Are foreign hostages hapless victims of militants abusing Islam or casualties of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq?
Hostage-taking and grisly killings in Iraq are dividing Arabs across the Middle East.
Since April, around 30 hostages from several countries have been killed in Iraq. At least nine were beheaded, their gruesome deaths videotaped and seen the world over on the Internet.
Many of the kidnappings are carried out by Iraqi Islamist groups who say their aim is to drive out foreigners and end what they see as the brutality of U.S. forces against their people.
Killing these foreigners, they say, is merely putting “God’s law” into effect. The most ruthless so far has been the Tawhid and Jihad group headed by al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which this week decapitated two Americans.
Several Arab scholars and Muslim clerics say all these guerrillas have done is to sully the image of Islam and the struggle for Iraq’s independence all over the world.
Shocking and indiscriminate
“This kind of resistance is very bad,” said Abdel-Monem Said, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “It is shocking public opinion, particularly as it is indiscriminate.”
Militants from Lebanon to Yemen have in the past resorted to kidnapping foreigners to further their political aims.
Last year’s Iraq war deepened Arab anger at Washington’s policies in the Middle East, but despite their fury at the U.S.-led invasion, many Arabs said the deliberately publicized beheadings had taken shock tactics too far.
“Killing innocent civilians is unjustified. The claims of the terrorist groups do not justify their acts,” said Saudi driver Qassem Haydar. “They cannot be called Muslims.”
In Lebanon, once infamous for the kidnappings of foreigners, top Shiite religious authority Ayatollah Hussein Fadlallah said kidnappings served the interests of the United States by giving it a reason to maintain the occupation.
“Resistance (to occupation) is legal, but needs to spare innocents and choose ways that are not contrary to Islam,” added Lakhdar Benkhellaf of Algeria’s Islamist party El Islah.
Revenge for occupation
Several Arabs, however, said the United States and its allies were ultimately to blame for the hostage-taking because of the occupation and offensives that kill scores of Iraqis.
“It’s savage revenge rather than execution,” said Jordanian political analyst Adnan Abu Odeh. “While there are those who are disgusted, a certain percentage no doubt feel vindicated because of the killings they see by the Americans in Iraq.”
Many said they deplored the killing of fellow Arabs and Asians who seek work in Iraq for better pay, but some said the occupation of Iraq justified the killing of Westerners.
No options
Zerrouk Slimani, a Tunisian school teacher, said nobody should regret the killing of Westerners. “When dozens of Palestinians are dead or 50 killed in Iraq, few in the West condemn these assassinations,” he explained.
Umm Mohammed, a Yemeni housewife, said her heart went out to families of hostages but that Iraqis were justified in resorting to such measures while fighting the world’s mightiest army.
“Cutting off people’s heads is wrong, but the occupation is an even bigger wrong. The Iraqi people don’t have any other options to resolve the situation,” she said.
Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi social anthropologist at Kings College London, said the impact of the hostage-killing was much greater because of its instant dissemination over television and the Internet. “The horror is in all our living rooms,” she said.
