New al-Ouda website

[Vancouver]

New to me, anyway. Seems to be a forum, but it is not running at the moment -- "internal server error 500".
http://www.azzawiah.com/
It is hosted in Ottawa by
Almina Multimedia Services
which formerly hosted a site belonging to al-Ouda's close associate Safir al-Hawali.

[Casey]

I believe that is part of Isamtoday

And this is the person who owns it;


Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al-Oadah
P.O. Box 25250, Buraidah, Al-Qassim, Saudi Arabia
Phone: 966 6 820789 Fax : 966 6 3830053
Send Email
Technical Department
Islamtoday.Com

It has English content

http://islamtoday.com/contact_islam.cfm

The
http://www.azzawiah.com/ site is there, the forum database not is good shape.

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
[Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver] Operation must use an updateable query.
/forum_view.asp, line 59

http://www.azzawiah.com/forum_view.asp?sub_no=32

[Casey]

Who is Prince Nayef? (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/018fdsio.asp)
The most powerful man in Saudi Arabia.
by Bill Tierney
12/23/2002, Volume 008, Issue 15

snipped.....


As interior minister, Prince Nayef is responsible for controlling the clergy within the kingdom. Although he has had the occasional extremist cleric arrested, he stands aside while many others preach jihad. One example from a long list is Ibn Jebreen, a respected sheikh from the Najd region, the heartland of Wahhabism. He emphatically preaches jihad, notably in support of the Muslim brothers in Chechnya. By his logic, anytime Muslims are under attack, it is incumbent on other Muslims to go to their aid. Given that a majority of Saudis cheered the 9/11 attacks, we can expect to see tens of thousands of Saudis head north to help their fellow Muslims when Iraq is attacked. As the ultimate boss of the Border Guards, Prince Nayef will be fully informed.


Further evidence of Prince Nayef's riding the jihadist wave is the case of Sheikh Salman bin Fahd Al-Oadah. Arrested by the Interior Ministry in 1994 for his radical preaching, Al-Oadah was released in 1999 without cause or comment. Since then, he has launched a website, Islamtoday.net, from his home in Buraydah, in the Najd. The English version of this site contains a straightforward definition of jihad:

The general meaning of jihad is the expenditure of effort in order to establish Allah's religion, call people to it, and establish its authority on the Earth, as well as reform the material circumstances of humanity. . . . The specific meaning of jihad is the military engagement of the unbelievers and those who carry the same legal status as the unbelievers. Jihad, by this meaning, becomes obligatory upon the inhabitants of the countries that come under the occupation of the unbelievers.

Today, Al-Oadah enjoys the protection of Prince Nayef's ministry.
Nor can such individuals be dismissed as fringe elements, the Saudi equivalent, say, of the Branch Davidians. When the Palestinians' Al-Aqsa Intifada began in the fall of 2000, senior members of the Saudi Ministry of Defense living in an upscale naval housing complex south of Riyadh heard their imam exhorting them as dutiful Muslims to fight Israel and those who support Israel. No wonder the Saudis hired a PR consultant to hit the Washington talk show circuit and discredit anyone who accuses them of being two-faced.



http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/who_is_prince_nayef.htm

[Casey]

Here is a bit about Sheikh Salman al-Oadah, it mentions the alneda.com website just before Reigs hijacked it.


Al-Qaeda Takes Fight For 'Hearts And Minds' To The Web (http://wincoast.com/forum/posts)
Jane's Intelligence Review | August 2002 | Paul Eedle

Posted on08/08/2002 7:05:51 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen (http://wincoast.com/%7Estandwatchlisten/)

snipped.....


How we can co-exist
The second wave of criticism erupted in March and was still raging three months later. In February, an open letter from 60 US intellectuals was published justifying President George W Bush's 'war on terrorism' on the grounds that it was a just war in defence of US values which are universal human values. Signatories included Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, and Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilisations.

In March, Saudi scholar Sheikh Salman al-Oadah published a response, signed by 150 Saudi academics and professionals, called 'How we can co-exist'. While it was clear in its condemnation of US policies, the letter caused a storm in Muslim circles by offering a dialogue with the West and conceding that the West and Islam did, indeed, share certain universal values. Sheikh Salman al-Oadah was one of the two main religious leaders of the opposition movement in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s, the other being signatory Safar al-Hawali.

Al-Qaeda reacted furiously. In April, alneda.com carried 'Please prostrate yourselves in private', a 14-page commentary attacking 'How we can co-exist' almost line by line.

This article was based on two main arguments. Firstly, Islam shares no fundamental values with the West. "These expressions of yours are based on the principle of equality in the documents of the United Nations, which do not discriminate between people on the basis of religion, ethnicity or gender. But Islam is superior; nothing is superior to it; even a Muslim who is a slave is better than a million infidel gentlemen." Secondly, Muslims are committed to spread Islam by the sword. "A person has only three options - become a Muslim, live under the rule of Islam, or be killed. The signatories should have made that clear to the West."

While these are extreme views, they are taken seriously in the world of Muslim political debate. Al-Qaeda is building on a theology of jihad against the West that has been elaborated in great depth by many different writers over the decade since the Gulf War in 1991. This literature has taken over from the previous generation of Muslim radical thinking in the 1970s and 1980s that concentrated on how to establish purist Islamic governments inside the Muslim world, as in Iran.

For example, Sheikh Naser al-Fahed, a Saudi scholar with a substantial following, published a long denunciation of 'How we can co-exist' on his website, and alneda.com published three more critiques, signed by seven scholars, in its 'fatwas' section.

As a result of the Al-Qaeda standpoint, it now takes great courage to speak out against this 'jihadi' view. Sheikh Salman al-Oadah told JIR that four or five people who signed 'How we can co-exist' have subsequently withdrawn their support.

Al-Qaeda's strategy

Al-Qaeda's use of the internet and videotapes demonstrate that 'perception management' is central to the conduct of its war with the West. In fact, it is possible to view all of Al-Qaeda's operations - including acts of violence - as one vast perception management operation. Everything Al-Qaeda does is taped to use later. They claim to have recorded testaments of all 19 of the 11 September hijackers and have videotaped many of their fighters in Afghanistan in order to have martyr obituary material if they are killed. An important motive for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan may well have been to produce the horrific video of one of his kidnappers mutilating his body, which was posted on the internet in May.

The absolutist arguments used by Al-Qaeda in its exchanges with radical Muslim critics suggest that the aim of this perception management is to convince both Muslims and Westerners that they are involved in a fight to the death, a violent 'clash of civilisations'. When Samuel Huntington published his famous article a decade ago, many people thought the theory far-fetched. Al-Qaeda wants to make the 'clash' a reality, repeatedly arguing that its conflict with the West is a black and white struggle of good against evil in which it is purely following the will of God.
A Muslim activist with well-placed sources in the radical movements told JIR that the aim of 11 September was to provoke a massive Western response which would in turn prove Al-Qaeda's argument that the West is at war with Islam and force Westerners and Muslims to take sides. This would guarantee that even if Al-Qaeda leaders were killed, the war would continue. In this view, the USA has played its role right on cue and its support for Israeli action in the West Bank has been a bonus, cementing anti-US hostility in the Middle East.

The activist said the next stage of the conflict would be aimed at undermining public support for the US government and its support of moderate or secular-minded Muslim countries. At that point, Al-Qaeda sympathisers could start to overthrow governments in the Arabian peninsula, Central Asia or Southeast Asia without Western powers intervening to drive them from power as the USA has done with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Muslim attitudes to the West

Neither Al-Qaeda statements nor the outpourings of radical Saudi religious scholars can really be used to gauge what is going on in the minds of millions of ordinary Muslims. It is certainly true that Al-Qaeda is not engaging intellectually with Muslim radicals in Lebanon, among the Palestinians or in Iran. Its influence is confined to the radical Muslims of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and this may prove to be an interesting weakness. The Iranians, Hizbullah in Lebanon and even Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have a record of tempering the use of violence with pragmatic politics in order to achieve concrete goals such as the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon.

However, all the evidence currently on the internet points in one direction: in Western terms, public debate in the Muslim world is now very radical. It is axiomatic in this debate that the West, above all the USA, is hostile to Muslims. The only argument is between those who, like Al-Qaeda, want total war, and those who want to confront the West using other means. At the moment, those who want total war are shouting loudest.

Behind Alneda.com

Since the internet arrived in the mid-1990s, political debate in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, has escaped from newspapers, where governments could control it - and where Western media could monitor it - to the comparative freedom of cyberspace. While Muslim debate surfaces on satellite TV channels such as Al-Jazeera, it is subject to filters and controls. The real arguments take place on websites, bulletin boards, e-mail lists and in chatrooms.

Al-Qaeda attaches great importance to waging psychological warfare, and has used the internet as its medium. Alneda.com is clearly produced by a substantial team of people, rather than a lone activist. The site is a professionally produced database-driven site with an imaginative webmaster. The site has been shut down three times, each time when CNN researched a story about it and contacted the Internet Service Provider (ISPs) for comment. The original site, www.alneda.com (http://www.alneda.com), was hosted in Malaysia and shut down on 13 May; it reappeared around 2 June at http://66.34.191.223/ hosted in Texas and was shut down on 13 June; it reappeared on 21 June at www.drasat.com (http://www.drasat.com) hosted in Michigan and was shut down on 25 June. In each case, it seems that the ISPs knew nothing about the content and shut the site down as soon as they were told what it was.

The website publishes summaries of international news coverage of Al-Qaeda and its own reporting of fighting in Afghanistan. The site also publishes articles, fatwas (decisions on the application of Muslim law), and even whole books from a wide range of different authors.

Al-Qaeda is taking a significant risk releasing material on alneda.com. It is a public website and there is a strong chance that anyone reading it or uploading to it can be identified and tracked down. Before the war in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda did not take that risk. Using a single, authoritative website is a new tactic, which Al-Qaeda must believe is worthwhile. Paul Eedle

Paul Eedle is a freelance journalist reporting on the Middle East and militant Islam.

entire article (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/729748/posts)

[Vancouver]

I watch IslamToday daily, and I get the general impression that al-Ouda's circle is declining in importance. Jihadis and wannabes don't often mention al-Ouda or al-Hawali anymore, although the names still come up in less sinister discussions of religion. On the other hand...

The original bin Ladin Qaida wants to topple KSA, so al-Ouda needs to be careful about endorsing that particular jihad. But IslamToday still openly backs every Sunni terrorist group in the world, to the extent that they can get away with it in KSA. They grab every chance to generate hate, e.g. the cartoons and the pope thing. They are always keen to report Coallition and NATO casualties in Afghanistan, but they never mention Taliban casulties except the occasional named bigshot. To me this suggests that al-Ouda's circle is involved in recruiting for, or more likely funding, the Taliban. I know that al-Ouda and al-Hawali were part of a pipeline to Iraq. When Zarqawi was killed, Islam Today carried a eulogy to the great man, falsely saying that it came from Hamas. When Basayev was killed in southern Russia, they did the same for Basayev, falsely claiming to be quoting Sawt al-Qoqaz. IslamToday frequently roots for the Islamists of Mogadishu and for the genocidal Khartoum regime. These Wahhabis have no interest in coexistence; they want to expand their power any way they can, albeit incrementally. Al-Neda could anonymously object to that coexistence article, no problem, but IslamToday is under duress from Riyadh to some extent.

There are at least two dozen people involved with the Islam Today website.

[Vancouver]

a MEMRI clip of Salman al-Ouda on Saudi TV:
http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1270
The text resembles part of what appears on al-Ouda's website.
He accuses the Pope of insulting Islam and Muhammad, which is the Muslim way of trying to get other Muslims to kill someone. I've heard it many times. The deceptive trick that al-Ouda falsely accuses the Pope of using, is one that he himself routinely uses.

[Vancouver]

One of Massari's suckholes accuses Salman al-Ouda of being an agent of the West:
http://www.tajdeedi.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?threadid=45994
That's no way for a jihadi to talk about Usama bin Ladin's favorite cleric.
The sender Abu Ya'qub
أبو يعقوب
could be Massari himself. He suggests a consultation between Massari and al-Boraq's web people, which sounds like a status-seeking effort on Massari's part. Such behavior is not unusual for a Saudi like Massari. Al-Boraq does have serious connections in Iraq, but so does al-Ouda, so it's interesting that somebody at tajdeed dares to disown al-Ouda. Maybe al-Ouda disowned Massari at some prior point, which Riyadh could easily compel al-Ouda to do; or maybe al-Ouda just never took Massari seriously. I don't.
Massari and his former partner Sa'ad al-Faqih are wanted in KSA; both want to be the next dictator of that country, which explains why they no longer get along.