Innocent Victims In The Global War On Terror

With Government and Big Business seen as a first and second sector, Third Sector here stands for globally active non-governmental non-profit organizations (NPO) as most promising  „powers of the future“ and possibly the last bastion for the defense of human rights against the media-supported Political/Military Complex. In fact, international Civil Society, a $ 1 trillion industry by now, already counts  26,000 NPOs - from Oxfam to Greenpeace  (five million members) - all democratically as unaccountable as Nike, Nestlé and Shell.

While the elimination of poverty, disease, environmental pollution, political oppression, human rights abuses, and imperialist aggression should command priority globally, the list is now topped by a so-called War on Terror against an undefined enemy that quickly degenerated into a war against Islam, including Islamic charities. Most of them have been closed down by now under American pressure, even in Saudi Arabia, supposedly to forestall terror financing, even though actual terrorist organizations are known to function outside the banking system.

Clamping down on waqf-based Islamic charities was particularly detrimental because the giving of zakat and sadaqa is a “pillar of faith“ in Islam, not optional, and because government supported Christian charities freely operate now within the Muslim world, even transferring thousands of Bosnian orphans to Christian families, for their conversion, while Muslim countries like Kuwait and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are arm-twisted even into removing collection boxes and forbidding cash collections in mosques during Ramadan. Even in Afghanistan all Muslim charities have been replaced by Christian ones.

On the basis of solid proof the author is, however, convinced that the United States under President Bush putting politics before the law was merely using the 9/11 disaster to legitimize its reach for world domination. This Dr Salloomi considers

Absurd, given that the US as a model, thoroughly collapsed under the inventor of the shameful Guantanamo torture camp.

According to Salloomi and Muslim world-wide the real reasons for Bush`s war on terror were:

* to stop humanitarian (and other) help to the Palestinians, in the interest of Israel, Washington being quite aware by now that real terrorists cannot be tracked down via their bank accounts. 

* to control the teaching of Islam by the closing of independent Islamic instruction, as in Pakistan, and limit it to three hours  per week.

* to incriminate the Wahhabi movement (e.g. for neither allowing churches nor Sufism, because of its religious police).

* to gain access to Iraqian oil, eliminate a possible threat to Israel from Baghdad, and open the country to massive Christian evangelization (“war for souls“) as exemplified by US “war crimes“ (Naom Chomsky and Naomi Klein) in Falluja.

*  to prevent a uniting of the Muslims world after the US or European model.

The author admits “fundamental mistakes“ made in Saudi Arabia by government controlled Muslim organizations like al-Haramain, The Muslim World League, WAMY, and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) which regularly mixed financial aid with da´wah and supported jihad movements. (This had seemed all right as long as they fought the Soviet Union rather than the United States.) For them he even created the contradictory term CONGO for “government-organized non-governmental organization“. 

But he resents the double standard prevalent in most accusations since the West as well regularly mixes politics with social assistance. And he is rightly furious over the recent US practice to consider Muslim charities guilty until proven innocent.

The book is repeatedly going over the same points and introduces new accusations even in the Conclusion. This makes it sounds unnecessarily apologetic. Only in the very last chapter Dr Salloomi describes the fundamentals of Islam - from