As long as Islam (like socialism) is seen in a credible light, we will always be in danger…
Islamic Jihad: Why No Life Is Safe
Al-Qaeda explains why no one—not fellow Muslims, women, or children—is “innocent” as long as the Islamic world is weak.
On September 11, 2019—the eighteenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror strikes on U.S. soil—al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video praising that “blessed raid” and inciting Muslims for more like it, particularly against American, European, Israeli, and Russian targets.
One of the more interesting aspects of the video is that the 68-year-old Zawahiri “criticizes ‘backtrackers’ from jihad, referring to former jihadis who changed their views in prison and called the 9/11 attacks unacceptable because innocent civilians were harmed.”
That Zawahiri finds himself contending with those who claim that “innocent civilians” should not be killed during the jihad is interesting—if not ironic—considering that the al-Qaeda chieftain is himself one of the modern era’s chief theoretician on the legality of waging jihad, even if innocents are killed.
Written sometime before 2001, Zawahiri’s treatise, “Jihad, Martyrdom, and the Killing of Innocents” (first translated and published in 2007 in The Al Qaeda Reader, pp.137-171) offers a fascinating insight on these three topics, particularly in the context of what shari‘a, or Islamic law, requires.
In regards to the inevitable killing of innocents, Zawahiri establishes the question: “[Often] mixed among the infidels, whom the mujahidintarget in warfare, are those whom it is not permitted to kill—such as Muslims, dhimmis, women and children, and so forth. So, is jihad, which is assigned us, to be abandoned on account of their protected blood, or is killing ones such as these—accidentally, not on purpose—forgiven in face of the highest goods that would be realized from waging jihad against the infidels, the enemies of Allah Supreme?”
