Terrorism fatwa denounced as ‘bogus’
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: The fatwa against terrorism issued here on Thursday by the Fiqh Council of North America has been denounced as “bogus.”
According to Steven A Emerson, executive director of the Washington-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, the fatwa is “bogus” since it does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. “In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate,” he added.
He said the Fiqh Council and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the two bodies behind the production of the fatwa, have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organisations. One of them is an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a current terrorist case, another previous a financier to Al Qaeda.
Fiqh Council chairman Muzammil Siddiqui,, Emerson continued, told a rally in Washington on 28 October 2000, “ America has to learn - if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come.” Emerson also attacked CAIR, charging that in the past four years,
several CAIR officials have been convicted of or charged with various terrorism-related offenses.
CAIR, he added, had also championed and defended officials of Islamic terrorist groups as well as attacked the prosecutions of Islamic terrorists arrested and/or convicted since 9-11. It had and attacked the government’s freezing of Islamic terrorist fronts as part of a “war against Islam” by the United States .
Emerson alleged that another signatory, the Muslim American Society, is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States, whose publications have repeatedly supported suicide bombings.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_30-7-2005_pg7_16