Sunday, September 9, 2012

Libya's second civil war in the offing ?


This time it won't be Gadhafi supporters against the rest, but Sunnis against the rest.

Three people have been killed      in clashes in Libya between local residents and Islamic extremists trying to destroy a Sufi shrine, the interior ministry says.
Officials said residents in the eastern town of Rajma clashed with Salafist Islamists who were trying to destroy the Sidi al-Lafi mausoleum. It is the latest in a series of attacks on shrines belonging to the mystical Sufi branch of Islam in Libya. Many Islamists view Sufis as heretics. 
In Rajma, 50km (31 miles) south-east of the city of Benghazi, witnesses said armed local residents fought off Salafist extremists who were trying to destroy the mausoleum. "The clashes left three people dead and several more wounded on both sides," Deputy Interior Minister Wanis al-Sharif told AFP news agency...

 ....A series of recent attacks has raised the specter   of sectarian violence in the country. Last week, attackers bulldozed a mosque containing graves belonging to Sufi Muslims in the capital of Tripoli. Government officials blamed an armed Islamist group. One day earlier another Sufi mosque was attacked and its library burned...
....Elmashalati said that her newspaper is in a building called The Tripoli Towers, where many foreign embassies also have their offices. Some have received threats, apparently from Islamists, that the building could be blown up.
Some of these attacks never even make it into the media. On Wednesday, she said, a bomb exploded n the Soha El-Hasna beauty salon in Tripoli. The salon was empty at the time and nobody was hurt. “They (the Islamists) just want women to stay home,” she said. “I don’t wear a head scarf (many Muslim women cover their heads out of modesty) but my boss told me I should always keep one in my bag for when I go into the streets.”
She said that billboards with pictures of women not wearing head scarves have been vandalized.
Ahmed Jehani counters that these are isolated incidents and that the vast majority of Libyans support women’s rights. Half of the delegates to the new Parliament are women, he said....

But what kind of women are the "half of the delegates to the new Parliament" ... that should be the question.   Most of them are likely  the kind that are beloved to the Muslim Brotherhood ... taqqiyah spouting females who will do and say anything to hasten the caliphate.



....The Arab Spring uprisings  have been used by the Islamists as a pretext for purging Christians in Egypt and Syria, as well as Sufis in Mali and Libya. Despite a recent election in Libya that was widely hailed as a signpost of stability, the country is in no way stable and its central authority is an illusion. Tribal warfare, even of the kind taking place in Zitan, 90 miles from Tripoli, is however a lesser evil compared to the revelation that the Libyan government either cannot stop the Salafi violence or is unwilling to do so....
....Libyan Interior Minister Fawzi Abdel A’al has made it clear that the Salafis have a free hand to do as they please. “If all shrines in Libya are destroyed so we can avoid the death of one person,” he said, “then that is a price we are ready to pay.”....

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