Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: May 2, 2005
URL: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17913
Which is "the federal government's
greatest court victory against terrorism"? According to an article by Debra
Erdley in yesterday's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, that would be the conviction
on April 26, 2005, of Ali al-Timimi.
Ali who? Well yes, with the exception
of the Tribune-Review, which followed the Timimi case because of a Pittsburgh
angle, the mainstream media stayed resolutely away from the case, with
nearly everyone simply reprinting the identical Associated Press dispatch
deep inside the newspaper. Television was apparently oblivious to the trial.
What is so momentous about the Timimi
conviction, Erdley notes, is its being the first time since 9/11 that the
U.S. government has put away a terrorist not for his deeds, such as raising
money or blowing something up, but for his words.
The previous time this occurred
was in 1995, when the feds convicted Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh,
for having incited the (aborted) "day of terror" planned in New York City
for June 1993. As the lead prosecutor in the case, Andrew C. McCarthy,
explained, what made the prosecution in this case unique, was the government's
stratagem to focus on the jihad
organization behind the individuals carrying out this program: all the
defendants were charged under the seditious conspiracy statute, which criminalizes
agreements to wage war against the United States and to oppose government
authority by force.
Included among the defendants was
the blind and diabetic sheikh, someone who himself obviously could not
take part in operations, but he is spending the rest of his life in a U.S.
prison for his seditious words.
And now, Ali al-Timimi, also a sheikh,
follows in Abdel Rahman's footsteps to jail because he tried to get a group
of young Americans Muslims associated with a paintball group in northern
Virginia, to go to Afghanistan and fight for the Taliban regime there.
Erdley explains:
Al-Timimi trial witnesses, including
several members of the Paintball Jihad, said that at a secret meeting on
Sept. 16, 2001, he advised the men to leave the country and take up arms
for the Taliban in its coming war with the U.S. "There is definitely a
line crossed where someone is not just expressing views about our country,
but encouraging, directing and enabling individuals to act on those words,"
[Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney Paul] McNulty said.
"Some people still want to debate
the issue of whether this constitutes speech. The essence of the case was,
did these words have an effect on these individuals? Did they get solicited,
induced, encouraged? Did they have an influence over the conduct of other
people? The jury came back guilty on all counts," McNulty said.
This case, prosecuted by Gordon
Kromberg and his team, is so important because it dealt with words and
placed them in context. For example, the indictment of Timimi quotes a
message he sent out on February 1, 2003, the day when the Columbia space
shuttle crashed to earth, in which he - a born American citizen - stated
that
There is no doubt that Muslims were
overjoyed because of the adversity that befell their greatest enemy.
The Columbia crash made me feel,
and God is the only One to know, that this is a strong signal that Western
supremacy (especially that of America) that began 500 years ago is coming
to a quick end, God Willing, as occurred to the shuttle.
God Willing, America will fall and
disappear.
That the government is ready to
take such sentiments into consideration when prosecuting a terrorism case
is one more sign of its growing recognition that the current war is not
against terrorism but against the ideas that lead to that terrorism, namely
arising out of radical Islam.
That said, it is troubling to see
the mainstream media so consistently seeming not to see the import of these
developments. Rather, they tend to ignore a case like that of Ali al-Timimi
- or, if they do notice it, focus on the wrong set of issues.
