The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement Blog

Issue 39

Issue 39 [@33:18]: This issue is broken into following segments.

Issue 39a: Walid Shoebat – “Shaheed, the word Shaheed, means witness, to witness to testify, to testify there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger. And you die as a Shaheed for that cause, you are a witness, you are considered a witness and martyr, and a martyr becomes glorified. Your family will glorify you after you die.”

Rebuttal 39a: One of the many tactics employed by this documentary is to keep repeating an allegation, no matter how false. Sooner or later it will psychologically stick with the audience as the truth. Shaheed interpreted as a martyr is one such construct that this documentary keeps repeating and wrongly attributes it to acts of terrorism. This wrong perception of Martyrdom attributed to Islam was clarified in detail in the Issue 34 under the heading ‘Martyrdom’ based upon excerpted section from the book “Islam, Peace and Tolerance” [p. 50-2] by Dr. Zahid Aziz.

Footnote – Shoebat himself acknowledges that Shaheed means witness. Thus, it would be totally ridiculous to substitute the word ‘martyr’ for ‘witness’ in Quran e.g.

“Allah is witness of what you do” (3:98)

“Allah is sufficient as a witness between us and you” (10:29).

Issue 39b: Walid Shoebat – “To a Muslim fundamentalist living in the Middle East I had to be initiated. I had to basically either kill my first Jew or destroy my first Zionist infrastructure. I had to prove beyond shadow of a doubt that I was worthy. And there are ample amount of students, teenagers, men, who are willing to die a suicide martyrs. Willing to put explosives. The martyr application is filled. There are many applicants. There are not enough bombs to fulfill the applicants. And to get in one of those missions indeed you must have been chosen. You must have been really good. You must have been violent enough. You must have been going out on every demonstration in the streets of Jerusalem or Bethlehem or our village. You must have shown yourself worthy of a greater operation. So when I explained what I have done and people have seen me in the community and I was worthy, [pause] I ended up in prison, I was of course recruited. And I remember Mr. Mahmud Al-Mughrabi. He was a proud, he was proud to have planted fifteen bombs. Killed many Israelis. He was being bailed out by a Jewish-Israeli lawyer. He back right in the street. So you find your bomb maker and you apply. You say, ‘look, I want to join, I want to do my first martyr operation, planting a bomb, whatever’ and you need connection. I found my connection. I rendezvous with this guy in Jerusalem in [unclear location] and he built this explosive charge with a timer in a loaf of bread and I had to smuggle it from the Temple Mount under the auspices of Al-Waqf department. Al-Waqf police is the Islamic police appointed by the government to watch over the holy sites. Them knowingly that I have explosive charges, smuggle me so that I can escape from the check points. There I carried my explosive charge from Jerusalem to Bank Leumi in Bethlehem. I was supposed to place the explosive charge at 6 pm exactly. I was supposed to have this explosive charge in my hand at 6 pm exactly. Five to six [o,clock] I saw some Arab children running around and I did not want to kill any Arabs. So, I decided to place this explosive charge on the roof, I tossed it on the roof. At 6 pm it went off and there was this big explosion. I looked behind me. I see a thick black smoke coming out of the building. And I started running. That’s the moment I first got a glimpse of the reality of killing. I thought people have died. And, I remember, I didn’t sleep for three days, constantly worried that I have killed somebody. Even terrorists have reality check that you kill or about to die. You can sense it. This is why in Israel, the way the nature of finding out a suicide bomber is to look at their eyes. They will have these glossy eyes. They are sweating profusely. They are not paying attention because in their mind they are about to go. And its, you weight the reality that now you are gonna die. Many times I have been in this situation or I had thought I was going to get killed shooting back and forth as we stone at the Israelis and they shoot back at us and things like that. I was face to face with death. When you think in your minds that you are going to die, you struggle between the requirements of your Islamic upbringing and between the reality that you value your life. And, at some point one has to outweigh the other. And, for a Muslim fundamentalist we always chose death. We always chose the suicide. My cousin died on his way to Ben-Yahuda street and he got killed. He died. I had people and relatives die fighting the Israelis. And as I look at now, I think what a waste. What a waste of life!”

Rebuttal 39b: Shoebat once again fabricates facts and logic for a scripted tearjerker account of his past. He cunningly chooses his words. To insinuate the audience he tacitly mentions the Temple Mount i.e. Al-Aqsa Mosque where allegedly his bomb was made. Then he makes sure that Al-Waqf police is mentioned as his accomplice in the terror plot. Like the plot of DaVinci Code, he touches every landmark in the holy land. Whom is Shoebat trying to fool or please? Equivalent of his lies in Christian world would be a Vatican staff member who manufactures a bomb for a terrorist in Sistine Chapel and then the Pontifical Swiss Guards of the Vatican slip the terrorist and his bomb into some populated part of Rome, e.g. St. Peter’s Square. His synthesized facts are laughable. Probably, of many reasons, it was this fantastic account that caught the attention of CNN. His self awakening to Christianity based upon his past of being a “terrorist” is rubbished by the CNN investigative journalism (see Part – 1 of “Ex Terrorist Rakes’ in homeland security bucks”).

CNN was not able to locate any incidence or police report of bombing of the bank that Shoebat takes “credit” for. The video clip clearly shows that the bank is housed in a tall building. It is just impossible for someone to lob up a bomb from street level to its roof, unless it is Shoebat throwing it in his fantasies of Marvel Comics characters the Fantastic Four. There are no police records of Shoebat’s self alleged arrests and imprisonment in Israel. Even his family members mock his fabricated “terrorist” activities. Obviously, Shoebat is more of a wannabe terrorist or a terrorist of a make belief for the gullible Western audience.

Shoebat not only unravels himself by his lies, he factually throws the whole documentary into a pseudo-intellectual gutter. Looking back at the previous issues, all his arguments similarly appear hollow and fabricated to please certain audience and pocketbooks.

Since, Shoebat is trying to placate certain masters who see the ghettoized-apartheid perpetrators as righteous and the subjugated populace as terrorists, it begets a review of the history of Palestine in last century. Shoebat might be surprised to find that founders of terrorism in Middle East are none but the founders of Israel, of which Yitzhak Shamir rose to be the Prime Minister. He wrote the book on terrorism and lived the life of one. The following is a direct quote from the written doctrine of LEHI group, a terrorist organization that he belonged to:

Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: “Ye shall blot them out to the last man.” But first and foremost, terrorism is for us a part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play: speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all.

It is quite difficult to reconcile the morality of last sixty years of Middle East geopolitics through the lens of this documentary. Recent history tells us that even if you are a terrorist, like Yitzhak Shamir, in cahoots with Nazis, you can be rewarded with land and country for your terrorist killings, face no accountability, then rise to the highest office in the country by an election which in turn itself reflects the lack of morality of the electorate – that enforces racism, apartheid, forced ghetto segregation for the occupied, kills indiscriminately, even chokes the food, water and electricity of the subjugated, robs the minorities of their present and future – then you belong to a civilized world, you are the citizen of the “lone democracy in the Middle East.”

Next time, Mr. Shoebat when you see rebellion in the walled-off ghettos in the Middle East, please be mindful that rebels might be borrowing a page from none other but the holy book of the occupiers or the script of the founding fathers of the occupiers. Quran is fully cognizant of such double standards of civility, human rights and right of self-determination that are allowed as a right to occupiers and the transplanted, yet denied to the natives who are occupied and displaced:

83:1-13.Woe to the cheaters, who, when they take the measure (of their dues) from people, take it fully, but when they measure out to others or weigh out for them, they give less than is due! Do they not think that they will be raised again, to a mighty day? — the day when mankind will stand before the Lord of the worlds. No, surely the record of the wicked is in the prison. And what will make you know what the prison is? It is a written book. Woe on that day to the rejectors who call the day of Judgment a lie! And none calls it a lie but every exceeder of limits, every sinful one; when Our messages are recited to him, he says: Stories of the ancients!

Terrorism, whether committed by the Prime Minister of a country or a homeless of the native land; terrorism, whether sanctioned by actual words of Torah or fabricated in the name of Islam has no room in Quran:

5:32. …We prescribed for the Children of Israel that whoever kills a person, unless it is for manslaughter or for mischief in the land, it is as though he had killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the lives of all mankind. And certainly Our messengers came to them with clear arguments, but even after that many of them commit excesses in the land.

References:

Islam, Peace and Tolerance – Dr. Zahid Aziz.

‘Ex Terrorist Rakes’ in homeland security bucks Part – 1, Part – 2 – Anderson Cooper 360 – CNN

The Holy Quran – Muhammad Ali, edited by Dr. Zahid Aziz