WAR ON TERROR Muslims have 'right to kill 4 million' Al-Qaida says Islam requires 'fair exchange' for U.S. 'oppression'
Posted: June 12, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern
Muslims have the right to kill 4 million Americans – including 2 million children – based on Islamic teachings, according to an article attributed to an al-Qaida spokesman.
"We have not reached parity with them," wrote Suleiman Abu Gheith, who contended that the U.S. has killed millions of Muslims around the world in places such as Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Sudan, the Philippines and Afghanistan.
"Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons, so as to afflict them with the fatal maladies that have afflicted the Muslims because of the [Americans'] chemical and biological weapons," Abu Gheith wrote on the Center for Islamic Research and Studies' website, which reportedly is linked to al-Qaida.
He warned that "America must prepare itself; it must go on maximum alert; ... because, Allah willing, the blow will come from where they least expect it. …"
The article was translated into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute, an independent, non-profit organization that analyzes Mideast media.
Abu Gheith found justification for killing Americans in the Islamic holy book, the Koran, in which "Allah said, 'He who attacked you, attack him as he attacked you,' … ."
"The Americans have still not tasted from our hands what we have tasted from theirs," Abu Gheith wrote. "The [number] killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were no more than fair exchange for the ones killed in the Al-'Amiriya shelter in Iraq, and are but a tiny part of the exchange for those killed in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, and Afghanistan."
Abu Gheith claims that more than 1.2 million Muslims have been killed in Iraq "due to the American bombings and siege." This assertion likely is based largely on charges that U.S. economic sanctions against dictator Saddam Hussein's policies – including his build-up of weapons of mass destruction – are directly responsible for the deaths of Iraqis who lack food and medical care.
The al-Qaida spokesman declared "America is the reason for all oppression, injustice, licentiousness, or suppression that is the Muslims' lot. It stands behind all the disasters that were caused and are still being caused to the Muslims; it is immersed in the blood of Muslims and cannot hide this."
Abu Gheith wondered how a Muslim can accept humiliation and inferiority "when he knows that the [divine] rule is that the entire earth must be subject to the religion of Allah – not to the East, not to the West – to no ideology and to no path except for the path of Allah?"
He castigated the United States as the "head of heresy in our modern world" with an "infidel democratic regime that is based upon separation of religion and state and on ruling the people by the people via legislating laws that contradict the way of Allah and permit what Allah has prohibited."
According to Abu Gheith the U.S. system "compels the other countries to act in accordance with the same laws in the same ways ... and punishes any country [that rebels against these laws] by besieging it, and then by boycotting it."
By doing these things, he said, the United States "seeks to impose on the world a religion that is not Allah's ... ."
