From CounterPunch
By Chris Floyd

An important development has been taking place in the real “war” on terror — not the profit-making, fear-and-domination machine of the Bush Administration’s devising, but the genuine struggle to quell the violence of Islamist extremism. Yet despite the potential of this breakthrough, an overwhelming majority of Americans have never heard of it. Certainly it has not been featured — or even mentioned — by the corporate press and government PR engines in the United States. And why not? Because it is a breakthrough toward peace — and peace, as we all know, is not boffo box office.

Last week, the Guardian’s Ian Black reported on “a remarkable recantation” by one of the founding figures of the modern jihadist movement, Sayid Imam al-Sharif. A former comrade-in-arms of Ayman al-Zawahiri — al Qaeda’s own Dick Cheney, the “deputy” who actually runs the gang — Sharif was the mastermind behind the Islamists’ first great “spectacular”: the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now Sharif, imprisoned in Egypt, is finishing a new book “that undermines the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad” and is already creating fissures throughout the Islamist movement, the Guardian reports.

Sharif is now repudiating the very jihadist methods that his group, Islamic Jihad, helped pioneer, instead citing the Quranic precept, “Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress the limits; for God loveth not transgressors.” In a letter from prison indicating his new line, Sharif declared: “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” reports Asharq Alawsat, the London-based Arabic daily. “Armed operations [are] wrong, counterproductive, and must cease.”

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