Word: islamist
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Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was the kind of guy you could have taken home to mom. Smart and friendly, he once jumped in front of a train in a London tube station to rescue a fallen commuter. But he also, in the name of the Islamist cause, gleefully threatened a hostage with decapitation in 1994. That hostage survived, but Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal Pakistan correspondent whom Sheikh is charged with kidnapping in January 2002, did not. The video of Pearl's beheading can still be found on the Internet (though the identity of the actual knife wielder remains...
Turkey's militant secularists may have lost their battle against the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) at the ballot box, but they're hoping that what the electorate denied them might be granted by the judiciary. To popular disbelief, the country's secularist chief prosecutor has applied to ban the ruling party, reelected last July with 47% of the vote, on the grounds that it is supposedly seeking to destroy secularism. The move comes on the heels of a controversial government move to overturn a ban on wearing headscarves at universities...
...Islamist parties have been banned before in Turkey, where strict secularism is enshrined in as a founding constitutional principle. But this time is different: The AKP is far more popular than any of its predecessors; its landslide victory in the election last year - prompted by a stand-off with the powerful generals rejecting the party's nominee for president - was largely a response to economic boom times, but also a sign that Turks are tired of military interference in politics...
European counterterrorism officials were not exactly surprised by news this week that Islamist radicals in north Africa have kidnapped two Austrian tourists, but they are concerned. Their monitoring over recent months has noted increasing jihadist calls to abduct foreigners as part of the wider surge of terrorist activity in the region. Some fear a spate of politically motivated kidnapping could be in the offing...
...dust settled on Saturday, three heartland states-Kedah, Perak and Kelantan-along with manufacturing-based states Selangor and Penang were all in the hands of the opposition. All of these states will now be ruled not by the National Front but, in most cases, by coalitions between the Islamist PAS party, the Chinese-based Democratic Action Party (DAP) and the multiethnic People's Justice Party...