We can defeat the IS and the Mautes
to see the President. This I did. In Davao I thanked the President for allowing me to join OPAPP, and he said, that’s good. I got my ulama friends, some intellectuals, and youth leaders involved in promoting the President’s federalization idea, and I got OPAPP to support the transfer of DXSR Radio Salam to a better location so we could upgrade its operations. For this purpose, Vice Mayor Arafat Salic lent an old house which he had not been using for years, and I had it refurbished through OPAPP, and we revived our regular Sunday “(Let’s think about it) program to promote peace and Muslim solidarity, Islam as a balanced and middle way of life, and federalism. Unfortunately, the siege prevented the technicians from reporting to the station.
Drug raids
On June 23, some uniformed elements forcibly entered the radio station, planted they had seized it in the vice mayor’s house. Two days before the raid on the radio station, they had produced 2 kgs of drugs and claimed they got it from my old house in Bangon, which I had not used for seven years. For the past two or three years, the house was being used as a madrasah school by a Turkish group. The raiding party took a plaque of appreciation that had been given to me from the house, and dumped it with the drugs to suggest that the drugs also belonged to me. Who can contradict them now that Marawi is deserted, and they are in effective control of all the empty homes inside the ghost city?
The Maute/IS problem is huge enough; we cannot afford to add more to it. But local partisan politics tends to make the problem larger still. This shouldn’t be. Since the time of Osama bin Laden, we have been closely monitoring the depredations of terror in the Muslim world and have developed some clear insights, based on authentic sources in the Koran and the Sunnah, into the real nature of Islamist extremism. It is antiMuslim, anti-Shia, anti-ulama, anti-peace, anti-co-existence, anti-Muslim leaders. The extremists are evidently connected to the enemies of Muslims and the enemies of the Arab people. Their main weapon is terror, which is now an international plague. The strongest nations, the US and Russia, are confronting the terrorists in Mosul and Raqqa with their latest conventional bombs
We have to unite against this menace. This is the only way we can defeat the Mautes and the IS. I have some ideas, some friends and some followers and I would very much like to do everything I can to help. The unfair and unjust treatment that my brother, the other members of my family and I have received from some of our politicians is rather unfortunate, but I do not take it against the President, and it has not diminished one bit my desire to be of service to this government. This sentiment is not mine alone; it is shared by so many others who have no higher wish and prayer than our country’s success. All we need is a chance to prove ourselves.