GADI ADELMAN: THE TERRORIST AS CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR?
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10061/pub_detail.asp
Naser Jason Abdo was arrested at America’s Best Value Inn on South Fort Hood Street in Killeen, TX only about 3 miles from the front gate at Foot Hood on an outstanding warrant for child pornography and for being AWOL (absent without leave) from Fort Campbell, Ky.
When his hotel room was searched police found a lot more than child porn. Fox News reported,
Authorities said they found two clocks, spools of auto wire, a Winchester .40 caliber ammunition and a handgun in a backpack, according to court documents. They also discovered an article titled “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom,” the same title of a how-to article featured in Inspire, the English-language magazine by the terror group based in Yemen, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
According to court documents, he told investigators he planned to construct two bombs in the motel room using gunpowder, sugar and shrapnel packed into pressure cookers and then detonate the explosives at a restaurant near the post that Fort Hood personnel frequent and then planned to shoot the survivors of the blasts.
There is a lot more to this story than just a Muslim U.S. Army soldier wanting to commit terrorism at Foot Hood and murder military personnel following in the sandals of Major Nidal Hasan.
Abdo, 21, was born and raised in Texas to a Muslim father and Christian mother; he converted to Islam at the age of 17 and joined the Army in March 2009. He is currently assigned to the 101st Airborne Division’s Company E, 1st Brigade Combat Team.
One of the interesting twists to the Abdo story is that this is not the first time he has been in the news. He made the news last year when he sought “conscientious objector” (CO) status. The Army Times reported September, 2010,
A soldier wants to leave the Army as a conscientious objector based on his beliefs as a Muslim, but he says he’s concerned he may be deployed to Afghanistan anyway.
Pfc. Naser Abdo, a 20-year-old infantryman assigned to the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., said Aug. 23 that if the military orders him to deploy, he will refuse to go despite the fact that it may result in a court-martial.
I thought it was rather interesting that Abdo had not only requested conscientious objector status, but the U.S. Army had granted it.
I recalled all the stories I had read and the interviews with Abdo I had seen, including one on Al-Jazeera.
I had read the regulations for obtaining CO status last year, but I felt it best to go back and re-read the regulations of the “Department of Defense procedures governing conscientious objectors and processing requests for discharge based on conscientious objection”.
According to the DOD (Department of Defense),
3.1. Conscientious Objection: General – A firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason of religious training and belief.
The DOD breaks it down even further by putting people in different categories,
3.1.1. Class 1-O Conscientious Objector. A member who, by reason of conscientious objection, sincerely objects to participation of any kind in war in any form.
3.1.2. 1-A-O Conscientious Objector. A member who, by reason of conscientious objection, sincerely objects to participation as a combatant in war in any form, but whose convictions are such as to permit a Military Service in a non-combatant status.
So, one would assume that for the U.S. Army to grant him this status Abdo had order to fall into one of these categories, but that would be the wrong assumption.
On July 12, 2011, just one week before Abdo was found and arrested; an article in the Washington Times covered the story that Abdo had received CO status.
The article was written by Retired Navy Adm. James A. Lyons. Lyons is the former commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.
Obviously not knowing that Abdo was planning another terror attack on Foot Hood, Adm. Lyons touched on Nidal Hasan and the first attack. He wrote,
Now it seems the Army has embraced Maj. Hasan’s position in an incredible decision made last month by the secretary of the Army to grant conscientious objector status to Pfc. Naser Abdo. He is a 21-year-old soldier, a member of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., who refused to deploy to Afghanistan, claiming that Shariah law prevented him from killing other Muslims.
Adm. Lyons went on to explain in simple detail,
The fact that Shariah law is totally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and has no legal basis in the United States was somehow overlooked in the Army’s decision process. Shariah is a totalitarian legal-military-political system that is designed to control every aspect of an individual’s life and is antithetical to our concept of freedom and democracy. By its dictates, Shariah is seditious.
By acceding to the dictates of Shariah, the Army has tacitly endorsed an absurd position that in effect sanctions Muslim service members to kill non-Muslims but forbids them to kill Muslims. Further, it is an unbelievable basis on which to classify them as conscientious objectors.
Questioning why the Army would do this Adm. Lyons makes a great point,
Who helped the Army come to this inconceivable position on classifying Pfc. Abdo as a conscientious objector? My guess would be the Army received “guidance” from its Muslim “outreach partners,” who it believes are operating in America’s best interest. This would be classic stealth jihad at its finest.
Lastly, the Admiral points out that Abdo’s status was put on hold pending a different investigation,
His discharge from the Army is currently on hold because he has been charged with possession of child pornography. That should not be surprising: Shariah sanctions marriage of girls 9 years old and younger, in effect, legalized pedophilia.
Among the things that a soldier is required to do in order to obtain CO status is write an essay on why he or she feels they should be granted CO status. According to the New York Post,
In an essay he sent to The Associated Press last year he said acts like the Fort Hood shootings “run counter to what I believe in as a Muslim.”
The Associated Press also reported that he wrote,
“I began to understand and believe that only God can give legitimacy to war and not humankind,” he wrote. “That’s when I realized my conscience would not allow me to deploy.”
In an interview with Fox News last September Abdo stated,
“Islam is a peaceful religion, it’s not a religion of warfare,” Abdo said. “And it’s not a religion of terror. As a Muslim, we stand against injustice, we stand against discrimination, and I feel it’s my duty as an individual to do this.”
The question that has been bothering me is why join the Army, not to mention the 101st Airborne as an infantryman if you are a Muslim, knowing that you will most likely be deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan since the U.S. is currently at war in both?
A statement by Abdo in an article by the AP answers that question,
Naser Abdo said he became a Muslim when he was 17. He said he enlisted thinking that Army service would not conflict with his religious beliefs, but reconsidered as he explored Islam further.
So after he joined the Army and after he became an infantryman and after he realized that he may be deployed to Afghanistan, he “explored Islam further”.
“Explored Islam further” or to put it more simply, as I have stated time and time again, became more a more devout Muslim, not radicalized, devout.
Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) accused him of ‘treason’ and urged the military to punish him to the full extent of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Dr. Jasser, a Muslim and 11 year veteran as a medical officer in the U. S. Navy says that Abdo’s “interpretation (of Islam) is dangerous”.
In an AIFD press release on July 18, again before Abdo was arrested, Dr. Jasser wrote in part,
“Recent allegations of child pornography by Pfc. Nasser Abdo have brought to light the grossly misguided decision by Secretary of the Army John McHugh to grant Abdo Conscientious Objector (CO) status. As with the Pentagon report on the massacre at Fort Hood, the U.S Army has once again fallen victim to the insidious influence of political correctness. Abdo’s assertion that his faith precludes him from serving ‘in Afghanistan, Iraq or any war the U.S. Army would conceivably participate in.’ is patently false.
Nasser Abdo is exploiting his Muslim identity and faith for his own political agenda. He represents a fringe group of radical Muslims who take their Muslim identity over their American identity. His argument that the Qur’an only allows Muslims to participate in “just wars” against non-Muslims is bigoted and inaccurate.
Abdo’s claims of conscientious objection clearly violate the requirements for CO status as delineated by DOD directive 1300.06. On August 21, 2010, he treasonously told the foreign Islamist media arm, Al Jazeera, “I don’t believe I can involve myself in an army that wages war against Muslims. I don’t believe I could sleep at night if I take part, in any way, in the killing of a Muslim.” In his own published web statement he further states that “being a soldier in the U.S. Army may not be permissible according to Islamic doctrine. It did not take me long to find an abundance of religious sources on the matter… fighting in an unjust war particularly against a fellow Muslim brother would be considered to be a form of disbelief or kufr”
AIFD would like to take this opportunity to make it explicitly clear that Mr. Abdo is not only a traitor but has departed from mainstream interpretations of Islam and our duties to the United States of America. In fact his interpretation is dangerous and part of radical Islam globally.
Naser Abdo didn’t want to be deployed; he stated “I don’t believe I could sleep at night if I take part, in any way, in the killing of a Muslim”. I guess murdering fellow non-Muslim American soldiers would give him a better night’s sleep?
The Newser has reported he was investigated last year for making “anti-American” statements,
The military’s criminal investigation division, along with the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, also had investigated Abdo earlier this year after he was flagged for making unspecified anti-American comments while taking a language class in April, according to a U.S. official briefed on the investigation.
This man, this conscientious objector is so peaceful that the War Resisters website praised him in a story on the first anniversary of the Foot Hood shooting. How ironic that Abdo would be hailed as “a Muslim peacemaker” in an article marking the Foot Hood tragedy, when now he admits to wanting to recreate the same death and terror as Nidal Hasan.
The first part of the article speaks of how the media covered the shooting at Foot hood and that “the shootings were certainly newsworthy”, but where the article goes from there is laughable,
The problem is that almost the only time Muslims are featured in the U.S. news media is when a Muslim engages in an act of violence. A one-sided focus on violence committed by some Muslims fuels the racist narrative that “Islam is a religion of violence”—which underwrites the so-called “Global War on Terror.”
The article continues with,
the long and vital history of Muslim peacemaking has been lost in the avalanche of reports on Muslims where the mainstream media connects them only with violent extremism.
I know Islam, I know history. Somehow I missed that part in history class; evidently there was a “long and vital history of Muslim peacemaking”.
Towards the end it tells Americans how to defeat “Islamophobia”,
we must work to undo the deeply harmful effects of this narrative on the lives of Muslims living both in the U.S. and abroad.
It explains how we can go about this and tells the reader,
We must lift up the stories and ongoing work of Muslim peacemakers like Naser Abdo.
I hope War Resister is happy with the way Naser Abdo turned out; there are certainly a lot of stories about him and how he is a “Muslim Peacemaker” now.
At the end of the article Abdo makes a statement,
“Only when the military and America can disassociate Muslims from terror can we move onto a brighter future of religious collaboration and dialogue that defines America and makes me proud to be an American.”
What better way is there to “disassociate Muslims from terror” than by becoming a Muslim terrorist yourself?
Abdo’s father was reached for comment in Jordan. The AP explains why his father is in Jordan along with his comments,
Police and the Army say Abdo admitted plotting an attack, but in Fuhais, Jordan, his father insisted the allegations were “all lies from A to Z.”
“My son loved people no matter who they are, whether Jews or Christians,” Jamal Abdo said. “Naser is not the kind of a person who harbors evil for the other people, he cannot kill anyone and he could not have done any bad thing.”
Jamal Abdo, 52, is a Jordanian who lived near Fort Hood in Killeen for 25 years until he was deported from the United States last year after being convicted of soliciting a minor.
Dad was convicted of soliciting a minor, and his son was accused of child pornography. Like father, like son?
Currently, depending on which report you read, there are 9000 or so Muslims in the U.S. Military. I hope that they don’t “explore Islam further.” I can’t handle the thought of 9,000 Nidal Hasans or Naser Abdos running around with weapons.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Gadi Adelman is a freelance writer and lecturer on the history of terrorism and counterterrorism. He grew up in Israel, studying terrorism and Islam for 35 years after surviving a terrorist bomb in Jerusalem in which 7 children were killed. Since returning to the U. S., Gadi teaches and lectures to law enforcement agencies as well as high schools and colleges. He can be heard every Thursday night at 8PM est. on his own radio show “AmericaAkbar” on Blog Talk Radio. He can be reached through his website gadiadelman.com.
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