Question: You are critical of exiled leaders who are calling for jihad while living in relative safety abroad, but if they had remained in Egypt, they would have been arrested, and they could not do anything from prison. Isn’t it better that they are at least trying to encourage the revolutionaries although they are far away?
Answer: First of all, I am not critical of anyone who offers practical strategies, plans, and informed analysis. I am critical of demagogues who incite people to do what they themselves do not do, and in fact, what they fled from doing.
I am critical of those who offer nothing but empty slogans, promote indiscriminate violence, and just try to appeal to peoples’ emotions for the sake of Facebook likes.
These leaders fled to Turkey and Qatar and elsewhere on the premise that, as you say, they could be more useful to the revolution outside, than if they were arrested. Yet, not only are many of them not useful, they are in fact detrimental.
They are out of touch with the situation in the streets, and are either insisting to pursue failed strategies, or else they are calling for civil war, and they cannot articulate how either of these two paths will lead to success.
I am critical of the blatant hypocrisy of people who pretend to believe in jihad, but are themselves out of shape, overweight, accustomed to a soft and privileged lifestyle, and have probably never in their lives done so much as slap the cheek of a kafir.
It is also very important to refute the idea that someone cannot do anything useful for the revolution from prison. Of course you can. It is just another battlefield.
What on earth do you expect to happen when you are confronting power? Of course you will be persecuted and chased. You have to be ready for the consequences of your rebellion, if you are intelligent, and if you are sincere.
Do we see the members of Da’esh fleeing to continue their struggle abroad via Facebook posts, for example?
Genuine revolution does not only exist on the streets; it exists wherever the oppressive institutions of illegitimate authority exist, it exists in prison as much as on the street. Indeed, it is perhaps even more crucial for it to exist in prison.