Juan Cole analysis of AL-Qaida letter: Unlikely to be by British Muslims

[Monkie]

http://www.juancole.com/2005/07/update-on-london-bombing-investigation.html

for those of you that dont know Juan Cole he is a professor of history and respect middle-east expert.
there are still quite a few unknowns here, but it is interesting to read what a scholar has to say about the letter,

"The statement was in Arabic. The instances of British Muslim participation in terrorism given in the CNN piece were all non-Arabs: Richard Reid and several South Asian British, all of whom undertook operations abroad rather than in the UK. None of them probably even knew Arabic well or could compose a statement in it. Britain's South Asian Muslim community is almost certainly not the origin of this attack. The statement celebrated Arabness or `urubah along with Islam. No Bangladeshi-Briton or Pakistani-Briton wrote that.

The statement was probably not written by a second-generation Arab Briton or even by a long-term, integrated Arab Briton resident.
So, if the statement is a guide to the identity of the attackers, this bombing could not have emanated from the British Muslim community.
~snip~
My guess is that the author of the statement is Egyptian or Sudanese, with some sort of intellectual genealogy in the radical fringes of the Muslim Brotherhood"

his blog with almost daily updates is a good source of "informed comment" on the arab world http://www.juancole.com/

[Wetzelbill]

1. Juan Cole is a machine