PARADOXICAL EFFECT:

As Muslims speak out, appeals intensify for reporter's release (Dan Murphy and Charles Levinson, 1/20/06, CS Monitor)

The Supreme Guide of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, Mahdi Akef, urged "the kidnappers of the American journalist Jill Carroll to release her immediately'' in a statement Thursday. "The Supreme Guide calls on all Iraqi factions to protect civilian lives, Iraqis or not, and especially the lives of reporters and media workers who came to expose the crimes of occupation."

The Muslim Brotherhood is considered the most powerful Islamist political opposition in the Arab world.

In Iraq Thursday, the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni Arab political party, also released a statement denounced kidnappings "because they are conducted against innocent people, who are mostly sympathetic with the Iraqis and their miseries.... The IIP urges the kidnappers to release this female journalist as soon as possible."

Saad Bazaaz, editor of Azzaman, a daily newspaper, and chairman of al-Sharqiya television channel in Iraq, in a phone call from Qatar, said that "Voices are coming from everywhere [on Carroll's behalf], even from the hardliners. And that is very good. Everyone in Iraq is talking about Jill Carroll, and they are saying the right things."

The Qatar-based Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, whose Al Jazeera program has made him one of the region's most respected and popular preachers, reiterated his previous religious ruling, or fatwa, against the kidnapping and murder of journalists in Iraq and said this certainly holds for Carroll's case. In Cairo, eight regional Arab human rights groups issued a joint statement reminding Carroll's kidnappers of her "respect for Iraqi, Arab and Islamic norms and traditions."

So yet another terrorist incident leads to the opposite of what they intended, this time prompting Muslim groups to speak out in the way Reformers and Islamophobes have been demanding.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2006 6:22 PM