Sudanese leader Hassan al Turabi, who knew Osama bin Laden and once organized an international alliance of radical Muslims, said in an interview on Thursday that Washington was exaggerating the reach of Al Qaeda to frighten people.
| Nice to see his European intellectualism is still in form. |
"I don't think he (Osama) has a worldwide network of (Al) Qaeda. The Americans are looking for ghosts. Whenever they are fighting or they are hit (they say) ''Ah, Qaeda is there'," Hassan Turabi said in an interview at his Khartoum home, where he has lived quietly since his release from jail in October. "The word Qaeda has become just like in the old days when you try to frighten the children. There is a ghost they are fighting," he added. Hassan Turabi said the exaggeration of Al Qaeda's reach was part of a pattern of using Arabic words to instil a fear of the alien among Westerners.
| Looks like he's been reading Chomsky while he was in the jug. |
"Even the word 'jihad', they don't translate it into English as 'struggle'. Because it's foreign, it frightens everybody. It's alien. Anything that refers to God, they call it Allah, as though Allah is a foreign god. But it is just God," he said.
| I'd take a stab and say our disagreement with Binny goes a bit beyond mere word definitions. He said as much in that declaration of war you praised a couple years back. |
Hassan Turabi knew Osama when the Saudi exile lived in the Sudanese capital in the early 1990s, and Sudanese say Osama saw Hassan Turabi as a spiritual mentor, despite ideological differences between them. "I understand whatever he is doing," said Turabi, but added that he and Osama were not on the same wavelength because of their different backgrounds.
| "I used to do the same sorts of things myself, after all. Just ask the SPLA." |
The Sudanese government expelled Osama under US pressure and closed down Turabi's Popular Islamic Conference Organization, which hosted regular gatherings of militant groups in Khartoum, including organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But three years in jail appear to have mellowed Hassan Turabi, who said the Bush administration was advocating democracy in the Arab world in the genuine belief that autocratic government in the region gives rise to extremism.
| Color me unimpressed. Turabi's a snake and if he's riding the pro-democracy train, it's only because he thinks he can pull a FIS and become Maximum Leader through the "one man, one vote, one time" ballot box trick. |
"Before, they preferred an autocracy. But now they realize that there is an upsurging spirit in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and every country and if you suppress them too much then you develop a spirit of extremism. So they are opening up a little bit now. They think democracy is better," Turabi said. But he added: "They are campaigning also for oil and this confuses their thought." Hassan Turabi declined to endorse the concept of a US campaign against Islam itself and attributed US policy to ignorance rather than malice. He recalled that when he went to Washington in an official delegation in the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was under the impression that Sudan was in Latin America. "They (the Americans) don't know much about issues. They are learning but not fast enough," he added. The Sudanese government, which remains broadly religious despite the rift with Turabi, has restricted the politician's activities, but Turabi said he keeps in touch with like-minded people around the world by using other people's telephones.
| I trust the NSA is tapping his line ... |
He has acted as informal political adviser to the Islamic Party of Iraq, part of the US-appointed Governing Council. A delegation from the Iraqi party wanted his advice on how to deal with the Kurds and the Shias and on drafting the recently approved interim constitution.
| If Turabi's involved, as a general rule it's bad news. Better keep an eye on them, just as we do with SCIRI. |
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