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Contributors
Daniel Pipes- Contributor
Daniel
Pipes is director of the Middle
East Forum, a member of the
presidentially-appointed board of the U.S.
Institute of Peace,
and a prize-winning columnist for the New York Sun and The
Jerusalem Post. His most recent book, Miniatures:
Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics (Transaction
Publishers) appeared in late 2003. His website, DanielPipes.org,
the single most accessed source of information specifically
on
the Middle East and Islam, offers an archive and a chance
to sign-up to receive his new materials as they appear. [go
to Pipes index]
 Convicting
the "Paintball Sheikh"
Media turns a blind eye...
[Daniel Pipes] 5/5/05
Which is "the
federal government's greatest court victory against terrorism"?
According to an
article by Debra Erdley in Sunday'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.
My guess is that, once again, the Internet has to make up for
this failing. tRO
This piece
first appeared in FrontPageMagazine
copyright
2005 Daniel Pipes
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