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General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Toad on October 03, 2001, 11:34:00 PM
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Presented for discussion; neither endorsed nor denounced.
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Relentlessly and Thoroughly”
The only way to respond.
By Paul Johnson, a historian and journalist whose forthcoming book is a history of art.
From the October 15, 2001, issue of National Review
Bold and uncompromising words were spoken by American (and British) leaders in the immediate response to the Manhattan Massacre. But they may be succeeded by creeping appeasement unless public opinion insists that these leaders stick to their initial resolve to destroy international terrorism completely. One central reason why appeasement is so tempting to Western governments is that attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world.
It is widely said that Islamic terrorists are wholly unorthodox in their belief that their religion sanctions what they do, and promises the immediate reward of heaven to what we call "suicide bombers" but they insist are martyrs to the faith. This line is bolstered by the assertion that Islam is essentially a religion of peace and that the very word "Islam" means "peace." Alas, not so. Islam means "submission," a very different matter, and one of the functions of Islam, in its more militant aspect, is to obtain that submission from all, if necessary by force.
Islam is an imperialist religion, more so than Christianity has ever been, and in contrast to Judaism. The Koran, Sura 5, verse 85, describes the inevitable enmity between Moslems and non-Moslems: "Strongest among men in enmity to the Believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans." Sura 9, verse 5, adds: "Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them. And seize them, beleaguer them and lie in wait for them, in every strategem [of war]." Then nations, however mighty, the Koran insists, must be fought "until they embrace Islam."
These canonical commands cannot be explained away or softened by modern theological exegesis, because there is no such science in Islam. Unlike Christianity, which, since the Reformation and Counter Reformation, has continually updated itself and adapted to changed conditions, and unlike Judaism, which has experienced what is called the 18th-century Jewish enlightenment, Islam remains a religion of the Dark Ages. The 7th-century Koran is still taught as the immutable word of God, any teaching of which is literally true. In other words, mainstream Islam is essentially akin to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism. It is true it contains many sects and tendencies, quite apart from the broad division between Sunni Moslems, the majority, who are comparatively moderate and include most of the ruling families of the Gulf, and Shia Moslems, far more extreme, who dominate Iran. But virtually all these tendencies are more militant and uncompromising than the orthodox, which is moderate only by comparison, and by our own standards is extreme. It believes, for instance, in a theocratic state, ruled by religious law, inflicting (as in Saudi Arabia) grotesquely cruel punishments, which were becoming obsolete in Western Europe in the early Middle Ages.
Moreover, Koranic teaching that the faith or "submission" can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, has never been ignored. On the contrary, the history of Islam has essentially been a history of conquest and reconquest. The 7th-century "breakout" of Islam from Arabia was followed by the rapid conquest of North Africa, the invasion and virtual conquest of Spain, and a thrust into France that carried the crescent to the gates of Paris. It took half a millennium of reconquest to expel the Moslems from Western Europe. The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the "occupied territories" of the Holy Land.
The Crusades, as it happened, fatally weakened the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, the main barrier to the spread of Islam into southeast and central Europe. As a result of the fall of Constantinople to the ultramilitant Ottoman Sultans, Islam took over the entire Balkans, and was threatening to capture Vienna and move into the heart of Europe as recently as the 1680s.
This millennial struggle continues in a variety of ways. The recent conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo were a savage reaction by the Orthodox Christians of Serbia to the spread of Islam in their historic heartlands, chiefly by virtue of a higher birthrate. Indeed, in the West, the battle is largely demographic, though it is likely to take a more militant turn at any moment. Moslems from the Balkans and North Africa are surging over established frontiers on a huge scale, rather as the pressure of the eastern tribes brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The number of Moslems penetrating and settling in Europe is now beyond computation because most of them are illegals. They are getting into Spain and Italy in such numbers that, should present trends continue, both these traditionally Catholic countries will become majority Moslem during the 21st century.
The West is not alone in being under threat from Islamic expansion. While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. The writer V. S. Naipaul has recently pointed out that the destructiveness of the Moslem Conquest is at the root of India's appalling poverty today. Indeed, looked at historically, the record shows that Moslem rule has tended both to promote and to perpetuate poverty. Meanwhile, the religion of "submission" continues to advance, as a rule by force, in Africa in part of Nigeria and Sudan, and in Asia, notably in Indonesia, where non-Moslems are given the choice of conversion or death. And in all countries where Islamic law is applied, converts, whether compulsory or not, who revert to their earlier faith, are punished by death.
The survival and expansion of militant Islam in the 20th century came as a surprise. After the First World War, many believed that Turkey, where the Kemal Ataturk regime imposed secularization by force, would set the pattern for the future, and that Islam would at last be reformed and modernized. Though secularism has — so far — survived in Turkey, in the rest of Islam fundamentalism, or orthodoxy, as it is more properly called, has increased its grip on both the rulers and the masses. There are at present 18 predominantly Islamic states, some of them under Koranic law and all ruled by groups that have good reason to fear extremists.
Hence American policymakers, in planning to uproot Islamic terrorism once and for all, have to steer a narrow path. They have the military power to do what they want, but they need a broad-based global coalition to back their action, preferably with military contributions as well as words, and ideally including such states as Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. To get this kind of support is not easy, for moderate Moslem rulers are far more frightened of the terrorists than of Americans, and fear for their lives and families. The danger is that they will insist on qualification of American action that will amount, in effect, to appeasement, and that this in turn will divide and weaken both the administration and U.S. public opinion.
It is vitally important that America stick to the essentials of its military response and carry it through relentlessly and thoroughly. Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency, it is better in the long run for America to act without many allies, or even alone, than to engage in a messy compromise dictated by nervousness and cowardice. That would be the worst of all solutions and would be certain to lead to more terrorism, in more places, and on an ever-increasing scale. Now is the ideal moment for the United States to use all its physical capacity to eliminate large-scale international terrorism. The cause is overwhelmingly just, the nation is united, the hopes of decent, law-abiding men and women everywhere go with American arms. Such a moment may never recur.
The great William Gladstone, in resisting terrorism, once used the phrase, "The resources of civilisation are not yet exhausted." That is true today. Those resources are largely in American hands, and the nation — "the last, best hope of mankind" — has an overwhelming duty to use them with purposeful justification and to the full, in the defense of the lives, property, and freedom of all of us. This is the central point to keep in mind when the weasel words of cowardice and surrender are pronounced.
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It is vitally important that America stick to the essentials of its military response and carry it through relentlessly and thoroughly.
With this point, I wholeheartedly concur.
We've spent the last 50 years building the most powerful swift and sure swords ever seen.. we need to use them, as required to the extent required, where required; without remorse. Up to and including "Unscheduled Sunrise".
The longer we wait, the harder it will be; the more it will cost us, not the least of that cost, lives in ALL parts of the world.
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" Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency"
Aint it the truth. Thank God for our British cousins.
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Been trying to make the point the author is doing about Islam for quite some time here in Dk, but have been labelled a racist almost every time.
I'm not a racist. I'm not even a religion-ist. If anything, I'm a culture-ist.
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Originally pasted by Toad:
"the last, best hope of mankind"
Dont you find this sentence a little bit arrogant?
I mean, this sound like the things a strange little man with small moustaches and a strange cross on the flag was used to say before causing some millions of deaths
Think about it ;)
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The entire thing is rather arrogant.
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Originally posted by StSanta:
Been trying to make the point the author is doing about Islam for quite some time here in Dk, but have been labelled a racist almost every time.
I'm not a racist. I'm not even a religion-ist. If anything, I'm a culture-ist.
Still waring that black leather and pink lace underware? :D
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Something of note: What religion produces the most international terrorists...?
xBAT
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Originally posted by batdog:
Something of note: What religion produces the most international terrorists...?
xBAT
At the moment, in the 20th century, or for all times?
Including politics or just religion?
Sometime I have the feeling (hope I'm wrong) that the Right-side of US culture NEED an enemy to survive. :(
Before was Communism, now (because of a little group of SOBs ) is the whole Islam :eek:
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Naaa... If you've read my posts you'll even see one somewhere about how viewing ALL followers of Islam as extermists to be wrong.
I'm just pointing out that for SOME REASON quite a few radicals with a martyr complex seem to come from that faith lately.
Why is this?
xBAT
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The article makes some interesting points, but there's a veneer of pro-Chirstian bias throughout the entire thing. It quotes Koran verse in a context it implies cannot be applied to the Christian bible. I'm not so sure of that.
Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency...
A statement of outright arrogance that is worth nowt. Britain is a democratic, sovereign State - the US will not get a 'blank cheque' when it comes to policy decisions.
I also disagree with the author's stand-point on the military response. Military action, while making good copy and engrossing TV, is only a single tool against terrorism. In particular, Islamic terrorism as it stands cannot be defeated with military might alone. What's another death or day without food to Bin Laden's supporters? The main target should be banks, fund raisers and the other pseudo-legal businesses used to lend credibility to terrorists.
[ 10-04-2001: Message edited by: Dowding ]
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I just posted it for discussion.
I've been doing more reading on Islam and I found this an interesting counterpoint. Most of the articles I find stress the "peaceful" aspect. Not nearly as many that take this view.
As I said, I'm neither endorsing nor denouncing.
Particularly, as you can see by the thread title, I'd hoped to see the discussion center on the religion itself vice particular statements about the political or military aspects of the campaign against terrorists.
In short... is the non-Islamic world going to be faced with "submission" eventually? Or will Islam modify its harsh view of non-belivers.
For example, I'm still looking and waiting to hear/read of some of the most important Islamic clerics stand up and say out loud for all the world to hear:
"Bin Laden is an abomination. True Muslims will not support him. Islam abhors those that support him or would be like him."
I've heard that from a few minor US Islamic clerics. Nothing from the supervisory clerics at the holiest shrines of Islam, Medina and Mecca....
Still waiting... or is Johnson correct? Has Islam not changed at all since the 7th century?
[ 10-04-2001: Message edited by: Toad ]
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This may be totally off the wall, off topic, and out of place. But it is my strong belief that we will not win against terrorism until
A: Every man woman & child on the planet can go to sleep with a full belly.
B Every man woman and child has shelter and the basic neccessity's of life.
Until everyone has their BASIC needs met, terrorists will find recruits anywhere there are hungry, disatisfied people.
Want to attack terrorism? Attack Poverty!
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Ghosth,
I agree with that.
However, who was it who said "the poor you will always have with you.."?
For how many centuries have some of these countries been at or below the subsistence level?
All "bad luck"? or is not that simple?
Still, the attempt has to be made. I'm just not sure it can be done.
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Too bad that most terrorists are from middle class or wealthy families, eh? Kinda blows that theory to hell doesn't it?
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The Leaders Perhaps, Bader gang in Germany yes.
Show me where Atta & the other WTC terrorists are from wealthy or middle class homes!
Fact remains its a LOT harder to get people to comit suicide when they have a full belly & know they will have tomorrow also!
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Originally posted by Ghosth:
Show me where Atta & the other WTC terrorists are from wealthy or middle class homes!
Well, let's start with Atta then.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101011008-176917,00.html (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101011008-176917,00.html)
Atta's Odyssey
How a shy, well-educated young Egyptian became a suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks. The mystery begins to unfold in Germany
BY JOHN CLOUD
"In Egypt, where Atta grew up, his family and friends describe a shy, unassuming young man who struggled to make his mark. They say he must have undergone a stark personality change to become the terrorist who supervised Sept. 11. Born in Kafr El Sheikh, a city on the Nile delta, Mohamed was the son of a lawyer and a homemaker....Atta seemed overshadowed by his two sisters, who rose to become a zoology professor and a medical doctor. Atta graduated from Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering and was an average student, according to his peers....
Cairo is one of the world's most crowded, impoverished cities, and by the early '90s, Atta felt the intense pressures on middle-class Egyptians not to slip in social rank."
Not exactly the starving goatherd, eh?
...and still.. yes, let's help them, I agree.
But what does it say about folks that still dig their cesspits deeper than their wells?
The idea of not sh*tt*ng in your water hasn't been a "closely held secret" for the last 1000 years.
You can only help people that WANT to be helped. If some folks think the society prescribed by an unchanged 7th century religious text is the "best possible world", perhaps help is impossible.
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Explain the poor countries that do not generate terrorists in light of your theory.
Idealogoy is what generates terrorists, not lack of anything.
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I agree 100% Ghosth.
But ideology and poverty/descrimination breed militant attitudes, which leads to terrorism. Northern Ireland, Algeria, Palestine are all examples.
Gadfly - name one terrorist organisation that operates without recruiting from a poor or badly treated sector of the society it originates from.
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Badly treated is not poor. Hell, I am badly treated every day at work.
You explain to me how an uneducated peasant can travel the world without drawing attention to himself, much less accomplish his mission.
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"In the latest attack, a 17-year-old Islamic Jihad supporter blew himself up Sunday near an Israeli car, killing himself and the Israeli driver"-AP
There is your poor, uneducated "terrorist", I worry about his type as much as I do a mugging from a poor uneducated American thug, i.e. not at all.
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Ever read the Old Testament and what God did to non-believers? The New Testament was only written after God talked to his PR manager.
Broes
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ROTFL Broes
Hey, someone call the FBI, Gadfly is badly treated at work, it's a possible recruit for terrorism! ;)
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I agree 100% Ghosth
Bollocks. Simple as that.
Who led the Russian Revolution in early 1900s? Poor? Hungry? BS - very well educated, well off, bored out of their skull or failing to make the mark in any other way amongst their peers. They agitated, brainwashed, financed and finally led millions of "poor and starving" to replace the "opressors" with them-very-f***ing-selves, screwing a great country "while they were at it" just for the hell of it.
OBL? Is a millionnaire, son of a multi-millionnaire etc. Others? See above. It's the followers who are easily found amongst unemployed/hungry etc - in many cases they've nothing else to do.
You guys remind me of my lecturers in Scientific Communism (yep, that was the name of a compulsory university course and one had to pass it too :)) 20 years ago who failed to convince me the it was "the poor and hungry" who started the whole thing in Russia - they used the same arguments too... Hmmmm? ;)
[ 10-09-2001: Message edited by: -lynx- ]
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I think the point the author made is that at least there is a "revised" New Testament.
The Koran has never been "revised", "updated", "softened" or anything else.
In short, Islam still operates under an "old testament".
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it's true Toad, good point.
Wait, the hebrews (jews? what is the PC name to use? we use "Ebrei") operate under an unchanged Old Testament too?
Israel have the death penalty?
Someone know about this? I'm courious.
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Naso, only going on what is in this article.
"Unlike Christianity, which, since the Reformation and Counter Reformation, has continually updated itself and adapted to changed conditions, and unlike Judaism, which has experienced what is called the 18th-century Jewish enlightenment, Islam remains a religion of the Dark Ages. The 7th-century Koran is still taught as the immutable word of God, any teaching of which is literally true.
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This guy may have described it much more closely to the way I feel.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/281/oped/The_deep_roots_of_terrorism+.shtml (http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/281/oped/The_deep_roots_of_terrorism+.shtml)
"The deep roots of terrorism
By H.D.S. Greenway, 10/8/2001
ORE THAN 30 years ago, when the shah of Iran was trying to modernize and Westernize his county by his ''white revolution,'' dissidents would whisper that their shah, through measures such as land reform and education for women, was undermining traditional society and affronting Islam. A few years later, among the Afghan refugees on the northwest frontier of Pakistan, armed men ready to die for their cause would tell you what it was they hated most about the communist government in Kabul. ''The communists came to our village,'' one holy warrior told me. ''They said we had to put our girls in school and that they no longer had to cover their heads!''
Today both the shah's hopes for a modern, Western-oriented Iran and the communist hopes for a modern, socialist Afghanistan lie in the dustbin of history. If there is a common thread to link their failures, it is that they were both wrecked upon the rocks of resistance to change. Things that both communists and capitalists could agree upon - and education for women is only one example - were seen as a threat not only to Islam but to traditional ways of life. Indeed, in many Islamic countries there is no separation of mosque and state. And so today, both countries, although bitter enemies, are theocracies that have turned their backs on the modernization (read Westernization) of the world.
Rapid change and the feelings of being powerless and left behind in an evolving world have driven hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, to seek solace in religion, and some to violence in the name of religion. It helps explain what motivated 19 young men to destroy themselves and so many Americans on Sept. 11.
Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University wrote years ago that since the 1920s, ''Muslim cults ... have looked at the defiled world around them - wild cities, shocking cultural trends, foreigners with alien ways, subjugation to the outsiders, a world that seems to be perpetually in crisis, young men and women who have strayed from time-honored ways - and have felt at one time or another the urge to destroy or the urge to withdraw and escape.'' Since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of globalization, America has emerged as the symbol of everything that has gone wrong for them.
Many Muslims go back to their religious roots because their societies have not given them any answers. Western secularism, Marxism, nationalism have all, in their view, let them down. They look at their own rulers as corrupt, hypocritical sellers of their country to Western (read American) interests. The vast majority are nonviolent and lead constructive lives. Only a very few turn to terror.
Fundamentalism is not restricted to Muslim countries. Hindu fundamentalism is a rising force in India, nibbling away at the secular India of Jawaharlal Nehru, and violence in the name of their gods threatens the stability of more than one Indian state. Israel, too, has seen a rise of Jewish fundamentalism in recent years, disapproving of the mostly secular state that the founding generation of Zionists created. Most relgious Jews are peaceful, but a few fanatics have shown their willingness to resort to violence in God's name. There can be little doubt that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered because he promised, or threatened, depending on your point of view, change.
Some 15 years ago, a Kuwaiti political scientist, Khaldoun al Nagueb, said to me: ''I wonder if, in its nonviolent form, what we are experiencing in the Arab world is not a bit similar to what Jerry Falwell preaches and the rise of militant Protestantism in your own country.'' And today we have Falwell saying that secular sin opened the United States to terrorism.
Even in our own country, the fearful, confused, left-behinds in our society turn to militia movements in their fear of a changing world in which they see themselves as losers. They may not be religious, but they see conspiracies everywhere, and if the secular terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, and the religiously motivated suicide pilots of September have anything in common, it was their need to destroy symbols of American power and authority.
An Egyptian scholar, Saad Ibrihim, once said that the profile of a typical Islamic fundamentalist would be ''young, at least partially educated, a high achiever, lower middle class, from a small rural town, rural background but now lost in a big city. They may graduate from universities but they are often shocked and dazzled by city life. They are not rewarded. They do not get what they perceive to be their fair share. They are repelled by corruption and lasciviousness.''
And who is responsible for their misfortune? Those in power in their individual countries, often. But who has corrupted their leaders? What is the font of everything they half envy and half fear? The United States of America, or so they believe.
As much as we may object to keeping girls out of school, neither this nor being forced to wear beards, nor banning television, for which President Bush scolded the Taliban, is a casus belli. Harboring terrorists is. And now that bombs are falling, we should make it clear that our target is terrorism, not customs and values we do not share. Rapid change can be destabilizing. We should not make the same mistake as the shah and the communists in trying, in Rudyard Kipling's words, to ''hustle the East.''
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 10/8/2001."
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http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/10/15/attack.nigeria.reut/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/10/15/attack.nigeria.reut/index.html)
Troops shoot rioters in Nigeria
"Nigeria is grappling with a rising wave of ethnic or religious bloodshed in which well over 2,000 people have died since army rule ended in Africa's most populous nation in 1999.
The introduction of strict Islamic sharia law in parts of predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria, despite opposition from non-Muslims, triggered violence early last year.
But the sharia crisis appears to have only compounded historical ethnic and regional rivalries blamed for a devastating civil war in the late 1960s in which more than a million people died.
Hundreds of people died in Muslim-Christian fighting in the central city of Jos last month and police are battling ethnic unrest in three other northern states."
I wonder if this is the future.