Also predicted are the demise of the United States and a pending Islamist domination of Europe. Yes, folks, this is a know-your-enemy type of must-read.
Last year, to mark the fourth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, this column included translated proclamations by Al Qaeda leaders promising the future killing of millions of Americans and the collapse of America, as well as statements by Arab writers calling the war on terror “a chapter in World War III.”
Some pundits have chosen to reject such analogies. But, as Osama bin Laden wrote in his “Letter to the Muslims of Iraq and [Islamic] Nation” on December 27, 2004: “The conflict in the West is a fateful war between unbelief and Islam, between the army of Muhammad, the army of belief, and the people of the cross. … The important, tremendous, and dangerous issue today in the entire world is this Third World War.”
Much has happened in the war on terror over the past year. The Arab press has been full of articles on the end of America. Walid Nouhad wrote in the Bahrain daily Al-Wasat on June 20 on the coming “breakup of the United States … in the same fashion as those empires that came before it.” America’s “destiny” is to be “just like the Soviet Union” when “it falls apart,” Saud Mokhtar wrote in the Saudi daily Al-Madinah on July 10.
Other articles in the Arab press have featured interviews with religious and Islamist figures making crude calls for the West to convert to Islam.
“Our aim is to put down roots in the European continent, and to act quietly and in accordance with the laws, so that one day we may see all of Europe Muslim!” the Turkish fundamentalist leader Nijmuddin Erbakan, a former Turkish prime minister who headed the Islamic Welfare Party, said, according to an April piece on the Arabic reformist Web site Elaph.com by a Germany-based Kurdish journalist, Tarek Hamo.
Go read it all [hat tip to Dr. Rusty].