Word: islamist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year after 9/11, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, was asked at a Washington forum whether the Bush Administration had plans, in its war on terrorism, for the Lebanese Islamist group Hizballah, factions of which the U.S. believes were responsible for the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service members. Armitage, a bear of a man, gave a chest-thumping reply. "Their time will come," he vowed. "There is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, and we're not going to forget...
...have the troops, the money or the political will. That means it may make sense to limit our hit list to the groups that actually threaten us. Hizballah does not now do that. Nor does the other group currently in the spotlight, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. The U.S. has sound reasons for wanting to constrain these groups, principally that they threaten our ally Israel. But those reasons have largely gone unarticulated as Bush falls back on maxims about the need to confront terrorism, as if Hizballah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will...
...Arabism declined, pan-Islamism rose in its place. Hence Islamist Hizballah--client of Islamist Iran, ally of Islamist Hamas--provokes a war with Israel. Hizballah's motivation has nothing to do with Arab nationalism. Israel withdrew from every square meter of Lebanese territory six years ago. But legal obligation means nothing to Hizballah. Like Hamas and Iran, Hizballah views the destruction of Israel as a religious obligation...
Moreover, Hizballah times its attack on Israel to suit the needs of its Iranian patron, about to be subject to sanctions by the West for its nuclear ambitions. Those ambitions, in turn, are meant to serve Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's even larger Islamist vision of a cataclysmic showdown with the infidel West as a harbinger of the return of the 12th Imam and the End of Days...
...Qaeda's list of grievances. In al-Qaeda's 1998 declaration of war on the U.S., Palestine is a distant third. But with Iran, through Hamas and Hizballah, having seized leadership of the jihad against the Jews, al-Qaeda could not stand by and allow its Islamist primacy to be eclipsed by the mullahs of Tehran...