Malaysia colleges a hotbed for militant recruiting
Zionist APCO reverse propaganda Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Chechnya, Pakistan, its now the turn of Malaysia For God or for fame?Malaysia's universities have become prime recruiting grounds for Islamic militants
Malaysian Muslim students protest at a recent US concert in Malaysia. -- PHOTO: AFP
KUALA LUMPUR - MALAYSIA'S universities have become prime recruiting grounds for Islamic militants looking for youngsters to draw into terrorist networks, security experts warn.
Unlike neighbouring Indonesia and Thailand, the moderate Muslim-majority nation has remained largely free of terror attacks but there are fears that lax admission policies have created a haven for jihadists.
A string of arrests and detentions this year have highlighted the growing presence of radicals using Malaysia as a base to sign up supporters and plan attacks.
In June, authorities deported 45-year-old Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian scholar Aiman Al Dakak along with eight other foreigners from Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Jordan, most of them students.
Al Dakak gave lectures to Malaysian and foreign students at his Kuala Lumpur home, allegedly indoctrinating them with jihadist ideology and urging them to carry out bombings on places of worship in the multi-ethnic nation.
The following month, engineer Mohamad Fadzullah was detained under internal security laws for trying to recruit students at Malaysia's national university and technical institutes for the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group. -- AFP
A rare video reportedly smuggled out of northwest Pakistan allegedly shows a woman being stoned to death by Taliban militants in the upper region of Orakzai.
Al Aan, a Dubai-based pan-Arab television channel that focuses on women's issues, said it had obtained cellphone footage that it says shows a woman being executed because she was seen out with a man. The killing reportedly took place two months ago and was smuggled out by a Taliban member who attended the stoning, according to Al Aan. ABC News could not independently confirm the cellphone video's authenticity.
The video, which seems to show a woman tethered to the ground as a group of men throw stones at her, is so graphic that ABC News cannot show it in its entirety. Parts of it air today on the 25th episode of "Brian Ross Investigates."
"It's difficult to know where and when it was shot," says Gayle Lemmon, deputy director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council of Foreign Relations, in an interview with Ross, "It is consistent with videos that have been coming from Taliban-controlled areas since the '90s."
Lemmon says that when women "stray outside the line" in Taliban-controlled areas, they may "face severe punishment."
"Women are respected as carriers of the family honor," says Lemmon, "but they also pay the price."
In a statement, US State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, "We condemn in the strongest possible terms the brutal stoning of a woman in Orakzai, Pakistan. ... The vicious attack ... is a chilling example of the cowardly disregard violent extremists have for human life."
Also on Friday's show, ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross delves into the secret U.S. air war using unmanned aerial missile strikes to target terrorists and militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The program is now itself being targeted by civil-liberties groups who question the legal limits of the U.S. to launch the attacks outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Joined by former national security advisor Richard Clarke, who was at the helm of the drone program and is now an ABC News consultant, and drone critic Philip Alston, an international law scholar appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the use of U.S. drones on the Afghan border, Ross explores the legal and ethical issues surrounding the program.
But why Malaysian officials are tight-lipped about this issue ?OR they don't know that nurturing a monster of terror can turn on its patron? They should look at Pakistan (the failed ever state in world !) and learn a lesson Malaysia is in a state of dilemma. While it is considered one of the better administered democracy and a modern country amongst the Islamic world like Turkey, it is also seen by other Islamists as dithering away from Islamic oneness! Malaysia fiercely wants to retain the image it has painstakingly created for itself- that of a modern and moderate Islamic state. But it cannot deny visa to Islamic clergy from Middle East. That will be seen as closing doors on Islams most important proponents. Malaysia wants no association with anything concerned with terror as the economic impact of that image is huge for the country to bear. How that country chooses to balance both worlds would be interesting to witness
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Malaysia's universities have become prime recruiting grounds for Islamic militants looking for youngsters to draw into terrorist networks, security experts warn.
Unlike neighbouring Indonesia and Thailand, the moderate Muslim-majority nation has remained largely free of terror attacks but there are fears that lax admission policies have created a haven for jihadists.
A string of arrests and detentions this year have highlighted the growing presence of radicals using Malaysia as a base to sign up supporters and plan attacks.
"The terror threat to Malaysia is very real in terms of terrorists who come in as students," Zamihan Mat Zin, deputy head of the Malaysian Islamic Training Centre, told AFP.
"They are under the radar so they can recruit and create terrorists in our midst," said Zamihan, who is among a group of Muslim scholars engaged by the government to rehabilitate terror suspects in custody.
In June, authorities deported 45-year-old Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian scholar Aiman Al Dakak along with eight other foreigners from Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Jordan, most of them students.
Al Dakak gave lectures to Malaysian and foreign students at his Kuala Lumpur home, allegedly indoctrinating them with jihadist ideology and urging them to carry out bombings on places of worship in the multi-ethnic nation.
The following month, engineer Mohamad Fadzullah was detained under internal security laws for trying to recruit students at Malaysia's national university and technical institutes for the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group.
Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said after the deportations that the phenomenon was an "unhealthy trend which can affect national security".
He said foreign militants were using Malaysia as a base to carry out financial transactions, share information and sign up new followers.
"Despite the arrests, we believe there are still many who are here now and this process is continuing," said Zamihan, who was given permission to interview the nine deported terror suspects.
"Some of these Al-Qaeda operatives who are caught overseas but not prosecuted because of a lack of evidence or a good lawyer, they are able to escape so they then come to Malaysia to study to do a Masters or PhD, but at the same time they are busy recruiting undergraduates."
"Once they have their recruits, whether local or foreigners studying here, they plan regional attacks. Many of them have confessed this," he said.
Kamarulnizam Abdullah, who heads national security studies at the National University of Malaysia, says better screening is needed.
"Our system is very lax and we just accept whoever without thinking of consequences," he said.
Malaysia has been effective in traditional counter-terrorism, but the threat at educational institutions tends to be forgotten, he said, adding that high regard for religious teachers from the Middle East meant they had a willing and uncritical audience for their radical brand of Islam.
"The arrests and deportations are a worrying development because it means the threat is still there that such recruitment is going on at universities," he said.
Zamihan said the nine deported in June were Al-Qaeda operatives who were quietly trying to resurrect JI, a militant Southeast Asian group blamed for a string of major attacks including the 2002 Bali bombings.
"They were recruiting locals or even foreigners studying here to radicalise them and create new terrorists," he said.
The developments have drawn international concern, with FBI assistant director for international operations Joseph Demarest saying recently that the organisation was deeply concerned over home-grown militancy in the Asian region.
"It is the affiliated groups that we are very concerned about... the smaller group, the individuals that we may not know about, these are the top concerns at least for the FBI," he said on the sidelines of a regional security conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Sidney Jones, an expert on Indonesian Islamic terror groups, said it was difficult to say how pervasive campus recruitment is, and whether it is part of a regional plot to rebuild JI.
"There are reports of terror recruitment on Malaysian campuses but Malaysian officials are tight-lipped so it is hard to pin down how extensive this is or what their connections are," she said.
A string of arrests and detentions this year have highlighted the growing presence of radicals using Malaysia as a base to sign up supporters and plan attacks.
"The terror threat to Malaysia is very real in terms of terrorists who come in as students," Zamihan Mat Zin, deputy head of the Malaysian Islamic Training Centre, told AFP.
"They are under the radar so they can recruit and create terrorists in our midst," said Zamihan, who is among a group of Muslim scholars engaged by the government to rehabilitate terror suspects in custody.
In June, authorities deported 45-year-old Al-Qaeda-linked Syrian scholar Aiman Al Dakak along with eight other foreigners from Syria, Yemen, Nigeria and Jordan, most of them students.
Al Dakak gave lectures to Malaysian and foreign students at his Kuala Lumpur home, allegedly indoctrinating them with jihadist ideology and urging them to carry out bombings on places of worship in the multi-ethnic nation.
The following month, engineer Mohamad Fadzullah was detained under internal security laws for trying to recruit students at Malaysia's national university and technical institutes for the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) extremist group.
Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said after the deportations that the phenomenon was an "unhealthy trend which can affect national security".
He said foreign militants were using Malaysia as a base to carry out financial transactions, share information and sign up new followers.
"Despite the arrests, we believe there are still many who are here now and this process is continuing," said Zamihan, who was given permission to interview the nine deported terror suspects.
"Some of these Al-Qaeda operatives who are caught overseas but not prosecuted because of a lack of evidence or a good lawyer, they are able to escape so they then come to Malaysia to study to do a Masters or PhD, but at the same time they are busy recruiting undergraduates."
"Once they have their recruits, whether local or foreigners studying here, they plan regional attacks. Many of them have confessed this," he said.
Kamarulnizam Abdullah, who heads national security studies at the National University of Malaysia, says better screening is needed.
"Our system is very lax and we just accept whoever without thinking of consequences," he said.
Malaysia has been effective in traditional counter-terrorism, but the threat at educational institutions tends to be forgotten, he said, adding that high regard for religious teachers from the Middle East meant they had a willing and uncritical audience for their radical brand of Islam.
"The arrests and deportations are a worrying development because it means the threat is still there that such recruitment is going on at universities," he said.
Zamihan said the nine deported in June were Al-Qaeda operatives who were quietly trying to resurrect JI, a militant Southeast Asian group blamed for a string of major attacks including the 2002 Bali bombings.
"They were recruiting locals or even foreigners studying here to radicalise them and create new terrorists," he said.
The developments have drawn international concern, with FBI assistant director for international operations Joseph Demarest saying recently that the organisation was deeply concerned over home-grown militancy in the Asian region.
"It is the affiliated groups that we are very concerned about... the smaller group, the individuals that we may not know about, these are the top concerns at least for the FBI," he said on the sidelines of a regional security conference in Kuala Lumpur.
Sidney Jones, an expert on Indonesian Islamic terror groups, said it was difficult to say how pervasive campus recruitment is, and whether it is part of a regional plot to rebuild JI.
"There are reports of terror recruitment on Malaysian campuses but Malaysian officials are tight-lipped so it is hard to pin down how extensive this is or what their connections are," she said.
What I wish to warn the growing Islamist countries is. These clergy islami fundamentalists who are poor and dont like the other muslims to earn and prosper. They want to live with old mediaval life style and philosophy. If the educated lot of muslim community do not intervene and stop this jihadi philosophy then a time will come when the islam will be in danger because of these jehadi idiologue. Now this has become the problem of Islam too. The developed Islamic countries have taken so much of time to develop but if this jehadis are not countered they will be back to zero. Choice is yours.
Mohamed Mohamud had never been to Afghanistan or Pakistan, and he had never spent time with any real life terrorists; his aspirations were shaped by what he saw on TV and on the internet, and his plan was conceived with the help of the FBI.
BY KAMBIZ GHANEABASSIRI,
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Speaking from the heart? |
PORTLAND, OREGON |
We live in a media world in which news coverage of the individual Muslim’s actions represents Islam the world over. Pundits, Islamophobes, and Muslim apologists alike look to the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition as the source that could explain or condemn Mohamud’s actions, but his motives seem to make most sense in the context of this new media landscape in which, as Marshall McLuhan argued, “the medium is the message.” Media are “extensions of man.” What McLuhen meant is that media do not simply serve as means for communication within society; they shape society by forming social interactions.
The truth of his aphorisms for the contemporary world was most poignantly felt by the Portland Somali and Muslim communities for whom the coverage of Mohamud’s arrest was experienced as a personal betrayal even though they had never even met Mohamud. “He ruined it for everybody,” a 24-year-old Somali told The Oregonian. Another said, “As a Somali, it’s, ‘Oh, my God, one more thing we’ll be remembered for’.”
Media images of Muslims do not only shape the experiences of Muslims in this country; they also shape non-Muslims’ experiences of Muslims. This is a simple assertion with profound implications, which the FBI’s actions in Mohamud’s case force us to face. A close look at Mohamud’s 36-page arrest warrant shows that the FBI placed him in one of the five options associated with the stereotypical Muslim found in media-influenced homeland security discourse. When the FBI, pretending to represent a militant Muslim group, met with Mohamud to discuss his aspirations for “the cause.” The FBI gave Mohamud five options: “(1) pray five times a day and spread Islam to others; (2) continue studying and get an engineering or medical degree so he could help the brothers overseas; (3) raise funds for the brothers overseas; (4) become ‘operational;’ and (5) become a ‘shaheed’ (martyr).”
These five options divide Muslims into three types. The first type is the “good Muslim” for whom Islam is a set of private rituals encapsulated in the proverbial Five Pillars.
The second type is the equivalent of the “sleeper cell.” He is political and concerned about the plight of Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. He may wish to lend moral and financial support to Muslims in these regions but is not “operational.”
The third type is the militant Muslim willing to fight and die for “Muslim causes”.
Missing entirely from this discourse is the option to organize and become active in non-violent civic or political organizations that support his causes. In reality, however, this is the option chosen by the overwhelming majority of American Muslims who are concerned about American Muslim civil rights and the plight of Muslims in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories.
Given his five options, the teenager Mohamud chose, not surprisingly, to become “operational.” But all he knew about what it meant to become operational was based on what he had seen on the news, particularly the news coverage of car bombs in the Middle East and the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Most tellingly in this regard, he, himself told the undercover FBI agent that he did not know how he could become “operational” and “would need training.”
The FBI’s operationalizing of Mohamud has raised many legitimate questions about entrapment. The arrest warrant, however, shows the FBI deliberately limiting their role to the provision of materials for Mohamud to carry out his intended act. The undercover FBI agent repeatedly asked Mohamud whether or not this was what his heart told him to do: “This is your choice, it’s what in [sic] your heart, we can’t tell you what’s in your heart.”
By repeatedly asking what was in his heart, the FBI seems to have not only sought to establish intent, but assumed that Muslim militancy is directly related to religion and religious sentiments. Moreover, its operative assumption about religion was an implicitly Protestant one which conceived religion as an inward experience (faith) rather than the more Islamic conception of religion as the moral standard by which people ought to be judged.
While the FBI was trying to ascertain the intent of Mohamud’s heart, Mohamud himself, by FBI’s account of events, appears to have been preoccupied with creating sensational headlines. When he was asked how he feels about women and children being present at the tree lighting ceremony, he retorted, “[I]magine every day we see you know in our, you know, newspapers and news you know our people are killed you know. So for us to see them in the same….” Mohamud wanted to be an actor of consequence in a media-defined reality, the virtual landscape created by our media in which the only Muslim actors are stereotypically either militants or victims of American neo-imperialism. It is only in this virtual landscape that it becomes sensible for the options given to Mohamud to be either prayer or violence.
Based on the FBI’s own account of the events, Mohamud’s primary connection with Afghanistan or the northwest frontier of Pakistan was media images of Osama bin Laden. As further evidence of his actions being motivated within a media world was the Osama bin Laden-like video he recorded to take credit for the bombing. He changed his clothes for the video and put on a white robe and a white-and-red headdress. He told his FBI handler that, “he wanted to be ‘Sheik Osama style’.”
His attachment to Osama bin Laden was based on a dream he had had of the mountains of Yemen, the land of Osama bin Laden’s ancestors. He was around fifteen years old at that time. He also seems to have been impressed by another media image—this time of the November 26, 2008 attacks in Mumbai. He, a product of his media world, did not seem too concerned that the Mumbai attacks were reportedly carried out by Lashkar-e Taiba, which targets India over the dispute in Kashmir, and not al Qaeda. Perhaps in his mind it was all jihad on the news!
Well, when I was fifteen you know I had a, I was—I made [a special prayer for guidance] about whether I should you know… should go you know and make jihad in a different country or to make like an operation here you know like, something like Mumbai. You know, it would be simple you know you could get some weapon you know. So I made [a special prayer for guidance] and it was like when I was fifteen so, I had a dream that night, and in my dream you know I saw the mountains of Yemen.Mohamud’s decision to blow up a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in which families were presents has generally been taken as emblematic of the cold-hearted brutality and anti-Christian sentiments of Muslim militants; a closer look at his media-inspired motivation, however, suggests that what was significant about the tree lighting ceremony for Mahmud was not so much the presence of families or the Christmas tree but the fact that the event coincided with the anniversary of the 2008 Mumbai attack.
When the medium is the message, one can’t really control the message. There are other ways as well in which the message he sought to convey through the media was misunderstood. Mohamud was looking for revenge of an equal Q-rating. The dead bodies would have been collateral damage. “[I]t’s gonna be a fireworks show… a spectacular show,” he told one of the FBI agents helping him acquire a bomb, “New York Times will give it two thumbs up.”
It is instructive to remember that in becoming “operational” Mohamud never had any face-to-face contact with terrorists or militants. Nor did he seem to have had any real connection with, or actual experience of the war in Afghanistan. His main connection with militants, according to the FBI, was mainly through a website called “Jihad Recollections,” where he pseudonymously published articles in 2009. He sought headline-grabbing revenge through equivalency in bloody news coverage. In his video statement, he said,
“For as long as you threaten our security, your people will not remain safe. As your soldiers target our civilians, we will not help to do so. Did you think that you could invade a Muslim land, and we would not invade you, but Allah will have soldiers scattered everywhere across the globe.”
The discrepancy in Mohamud’s mind between reality in the media and reality of actual events speaks to McLuhan’s assertion that media are extensions of man. There is, of course, no real equivalency between the actions of a teenager seeking to become operational through the Internet and the actions of the most powerful army the world has ever known, except perhaps in the 24/7 media defined reality that envelops us.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is Associate Professor of Religion and Humanities at Reed College. He is the author of A History of Islam in America (Cambridge University Press, 2010). A version of this article was previously published in Religion Dispatches.
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