Human Dignity Between Islamic Terrorism And  Democratic Values

Dr. Nazhad Khasraw Hawramany

July 24, 2005

There have been  a  recent series of documentaries shown in July 2005 by Kurdistan TV, which broadcasts from Erbil/ Iraqi Kurdistan, about the confessions of Islamic terrorists from a group called Ansar-Al-Islam (meaning supporters of Isalm)  who were captured  in Hawler (Erbil), the capital of the  Iraqi Kurdistan`s Region. They included  video clips of their heinous acts of beheading and dismembering of innocent Kurdish civilians, practiced by the members of the group,  just to get used to the new worship methods of Islam by this perverse group, that is by practicing beheading and dismembering of living human beings after asking them to call  The SHAHADA ( In the Name Of Allah, the Only God, In The Name OF Mohammad His Prophet!!) and then cutting their thoats with a butcher knife before running Cameras in an orgy of savage barbarism (according to teaching of those Islamic terrorists, one must behead ten people to get the rank of Amir-Al-Islam i.e. the prince of Islam !!), and all this within the confines of the private home of the chief of the group, who is called Sheikh Dana-Albarzanji, located in the Azadi district  in the heart of Hawler and then throwing those bodily parts separately and in different locations of Hawler.Those video clips also showed acts of mutual sodomy between the members of that group which was also filmed by a video camera by the group itself.

Those confessions and video clips sent waves of  panic, disgust and disbelief among the Kurdish public for many obvious reasons:

First that all the members of the group were Kurds, many of them with university degrees, the chief of the group being a mechanical engineer, and another one with a master degree in political sciences (the title of his theses for the master degree from University of Salahuddin in Hawler was: Guarantees for Human Rights in Iraqi Kurdistan!). To add insult to the injury, he was serving as a lecturer in the same University. Another one of those terrorist was an officer in the security agency of Kurdistan (ASAYESH). Secondly, they were all looking like normal citizens and behaving as such, so no one could ever suspect in his wildest imaginations that they could perpetrate such savage acts of barbarism against their own people under the banners of Islam (taking into consideration that many ordinary Kurds do visit mosques normally for Friday's prayers). Thirdly they were all doctrine in the local mosques and Quran schools of Kurdistan under the unsuspecting eyes of Kurdistan security agencies and had wide connections with Al-Kaida affiliated groups and could move freely into Baghdad, Mosul, Islamic Republic of Iran and probably Syria too. Fourth they did not show any signs of regret or remorse for those heinous acts, in contrary they looked proud and deeply satisfied for their acts of  "Islamic Jihad".

The group did of course participate in sheltering and leading  their brothers in Jihad, the Arab suicide bombers to targets in Iraqi Kurdistan. Many of  their victims were selected haphazardly among ordinary Kurds and were raped and slaughtered like sheep with utter disregard of human dignity and the sanctity of human lives.

Those scenes have perplexed the Kurdish public as well as Kurdish politicians and intellectuals to the extend of brainwashing of those people through perverse interpretation of Islam, which deprived them of any emotions or respect for the sanctity of human lives as dictated by all religions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Budhism and turned them into vicious beasts. The horrible thing is that even after the disclosure of those obscene crimes, many Islamic clerics in Kurdistan are hesitant to condemn them publicly or to open an investigation about the Islamic institutions or mosques which explicitly or implicitly condone such behaviour and which participated in training those terrorists.

As we have seen recently in terrorist acts of bombings in London-Subways, and terrorist attacks in Sharm Al-Sheikh resort in Egypt, that  this phemomenon is not unique to Kurdistan or Iraq, but it displays a crisis in the interpretation of Islam in the whole globe and the disillusion of many young Muslims about the real messages of Islam.

While some Islamic clerics in Egypt and Saudi Arabia sometime criticize those Islamic terrorists in few vague words, only when those terrorist acts hit their own countries, they explicitly condone such barbaric acts of terrorism in Iraq, Israel, USA, UK , Spain and Kurdistan and they attribute it to the policies of USA and West in general in the Middle East. Those clerics jubilated terrorist acts in Israel and Iraq and called  the killing of innocent children and women in Iraq by  Al-Zarqawi and Baath thugs as legitimate acts of "resistance" or even Jihad!

The Arabic media  (e.g. Aljazeera channel) in general spare no efforts to cultivate the culture of hatred and intolerance. The Friday sermons in the majority of mosques in the Middle East (and even in Europe and USA), are calling for Jihad and intolerance and are indoctrinating young Muslims to be future terrorists and suicide bombers. The Saudi charities are still collecting money for dubious institutions which finance such institutions of hatred and intolerance.

The crisis in the Islamic world is part of the crisis of democracy in those countries, almost all those countries which  implicitly encourage such acts of intolerance and violence in the name of Islam are authoritarian and despotic regimes which lack the principles of free speech and democracy like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen...etc. Anyone who tries to debate challenges of modern age and Islam, risks facing death and physical elimination on the hands of Islamic zealots with the complacency of governing authoritarian regimes.

This lack of respect for human dignity by those terrorist Islamic organizations like Al-Kaida and Ansar Al-Sunna and Alzarqawi group, is in sharp contrast to the respect for human life in democratic societies, where all the sections of society including the weakest elements like children, elderly, mentally or bodily disabled people, religious and ethnic minorities are protected by law and are provided by all means to have a decent life void of fear, hunger and discrimination. These are the fruits of democracy.

Promoting democracy in the Middle East and abstaining from supporting authoritarian regimes in the region as well as a relentless and efficient campaign to protect human rights in the region are the right policies to uproot Islamic terrorism from the region, this terrorism has grown up into an aggressive cancer which is threatening to spread to every corner of the world and threatens to wreak fear and havoc in the  whole world.