The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hanna Tetteh has been described as someone who is ignorant on Islamic ideologies.
This according to a a lecturer at the Department of Religion and Human Values of the University of Cape Coast, Mustapha Abdul Hamid is because of the minister’s comment on the recent former Guantanamo detainees brouhaha.
Following government’s decision to host two former Guantanamo Bay detainees in Ghana, Hanna Tetteh explained that they had received assurances from the United States government that the two are harmless and pose no security threat to Ghana.
However, in an interview on the Citi Breakfast Show on Monday, Mustapha Hamid challenged the minister and the US government to provide evidence of how they arrived at such a conclusion.
“She is either genuinely ignorant or she is being mischievous or she is just pandering to the whims of the Americans. Which disorientation school did they send them to? Because if you say they are no longer dangerous what it means is that they have been weaned off this fundamentalist ideology.”
“…did they have a process where there had Islamic scholars and leaders were giving them better orientation on what the true Islamic ideology is? We don’t have such evidence,” he charged.
He also insisted that Ghanaians are justified in worrying about the presence of the two in the country saying Ghana risked being attacked for hosting them.
[contextly_sidebar id=”PA57jxKqIYclqlWyffqAme0GFwCTcNgi”]According to the lecturer, Jihadists are of the assertion that a friend of your enemy is also your enemy, hence, though Ghana, may have received them out of generosity, in the mind of the jihadist, Ghana becomes a legitimate target for attacks.
Mustapha Abdul-Hamid said contrary to what the government wants the public to believe, the radical ideologies which led to the incarceration of these two former detainees may have been accentuated in the time they spent at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre.
“They may not have anything against Ghana as a nation, but they certainly do have something against America, especially so because America has confessed that it has no evidence for which it incarcerated them for 14 years. Source of Jihadist ideology is that the friend of your enemy is your enemy. That one is a non-negotiable aspect of the ideology that cuts across Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabaab and Boko Haram. So we have shown by this act, which we believe to be an act of generosity and compassion but in their mind it is an act of complicity in the sense that we have shown ourselves to be an ally to America,” he explained.
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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana