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The Blind Sheikh’s Legacy of Terror

Feb. 20 2017

On Friday night, the Egyptian-born religious leader and terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, died in an American prison. Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of the sheikh for planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, reflects on his blood-soaked career:

Before there was an al-Qaeda or an Islamic State, there was the Blind Sheikh, known to his worldwide following as “the emir of jihad.” And he bears much of the responsibility—he would think of it as the credit—for what followed him. Indeed, Osama bin Laden credited Sheikh Abdel Rahman with the fatwa that approved the 9/11 jihadist attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered. . . .

Abdel Rahman was [deeply influenced by such contemporaries as] the Shiite jihadist icon, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Notwithstanding their theological differences, Abdel Rahman, [a Sunni], perceived in Khomeini the possibilities of Islamic revolution and the exploitation of what he saw as American weakness—particularly by Hizballah, Khomeini’s forward jihadist militia that, among other atrocities, killed 241 U.S. Marines in their Beirut barracks in 1983. . . .

Abdel Rahman also revered Sayyid Qutb, his fellow Egyptian and a Muslim Brotherhood hero long imprisoned and eventually executed by the hated Nasser regime. . . . Qutb . . . infused his teaching with visceral anti-Semitism, portraying the Jew as the instantiation of all that is anti-Islamic and treacherous. Abdel Rahman drank deeply from this noxious well. [Indeed, he] became most notorious for issuing the fatwa relied upon by the jihadists who murdered the Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat at a military parade in 1981—for the unforgivable offense of making peace with Israel. . . .

[Abdel Rahman’s] acolytes included Sayyid Nosair, Mohamed Salameh, Mahmud Abuhalima, and Nidal Ayyad—to name just a few. . . . In 1990, Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane, the controversial founder of the Jewish Defense League, at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. On February 26, 1993, Salameh, Abuhalima, and Ayyad, along with Ramzi Yousef, carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center—a plot long in the making, much of which was planned during visits to Nosair at Attica prison in upstate New York.

Read more at National Review

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anwar Sadat, Meir Kahane, Politics & Current Affairs, Radical Islam, Terrorism, War on Terror

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic