Thursday, April 24, 2008
A home-grown 'Champion of Islam'
Naeem Muhammad Khan is a 23-year-old Torontonian who supports the
Taliban and calls Osama bin Laden a hero.
Taliban and calls Osama bin Laden a hero.
TORONTO -- Naeem Muhammad Khan wants everyone to "Support Our Troops," but he's not talking about the Canadian Forces in Kandahar.
From his apartment in Toronto, Mr. Khan has been posting messages on the Internet calling Osama bin Laden a "hero" and "champion of Islam." The 23-year-old fundamentalist's on-line logo combines the black Taliban flag and the outline of an AK-47 above the Support Our Troops slogan.
Between sips of iced coffee at Tim Hortons, Mr. Khan explained that he is a supporter of the Taliban, as well as other armed Islamic groups.
"'Support our Troops' means supporting the mujahideen [Muslim soldiers of God] who are fighting for their freedom and rights against illegal occupation in many, many places over the world like Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine and Somalia," he said later in an e-mail.
Views like these are becoming increasingly common in Western countries, Canada included, and they are worrying to governments concerned about radicalism and violence.
Mr. Khan is an Islamist, not a terrorist, but what most disturbs moderate Muslims like Tahir Gora are his harsh comments about those who do not subscribe to fundamentalist beliefs.
In his online postings, Mr. Khan calls Tarek Fatah, Irshad Manji and other moderates "apostates" and says that under Islamic law the punishment for apostasy is death. The same goes for those who insult Islam.
"Behead her!!! And make a nice video and post it on YouTube," he writes about one so-called "Islam basher." As for "Jews who support Zionism and Israel...since they are killing Palestinians...killing them is not bad...they deserve to die."
Elsewhere he writes that, "Those who hate Islam and want to destroy is [sic] will have their fates decided by the swords of Muslims Inshallah [God-willing]."
Mr. Khan said he was angry when he wrote these and did not mean anyone harm. He said he meant that those killing Palestinians deserve to die and that under Shariah law the sentence for apostasy and insulting Islam is death.
But Mr. Fatah and Mr. Gora say such expressions go too far, and are becoming all too common in Canada.
"In recent times, hundreds of Islamic radicals have settled in Canada," said Mr. Gora, a Pakistan-born writer who has been tackling the issue in his Hamilton Spectator columns. "They are spreading hatred and extremism in the guise of freedom of expression. On the other hand, they put death penalties to those dissidents who challenge the traditional medieval way of Islam."
Mr. Gora heads the Canada Safety Think Tank, which monitors what he calls the growing Islamic radicalization in the country. He wants Ottawa to take the issue more seriously and believes police should lay hate crimes charges against extremists who pronounce death sentences on moderates like himself.
The government says it is trying to tackle the problem. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service's latest annual report listed radicalization as a top priority.
Terrorism cases before the courts in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa all concern allegations of violent plots motivated by Islamist extremism. And the RCMP said in January it was investigating a Bangladeshi-Canadian for what Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day called "extremist rantings" that were "encouraging jihad and extolling the virtues of killing our Canadian soldiers."
Mr. Khan says he only believes in Islam as a way of life and a solution to world crises and does not support terrorist attacks, but he considers bin Laden a Muslim resistance hero, "the only person who is willing to stand up and fight against these oppressive forces."
Raised in a secular family in Karachi, Mr. Khan said he became a follower of the controversial Pakistani cleric Israr Ahmad and adopted his conservative Deobandi stream of Sunni Islam.
After graduating from Greenwich University in Karachi with a degree in Business Administration, Mr. Khan immigrated to Canada with his parents in 2006. He is unemployed but said he hopes to complete an MBA.
He said in Canada he can openly preach views for which he would be jailed or tortured in Muslim countries. "And believe it or not, me and many Muslims like me are willing to migrate ASAP to an Islamic state as soon as it emerges," he said.
Intelligence expert Professor Wesley Wark said Mr. Khan's "odious" views raised the question of whether Canada needed to specifically outlaw the incitement of terrorism.
"They naturally make one wonder about remedies for such grating speech. Our current anti-terrorism legislation does not specifically sanction incitement to acts of terrorism. Should it? At the very least we need a proper debate in this country, similar to the one held recently in the EU Parliament.
"My own view is that any sufficiently tight legal definition of incitement, likely to pass Charter muster, would have to link incitement very closely to real evidence of plots. So what we have in the current law, a language about "facilitation," probably captures the offense as well as anything is likely to do in an imperfect world. Mr. Khan is neither an inciter or a facilitator. He is just badly informed and misled, neither of which, thankfully, are crimes.
"There is sometimes a value in exposing views such as those of Mr. Khan in public, where ridicule can scrub them away. Mr. Khan, while posing as a reasonable-minded opponent of the NATO mission in Afghanistan, is also certain that Osama Bin Laden is a hero, had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and was never harboured by the Taliban regime. People are free to chose their heroes, but not their facts. al-Qaeda organized the 9/11 attacks, as Bin Laden himself gleefully admitted in one of his infamous videotapes. He and his organization were harboured in Afghanistan, after being driven out of first Saudi Arabia and then Sudan. In fact, al-Qaeda became a state within a state in Afghanistan, with its own private army. Mr. Khan's notion of the history of al-Qaeda is half-baked, to put it politely.
"As one US National Intelligence Estimate on the threat of terrorism noted, support for Islamist terrorism will eventually be defeated through its own rhetorical, ideological and violent excesses, above all the killing of fellow Muslims. Mr. Khan is a voice in the wilderness among Canadians, Muslim and non-Muslim. Let the brushes of ridicule scrub him away."
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