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Chertoff: "Islam has been hijacked by ideologues"
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http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/021226.php
May 30, 2008
Chertoff: "Islam has been hijacked by ideologues"
Almost seven years have passed since 9/11, and we're hearing the same thing from our leaders that we've heard since 9/12. It is a reminder that, at the highest level of government, policy decisions are driven -- hijacked, if you will -- by willful blindness to the roots of the ideology that drives not only al-Qaeda, but is also common to Hizballah, Hamas, and other jihadist groups. Does anyone at the State Department, Homeland Security, or elsewhere, ever puzzle at how ingrained and widespread jihadist activity is, even outside of the Wahhabi sphere of influence, if it's supposedly all just a big misunderstanding and "hijacking" of an otherwise peaceful belief system?
"'Islam has been hijacked by ideologues'," from the Associated Press, May 29:
US Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said Thursday that progress is being made in the war on terror but it is being sabotaged by critics of American foreign policy in the West.
Chertoff was speaking at a security conference in Jerusalem with counterparts from around the world, aimed at sharing information and techniques to fight terrorism.
He said that the US was making inroads in the "battle for hearts and minds" in the Muslim world, but that the effort was being undermined by "sources of cynicism in our society that cannot distinguish between our actions and the actions of terrorists, that treat everything as equivalent, that view appeasement as the best course of dealing with the enemy."
He said Muslim communities "have seen their religion hijacked by a group of ideologues." But he noted that there was a new trend of Muslim clerics in the Middle East and the US that have begun to speak out, preaching that "the ideology of bin Laden and others is at odds with what Islam is about," he said.
Specific examples of such clerics would be nice, of course, especially if they denounce something more substantive than the usual, vague terms like "terrorism," "extremism," and the killing of "innocents."
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"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't." -General George S. Patton
Psalm 82-8: Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You inherit all the nations.
