Category Archives: Al Qaeda

Meditations: Jihadist Assailants, Flaming Suicidal Protest & Gandhi Within the Same Frame

Michael Roberts

Early in the month of February 2023, I was invited by a young friend, Dr Geethika Dharmasinghe, to deliver a Zoom Video Lecture to a small class of her students at Colgate University in New York. These students were following her course on “Religion and Violence in Asia.”

Gandhi speaking and Zahran Hashim in pact with fellow Lankan jihadists …. Zahran was one of the two suicide bombers at the Shangri La Hotel in Colombo on Easter Sunday 2019 where where 36 people died

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Hassina Leelarathna: In Action, In Words And In Commemoration

LT Times,  November 2021

Hassina Leelarathna, a co-founder of the only Sri Lankan newspaper in the U.S. and an activist who spurred fellow immigrants to help when disasters struck their homeland, has died at age 73. Leelarathna died in Sherman Oaks on Oct. 17 after battling lung cancer for the last five years, said her son, Sahan Gamage.

 

Hassina Leelarathna co-hosted a bilingual radio show called “Tharanga,” focusing on news, music and culture. The program began in San Francisco at KFJC-FM, pictured here, before migrating to Los Angeles when the family relocated south in 1985 (Sahan Gamage)

 

 

 

 

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Shock! Terror! 9/11…… From Within CIA Headquarters at Langley

Anbereen Hasan

On 9/11 I was at my desk at the CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA. We had just started our morning meeting when the planes hit the World Trade Towers in NYC. We sat in stunned silence, trying to absorb the catastrophe before our eyes; then we shifted to frantic action. Overnight, my professional world changed. I was now front and center in our fight against terrorism. The walls outside our embassies only got higher as the world saw the U.S as a target and a threat.

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Pyrrhic Defeat: Seven Days which shattered the Great Game of Smashing Afghanistan

Jolly Somasundaram

            “Truth is like the Sun, one can shut it off for sometime, but it will not go away.” …. Elvis Presley                  

Afghanistan has done it again! A country, where her geography was her destiny, made her push towards repeated trysts with history- Alexander’s Greeks, Mongols, Mughals, the Brits, Russians, Americans. She, redoubtable to foreign invaders, specialised in making her country, micro- Kanattestans for these invading hordes. These done-in foreign forces now out-done, were not small fry but superpowers.

Troops from Britain- the Rotweiller in her time slot of Empire building- were decimated three times, bleaching this arid landscape. Undaunted, Sysyphean Britain ventured on the fourth, though now a metamorphosed American poodle: same wipe-out. Russia, in her own time slot of imperial hope, was similarly sent scurrying home. Smaller European countries- Australia, Germany, France Italy, Canada, wishing to taste Petite Gloire but lacking oomph, hitch hiked on the NATO bandwagon: the same degrading exit.

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Indelible. Unforgetable. 9/11 in Pictures

We Shall Remember.

Fire and smoke billows from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/David Karp)

 A person falls from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center as another clings to the outside, left, while smoke and fire billow from the building, Tuesday Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

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John Pilger’s Overview of the Deeper History of Western Intervention in Afghanistan

John Pilger  in Consortium News, Volume 26, Number 240, 28 August 2021, with this title “The Great Game of Smashing Nations”

More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the U.S., Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

Outside the gate of the Arg, the presidential palace, in Kabul, the day after the Saur revolution on April 28, 1978. (Cleric77, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” [then] destroyed.

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Afghanistan Withdrawal: Trump Initiated, Biden Followed, Pentagon Unhappy ….

   Clive Williams in Email Note to Michael Roberts, 18 August 2021 *&*

President Trump made the political decision to withdraw and committed the US to a withdrawal schedule in 2020. President Biden followed through on that commitment. It was not a military decision. The US military could have stayed indefinitely. They had no fatalities this year and only nine in 2020, so it was a sustainable deployment. There was no prospect of defeating the Taliban militarily though without the cooperation of Pakistan.
State [i.e. the State Department] accepted President Trump’s decision, but the Pentagon was not happy about it, particularly because so much equipment had to be abandoned due to the accelerated withdrawal schedule.  The biggest mistake the Americans made was supporting corrupt Afghan political leaders who lacked popular support. The second biggest was not adequately monitoring and mentoring the ANSF. [i.e. = Afghan National sEcurity Force].
Clive
 Taliban fighters in Kabul on Monday. Picture: Reuters

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The Making of Wahhabi Zealots in Sri Lanka, 1980s-2019

Michael Roberts

All those addressing the fervour that promoted the killing work of the Zahran Hashim jihadist network in Sri Lanka in April 2019 must come to grips with the modern currents of Wahhabi political thinking that go back to the outpourings of the Egyptian intellectuals Sayyid Qutb[1] and Al-Zawahiri[2] in the latter half of the 20th century. This step will then take investigators to the Al-Qaida movement[3] and thence to the more recent brand of Wahhabism embodied within ISIS.

Sayyid Qutb  al-Zawahiri

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Allahu Akbar! Missing Dimensions in Contemporary Reportage

Michael Roberts

I recently watched a good part of Stephen Sackur’s dialogue with a French lady politician [whose name I have forgotten]. Sackur pursued his usual hard-line aggressive and bullying mode of questioning – posing vigorous criticisms of the French government’s position on secularism and its hostility to the carving out of sacred domains by French Muslim peoples.  The implicit suggestion[1] was that the British system’s tolerance of religious sensibilities was a better line of policy.[2]

Muslim protests … and the selfie proudly posted by the Islamic terrorist who was responsible for the killings in Nice in October 2020

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War: Its Stark Truths

Richard Koenigsberg

Wars are fought–soldiers die–to testify to the truth of a society’s sacred ideal. If so many people die for an ideology—it must be real.

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