Non-Islamic extremist religious and political groups are latching on to and, in some cases, forming ties with terrorist Muslim groups and activity, according to two reports.
The Sept. 11 attacks have been used by far right groups to gain recruits and stir up anti-government and anti-Semitic sentiment, reports USA Today (Nov. 27). One human rights leader says that some groups have followed a strategy of blaming the Jews for the attacks, while also raising anti-Muslim feelings and blaming immigration for the events. The white supremacist World Church of the Creator shows on its Web site a photograph of the burning World Trade Center with a caption reading, “Friendship with Israel leads to this.”
Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, is also linking up with militant anti-American non-Islamic groups that span the religious and political spectrum. Pacific News Service (Nov. 16) reports that the militant Islamic groups surrounding bin Laden are reaching out to groups such as neo-Nazis in order to “forge a united front to defeat what they see as an evil triumvirate poisoning the world: the United States, the consumerist West, and a Zionist lobby they say controls the whole affair.”
Lebanese Grand Mullah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the leader of the anti-Israel Hezbollah organization, recently told European reporters that U.S. actions in Afghanistan were providing unrelated terrorist groups with a common reason to attack the United States. The anti-Semitism shared by neo-Nazis and Al Qaeda is creating an alliance which has been helped along by Ahmed Huber, a former Swiss journalist and now businessman who converted to Islam in the 1960s.
Huber considers himself a mediator between Islam and the far-right. He has become a major attraction at neo-Nazi National Democratic Party rallies, according to party officials. Huber himself has confirmed that he has had contact with bin Laden associates at an Islamic conference in Beirut. Reporter Paolo Pontoniere notes other Al Qaeda connections with the Real IRA, an Irish terrorist group known for car bombings, the Basque terrorist organization ETA in Spain, The Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the Liberation Tigers in Sri Lanka.
(http://www.pacificnews.org)
