Reply #55: to the best of my knowledge that is true

[Aidoneus]

I am more familiar with their European & Central Asian activities than in the Arab lands, but the official tendencies of the movement are familiar enough for me to guess. The agenda they promote is very ambitious, and they are indeed a "radical" movement, but they prefer pamphlets to explosives and political analysis & discussions to Kalashnikovs.

This is so even when under the force and oppressive state violence of particulary that of the Uzbekh dictator Karimov, who has held thousands of HUT members in his prisons. There are recent "fears" among analysts of the area that their approach may be altered in the face of this state suppression and that they would be more like the IMU (Karimov's other, and more militant, opposition in the pan-Fergana area), but all the same it has yet to do so and I assume this is the case in the several dozen other locations in the world that the organization exists in.

Their appeal is, to some degree, across the board in situations where they are locally placed in opposition to a repressive state (as any decent opposition worth its salt could muster up), but particularly so among the educated and professional layers of society in less extraordinary situations. Their approach loses some of its appeal to those with a less long-term approach, and more actively militant movements pick up more support on such grounds.

I don't doubt that the act described above would have been by a member of the organization, as the Egyptian state has made great sport of imprisoning and torturing HUT members for many years and there exists a great deal of irreconciliable differences.