Red-faced in Tel Aviv, Current affairs, NewAgeIslam.com

Current affairs

Red-faced in Tel Aviv

By ISABEL KERSHNER

Feb 20, 2010

Mossad, which in Hebrew stands for the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, is in charge of Israel's overseas espionage and covert operations

The initial nods, winks and pats on the back here (Jerusalem) over the assassination last month of a senior Hamas official in Dubai are turning to puzzlement and concern as mounting evidence, including extensive surveillance videos, points to a remarkably clumsy operation many Israelis deem unworthy of their intelligence service,Mossad.Officially,Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the case, as is customary in delicate matters of intelligence and national security. But since the news of the assassination broke last month, Israel has unofficially made the story its own, with newspapers blaring congratulatory headlines and government ministers praising Mossad's director.

However, then the Dubai police released images showing some of the 17 people suspected of being in the hit squad bumbling about in poor disguises, and Britain became infuriated by the use of faked British travel documents. Now Israelis are wondering whether their once-famed spy service could have been behind such a sloppy job or,in a John Le Carré-like twist, if Israel could have been framed.

On Wednesday, a commentator for the newspaper Haaretz, Amir Oren, wrote a front-page column about the case,calling for the Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, to step down."What must have seemed to its perpetrators as a huge success," he wrote,"is now being overshadowed by enormous question marks."

http://newageislam.com/red-faced-in-tel-aviv/current-affairs/d/2486

Indian Muslims endorse fatwa against terrorism: Media welcomes Jamiat Ulema ‘Seizing the initiative in these troubled times’

Radical Islamism and Jihad

Indian Muslims endorse fatwa against terrorism: Media welcomes Jamiat Ulema ‘Seizing the initiative in these troubled times’

Declaration of intent

Editorial in The Indian Express

Nov 11, 2008

Seizing the initiative in these troubled times, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind expressed a consensus condemning terrorism as un-Islamic. More than 6000 clerics signed the declaration, and reminded the nation that jihad and terrorism were “poles apart” and that “terrorism is the biggest crime as per the Quran”. What’s more, they displayed a grown-up refusal to play politics over revelations about Hindu militants arrested in connection with the recent bomb blasts, saying that terrorism should not be linked to any religion.

They also pressed for a separate law to deal with communal violence, and greater representation of Muslims in education and employment. Certainly, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind’s resolution carries great moral weight and legitimacy among Indian Muslim communities, and the resolution is a sensible move away from victimhood to agency. It is a welcome attempt at reaching out to the rest of the nation and carving a moderate space to respond to the particular exigencies of the situation facing those communities.

Unfortunately, the entire spectrum of commentators that conflate Islam and terrorist activity and suggest that the religion encourages a willed surrender of independent thinking fail to recognise how any religion shape-shifts in response to changing situations. Jihad itself is a normative concept in the Quran, an ethical mission and a warlike one — variously deployed depending on political circumstance — and the Hyderabad resolution clearly distinguished between the two.

http://newageislam.com/indian-muslims-endorse-fatwa-against-terrorism--media-welcomes-jamiat-ulema-%E2%80%98seizing-the-initiative-in-these-troubled-times%E2%80%99/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/969

The Anti Terror Fatwa: But Who Is Listening?, Islam,Terrorism and Jihad, NewAgeISlam.com

Islam,Terrorism and Jihad

The Anti Terror Fatwa: But Who Is Listening?

By Salil Kader

This conference and the fatwa issued are of great importance for more reasons than one. Deoband, arguably one of the most important Islamic centres of learning in the world after the Al Azhar University at Cairo , has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in the recent past. This is so because Deoband has been widely believed to be the motivating ideology behind many recognised terrorist groups like the Taliban, the Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Harkat ul-Mujahideen. Interestingly, what many commentators and analysts researching the phenomenon of ‘Islamist terrorism’ failed to highlight was the fact that the world-renowned seminary never endorsed the Taliban or the brand of Islam that they tried to impose upon the hapless Afghans. The Princeton University Professor Muhammad Qasim Zaman records in his book ‘The Ulama in Contemporary Islam’ (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2002) that “the Deobandi ulama were never unanimously euphoric about the Taliban … in terms of intellectual activity, too, there is a great gulf between the Deobandi Taliban and Deobandi scholars like Taqi Uthmani.” (p.139-40).

http://newageislam.com/the-anti-terror-fatwa--but-who-is-listening?/islam,terrorism-and-jihad/d/47