Jihad is Theft and Tax Evasion

Sheikh Anwar also commands Muslims to engage in tax evasion, which leads me to my concluding thoughts:

One may see this as an alarming development if one wishes to do so, and there might be some previously law-abiding jihadis who will take this advice to heart and take up thievery and tax evasion. Ordinary criminal activity may even be a better form of training for terrorists than what they can get in remote camps or conflict zones. At the end of the day, however, criminal activity undermines the security of the terrorist enterprise by exposing the mujahideen to a set of threats that they might be better off avoiding and playing to the strengths of law enforcement.

With the above comments in mind, here is Sheikh Anwar's ruling, presented as a free-standing PDF despite Samir Khan's best efforts to prevent that from happening:

Awlaki_Ruling_on_Thieving.pdf [9 MB][click to view or right+click to download and save]

The enduring fascination of terrorists with bank robbery is something that could stand to be better understood. There is no shortage of examples, but what is missing is some treatment of the subject that gets beyond simple history and explores the underlying behavior that spans decades and ideologies. And speaking of Samir Khan - the presumptive editor of Inspire Magazine - readers may wish to familiarize themselves with the story of Mustafa Naushad.

Atlas Shrugs