Home Know Your Enemy/Understand Your Enemy Part 2 (sponsored)

As lead prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, continued to involve himself and his legal team in further and deeper knowledge of the enemy in order to successfully bring to trial and to win the U.S. government's case against Sheik Abdel Rahman, aka the Blind Sheik, for the World Trade Center bombing which killed and maimed hundreds of Americans in 1993 in New York City.

See Part 1 here.

McCarthy well understood as an experienced lawyer that on a jury and in a jury's debating the case later behind closed doors, other interpretations or other ways of construing Islamic scriptures could be put forth. A jury member could contend that these exhortations to violence and "hatred" should be "contextualized" — i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century.

However, by focusing on interpretation does not make the Blind Sheik's literal construction wrong. As McCarthy contended, the blunt fact of the matter remained that in the contest of competing interpretations, it was the jihadists who seemed to be making sense because they had the words of scripture on their side. It was the others who seemed to be dancing on the head of a pin. The Sheik's demands for jihad were rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. Perhaps that doctrine needed reform in today's world, needed a light to shine on it and reveal the "hatred" involved, but to date that has not been done.

As one reads and takes a much deeper look at Islamic doctrine, another very obvious, but inconvenient fact emerges: Islam in NOT a religion of peace. Granted, there are other ways of interpreting Islam that could make it something other than a call to war; but what is one going to do with verses such as "Fight those who believe not in Allah," and "Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war." This is not a peaceful injunction no matter how one contextualizes.

Again, another common trait began to emerge for my better understanding of Islamic doctrine and of my Persian family. Just as Andrew McCarthy was also finding out, there is a huge gulf between what the average Muslin understands and believes about the faith and what the Koran actually states. A disturbing aspect began to emerge: the character witnesses who testified for the defense were moderate and peaceful Americans who would no more commit terrorist acts than the rest of us.

However, when questions about Islamic doctrine would come up such as "What does jihad mean?" "What is sharia?" "How might sharia apply to a certain situation?", these moderate, peaceful Muslims claimed that they were not qualified or competent to say. They said that they would have to turn to an Islamic scholar like the Blind Sheik. Just as my Persian/Islamic family would say to me when I too was curious about sharia law since I was living in the country and under the law's jurisdiction: blind belief without thought, facts, or much of past history involved.

Now to be fair, my family had never read the Koran in their native tongue--Farsi. The Islamic text had always been read in the original Arabic, without a knowledge or understanding of what was being memorized. And this went on for generation after generation — no questions asked. The original text in Arabic was considered the true, unaltered word of Mohammed as given to him by Allah. Therefore, to my family's way of thinking, the Koran had to be read in Arabic even though there was no one available to explain what the text said. And this was the way of millions of non-Arab speaking followers.

There was no doubt what the Blind Sheik was on trial for and why. He was a terrorist and he liked to brag openly about it. But interestingly, this did not disqualify him in the minds of these peaceful and law abiding Muslims from rendering authoritative opinions on the meaning of core tenets of their religion. No one was saying that they would follow the Blind Sheik into terrorism — but no one was discrediting his status either. This basically came as a shock to Andrew McCarthy, but not to me. This dichotomy had been rattling around in my brain for years. Winston Churchill had addressed it many years before when he wrote:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy....Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

So, like McCarthy, I had to realize that a distinction needed to be drawn between Muslims and Islam. For McCarthy, there was an objective reason to do so. While working on the national security case, the first Muslims he encountered were not terrorists. To the contrary, they were pro-American patriots who helped infiltrate terror cells, disrupt mass murder plots, and gather evidence needed to convict jihadists. For national security reasons we have the obligation to understand our enemies; but we also have an obligation to our principles not to convict by association — not to confound our Islamist enemies with our Muslim allies and fellow citizens. And Churchill appreciated this distinction. "Individual Muslims," he stressed, "may show splendid qualities. Thousands became the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen." The problem was not the people, he concluded. It was the doctrine.

So what about Islamic law? McCarthy turned to the giant legal figure in American jurisprudence, Robert Jackson, FDR's attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and chief prosecutor of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg. In 1955, Justice Jackson thought sharia was a subject of noteworthy study. And here is what Justice Jackson concluded: "In any broad sense, Islamic law offers the American lawyer a study in dramatic contrasts. Even casual acquaintance and superficial knowledge — all that most of us at bench or bar will be able to acquire — reveal that its striking features relative to our law are not likenesses but inconsistencies, not similarities but contrarieties. In its source, its scope and its sanctions, the law of the Middle East is the antithesis of Western law".

Contrast this with the constitution that the U.S. government helped write for post-Taliban Afghanistan, which showed no awareness of the opposition of Islamic and Western law. That constitution contains soaring language about human rights, yet it makes Islam the state religion and sharia the principle source of law. And under it, Muslim converts to Christianity have been subjected to capital trials for apostasy. Did our government really understand what was the enemy's intent? Did the American crafters of that Afghani constitution really believe that centuries of sharia law would simply evaporate overnight with a 21st century document of Western ideals?

Sharia rejects freedom of speech as well as freedom of religion. It rejects the idea of equal rights between men and women as much as between Muslim and non-Muslim. There is no separation between spiritual life and civil society. It is THE framework for all human life — dictating matters of government, economy, and combat, along with personal behavior such as contact between the sexes and personal hygiene. Sharia aims to rule both believers and non-believers, and it affirmatively sanctions jihad in order to do so.

So what will Andrew McCarthy do with this information concerning the prosecution of the Blind Sheik? Part 3, the conclusion, will be presented soon.

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Carol Alipour-Paz was born in the Midwest — Ohio. She is a graduate of The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, with Bachelor degrees in English, French, and Science. Carol holds a Masters in Education K-12 from New York State University, SUNY New Paltz, N.Y. Her teaching career covers 30+ years in the high school and elementary levels, plus cooperating professor for college students preparing for education in classrooms. Carol has taught both overseas and in the States. She and her family have lived in other cultures outside of the U.S., predominantly in the Middle East and with her Iranian/Persian family. Carol has been the hostess of "Women to Women" on Charter Media for 4 years, and now she writes a monthly article on her website WomentoWomennv.com concerning local, state, national, and international topics.

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