A Religious Right To Murder People Without Punishment?

21 Dec, 2005 by John Hawkins

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You almost have to admire the chutzpah (Well, not really) of Osman Karahan, a Turkish lawyer, who argued that his terrorist clients, who were responsible for the deaths of 58 innocent people, should be allowed to skate because it was their religious duty as Muslims to commit murder.

“A lawyer defending al Qaida-linked suspects standing trial for the 2003 suicide bombings in Istanbul told a court that jihad, or holy war, was an obligation for Muslims and his clients should not be prosecuted.

“If you punish them for this, tomorrow, will you punish them for fasting or for praying?” Osman Karahan — a lawyer representing 14 of the 72 suspects — asked during a nearly four-hour speech in which he read religious texts from an encyclopedia of Islam.

The November 2003 blasts targeted two synagogues, the British Consulate and the local headquarters of the London-based HSBC bank, killing 58 people.

The Arabic word jihad can mean holy war among extremists in addition to its definition as the Islamic concept of the struggle to do good.

Karahan spoke for three hours at the court in Istanbul.

“If non-Muslims go into Muslim lands, it is every Muslim’s obligation to fight them,” Karahan said.”

Know what my favorite part of that whole excerpt was? When they explain that Jihad can actually mean, “holy war.” Really? You don’t say! Maybe no one ever picked that up the first few hundred times Imams and terrorists said that it was Allah’s will that other Muslims slaughter infidels in the name of Jihad.

In any case, Turkey is a fairly secular country and after all the attacks they’ve suffered at the hands of Kurdish terrorists, it’s unlikely Osama Bin Lawyer will get anywhere with his, “It’s our religious right to kill as many non-Muslims as we like defense.”

Still, the fact that the lawyer is even running that up the flagpole shows that he thinks it has an outside chance of working which is more than a little scary.