Wednesday, January 18, 2017

The assassination attempt on the life of a young Yemeni free thinker

Regarding this story by Brian Whiaker.  I would be very careful.  There are Yemenis on social media expressing doubts.  The fellow, Muhammad `Ali `Atbush, who authored a book challenging the Islamist and even mainstream notion of "Qur'anic miracle" of science, seems to be engaged in a degree of self-promotion.  I don't know whether he really survived an assassination attempt but the story seems fishy: that a team of hit men came to his neighborhood to kill him but that they missed him from a distance of...2 meters. How credible is that? The author on his Facebook page also seem to relish posting what critics says about him.  And how come there were no witnesses there? And killing with silencers is not very common there.  I won't judge either way on the matter but I would be skeptical especially that the book was really not as known as Whitaker seems to think.