Word: sects
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...demolition, artillery and light-weapon use, but they were also expected to be familiar with the fatwas of al-Qaeda, including those that called for violence against Muslim rulers who contradicted Islam-a basic Takfiri tenet. French terrorism expert Jacquard describes Takfiri indoctrination this way: "Takfir is like a sect: once you're in, you never get out. The Takfir rely on brainwashing and an extreme regime of discipline to weed out the weak links and ensure loyalty and obedience from those taken as members...
...associates, was greatly influenced by one of his teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What's more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity of all Arabs, but in a more ambitious pan-Islamicism, which...
Qumran, where Dubay and Walker found the bones, was home to an ascetic sect of Jews, the Essenes, roughly contemporary with Jesus. In the cliffside caves, in the first century A.D., the sect members buried their sacred texts in sealed jars to save them from the Roman army. Those documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls, were discovered in 1947, and are the oldest existing scripture in Hebrew. But the lives of the Qumran people remain shrouded in mystery and controversy...
...that Tung and his senior officials have advanced are forced and fallacious. Tung has said the self-immolation in Tiananmen Square of "cultists" who Beijing says are Falun Gong followers reminds him of Jonestown, 1978. A senior member of his Cabinet associated Falun Gong with Japan's Aum Shinrikyo sect, whose leaders unleashed a deadly gas attack in 1995 in a Tokyo subway, killing 12 people...
...there between Falun Gong and Jones-town or Aum Shinrikyo? Almost none. What happened in Jonestown was mass murder, not suicide: Jim Jones misled his followers into drinking poison and 913 died. As for Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese court has refused the government's request to ban the sect though it has handed down death sentences to two leaders found guilty of the gas attack. The court made the distinction between violators of existing laws and citizens' constitutional freedom to practice faith, however unpopular those beliefs may be to others. To link Falun Gong with these groups is to incite...