When all the women were dead, the jihadists burned their bodies inside the houses. After they had finished with the women, the jihadists went back to …where they had locked the children. ‘They brought out the little kids – two, one and a half, three years old – they took them out holding on to each other. They took the groups and killed them with knife stabs’. The jihadists ripped open the children’s bellies with knives and tore out their intestines… ‘It was possible they killed the children like that so as not to waste their munitions, or perhaps as a game for the jihadists'.
"Although the scene above is entirely true and based on eye-witness accounts, one element of it is complete fabrication. The atrocity has nothing to do with jihadists, nor is it set in the Middle East. It took place in Guatemala, in the 1980s. I have merely substituted the real culprits—U.S.-financed counter-insurgency troops—with the word “jihadists” each time. The real passage is taken from a Virginia Garrard-Burnett’s book on Guatemala.
By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...
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