic cell phone calls for help. More people jumping to death as courageous men and women of the fire and police departments enter the Towers to rescue survivors. They know this is bad. They know they might die. They continue up the stairs, fear etched in their faces, 90lbs of equipment slowing their ascents, each step one closer to sealing their fates.
Ielpi knows his son is somewhere inside. He'd received a call from him-- "Dad, we're going to the World Trade Center." Ielpi said, "Jon, be careful." They never speak again.
The South Tower falls. The North one follows. Lee Ielpi arrives within thirty minutes of its collapse. He's desperate to find his son. "I got here within half an hour after the North Tower came down. You couldn't see a quarter of the way down the streets for blocks and blocks. We saw the dead in the streets. You see some of the walking wounded.”
As Ielpi continues, he points towards the thousands of windows in the surviving buildings that ring where the towers once stood. On that September morning, people peered from them, transfixed by the unfolding horror. "They saw things that people aren't supposed to see," says Ielpi. "Many of those who occupied those buildings left handbags, backpacks, personal items when they left. Most never came back for their belongings. How many divorces because of what they saw? How many started drinking? No one's done any studies yet. These people are 9/11 victims, too."
I stare at the windows. The broken ones have long since been replaced and the bright sun glints off them on this fine late summer day. The stillness unsettles me.
Jonathan Ielpi, 29 years old, father of two young children, died beside men from his father’s fire company. His dad spent nine months digging through the wreckage with garden tools, recovering body parts. Three months into the search, they found his son. On that day he got home from Ground Zero at 9:30pm. The phone rang. “Got a phone call from a deputy chief, a good friend of mine," he said, “We have your son.” Ielpi and his other son Brandon, also a firefighter, drove to the site. “My son Brandon and I were able to come here. And all work stops when we had whole bodies or something that would resemble a whole body, and people would line up on each side of this makeshift ramp. And I went down with my son, Brandon and we were able to collect Jonathan. He was already in the basket.” Ielpi is overcome with emotion. He pauses, then continues: “So we were able to go down, spend a little time and then Brandon and myself and some of the guys in Jon’s company, we carried him up, put him in an ambulance and took Jon away. We were blessed in a way, because my son was a whole body”.
As each Tower collapsed, an enormous amount of energy was released. The floors pancaked down and the exponentially increasing mass accelerated. Nearly everything within its envelope was pulverized to dust. Lee Ielpi says that not a single filing cabinet was found. Not a single desk, telephone, computer or chair survived the macerating action of tons of concrete, glass and steel as it churned its way into the ground. And the glass that made up the Tower’s facades was reduced to dust. According to Ielpi, not a single piece of it was found. The few bodies found relatively intact, including his son’s were those that were thrown clear of the main collapse. Jonathan Ielpi was found on a staircase from the South Tower with men from his father’s company. His father takes comfort in knowing that he died with brothers, doing what he loved.
The outlines of where the Towers once stood are now marked with traffic cones. I look down on them and am stunned by their size. Ielpi tells me that the footprint of each building occupied one full acre. They are marked so that families of the dead can stand within these boundaries and grieve.
He speaks of the great dust cloud that enveloped Manhattan when the Towers came down. He says it spread the souls of those who perished that day throughout the city. I recall that it hung over the city for days. Then the rains came and it disappeared, washed down the city streets, off the buildings and cars and eventually out to sea.
The people in the group I’m with are shocked, mesmerized. Several are holding back tears. The closeness of 9/11 pours over me in a wave of anger and profound sadness. Ielpi points to a small group of antiwar protesters far below who are pacing around the fenced perimeter of the site. He turns to us, sadness in his eyes as his voice drops: “Those people down there, they don’t know……they’ve never been through this……we have gotten complacent……we are forgetting what happened here……this could happen again."
I stand in line to say goodbye. When my turn comes I clumsily shake Lee’s hand and thank him. As I leave the room, I look towards a willowy young woman who works in the 9/11 outreach center with him. She’d been standing behind us as he spoke. Three years ago she’d witnessed the horrors of 9/11 up close. Our eyes lock briefly. There are ghosts there.
I take the elevator down to street level and exit the building. I’d planned on having a drink with a friend. It would be more than one. I reflect on what I’ve just seen and heard and a single pointed thought pierces my trembling psyche: We must not lose this war.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Muslim Beastality at Beslan
Christians slaughtered by terrorists in Beslan, Russia. Nepalese Hindus butchered by terrorists in Iraq. Jews suicide-bombed in Beersheba, Israel. On this third anniversary of 9/11, adherents of a radically and rabidly politicized version of Islam are still not discriminating – they are attacking innocents of all races, creeds and colors. But the hopeful news is that within the Muslim world voices are beginning to speak out against the terrorists, the nihilist barbarians who – if not stopped – will damage both the causes they claim to champion and Islam itself. “We cannot tolerate in our midst those who abduct journalists, murder civilians, explode buses,” wrote Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of Al-Arabiya news channel. “We cannot accept them as related to us, whatever the sufferings they claim to justify their criminal deeds.” He added: “These are the people who have smeared Islam and stained its image. We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women.” Such courageous responses are long overdue -- as Nonie Darwish, self-described “daughter of an Arab warrior,” has noted. “The world has been seeing Arab radical terrorism growing without much international outcry for half a century,” she wrote. “Many thought it is only against Israel and its interests and ignored it.” True, such voices are still a minority. Many leaders in the Arab and Muslim worlds avoid taking positions that might anger radicals. And there are still those who defend terrorism. Known as “the spiritual leader” of the Al-Muhajiroun sect, Omar Bakri Mohammed lives near London, where last weekend he told an interviewer that he would not condemn the massacre of hundreds of Russian children. On the contrary, he would support similar attacks elsewhere – including in Britain where he has been granted asylum. "If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified,” he declared, “because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq.”
This weekend, Mohammed noted, he will be appearing at a 9/11 event -- to commemorate not the victims, but the perpetrators. Of course, it is not just Islamists who condone terrorism. Darwish observes that “many in the West and the UN are still finding excuses for terrorism.” Take Michael Kinsley, one of America's leading public intellectuals. He has written:
An illegitimate tactic used in a legitimate cause, as part of a conflict with legitimate and illegitimate tactics and aspirations on both sides, is different from an illegitimate tactic used for purposes that are utterly crazed and malevolent.
How is that different from Omar Bakri Mohammed's view?
Similarly, editors at the Reuters news agency long ago pronounced that “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.” They will not judge whether those who murder children in classrooms, decapitate hostages and blow up buses are any worse than, say, George Washington or Mahatma Gandhi.
By contrast, Egypt's Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi has accused the killers in Russia of “taking Islam as a cover -- and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims."
Certainly some terrorists have legitimate grievances and the causes they claim to represent may be just. The plight of the Chechens falls into such a category.
Chechyna, a mostly Muslim land, resisted Tsarist Russian conquest until the middle of the 19th Century. During World War II, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin exiled hundreds of thousands of Chechens to Siberia, believing them to be likely Nazi allies.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Chechnya briefly achieved independence. But Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet president, used an iron fist to restore Kremlin rule. Vladimir Putin, Russia's current leader, has been equally brutal. Since 1994, more than 80,000 Chechens have been killed. Still, nothing suggests that most Chechens support the Beslan atrocities. Exiled Chechen president Alsan Maskhadov does not condone the mass murder of children. His London spokesman said the terrorists are harming the cause of Chechen independence. "But, of course, their demands have all to do with Chechnya,” he acknowledged, “so whatever has happened the Chechens will be held responsible. That's what I'm afraid of."
The Chechen terrorist leader, Shamil Basayev, seeks more than an independent Chechnya. Like his al Qaeda allies, he wants a new Islamic caliphate that would expand well beyond Chechnya's borders.
Hamas, the Palestinian organization that claimed responsibility for the Be'ersheba bombing, has similar ambitions. Reuters is reluctant to tell you what Hamas wants: not an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, but an Islamist state in place of Israel, one that would kill or ethnically cleanse its non-Muslim population.
As for the butchering of the Nepalese in Iraq, that was carried out by Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda affiliate that was based in north-eastern Iraq while Saddam Hussein was in power. For Ansar the question is not, “Why kill minimum-wage workers from Nepal?” but “Why not?”
On the third anniversary of 9/11, self-proclaimed jihadis -- “holy warriors” -- are engaged in a World War against Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and, not least, moderate Muslims.
“Islamist terrorism represents one of the most lethal threats to the stability of the civilized world,” said Kamal Nawash, the Palestinian leading the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism. “Democracy can not succeed unless terrorism is defeated and Islamic extremism is discredited.”
_____________________________________
An Ex- Msulim speaks
Until age 30, I lived as a Muslim in the Middle East. Horrible news such as that from Russia and other incidents in the Philippines, India, the Sudan or Pakistan was always covered up and twisted to portray Muslim terrorists around the world as simply victims of terrible discrimination. They were always portrayed as “freedom fighters” in the minority who needed to rise against the majority Christian or non-Muslim populations in their midst. The larger picture in these countries and the reasons behind the turmoil were never explained in any other way. I will never forget the prayers that many gave in support of minority Muslims all over the world who were believed to be the frontier for Jihad in spreading Islam to the “lost” world around them, Dar-el-Harb -- the land of war, to be conquered by the sword. I once had a guest from Egypt in my home. He was the kindest, most wonderful man you will ever meet. While watching Chechnyan rebels on TV, I saw him cry and pray for their success against the Soviet Union. Praying for killing has never seemed holy to me.
The world has been watching Arab terrorism grow with little international outcry for half a century. I saw many men and women in my culture of origin turned into robotic monsters with a wish to destroy life on Earth to get into heaven. Many believed their hatred was against only Israel and its interests and therefore ignored it.
The world and its lazy media continue, like ostriches, to stick their heads in the sand, and even after 9/11 the U.N. and many in the West still find excuses for terrorism. The Arabs’ best friends, the French, even thought they would get special treatment from terrorists by selling out the U.S. and supporting Saddam Hussein. But to the terrorists the French were just temporary friends until the right time to strike came. One enemy at a time.
Where are Muslim demonstrations against terror? All I noticed in the Arab world after 9/11 were celebrations. The very few courageous Arab writers who think and speak independently are often attacked and terrorized for their views, accused of being puppets of the Zionists. Apparently, standing strong against terrorism and for reformations in the Muslim world is viewed as a “Zionist” conspiracy no matter how heinous the murders carried out by militant Islamists.
Since 1967 there have been thousands of Arab terrorist attacks. There has been only one Israeli terrorist attack against Arabs, by a crazy man who was condemned by almost all Israeli citizens, and the Israeli government never tried the Arabs who beat the attacker to death after he surrendered. Yet I hear apologists for terrorism here cite that one incident as justification for the thousands of terrorist attacks against Israel and the U.S. over the years.
Even worse, how many resolutions by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights condemning an Arab country for human rights violations have ever been proposed or passed? The answer is zero. But the number of Human Rights Commission resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations is 26. Imagine that.
Is there any doubt that the state-sponsored and culturally encouraged terrorism all over the Middle East perpetrated by the Arab states is not a violation of human rights? Could it be that the U.N. is contributing to the problem? When I saw the horror on the faces of the Russian children, I decided to take a stand against the Islamic culture of terror I grew up in and the madness resulting from its teachings. The intense and repetitive teaching of hate produces inhuman robots. Make no mistake about it: My motivation is out of love for the goodness that I know exists in the Muslim world and a fervent desire for this goodness to prevail.
It is time for the world media and the U.N. to take a serious stand against Islamic -- yes, Islamic -- terrorism. The U.N. should immediately issue a very strong resolution condemning terrorism, with serious consequences to oil-rich Arab countries that finance terrorism or teach that terrorists are heroes going to heaven. No “ifs,” “ands” or “buts” and no diluted language by the international media. The out-of-control culture in the Middle East needs a wake-up call and a dose of reality.
I cannot defend the cruel teachings and hate speech of my culture of origin, and no other Arab with any integrity should. There is no cause in the world that can justify this insanity. I lived within it and know what will end it. What is needed immediately is a united world stand against the Arabs’ stagnant and barbaric view of the world and of themselves. The world must no longer stand by, confused and equivocal about 9/11 and Islamic terrorism.
Please, America and the good people of the world, save my Arab culture from itself.
Please.
____________________________________
WHAT HAPPENED ON SEP 11, IS MERE CHICKEN FEED WHEN COMPARED WITH THE MOST DEVASTATING MUSLIM ATTACK ON INDIA THAT BROKE UP THE SUB CONTINENT INTO THREE BLEEDING FRAGMENTS OVERNIGHT, SWALLOWING UP SOME TWO MILLION INNOCENT HUMANS.
WHEN WILL PARTITIONED BLEEDING INDIA, BROKEN BHARAT, RETALIATE TO PUSH MOHAMMED AND HIS ISLAM BACK TO MECCA AND RECLAIM HER FRONTIER AT KHYBER?
FOR SUCH ACT OF COURAGE AND BRAVERY AGAINST THE ISLAMIC CAT, "CHICKEN HINDUSTAN" NEEDS THE HELP OF ALL THE WORLD.
....................000000000
[_private/ftarc.htm]