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[ by Charles Cameron — in a story, in a nutshell, the very different world of al-Shabaab ]
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The third issue of of the pro-Shabaab magazine Gaidi Mtaani, issued a few months back, contained a long piece titled A Greater Scheme of Things, and in it I’d like to zero in on the extraordinary story which is the heart of the piece — and which offers us a fasacinating insight into jihad:

it was luminously evident, for me personally, in one memorable incident in Mogadishu’s frontline last year. Just after Dhuhur prayer, one particular day in March, the Mujahideen received news that the enemy was preparing to mount a large offensive in the Northern parts of the city – in an area that was then newly captured by the Mujahideen.

In no time, the news spread across the entire frontline and the Mujahideen geared up for a protracted battle. New defence posts were erected, the old ones were fortified, trenches were dug, reinforcements were called in, snipers were placed on rooftops and small groups of well-equipped fighters were strategically positioned to guard every street and every alley. Garrisoned in the makeshift base, a short distance behind the frontline, were dozens of young martyrdom seekers, each eager to engage the enemy once called. A flurry of activity engulfed the bullet-battered neighbourhood as sporadic gunfire resonated across the empty streets and a countless number of vehicle-mounted weapons, such as ZU-23 and B-10, Dhshk, Shilka, were all streaming in and out of the base to take their positions. Upon seeing the long line of military vehicles and artillery, one of the fighters erroneously remarked in amazement: ‘today we will defeat these African invaders.’ Materialistically, all possible preparations were made to defeat the encroaching enemy, but were they enough to achieve victory?

Just after Asr that day, the battle began in deadly earnest, with ear-splitting explosions and exchange of gunfire reverberating from all corners from the city. A salvo of mortars ripped through the fragile rooftops, grenades exploded with alarming ferocity, tanks bulldozed buildings and reduced them to rubble and a hail of bullets cracked into the shell-bestrewn streets. In the backdrop of such a frenzied atmosphere, the Mujahideen maintained remarkable inner tranquillity, for the believer’s heart is an island of santy in such a setting. They’ve put up a sturdy defence in all corners, necessary arrangements were made to outflank the enemy and the chants of Takbeer were gradually rising above the cruel cacophony of gunfire. But something strange was also happening: all the artillery brought by the Mujahideen failed to fire a single shot! The guns were cleaned, lubricated, loaded and reloaded, but they still recoiled without firing a round and with the bullet jammed in the barrel. The field commanders hopped from trench to trench, through tunnels, in order to analyse and resolve the situation, but all their efforts were in vain.

‘Today we will defeat these African invaders’ chimed in the memory of one of the commanders and that’s when they had realised that what was happening was in fact a punishment for a grave sin they had committed: trusting in the abilities of their weapons. The certitude with which the statement was expressed proved to be destructive and no sooner had the Mujahideen recognised the mistake and repented than the very same artillery, almost instantaneously, began firing again. The Mujahideen managed to repel the enemy, but those who’ve uttered the statements also learnt a great lesson: that fortifying the bastion of Eeman must take precedence over building a substantial military arsenal; for military arsenal can never bring victory without Eeman.

Such is the clear manifestation of Allah’s absolute control over all affairs that the Kuffar have failed to comprehend.

I’ll comment on this story in a follow-up post: for now, I’d just like to let this very revealing tale hang in the air for your consideration…

Your comments are most welcome.

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Source:

Gaidi Mtaani #3, safe copy available from Jihadology, pp. 12-15

[ by Charles Cameron — in which jihadis take on Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, quite an interfaith haul for hatred ]
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Aaron Zelin at Jihadology posted an hour-long video entitled Woolwich Attack a week or so ago, and I found it particularly interesting on two accounts: first, that it makes a multi-faith attack that includes Buddhism in its catalogue of enemies of Islam, and second, that it uses an innovative feature of modern digital typography. Here, I’ll concentrate on the first. Here’s the video’s title:

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Christianity as a target is well represented in the form of Dr Justin Welby, the recently-appointed Archbishop of Canterbury:

Notice also the lower of these two screengrabs, this one showing Ayman al-Zawahiri (left) berating a leading Muslim spokesman in the UK, Ibrahim Mogra of the Muslim Council of Britain (right), for speaking at the same event as the Archbishop. The damning subtitle suggests he’s one of those “who issue Fatwas according to the school of thought of the head of the Church of England”.

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It wasn’t the attack on Christians or fellow Muslims that caught my eye, though, but the unexpected presence of the monk Wirathu, the rhetorical leader of Myanmar’s recent Buddhist rioting against Burmese Muslims. I’d seen his face on Time magazine and elsewhere, but it came as a bit of a shock here in a jihadist video — I’d filed him and his 969 movement under “Buddhism” rather than “Islam” in my mental listing of violent movements with religious underpinnings.

Ugly, ugly.

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Finally, no invitation to jihad these days is complete without its mention of the al-Aqsa mosque and Jerusalem — and it is here that Judaism comes in for attack. Consider these two screengrabs:

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The video closes, significantly, with a long shot of the Dome of the Rock through a window…

Yesterday my friend William Benzon made a post titled On Describing a Painting which began:

Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts bills her article thus: The Power of Patience: Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention. OK. But I take a different lesson from it, one about one of my current hobby horses: description. Roberts focuses on an 18th Century painting by John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Her point is that the more you look at the painting, the more you notice and hence the more you can note in a written description. She asks her students to spend a full three hours with a single painting.

Of her own experience with that painting she observes:

It took me nine minutes to notice that the shape of the boy’s ear precisely echoes that of the ruff along the squirrel’s belly—and that Copley was making some kind of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each. It was 21 minutes before I registered the fact that the fingers holding the chain exactly span the diameter of the water glass beneath them. It took a good 45 minutes before I realized that the seemingly random folds and wrinkles in the background curtain are actually perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye, as if Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or imprinting themselves on the surface behind him. And so on.

She begins her next paragraph: “What this exercise shows students is that just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it.”

Looking at that final screengrab with this in mind, I see a close correlation between the golden Dome that focuses our attention on the Noble Sanctuary / Temple Mount, and the round, yellow-gold keffiyeh of the jihadist observing it through his window — “making some kind of connection between” them, to echo the words of Harvard’s Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities…

It’s a skilled and meaning-filled use of the medium.

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In my second post in this series, I’ll point to a significant development in graphics and technology introduced in this video.

[ by Charles Cameron — eccentric cleanliness and uncleanness, and a righteous blast of Handel ]
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I ran across two quotes the other day that made me decided to start a collection of what I’ll call “Quotes from Outer Orbits”. Here are the first two:

My first pick comes from the label of one of Dr Bronner’s Magical Soaps:

Replace half-true Socialist-fluoride poison & tax-slavery with full-truth, work-speech-press & profitsharing Socialaction! All-One! So, help build 4 billion Hannibal wind-power plants, charging 96 billion battery-banks, powering every car-factory-farm-home-monorail & pump, watering Babylon-roof-gardens & 800 billion Israel-Milorganite fruit trees, guarded by Swiss 6000 year Universal Military Training

My second is a lot fiercer, but no less strange — it’s from radio host Pete Santilli, speaking on air:

I want to shoot her right in the vagina and I don’t want her to die right away; I want her to feel the pain and I want to look her in the eyes and I want to say, on behalf of all Americans that you’ve killed, on behalf of the Navy SEALS, the families of Navy SEAL Team Six who were involved in the fake hunt down of this Obama, Obama bin Laden thing, that whole fake scenario, because these Navy SEALS know the truth, they killed them all. On behalf of all of those people, I’m supporting our troops by saying we need to try, convict, and shoot Hillary Clinton in the vagina.

I’ll take the literal soap box over the metaphorical one, thanks!

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But I don’t mean to leave you depressed at the state of the world. Meanwhile the Ensemble Zaïs, led by Benoît Babel, plays one of Handel‘s Organ Concerti with a vitality that inspires me…

Who can despair at this?

[ by Charles Cameron — the belt-fed video camera, & ammo for women ]
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A brilliant photo juxtaposing war and media in a single image.

Also reminiscent of that Yardley’s “A Woman’s Ammunition” ad from so long ago:

[ by Charles Cameron — how a half-baked, re-raked tale from 2007, now showing on my local Facebook, gets things all wrong ]
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Let’s set the record straight.

It seems that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times did the amplification in this case. He tweeted, and Mia Farrow retweeted him, so we know what he said:

!! RT @NickKristof: No words: A Saudi woman is gang-raped by 7 men; then a Saudi court sentences her to 200 lashes! http://t.co/Vm6M6AzwZG

— mia farrow (@MiaFarrow) September 27, 2013

I can’t find Kristof’s original tweet, I guess he’s deleted it. About the same time Mia Farrow was RTing it, though, and thus saving it for the record, he tweeted:

I'm wondering (via @JMHall_) if the Saudi case that the Examiner is reporting is the old 2007 Qatif Girl lashing case, rather than a new one

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) September 27, 2013

And if you go to JM Hall‘s twitter stream, you’ll see that he was schooling Kristof on this one, and pointed him to an NYT piece from 2007. Funny, that — being an NYT piece and all…

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Anyway, the word got out on Facebook and went at least a little viral. And that’s sad. Because while the story does illustrate the state of jurisprudence in Saudi in 2007, the raped girl never actually received those 200 lashes — she was personally pardoned by the King.

Which should be a reason for rejoicing, not condemnation.

But here’s how it was presented on my FB page —

That does somewhat encourage the reader to think she did in fact receive those lashes, doesn’t it?

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I understand, Nick Kristof tweeted it — and he’s the good guy who helps a whole heap of socially beneficial causes around the world that deserve all the support and encouragement he can bring them. I’m not disputing that, in fact I’ll gladly stipulate it.

But the story was wrong, and wrong in a damaging way. And forwarding or endorsing this sort of thing makes me very sad. Let me explain why.

The Examiner.com is an outfits that “operates a network of local news websites, allowing ‘pro–am contributors'” — nothing wrong with that, you just need to be careful when you read them, in other words.

The Examiner article in question quotes the Clarion Project, calling it “the women’s rights-centered news portal” when it’s far better known as the source of a whole lot of anti-Islamic propaganda — the Muslim organization CAIR lists Clarion among the “Islamophobia Network’s inner core” groups, while Clarion views CAIR with similar distaste. Okay, maybe they cancel each other out, let’s stipulate that, too.

But the article then states that the Clarion piece was posted “on Sept. 22, 2013” — whereas if you click through, you’ll find it’s actually dated Thu, November 15, 2007 — it’s 5 going on 6 years old. So why drag it up again now?

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Retired US diplomat John Burgess who blogs about Saudi Arabia quotes to us, in a blog post from December 2007 and titled ‘Qatif Girl’ Receives Saudi Royal Pardon, an article from Agence France Presse in Riyadh, also dated December 2007, which can tells us what actually happened — how this unhappy story ended:

RIYADH (AFP) — Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has pardoned a teenage girl sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes after being gang raped, Al Jazirah newspaper reported on Monday.

The ruling against the 19-year-old girl in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom had attracted widespread international condemnation, including from human rights groups and the White House.

The Arabic language daily said it had been informed of the royal pardon from its own, unidentified, sources.
But in the same article, the kingdom’s Justice Minister Abdullah bin Mohammad bin Ibrahim Al Shaikh told the paper the king had the “right to overrule court judgements if he considered it benefiting the greater good.”
The minister added that the king, who is viewed by many as a cautious reformer, was concerned with “the needs of the people and the court judgments that are made against them.”

Got that? Pardoned. By the King. Who is viewed as a cautious reformer.

I hope Kristof and Farrow have let their friends know…

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So the Examiner writer whose work Kristof and others are quoting has:

picked up a nasty story from Saudia Arabia almost six years ago,

that actually didn’t end in a girl being given 200 lashes for being raped

but resulted in the King personally pardoning her,

thus moving Saudi jurisprudence in a very welcome new direction

— and posted it without any of the redeeming parts, with attribution to a group that’s not exactly friendly to the House of Saud, and getting the date wrong by almost six years in the process… And then well-meaning, generous people — Nick Kristoff and some of my friends among them — circulate this ugly and incomplete story, without first checking to see what truth there is to it.

I quoted a source without checking its veracity only the other day [1, 2, 3], so I’m in no position to go around blaming people who don’t check their sources. But seeing this particular story of the 200 lashes go viral makes me sad — because repeating it only stirs up righteous anger, disgust and hatred.

Rape is terrible. A penal code that sentences people to 200 lashes is way, way beyond my sense of justice. But I don’t believe stirring up hatred between nations or against religions is the path we want to choose…