New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman stresses the importance of the internet in recruiting young Muslims to join the violent jihād in Afghanistan, citing the recent case of five US Muslims arrested in Pakistan, who had been recruited to join the fight in Afghanistan via email.
He also calls on the Muslim community to start speaking out against extremism quoting Egyptian-American scholar and researcher Mamūnn Fandī: “What Muslims were talking about last week were the minarets of Switzerland, not the killings of people in Iraq or Pakistan,” noted Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. “People look for red herrings when they don’t want to look inward, when they don’t want to summon the moral courage to produce the counter-fatwa that would say: stabilizing Iraq is an Islamic duty and bringing peace to Afghanistan is part of the survival of the Islamic ummah,” or community.