Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Sandman on September 08, 2004, 12:59:02 PM
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It's an old article, but it makes for interesting reading.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_1_why_the_muslims.html
Enjoy.
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Good grief an article I can 100% agree with. This in particular has been my view for some time.
But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is easier for millions of Muslims than admitting the truth. Billions of barrels of oil, large populations, the Suez Canal, the fertility of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates valleys, invaluable geopolitical locations, and a host of other natural advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past now yield an excess of misery, rather than the riches of resource-poor Hong Kong or Switzerland. How could it be otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a building permit in Cairo; when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad; and when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic studies than in medicine or engineering?
and this
We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more ores, or better weather, but because of our culture. When it comes to war, 1 billion people and the world’s oil are not nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the U.S. House of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O’Riley, and the G.I. Bill. Between Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and Saddam on his balcony reviewing his troops, between the Greeks arguing and debating before they rowed out with Themistocles and the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of the Gulf War, lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest of the world copies its weapons, uniforms, and military organization from us, not vice versa.
Al Qaeda attacks America and the west not so much for what we did but for what we are. The above is why they have no hope of winning either.
The very arguments that exercise the contributors on this board whether European or American is where our strength lies. To the Arabs it looks like weakness.
Excellent article. A keeper I think.
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Very interesting.
Charon
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Wow if only the world of Islam would read and comprehend that artical.
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It is so sad to think that a faith that declares itself to be the religion of peace has such a hard time distancing itself from the acts of those who claim they are acting in it's service. I do not claim that islam is a religion of terror. The terrorists acting under the color of that faith do that on their own.
Until islam and the alleged majority of its adherants declare themselves in opposition, serious opposition, to the acts of terrorists it IMO cannot be taken seriously as anything but a supporter of this activity.
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Good read.
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Originally posted by Maverick Until islam and the alleged majority of its adherants declare themselves in opposition, serious opposition, to the acts of terrorists it IMO cannot be taken seriously as anything but a supporter of this activity.
The 'silence' from the more moderate muslims (you know, the ones who are not murderers) has been deafening. I have been asking for 10 years to hear some opposition to these miscreants who murder in the name of their god.
First off, I hate the term 'arab street', I just hear it used so often that I cannot come up with a more appropriate one. Plus, I'm not ready to take the word of this newspaper or its writer's word for this just yet, but this article indicates the more moderate muslims are fed up with the heinous acts being carried out in the name of their god. It is about 40 years too late IMHO but I'm still glad to hear it.
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School Siege in Russia Sparks Self-Criticism in Arab World By JOHN KIFNER
BEIRUT, Sept 8 - The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has sparked an unusual round of self-criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world.
"It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims," Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the widely watched Al-Arabiya satellite television station wrote in one of the most striking of these commentaries.
Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Mr.
Rashed said it was "shameful and degrading" that not only were the Beslan hijackers Muslims, but also the murderers of Nepalese workers in Iraq, the attackers of residential towers in Riyadh and Khobar, Saudi Arabia, the women believed to have blown up two Russian airplanes last week and Osama bin Laden himself.
"The majority of those who manned the suicide bombings against buses, vehicles, schools, houses and buildings, all over the world, were Muslim," he wrote. "What a pathetic record. What an abominable `achievement.' Does this tell us anything about ourselves, our societies and our culture?"
Mr. Rashed, like several other commentators, singled out Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a senior Egyptian cleric living in Qatar who broadcasts an influential program on Al Jazeera television and who has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for the killing of American and foreign "occupiers"
in Iraq, military and civilian.
"Let us contemplate the incident of this religious Sheikh allowing, nay even calling for, the murder of civilians," he wrote. "How can we believe him when he tells us that Islam is the religion of mercy and peace while he is turning it into a religion of blood and slaughter?"
Mr. Rashed recalled that in the past, leftists and nationalists in the Arab world were considered a "menace"
for their adoption of violence, and the mosque was a "haven"
of "peace and reconciliation" by contrast.
"Then came the Neo-Muslims," he said. "An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry."
A columnist for the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyassa, Faisal al-Qina'I, also took aim at Sheikh Qaradawi. "It is saddening," he wrote, "to read and hear from those who are supposed to be Muslim clerics, like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and others of his kind, that instead of defending true Islam they encourage these cruel actions and permit decapitation, hostage-taking and murder."
In Jordan, a group of Muslim religious figures, meeting with the religious affairs minister, Ahmed Heleil, issued a statement today saying the seizing of the school and subsequent massacre was dedicated to distorting the pure image of Islam.
"This terrorist act contradicts the principles of our true Muslim religion and its noble values," the statement said.
Writing in the Jordanian daily Al-Dustour, a columnist, Bater Wardam, noted a propensity in the Arab world to "place responsibility for the crimes of Arabic and Muslim terrorist organizations on the Mossad, the Zionists and the American intelligence, but we all know that this is not the case."
"They came from our midst," he wrote of those who had kidnapped and murdered civilians in Iraq, blown up commuter trains in Spain, turned airliners into bombs and shot the children in Ossetia.
"They are Arabs and Muslims who pray, fast, grow beards, demand the wearing of veils and call for the defense of Islamic causes. Therefore we must all raise our voices, disown them and oppose all these crimes."
In Beirut, Rami G. Khouri wrote in the Daily Star that while most Arabs "identified strongly and willingly" with armed Palestinian or Lebanese guerrillas fighting Israeli occupation, "all of us today are dehumanized and brutalized by the images of Arabs kidnapping and beheading foreign hostages."
Calling for a global strategy to reduce terror, he traced what he called "this ugly trek" in the Arab world to "the home-grown sense of indignity, humiliation, denial and degradation that has increasingly plagued many of our young men and women."
A Palestinian columnist, Hassan al-Batal, wrote in the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Ayyam that the "day of horror in the school" should be designated an international day for the condemnation of terrorism. "There are no mitigating circumstances for the inhuman horror and the height of barbarism" at the school, he wrote.
In Egypt, the semi-official newspaper Al-Ahram called the events "an ugly crime against humanity."
In Saudi Arabia, newspapers tightly controlled by the government - which finds itself under attack from Islamic fundamentalists - were even more scathing.
Under the headline "Butchers in the Name of Allah," a columnist in the government daily Okaz, Khaled Hamed al-Suleiman, wrote that "the propagandists of Jihad succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam.
"They turned today's Islam into something having to do with decapitations, the slashing of throats, abducting innocent civilians and exploding people. They have fixed the image of Muslims in the eyes of the world as barbarians and savages who are not good for anything except slaughtering people,"
he wrote, adding:
"The time has come for Muslims to be the first to come out against those interested in abducting Islam in the same way they abducted innocent children. This is the true Jihad these days and this is our obligation, as believing Muslims, towards our monotheistic religion."
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"The time has come for Muslims to be the first to come out against those interested in abducting Islam in the same way they abducted innocent children. This is the true Jihad these days and this is our obligation, as believing Muslims, towards our monotheistic religion."
Good read but I sure do not see this happening. I certainly will not hold my breath waiting for it either.
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They truly are "Their worst Enemy".....