Muslim Citizens Told: The Time Has Come to Destroy France
In a little-noticed videotape, 40 minutes long, that was released this week, a prominent al Qaeda figure, Anas al Liby, advises the twelve million French Muslim citizens that it is time to start laying France to waste.
French soil, he declares, must be reduced to “an ocean of blood.” This event will signal “the beginning of the end of western civilization.”
DEBKA-Net-Weekly‘s counter-terror sources report that French government and intelligence authorities are taking this threat very seriously for a number of compelling reasons:
1. Al-Liby is rated as an al Qaeda high-up and member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle.
Born 42 years ago in Libya, Anas al Liby (picture) fled his country and Muammar Qaddafi’s security police when he was marked down for involvement in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam. Tripoli was informed that he is wanted for conspiring to kill US nationals, wanton murder and destroying US property and national defense installations.
Libya was granted political asylum in Britain. He is believed to have fled to Afghanistan to avoid prosecution for the embassy bombings. He has used many aliases, Anas al-Sabai, Anas al-Libi, Nazih al-Raghie and Nazih Abdul Hamed al-Raghieh.
On Oct. 10, 2001, his name was added to the FBI’s list of 22 most wanted terrorists, with a $5 million bounty offered for his capture.
2. The al Qaeda terrorist appears on the tape in full battle gear, a sign that his message is operational – not just for the purpose of propaganda.
3. The Islamic theological justification he offers for the comprehensive assault on a whole country is this: France deserves to be punished for its government’s refusal to allow Muslim women to wear headscarves when attending educational and government institutions. He describes this injunction as sourced in Western contempt for the Prophet Mohammed and his teachings, an attitude which produced the evil cartoons lampooning the Prophet. Therefore, European Muslims must accompany the major assault on France with attacks in Norway and Denmark, to punish them for allowing the offensive cartoons to appear in print.
Al Liby further argues that the cartoon affair was far from trivial; a string of quiet Muslim demonstrations and a few halting apologies by Westerners are totally inadequate. He quotes an ancient Muslim poet who wrote: “The Prophet is more beautiful than the loveliest of women and without flaw.”
The caricatures, he says, were “a deliberate attempt by the West to distort the Prophet’s perfect image.”
Therefore, any Muslims tolerating the French ban on the Muslim headscarf or the feeble apologies offered in the West for what they called “the unfortunate error” of the cartoons are colluding in the desecration of the Prophet’s honor and prestige.
It should be understood, says the al Qaeda leader, that the contemporary war against unbelievers is no different from the war the Prophet himself fought against the unbelievers around him. He faces the same hate today as he suffered when he started out on his path in the seventh century. There is no difference between the infidel mounted on a horse then and the infidel riding a car or a plane today, whether he lives in a tent as he did then or in a villa now.
Al Liby winds up his peroration and its graphic presentation of the fundamentalist gospel with a blood-curdling war cry. He tells French Muslims they have nothing to fear from French security services because the gates of the Garden of Eden are wide open for believers who fight for the honor of the Prophet.
“Go forth and stamp on their livers, soak the ground with their blood!”
