zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » Vital knowledge — or fatal ignorance?
«
»

Vital knowledge — or fatal ignorance?

[ by Charles Cameron — a DoubleQuote in two tweets on the importance of religious knowledge in due season ]
.

From about a month ago:

**

Today:

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 22nd, 2013 at 2:08 am and is filed under africa, Charles Cameron, iraq, Islam, islamist, prayer, Religion, syria, twitter, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Vital knowledge — or fatal ignorance?”

  1. Charles Cameron Says:
    September 29th, 2013 at 5:08 pm

    From AP today, under the title Terrorists used new tactic to spare some Muslims

    The turbaned gunmen who infiltrated Nairobi’s Westgate mall arrived with a set of religious trivia questions: As terrified civilians hid in toilet stalls, behind mannequins, in ventilation shafts and underneath food court tables, the assailants began a high-stakes game of 20 Questions to separate Muslims from those they consider infidels.
    .
    A 14-year-old boy saved himself by jumping off the mall’s roof, after learning from friends inside that they were quizzed on names of the Prophet Muhammad’s relatives. A Jewish man scribbled a Quranic scripture on his hand to memorize, after hearing the terrorists were asking captives to recite specific verses. Numerous survivors described how the attackers from al-Shabab, a Somali cell which recently joined al-Qaida, shot people who failed to provide the correct answers.
    .
    Their chilling accounts, combined with internal al-Shabab documents discovered earlier this year by The Associated Press, mark the final notch in a transformation within the global terror network, which began to rethink its approach after its setbacks in Iraq. Al-Qaida has since realized that the indiscriminate killing of Muslims is a strategic liability, and hopes instead to create a schism between Muslims and everyone else, whom they consider “kuffar,” or apostates.
    .
    “What this shows is al-Qaida’s acknowledgment that the huge masses of Muslims they have killed is an enormous PR problem within the audience they are trying to reach,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization. “This is a problem they had documented and noticed going back to at least Iraq. And now we see al-Qaida groups are really taking efforts to address it.”

Switch to our mobile site