Anyone surprised?
(NY Times) One brother joined the global jihad against the West under the nom de guerre Abu Yahya al-Libi. He rose to become Al Qaeda’s brightest star and second in command, until an American drone strike killed him in Pakistan four months ago.
The other brother, Abdel Wahab Mohamed Qaid, was the first to become an Islamist militant but is now a moderate member of Libya’s new Parliament.
As the United States weighs responses to the Islamist-led assault on its diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Mr. Qaid says the two brothers’ diverging paths trace a timely lesson: a parable of the dangers of treating the many different strands of political Islam as a single radical threat.
Abu Yahya’s support for Al Qaeda, Mr. Qaid said, began after his years as a prisoner at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — an account supported by Western analysts who have studied Abu Yahya’s life.
Both brothers had previously shunned Osama Bin Laden and the cause of global jihad as irrelevant to their single-minded focus on ousting the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. But then, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan, the Americans began rounding up any Islamist militants they could find, regardless of their specific ideology or agenda; Abu Yahya was captured in Pakistan and imprisoned without trial at Bagram.
When he finally escaped in 2005, picking a prison lock and evading his guards, Abu Yahya, originally known as Mohamed Hassan Qaid, was reborn as the leading theologian, propagandist and battlefield commander of an Islamic holy war against the West that left little room for local concerns like the struggle for Libyan democracy.
See? Abu Yahya turned into a lunatic terrorist because he was imprisoned by the evil United States….what was he doing in Pakistan, anyway? Um, consorting with al Qaeda and the Taliban? Because he started hanging in Afghanistan and studying under Islamic extremists back in the early 1990’s, studying Islam under scholars who hung out with ……. al Qaeda and the Taliban, among other extremist groups.
It is stated that “When he returned two years later” [from his Islamic studies in Mauritania, Africa], “Afghanistan was no longer a battleground for militant Libyans, but rather a haven: the Taliban controlled most of the country. Mr. Libi’s training in warfare was minimal, and his early work as a preacher rarely touched on militant action, according to the Libyan man who said he had met Mr. Libi in Afghanistan, and who spoke on condition of anonymity out of security concerns. “He started to visit training camps and talk about Shariah,†or Islamic law, this man said in a telephone interview, about “morals, etiquette, how to act.
Yeah, that excerpt came from the NY Times.
What the Times is also attempting to do is separate violent extremist Islam from those who are pushing political Islam, with notions such as Sharia law. I guess the Times hates women and gays, who are treated like dog sh*t under hardcore Islam.
Read: NY Times Blames US For Libyan Terrorist »
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