The fashion magazine Dhimmi Marie Claire that glamorized the ultimate symbol of female oppression here has taken the final step over to the dark side. The piece is a the worst kind of mind f**k. As if glorifying the cultural jihad weren't horrid enough -- now love and murder is the vogue.
The writer, Paul Cruickshank, has appeared in The New Republic,
The Washington Post, and on CNN. His documentary on Malika airs on CNN International .....
She was a single mom;
he was divorced and searching. Together they kindled an epic passion for each other — and jihad. (hat tip Heidi)
This is a story about love — love that lives and grows in the least likely
places. It's a story about soul mates joined in the soulless business of terror.
Malika met Abdessattar at a tram stop in Brussels. She was fully veiled;
he bore the deep marks of prostration before Allah, of ritually pounding his
forehead into the ground. They grew passionate — about each other, and about
jihad. Two years later, Abdessattar would become a martyr. This past December,
Malika would be arrested in a vast counterterrorism operation in Belgium, with
authorities calling her "an al Qaeda living legend." Utter devotion led them
there.
I first came into contact with Malika el Aroud four years ago
when I obtained a rare copy of her self-published memoir, Soldiers of
Light, while I was helping to research a book and CNN documentary on Osama
bin Laden. I found her e-mail address, but it would take six months of phone
calls before she would agree to meet with me for an interview.
Malika el Aroud, shown here in 2003, was arrested three months ago in a massive counterterrorism operation in Europe.
Herman Ricour/AP Images
I sat down across from her to start our interview, and it was then that she
dropped her motherly tone. "If you're polite with me, I'll stay polite and
there'll be no problem," she said, fixing me with her piercing eyes.
[...]
Two more short-lived marriages followed. Then one day, Abdessattar Dahmane,
wearing glasses and a fezlike Tunisian cap, gingerly approached Malika while she
was waiting for a tram. He explained, as she stood there fully veiled, that he
had heard about her through the center and wanted to meet her. Apologizing for
being so forward, he gave her his phone number and asked if they could continue
the conversation by phone. Attracted by his courtesy and warm smile, Malika
agreed.
In early 1999, the two had long talks and walks in the city's
public parks, and a chaste romance developed. "He was very gallant and gentle
toward me," Malika told me, her eyes shining. What she did not know was that
Abdessattar, who had also been married and had pursued media studies at Tunis
University, had caught the attention of Belgian security services because of his
connection to a group of pro-al Qaeda extremists. When she met him, he had just
returned from trying to get into Kosovo, where he wanted to fight jihad against
Serb forces targeting Kosovo Muslims.
In the early months of his marriage to Malika, Abdessattar talked incessantly
about how an alliance of non-Muslim powers led by the United States was
oppressing Muslims around the world. He spoke of "global jihad," which had been
recently declared by bin Laden from the mountains of Afghanistan. "He made me
understand certain things," Malika told me. "I felt the same pain he felt,
seeing our brothers and sisters massacred and killed. I felt such anger that I
wanted to take up arms myself." Russian military actions against Chechen Muslims
particularly agitated the couple.
One evening in late 1999, Abdessattar
caught sight of bin Laden on the evening news: The self-styled prophet, dressed
in flowing white robes, was calling for volunteers for his global jihad. "My
husband was transfixed," Malika told me, dreamily. "There was a fascination, a
love. It was very clear, and I felt the same. Osama had a beauty in his face."
At that very moment, Malika said, her husband resolved to leave Belgium for
Afghanistan to volunteer for jihad. She agreed that she would eventually join
him.
Once or twice she saw the wives of bin Laden, when they came to visit with him
from Kandahar, al Qaeda's headquarters in the south. Despite well-worn tales of
scant freedoms — of virtual house arrest for the wives of Islamic
fundamentalists — "they seemed happy, from what I could tell," she said. "They
were radiant, even. Otherwise they wouldn't be married to him. I don't think he
was forceful with them." Malika never met bin Laden, because of strict
segregation between the sexes, but called his appeal magnetic. "It's easy for me
to describe the love that Abdessattar felt for him because I felt it myself,"
she told me, her voice brimming with passion. "It was he who helped the
oppressed. It was he who stood up against the biggest enemy in the world: the
United States."
A few months after her arrival, she and Abdessattar
moved into a more comfortable residence in an enclave of homes reserved for bin
Laden's most trusted operatives near Jalalabad's main river. But Abdessattar was
determined to school Malika and show her more of the real Afghanistan, taking
her on tours of run-down hospitals and villages ravaged by war and hunger. Her
husband told her, "Look, look at this closely, because this is the work of the
Americans, the result of the U.N. sanctions."
One day, Abdessattar took
Malika on a tour of his training camp, where, to her delight, he showed her how
to fire a Kalashnikov assault rifle, even allowing her to squeeze the trigger,
making the mountain valley echo with the thunderous sound of high-intensity
rounds. But Abdessattar had not taken her there just for her amusement; he was
teaching her how to protect herself from the nearby Northern Alliance, which was
fighting against bin Laden and the Taliban. He told her, "If they come when I am
away, fire on them till they kill you. Don't let yourself be taken alive." From
that day on, Malika would never sleep without the weapon at the foot of her bed.
[...]
y September 12, the suicide mission was an open secret in Jalalabad, where
people in the streets were celebrating the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. and the
death of Massoud. Malika learned of her husband's death when she stepped outside
and a woman warmly congratulated her on being the wife of a martyr. Malika
recalled in her memoir, "My heart jumped."
A succession of visitors came
to congratulate her over the next few days, seemingly unaware of how stricken
she was with grief. Eventually a courier, sent by bin Laden, dropped off a
videotape that her husband had made in the hope that she would hear the news
from him first. "Abdessattar gently prepared me for the fact he was no longer
there," Malika said, as if speaking of the most tender kind of love token. "He
told me he loved me, but he was already on the other side." The courier also
gave her $500 in cash from bin Laden to settle her husband's debts. "It's the
pinnacle in Islam to be the widow of a martyr," Malika told me proudly. "For a
woman, it's extraordinary."
The next morning, an al Qaeda escort brought her across the border into
Pakistan. She was lucky to have left when she did. Soon after, the U.S.
initiated an intensive bombing campaign after receiving intelligence that bin
Laden was hiding at Tora Bora.
[...]
On her return to Belgium, Malika was interrogated by authorities, who eventually
charged her with complicity in the assassination of Massoud. But she was cleared
in a 2003 trial and went on to meet another Tunisian-born man, Moez Garsallaoui,
who shared her incendiary views. They married, and she moved in with him in
Switzerland, away from the media attention in Brussels. There, Malika devoted
herself to promoting bin Laden's cause online. The computer-savvy Moez set up an
Arabic Website for himself and helped his wife administer a French-language
counterpart called Minbar-SoS, a reference to the pulpits in mosques, called
minbars. Under the pseudonym Oum Oubeyda, a variation on Abdessattar's al Qaeda
code name, Malika regularly voiced her support for al Qaeda, while others posted
videos of bloody attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. The site eventually attracted a
following of more than 1400 full-time members.
So what? I have thousands of full time members. Would Marie Claire ever do a story on someone like me, American blogger fighting the jihad? They'd sooner submit to sharia.
To test the depths of her ferocious resolve, I asked Malika what she thought of
Muriel Degauque, a Catholic convert from Belgium who had recently blown herself
up in Iraq, becoming al Qaeda's first-ever Western female suicide bomber. "She
had a lot of courage," Malika replied. "This is necessary, and I take my hat off
to her. Going there, blowing yourself up, killing the Americans."
Then
she took me to the computer in her bedroom and showed me how she administered
her Website, where she openly encouraged people to join bin Laden's jihad. As
one posting said, "I intensely hope and pray every day that our fighters
massacre those American pigs and their allies."
[...]
But Malika is the star here. She's the one who inspired the men who were
arrested — along with countless others — Belgian counterterrorism sources say.
Now in prison after her latest arrest, she awaits her trial in an isolated cell,
while every counterterrorism agency in the world watches. One can only imagine
the sense of satisfaction she feels, having advanced the work of her beloved
Abdessattar. Helping each other realize their dreams — that's just what true
lovers do.
As Malika put it in her memoir, "Ours was the most beautiful
love story that any woman could dream of."
Next month ...Eva Braun's sex tips -- how to keep your Nazi satisfied!
There's a lot more of this traitorous propaganda. How low can they go?
UPDATE: Heidi adds,
"I was more pissed about the fact that the reporter was attempting to project this image of these animals as being mere freedom fighters, and not refering to them as the Terrorists they are. Additionaly, what got my irish up was the fact that the journalist wasn't giving any historical context for Malika's claims regarding her desire to push back, nor specifics about what was being taught in her Islamic Fundie school, which for the readers of this rag who are not familiar with anything remotely associated with al-Qaeda's perceived "struggle", will accept this lunacy as gospel, and will in turn have even more fuel for their ever appologetic fire. GAH!