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The Guidebook for Taking a Life

[New York Times] Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet - We were in a small house in Zarqa, Jordan, trying to interview two heavily bearded Islamic militants about their distribution of recruitment videos when one of us asked one too many questions. "He's American?" one of the militants growled. "Let's kidnap and kill him." But before anyone could act on this impulse, the rules of jihadi etiquette kicked in. You can't just slaughter a visitor. You need permission from whoever arranges the meeting. And in this case, the arranger who helped us to meet this pair declined to sign off. "He's my guest," Marwan Shehadeh, a Jordanian researcher, told the bearded men. The rules of jihad etiquette have some general themes. Suicide bombers have long been called martyrs, a locution that avoids the Koran's ban on killing oneself in favor of the honor it accords death in battle against infidels. Here are five of the more striking jihadi tenets, as militant Islamists describe them: Rule No. 1: You can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt. Rule No. 2: You can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress. Rule No. 3: Sometimes, you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example. Rule No. 4: You cannot kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there. Rule No. 5: You can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad.
2007-06-12 01:00:00
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