Monday, March 14, 2011

Shorter Quilliam

Thanks to the indefatigable Flying Rodent, Quilliam present a seven-point plan.

Quilliam therefore proposes the following urgent actions...


This could be reduced to:

What the Interim National Council said.


I think that's a use of "proposes" for the Newspeak dictionary.

Also, I have no idea what the following means.

Noman Benotman, a Libyan senior analyst at Quilliam who prior to the recent violence had acted in his private capacity as an intermediary between Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) of which he was formerly a senior member, said:
‘For the last forty years, the Libyan people have been the victims, first of the brutal Gaddafi regime, and then in the 1990s of the violent clashes between the regime and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, of which I used to be a leader. From 2007 until the start of the recent Libyan uprising I acted as an intermediary between the Libyan government and the LIFG in order to resolve both these issues within the framework of a broader democratic resolution of Libya's problems. This process resulted in the LIFG’s rejection of jihadist violence and the release of over 700 people from Libya’s prisons.[']


Both what issues? What was "within the framework of a broader democratic resolution" given that Libya doesn't have a democracy of any kind? Anyway, I'd never heard of them, but I have now.

LIFG was founded in the fall of 1995 by Libyans who had fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. It aims to establish an Islamic state in Libya and views the current regime as oppressive, corrupt and anti-Muslim, according to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.


And this Noman character.

Noman Benotman's letter to Zawahiri was published in Akhbar Libya (News) as an op-ed clarification in November 2007. The gist is that Al-Qaeda's efforts have been counterproductive and used as "subterfuge" by some Western countries to extend their regional ambitions. These comments were first aired at a meeting in Kundahar in the summer of 2000


If he's criticising AQ for "counterproductive" "efforts", doesn't that mean that they agree about ends, if not means? Must be a lovely guy.

On July 10, 2009, The Telegraph reported that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group had split with Al Qaeda.


From which I infer that they were on the same side before. In other words, this is a person who didn't object to the events of 11 September 2001, 7 July 2005, etc at the time. Lovely. Denis MacShane wants the UK government to fund this guy. And he thinks we're sympathetic to terrorists.

4 Comments:

Blogger flyingrodent said...

Well, Quilliam's schtick has always been that they've got access to ex-Jihadists who can tell it like it is, brother.

That said, it must've been a hell of an epiphany for that guy. Split with Al Qaeda mid-2009, committed democrat within the norms of civilised society by March 2011? The only explanation I can think of is that somebody must've given him a copy of Terror & Liberalism.

3/15/2011 11:34:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Looks like Quilliam are already making cuts

"Lucy James is a former researcher at Quilliam" complaining she can't get job seekers allowance. She was among the non-islamic staff at Quilliam who had some involvement in "security studies"

Ann On

3/15/2011 03:58:00 PM  
Blogger Naadir said...

Progress is pushing quite heavily to retain Quilliam's funding. They specifically emailed mailing list members a link to this article
http://www.progressives.org.uk/columns/column.asp?c=634

3/17/2011 12:11:00 PM  
Blogger Tom Griffin said...

Mark Curtis's Secret Affairs is interesting on the LIFG.

They were the group that David Shayler claimed MI6 backed in an attempted assasination attempt on Gadaffi in the 1990s:
http://www.anniemachon.com/annie_machon/2009/06/diamonds-and-rust.html

3/29/2011 09:32:00 PM  

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