Cape Town - As a prominent Cape Town Muslim cleric used Friday prayers to declare the Islamic State (IS) an “anti-Islamic formation which had violated all the core principles of the Muslim faith”, the US State Department has admitted that the IS’s propaganda machine “is something we have not seen before”.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told CNN: “We are seeing 90 000, I think, tweets a day that we’re combating.”
She was referring to a particularly gruesome recruiting tool, a 52-second video depicting the killing of two US journalists and a British aid worker, making the rounds among internet users.
The spotlight was turned on Cape Town this week after a 15-year-old from Kenwyn was intercepted at Cape Town International Airport, apparently en route to join the IS, a paramilitary structure operating from Iraq and Syria which claims to have a religious foundation. The IS is targeting vulnerable and alienated young people worldwide to join its campaign of unbridled terror that it has unleashed on the people of the region.
On Friday,
Sheik Moegamat Moerat of the Zeenatul Islam Masjid directly addressed the IS threat during prayers at the mosque.
“It is necessary for all to understand what IS is all about, what its aims and objectives are, and how they go about achieving their objectives,” Moerat said.
He told the packed mosque the IS was a structure diametrically opposed to the Islamic faith, because it “had violated all the five pillars of Islam, which is to protect life, protect the mind, protect honour, protect property and to protect religion; so they have violated all five principles in the name of Islam”.
The cleric was searing in his critique of the IS methodology, which he said was the brutal suppression of human rights, mass killing of all people, even fellow Muslims who held divergent views, the destruction of places harking to antiquity, and other acts of terror.
“We have been created with difference, and we can only become tolerant when we understand and accept that difference, because there is no compulsion in religion and we cannot compel someone to be a Muslim,” he said.
He directed congregants to heed the message in the first public sermon of the Prophet Muhammad, which was to “spread peace”.
Meanwhile, information now emerging from the areas in Iraq and Syria controlled by the IS reveals that the number of recruits from the US and Europe are expected to swell to 20 000 by the year end.
This follows an extensive recruitment drive, primarily on social media, targeting young people who could be potential combatants, or brides for IS terrorists.
Professor Farid Esack, a South African Muslim liberation theologian, professor in the study of Islam and dean of religion studies at the University of Johannesburg, said the IS was using “theatrics and dramatics” as part of its propaganda campaign.
The intensity of the IS campaign, and the fact that it has penetrated a quiet suburb of Cape Town, moved the Muslim Judicial Council to state: “
It (the IS) is not an Islamic state, it is a political terrorist group.”
Weekend Argus