Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Omar Bakri Muhammad: Killing Women and Children Allowed?

Omar Bakri Muhammad
The Telegraph
Photo: Ruth Sherlock

In a Telegraph article by reporters Robert Mendick and Robert Verkaik, "Hate cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad preaches killing of women and children on Facebook" (November 29, 2014), we find the following passage:
On Facebook, Bakri justified the killing of all opponents of the jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq[, arguing] that the "Mujahideen" must kill anyone who does not believe in extreme Islam "wherever they find them". He even justified the killing of women and children if they were sheltering in schools or hospitals[, for i]n a section titled "killing women and children" he said this was usually not permissible, but stated: "Having said this, one must distinguish between killing women and children and the Mujahideen fighting the Kuffar [non-believers] enemies wherever they find them, whether that be in a school or hospital or elsewhere."
I have to admit that I can't easily follow this passage on Bakri supplied by The Telegraph. Is Bakri saying that the intentional killing of non-Muslim women and children is allowed by Islam, or is he saying that they can be killed as 'collateral damage' if attacks on schools or even hospitals is necessary because these buildings are being used by forces fighting Muslims?

Clarity matters on issues like this.

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4 Comments:

At 8:33 AM, Blogger N.E. Brigand said...

It's horrible, but not very different from what John Yoo, a lawyer who wrote memos on interrogation methods for the Bush administration, said the president was authorized to do, if he deemed it necessary: torture the innocent children of detainees to induce the detainees to talk.

 
At 9:17 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Unclear to me is precisely what OBM actually said.

As for JY, did he say torture, or just threaten to torture?

Jeffery Hodges

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At 10:43 AM, Blogger N.E. Brigand said...

Yoo was asked in a debate in 2005 if the president was allowed (and I apologize, since this is graphic) to order that the testicles of a detainee's son be crushed to persuade the detainee to talk. Yoo replied that, in his interpretation of the law, the president was indeed permitted to do so.

 
At 12:02 PM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

No apology necessary. I expect we'll be learning a lot more, too, now that the summary of the findings on CIA torture are being released.

Jeffery Hodges

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