In the mid-Nineties, when I was recruited into the radical Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir, my recruiters urged me to look around. In the Balkans, they said, Muslims were being massacred while the West looked on.
In Iraq, millions of children were being starved to death by United Nations sanctions. From Morocco, the most westerly point of the “Muslim world”, to Indonesia, the most easterly, despots and tyrants backed by the West were keeping Muslims from fulfilling their full potential. Israel, they said, was massacring Palestinians with Western arms and political backing.
Such arguments convinced my 16-year-old self that the West was implacably opposed to Islam, that Muslims and non-Muslims would always be enemies and that the solution was jihad. [telegraph.co.uk] Read more
