Nature of the Enemy

[Barry]

Rift Grows Between al-Qaida, Muslim Groups
By ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU, Associated Press Writer
April 29, 2006

CAIRO, Egypt - When terrorists blew themselves up in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula this week, the radical Palestinian group Hamas quickly joined Arab governments and Western leaders in condemning a "criminal attack against all human values."

Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood called the bombings "aggression on human souls created by God."

The denunciations were unexpectedly harsh from the Islamic fundamentalist groups — Hamas has killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in suicide bombings, and the Brotherhood is determined to impose an Islamic government — but experts agree that radical Muslim organizations want to distance themselves from al-Qaida.

The widening rift largely has not been acknowledged among Western powers, who tend to lump Islamic radicals together. The U.S. list of "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," for example, puts al-Qaida with Hamas and the Lebanese-based Hezbollah.

Scholars of Islamic movements and some Western policy-makers, however, say distinctions now must be made between hard-line Islamist organizations and "holy warrior" groups such as Osama bin Laden's terror network.

"There is a fundamental difference between Islamic groups: Most are sociopolitical reformists, others are religious extremists," said Dia'a Rashwan, an Egyptian expert on radical groups.

Hamas and Hezbollah, for example, have national agendas, he said. They want to reorganize society according to Sharia, or Islamic law.

Extremist religious movements such as al-Qaida are international revolutionaries who excoriate not only non-Muslims but also Muslims who fail to follow their views. Theirs is a holy war to spread their views among Muslims and to repel any "infidel invasion" of Islamic lands.

"Branding these two branches of radicalism the same way, as terrorist organizations, reflects a complete misunderstanding of the issue," he said.

Rashwan said the confusion was a "fatal mistake" of the Bush administration in its war on terror.

He said that to fight an enemy, one had to define it correctly: "America doesn't, and this is why it is losing the war on terrorism."

U.S. policy makers and the State Department did not respond to requests by The Associated Press for comment.

Leaders from both branches of radical Islam frequently join in a call to destroy Israel and form an Islamic superstate of all Muslim countries.

But the similarities are mostly rhetorical, said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

"The rift is widening, partly because most governments have become more open to engaging in a dialogue with hard-line Islamic voices if they give up violence," he said in a telephone interview.

And in most Muslim countries, he said, the population has been more willing to engage with national radicals than with "millennial" movements that view Israel and the West as apocalyptic enemies. In Lebanon, for example, al-Qaida-style groups had little support, but Hezbollah became the leading political force among Shiite Muslims, he said.

By cracking down on al-Qaida but allowing more freedom to political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood — a rising force in Egypt with more than 80 lawmakers in Parliament — Arab states were in effect "creating more daylight" between revolutionary and reformist radicals, he said.

"Realistically, part of the U.S. policy is influenced by the attitude of host countries," Alterman said.

Washington is more willing to engage with a group if local authorities already have, like in Morocco, where the national government opened talks with the Justice and Development Party but rejected other hard-line groups. The United States has largely followed the same line, he said.

The current halt in attacks by the likes of Hamas, which won Palestinian legislative elections and formed a new government last month, however, left a vacuum that is being filled by other radical groups, such as Islamic Jihad, a competing Palestinian group. It has claimed responsibility for eight suicide attacks against Israel since a cease-fire declaration last year.

Israeli media also have reported mounting signs that al-Qaida had designs on the Jewish state as a next battleground. Israeli officials said recently that Palestinians have established contacts with followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. The officials also said al-Zarqawi had established footholds in neighboring countries — Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.

Yet many Mideast watchers see a political motive.

"Quite a few observers believe Israel tends to overstate al-Qaida links to Palestinian terrorism because they want to be seen as equal victims of a global movement against the West," said Jeremy Binnie of Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center in London.

On the other hand, nationalist groups do not want to see their more militant members joining the international jihadists, said Hugh Roberts, Egypt director of the International Crisis Group think tank.

"Palestinian groups are already highly organized and well-rooted organizations. They are very well placed to prevent al-Qaida from getting a solid foothold," Roberts said.

Al-Qaida's murky structure also is misleading, experts say.

Some attacks first blamed on al-Qaida, such as the March 2004 train bombings in Madrid, have since been linked to local groups with only nominal links to bin Laden's umbrella terror network.

Still, the recent blasts in Egypt show that al-Qaida-type influences continue to spread in the Muslim world.

Though Egyptian authorities blamed last week's five bombings — three on a Sinai resort and two targeting international peacekeepers and police — on semi-nomadic Bedouin tribesmen who populate the Sinai Peninsula, most experts say international jihadists likely played a role. The blasts killed 21 people, most of them Muslims.

"It's hard to think that a homegrown group of Bedouins could have, on its own, operated such complex and synchronized bombings," even with know-how gathered on the Internet, Binnie said.

"The level of organization these attacks" demonstrated several al-Qaida trademarks, Roberts said.

Since November's attacks on a Jordanian hotel that killed more than 60, al-Qaida has increasingly been criticized for killing civilians. And when bin Laden issued an audiotape earlier this month, many observers said his new call to support Palestinians against "Zionists" and "crusaders" was a move to boost declining popularity in the Muslim world.
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The Bush administration may or may not misunderstand the enemy in terms of whether these two broad groups (nationalist Islamicists and internationalist Islamicists) are on good terms, but what the writer of the above article seems to fail to grasp is that it's not a case of one group being good guys in comparison to the other. They're both causing significant trouble that should be dealt with. They're both the enemy, whether they're in bed together or not. That's not to say understanding them better isn't a worthwhile endeavor for dealing with them. But internaionalist groups like Al Quaeda aren't the extent of the enemy.

[Corlyss_D]

I agree. It's like the fatuous pricks who smuggly declare "of course Saddam had no links to al Qaeda because he is secular and they are religious fanatics." Another case of ideology getting in the way of perception. Both violate the first rule of understanding Arab politics: don't watch what they say, watch what they do. The Moslem Brotherhood has been a terrorist organization for 70 years. Their winning a few seats in the Egyptian Parliament and denouncing other radicals doesn't make them fit for polite company.

[Barry]

Germany and Japan had little in common in the 30s and 40s. That didn't mean we could ignore or fail to deal aggressively with one.

[Corlyss_D]

http://iran.theatlantic.com/homepage.html

An interesting hub of articles and news about Iran

[Ralph]

I still want open access to Iranian pistachios. At any price.