This was also the headline of a post I put up in November 2003. And today, six years later, Der Spiegel headlines this: "Surprising Study On Terrorism: Al-Qaida Kills Eight Times More Muslims Than Non-Muslims."
[A] new study by the Combating Terrorism Center in the US has shown that an overwhelming majority of al-Qaida victims are, in fact, co-religionists. ...The question is why does Der Spiegel think this is "surprising?" I was not the first to point this out six years ago. In fact, recently underbused Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Phil Carter beat me by three days on his own blog back then. I wrote in 2003,
Between 2004 and 2008, for example, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. And even though these attacks include terrorist incidents in the West — in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 — only 12 percent of those killed (371 deaths) were Westerners....
Put another way, between 2006 and 2008, non-Westerners were 38 times more likely to be killed by an al-Qaida attack than Westerners.
It is not at all clear that the Muslim world is itself awake to the implications of this fact. I have maintained all along that this war is indeed a religious war. Al Qaeda’s objectives are religious objectives, the restoration of the Islamic caliphate and the practice of pure Islamism, as they determine it, in the Arab countries.
Hence, they want to do two things:
1. expel Western non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries.
2. emplace their brand of Islamism in the societies of the historic caliphate
Then they want to expand Islam across the globe.
But how can Muslims make war on other Muslims when it is prohibited in the Quran? The same way that Christians in Europe killed one another over religion during the religious internecine wars of Europe that occurred regularly from the 16th to 17th centuries. If you see yourself as the defenders of the true faith, then you exclude from the faith the other side.
What the blasts yesterday in Istanbul and the other attacks going back years that killed Muslims show is that al Qaeda excludes most of the world’s Muslims from the umbrella of protection afforded by the Quran. Either al Qaeda considers them apostate or heretical Muslims, thus not truly Muslims, thus permissible to kill, or al Qaeda considers collateral deaths permissible in the furtherance of its aims. Or both, in some way.
Al Qaeda’s war is not only against the West; in fact, I say that they are not even principally fighting against the West. Their primary war is against other Muslims. What is at stake are lives, human freedom and the very definition of Islam itself.
As I pointed out in August 2002, the Muslim world is faced with defining what Islam really is. If al Qaeda is not in fact the keeper of the true faith, then the rest of the Muslims must unite to destroy al Qaeda just to ensure the survival of Islam itself. They need to understand that the present crisis is not primarily that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not toe their line.
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