"Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West."

-- j blount (jamesbloun...)

xpost

Which leads us onto: Is it right to fear radical Islam, or should we adopt a bolder, more dominant attitude to this plague? It's not as if we're THAT scared (in fact, we're generally derisive and scornful) of radical right-wing Christianity, despite certain moral similarities to its eastern counterpart!

STFU ABOUT THAT MOTHERFUCKER MORAINE BTW

If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike for example - Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don't possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 - may Allah have mercy on them.

No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.

No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.

But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.

So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.

I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.

I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.

The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.

In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

And that day, it was confirmed to me that oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.

This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known, and it means the throwing of millions of pounds of bombs and explosives at millions of children - also in Iraq - as Bush Jr did, in order to remove an old agent and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the pilfering of Iraq's oil and other outrages.

So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs, should a man be blamed for defending his sanctuary?

Is defending oneself and punishing the aggressor in kind, objectionable terrorism? If it is such, then it is unavoidable for us.

This is the message which I sought to communicate to you in word and deed, repeatedly, for years before September 11th.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm

why the fuck am i arguing with you?

(some dickwad would have gone 'Hydrogen, helium, berrylium...' if i hadn't CHECKED THEM with this)

uh wow, just wow. have you never heard of fln or shining path or the contras or the anti-castro nutcases or any number of latin american terrorist groups?

-- j blount (jamesbloun...)

xpost

UH

look, i'm going. i've had enough of this personal bullshine.

-- hstencil (hstenc!...), September 18th, 2006.

none (haha okay maybe one) of these has acted on non-latin-american soil though.

Yeah, it's just stupid, that bit.[The part about Israel having the moral high ground]

To say you can kill 1000s of innocent civilians, in the full knowledge that you will do so with the tactics that you are using, then hide behind the figleaf that you did not 'intentionally' target them is an intellectual absurdity and moral cowardice. Ha, then he blames the victims for their own deaths! So the Lebanese are responsible for the "collateral damage" that the West and Israel caused. If it wasn't so grim it would be hilarious.

I'm fed up with these people.

Also, who gives a monkey's who has the moral high ground in the conflict between Israel and Hamaz & Hizbullah. Surely the question is how can we stop it? Or how can they stop it? Or how can the US stop it? And perhaps what might be a just outcome in terms of land/powers/return of refugees etc.

As to the first bit, I think these people actually want some sort of global conflict. They find it all very exciting.

He criticises conspiracy theorists and then falls into the same trap (as you did re: West Ham) as they do, finding connections that aren't there (it's called apophenia), seeing only a totalized reality rather than the disparate events and situations, the conicidental and random and contradictory stuff that actually makes up the world.

I find it depressing.

"a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists" - no sh!t, sherlock!

"The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants." Er, yeah. That's France, where all religious symbols are explicitly banned in schoold, which has explicitly practised assimilation, not integration.

The guy is, as usual, an ill-educated moron, mouthing off on subjects he knows little or nothing about and managing to get paid for it. Tw@t.

do we? really?

we've done it for years, by proxy. the support of puppet regimes around the world (esp in the middle east).

and i'm beginning to side more with my second interpretation of the article (the first being a hastily-written and thought 'Hurray'), in that it seems unnecessarily pessimistic and afraid.

otm x 10

Besides, I don't even think the mindset of suicide bombers is the thing to combat: the real unique element IMO is the men who find the kids with the right mixture of idealism and depression, nurture them, and send them off. For every bomber you have to imagine a whole lot of older men, managers, confidants, involved in it who will never strap on a vest themselves.

So, yeah, only the conservatives(or at least, those currently holding american office) can save us from the bad brown men, evidently by ignoring/defunding/de-emphasizing any nuclear proliferation, which is kinda odd, seeing as he then goes on about this:

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

so, we should bomb the fuck out of people before they get their hands on the bad shit? hey, remember them debates two years ago? remember how that one liberal guy said without hesistation that nukes were the greatest threat to stability? remember how all them liberals have been spending the last few years continually trying to get funding for these programs from the "hard-headed" "religious lunatics of the West" currently in power?

and this bit:

Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

is straight TNR/NRO bullshit.

So, this guy's saying that we're surrounded by threats and shit, so we should just kill the lot of them? An F16's real good at taking out terr'ist cells in Hamburg and London, now, isn't it? The neocons are right and the only acceptable strength is thru military show of force.

oops, this should have been in the form of a question

And you know, there are quite a lot of muslims who are more interested in their breakfast, or what's on TV, or the premiership than anything like this.

That's a lousy definition of radical islam, as well. Lots and lots of different currents withing islam that could be described as radical that have nothing to do with violence. (Including, say, Islamic feminists like Amadiume (sp?). Lots of lots of currents within fundamentalist islam that have nothing to do with violence, too.

I think Islam is such a BIG religion, and is so varied culturally, doctrinally and every other which way that there is almost no meaningful sentence that would start with the words " Muslims are ..." and would be true. Until people get that into their thick heads and stop these ludicrous over-blown generalisations, I don't think we're getting anywhere.

as much as i think all religion is irrational horseshit, suicide bombing & asymmetrical warfare isnt caused by & doesnt require belief in 72 virgins & all that other shit white ppl love to mock

BUT this thread has seen me work my way through a series of contrasting thought-processes, spilling my demons unchecked, and coming to an uncomfortable conclusion. I now see that the article, although seductively-written, contains more than a little underinformed hysteria, and that my 'radical Islam' has a counterpart (I knew this already, as I said upthread when advocating that we show less terror for radical Islam, especially considering our attitude towards radical Christianity).

PLZ NOW stop going on about Ian Reese-Moraine. I've not articulated myself here as well as I could have, but I'm admitting here that I haven't thought about this as much as I should have done.

And FUCK definition, what matters is the actual content.

-- Ian Riese-Moraine eats nation-states for breakfast! (eastern_mantr...), June 25th, 2005.

Moves for "sharia zones" outside a nation's legal system, Ayan Hirsi Ali, the "racaille"... he's right to mention Europe.

I don't read this piece as (that much of) a neocon endorsement at all, let alone an endorsement of Iraq (no idea what Sam Harris thinks of Iraq, probably "oh it's real bad and we've got to do it right amirite"). The problem with the neocons is that they WERE rousseuian multiculturalists! They thought if you knocked off a bad government a good one would just pop up, regardless of history, culture, mistakes, etc...

ding ding ding!

xpost

did I EVER say 'Muslims are' except in the context of 'SOME Muslims are...'? You are twisting my words.

That wasn't aimed at you. It was aimed at the general discourse around the threat of (militant) islam.

So instead of focusing on law enforcement and intelligence, you fling increasingly exhausted divisions around the globe to make things worse and not catch the guy they were sent after. And everything is seen thru the war metaphor, which grants a shitload of power to whomever's holding the reigns at that point, pun intended.

but this version of it does! And I think it's a crock that thinking so immediately means signing up with administration policy, which is what Harris is getting at (I hope). Look, ppl seem to be reading Harris as saying "it's ok for liberals to be as ignorant and belligerent as the right." I think he's saying (or I'd like him to be saying, I guess) "this kind of terrorism will have to be fought, and it's better liberals do it than conservatives."

I do not condone the warlike actions of the West.

ALL I AM SAYING is that a more grown-up, dismissive policy from the Western people, not just the governments, towards 'terror', would be the surest way to ruin its effect. Stiff upper lip and all that. It's what we did after 7/7!

That truth about the article Geoff is stating is surely an obvious one. Clinton's anti-terror policies are just what Harris is calling for, and they, irrefutably, WORKED.

clearly has so little grasp of the complex multiple problems and various different geopolitical contexts for religiously linked violence

no idea how good his books are, but this is an op-ed.

Now that made me REALLY cross. I'll dig out a link.

(Poss already discussed on ile, in which case I'll shut up)

I will say this before leaving, though: things have changed since Clinton. More than ever, we need serious intellectual thought applied to our governments' dealings with the Middle East, thought which you guys seem to be supplying but which the men in charge seem wilfully incapable of.

That truth about the article Geoff is stating is surely an obvious one. Clinton's anti-terror policies are just what Harris is calling for, and they, irrefutably, WORKED

Erm, like which ones?

The more I think about it the more idiotic that article seems. I feel quite ashamed by my original response, and relieved by my subsequent doubt.

Ethan OTM, I'm too young (and British) to understand the full implications of this, going on hearsay and gut instinct alone. Honestly and truly, I'll shut up now. No hard feelings?

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/1998/394/foc2.htm

I posted it last week. No idea which thread it was on, though. I think it involved Ned Raggett, but that doesn't really narrow it down.

xpost jhoshea so right - hitchens too

As far as I can tell, this is the smartest thing written on this thread. Western Europe pays lip service, but the sheer amount of discrimination, profiling, (what some would call) 'forced' poverty, and state-led assaults on Muslims in Western Europe far outnumber similar actions in the US. The difference is that Western European militaries aren't strong or populated enough to 'go to war' in the Middle East-- if they could, I'm pretty certain that a good number of these countried would.

xpost

also carter after the soviets invaded afghanistan

hil on the other hand can go fuck a brick.

xpost

xpost

what, like an economic system which preserves the status quo, and when millions of people in resource rich countries live in poverty, ruled by puppet govts supported by the west?

and then, you are a muslim in a westernized country, seeing that all the wealth that is around you, and that you benefit from yourself, is supported by this very system, and that the people around don't recognise their complicity in violence perpetrated thousands of miles away by proxy (and thats without even thinking of iraq), and then they have the nerve to tell you that you are the violent one

However, getting the bombers from WTC '93 and Ok.City '95 worked.

xpost what about appointing cohen secretary of defense???? big wtf moment, and alot more responsible for bombing the shit out of everybody in 97-99 than any lewinsky diversion

ethan, kingfish, etc. otm.

funny feminist musing of the day: it seems terribly funny and odd to me that to neocons, the only definition of strength is ultra-phallic MANLY throwing bombs and what not.

p.s. this reactionary doomsday bullshit is probably a result of neocons coming to the TERRIBLE realization that, no, western/american civilization did NOT triumph at the end of the Cold War oh nooooooes.

Hey, Americans, while you're here can you talk about what the response to/from the Nation of Islam over the last five years has been?

It's something I've never seen mentioned in this whole contemporary worry about Islam, but it's something that I would be fascinated to hear about.

I know NOTHING about 'em, by the way.

funniest shit ever was when these panthers gave me a free copy of their paper & we spent like 45 minutes discussing politics, laughing & shit - so i take the thing home to read it & its full of insane 'the white man cannot be negotiated with, ever' bullshit!

and then, you are a muslim in a westernized country, seeing that all the wealth that is around you, and that you benefit from yourself, is supported by this very system, and that the people around don't recognise their complicity in violence perpetrated thousands of miles away by proxy (and thats without even thinking of iraq), and then they have the nerve to tell you that you are the violent one

The logical leap from what I wrote to what you wrote is one I cannot actually comprehend. Dude, I'm not saying that we should keep the status quo, I'm not saying we should 'dismiss the Middle East', I'm saying that we shouldn't get worked up into a panic by the threat of a so far limited terror campaign. We should work to nullify what threat there is, but this should be done covertly, unassumingly, and sensibly. Then we can turn to the greater socio-political problems which you list.

And Jessie, I've actually only responded to those who have either quoted my posts or referred to me directly. I'll admit that I've skittered about in search of an opinion, but you'll find that I've been reasonably consistent more or less since my second post.

You have some sort of inexplicable personal bias against me anyway.

I know NOTHING about 'em, by the way.

the nation of islam has about as much to do with islam as baseball has to do with underwater basket-weaving.

maybe neocons dont fuck w/ em cuz theyre the only other grown men who still try & rock bowties

-- and what (an...)

aside from their boy tucker carlson...

Just vanished off the radar.

'we must nullify the problem-- then & only then we can begin to think about the source of the problem!'

xpost that was the joke dude

If you compare the civilian casualties of this conflict to those of any the last few 3 year wars we've been involved in, it becomes clear that we've been handling the Iraqis with kid gloves.

Which doesn't make the war any less foolish. But, just like in Vietnam, shallow-thinking leftwingers are willing to go to any jingoistic length to make a point, like demonstrating for the likes of HEZBOLLAH, vicious and amoral as they are.

>Western Europe pays lip service, but the sheer amount
>of discrimination, profiling, (what some would call)
>'forced' poverty, and state-led assaults on Muslims in
>Western Europe

Europe awash in tribal, reactionary thinking shocker.

For me, of course I don't support the war in Iraq, but I'm not sure I'm on the same page as liberals, yet. I agree with their dissection of the war, but I hear an undercurrent of pacifism under it all, which is an admirable recipe for disaster.

For example, when McCain said "the only thing worse than military action is Iran with nukes," leftwing academics went nutso. Does anyone really think that if Iran gets nukes it won't change much of anything? That they'll just join the "deterred club" and it'll be business as usual? That's nutter.

it's cause they're not really muslims so much.

no one really pays attention to them except for maybe a few jews. every once in a while farkkan says something outrageous and the news is all omg.

basically a crazy, marginal organization made up of poor people who's suffering most americans are happy to ignore - pretty dire all around. haven't even seen them selling newspapers in a long time.

nice bow ties though.

Really? They see themselves as Islamic, though, don't they?

If I'm understanding this comment properly, it's in part due to the greater proportion of middle-class Muslim immigrants to the US. I know that, in comparison to England, Muslims in the US are better-educated and have more money, so they've assimilated better. I don't know that their beliefs, when they happen to be religious, are substantively different than their English or European counterparts, but they've got a foothold in society which definitely makes them less likely to radicalize.

But they're the ones being simple and naive, because they're ignoring pretty much everything we know about human beings and culture, in our own culture or anywhere else -- specifically, the fact that people are not robotic slaves to their ideologies. People are not that principled! The ideologies people sign onto are incoherent and opportunistic, and their inclination and willingness to get violent over them are even shakier. I mean, this is just another way of putting Ethan's lots-of-factors argument -- people see changes in their material circumstances, their opportunities, their leadership, their perceived enemies, or just plain intellectual fashions, and things change.

What's shocking to me is that people are so quick to take the threats of militants as some sort of unchanging gospel, despite so much of our American experience of public opinion being a good demonstration of exactly how malleable it can be. So what's troubling is that people who view these threats as intractable seem to me to not really view the people of the Middle East as people at all, not human beings whose ideologies express different things at different times -- they view them as ghouls or orcs or rabid dogs, basically, and trot out whatever they can to try and demonstrate that these ghouls are inherently bent on our destruction, by nature. (I think I said this before on ILX and got Momus nagging me for an eternity for it, but: one advantage the Bush worldview has on these people is that he at least believes in the possibility of the Arab world transforming into a peaceful, stable place. Nevermind methods and mistakes; he at least seems sincere in imagining that it's possible.)

They can be. Not when it comes to positive change, but when it comes to hating a common enemy/scapegoat, sure, people can be diehard, because they can collectively convince themselves that if they hurt the BAD GUYS sufficiently, their lot will improve. America is becoming a scapegoat for every self-caused ill in the middle eased. While at the same time, "islamofascists" are becoming the bogey men of OUR society. It's a dangerus path.

xpost: poor muslims move to europe, middle classers move to us,
I'm not sure this is strictly true.
The thing about the US is, it's not that hard to ascend into the middle class. I'm not saying it's a walk in the park, but relative to Europe, low social stratification is a major benefit to immigrants.

most of this has been me AGREEING with Ethan, but getting confused over some slightly moronic definitions, i.e. 'radical Islam'. I turned off my bullshit detector first time I read the article, a mistake I hope not to repeat in future.

and nobody has said 'Nabisco OTM' yet, which is an oversight.

Good point, but Islam does not equal the Middle East or the Arab World. I think that's one of the conflations and slippages that all these clash of civilisations/DOOOOOOOOOM! writers make all the time and it's a dangerous one.

At a guess, non-Arab Muslims must far outweigh Arab Muslims. 176 million Muslims in Indonesia alone, plus Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, non-Arab North Africa plus all the people in India, China, Thailand, various ex-Soviet republics ...

NOI: thanks for the info.

if you live in lebanon or iran or any number of countries, non-islamic ones also, you might view americans this way. after all, they have a democracy and voted for their leaders that drop bombs, and wage war both overtly and covertly

*remembers Guantanamo Bay*

whoops! :S

Oh, Americans: believe hundreds of years of their own racism could magically vanish one afternoon in 1971; believe young anarchists will soon enough have teenage daughters and start voting conservative; cannot imagine that people who occasionally burn flags after getting hopped up on state-television misinformation might one day be comfortable and distracted by their own opportunities and let their resentments gradually fall by the wayside.

(P.S. it hardly matters if people hate America or hate the west -- the west is getting a pretty sweet deal in terms of the rest of the world not-hating us already. The only thing we need to ask for here is that none of them feel like physically attacking us. They can go on with high west-resentment levels for decades and decades, and most likely will do exactly that -- how worried are we about that one?)

This process can go both ways. And understanding it as a process doesn't really point the way in defending against the ones whose willingness to get violent isn't shaky.

The real problem here is that liberals have a dim view of "the West" as a whole, and so do the various kinds of radical Islam (radical = belief that the status quo needs to go, now, by whatever means). But the actual components of these two dim views have, at root, very very little in common. RadIslam's opposition is not the left's opposition. It's the difference between thinking the CIA was behind Pinochet and thinking the Mossad was behind 9/11. One is true and one isn't.

Of course this seperateness of vision is immediately and absolutely confused by the West's actual behavior in going after them, flushing the Koran, Abu Ghraib, and on, and on, and on.

xpost to nabisco again

yeah the persistent misunderstanding of use of strength has been completely depressing. this idea that we have to constantly prove how strong we are. everybody knows how strong we are, they can see our guns and boats and count our nukes. but of course what we've done over the last four years is actually demonstrate the limitations of our strength, so that where people used to think we were stronger than we really were they now think we're maybe not so tough. i remember arguing with a guy before we invaded iraq about how sometimes you show your strength most by not using it, and he looked at me like i was from mars. which is one thing that drives me nuts about this "liberals are pansies" meme (which is basically what the harris piece boils down to) -- refraining from using brute force does not necessarily mean you're afraid to use it; it often means that you think it's just not a very good or helpful idea.

what's troubling is that people who view these threats as intractable seem to me to not really view the people of the Middle East as people at all, not human beings whose ideologies express different things at different times -- they view them as ghouls or orcs or rabid dogs, basically

guy from new jersey called into an npr talk show this morning, on the whole "torture debate" (i still cannot believe we're having a "torture debate), and said, in justifying doing whatever was "necessary" to detainees, "these people are not part of the family of man."

xpost: yeah, liberals seem to me to be the last real defenders of "western values". i can't tell that anyone else has much use for 'em.

I haven't even read the thread, just seems like a good time to use this.

(apropos of nothing the one that is most curious to me is that next to none of them are lawyers - I wonder if this has anything to do with the Islamic legal tradition being so profoundly different from the Western one)

I think it's neocons who, these days, are most likely to believe that economic despair and lack of education cause Muslim terrorism. That's the ostensible basis for Bush's "democracy experiment" in the Middle East. The author is right about the last point, but liberals may be right that American militarism (or, perhaps more narrowly phrased, unnecessary or foolishly exercised American militarism) may -- on balance -- create more terrorists than it eliminates.

"...my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe... about paradise... it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism".

Harris sets up a completely stupid binary here in which:

* "the realities of our world" = "what devout Muslims believe about paradise"

therefore

* the liberal belief that "Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism" = not reality but imagination

This is just remarkably faulty logic. There can be subjective and objective reasons people do what they do, and they can be different without making one of them wrong or "imaginary". To define reality as "what Muslims believe about paradise" seems particularly weird, especially coming from a writer who's made a stand against religion.

Head-in-the-sand Harris!

Before I go further, just to summarize my own *political* position (on *this* issue): I am, indeed, one of those people who DO believe the Bu $h admin was involved in some way, in 9/11 (either through willful inaction or collusion). And I fundamentally disagree with some of the inferences the article unfortunately tries to extrapolate while blaming liberals; I still think the number one reason the situation is this way, is primarily due to Western hegemonic influence. Furthermore, I was amongst those to most fervently applaud Ahmedi-nejad's eloquent speech to the UN yesterday afternoon, of how the US has no moral leverage whatsoever. Demonizing him, if he ceases to make bombastic statements about Israel, in the same way that Hussein was, is going to be a lot harder in the long run.

All that said and out of the way, I think Geoff is right up above when he mentioned the author is probably expressing his disenchantment with ("fellow") liberals, as he claims to be one and is troubled at their lack of directly wanting to acknowlledge militant Islam's role in the conflict; as Geoff said, he seems to prefer that the liberals countered Islamic radicals rather than radical Christian religionists (with "reason," right?). He is not just waving the "liberals r unmanly PANSIES ugh" meme, he is trying to examine why there is a deeply-held reluctance to take "Islamists" (I don't like that term, it should be "Jihadists") at their own word of why they are attacking the West, instead of attributing all the blame to our own actions...admittedly in a sloppy way with broad brushstrokes and overfamiliar, ineffective admonitions (that've been recycled by Republicans).

It's a shame the article fails in its ambitions (and also fails in not attempting to proffer any workable solutions towards containing whatever the author is labeling as "radical Islam,"), since I think it's touching on a significant point that is kind of exemplified on this thread: a lack of knowledge of the history of militant, evangelical Islam, which therefore leads to all sorts of erroneous perspectives regarding its proliferation. For I also think Geoff was correct when he stated that the "magical ingredient" is belief, and I'd like to go so far to say that it is this belief that forms the driving motivation behind any mujahedeen movement, regardless of the innumerable other factors, which in my opinion may ultimately become interchangeable, and remain unnecessary. The belief never does.

The reason this is harder for us to grasp is 'coz salvation and its implications do not play such a great role (or any role) in our daily irreligious lives as it does in theirs. The stakes are radically different.

And aside from that lack of historical perspective on Islam, (beware controversial part), I'd venture to say that the second influence on the liberal hesitation to blame radical Islam is, oh, that familiar devil: white liberal guilt. (Well, I don't know if you can call it "guilt," but perhaps "oversensitivity" even though that isn't what I really want to say either. I don't know what the correct word is.) Please bear with me before you start to flame..

I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate it whenever Republican/right-leaning commentators criticize anything about the "PC" mindset of liberals (sounding as they regressive malcontents), but I also must acknowledge that, as a brown liberal (in the West) , I've found myself in an uncountable number of situations (both real-world and online) where I'm surrounded by liberals who are very hesitant to criticize any aspect of Islam whatsoever, from what appears to be an unconscious fear of ever appearing racist...but who would, without an instant's reluctance, tear Christianity to shreads (any aspect of it). Or I've encountered this in differing analyses and writings.

It's completely understandable; you can only truly hate, reject or disagree with what you really know, (but I hope that isn't read as an advocation to hate Islam =) This may seem like a flippant and/or irrelevant observation to the lot of you, but as one who is neither white, Christian or Muslim. it'd be hard for me to deny after experiencing it so often. Take it or leave it.

Coming as I do from a different civilizational background (with a privilege to take part in a "foreign" culture than Americans), I haven't experienced the hesitation to elaborate on aspects of fundamentalist Islam that I find disturbing, and in unique ways more troublesome than other religions (only!) WHEN it comes to a) religious tolerance and b) evangelism. Now I know that I'm going to be slandered in specious arguments for being "anti-Muslim" (anything but true) but before that (ugh, I'm getting sick of my own defensiveness!), why not hear my third point. The reason why Western liberals, or by extension leftists, would like to attribute the blame of "rising Islamic fundamentalism" to economic and/or capitalistic conditions alone, is because it allows them to co-opt Muslim anger into a grander ideology on class and economic conflict, to their own philosophical benefit.

I'm sorry, but you can't really compare in any depth the Jihad with Central American contras, or Latin American revolutionaries, without being (unintentionally or not), deeply disingenuous and inaccurate - and this goes back to the historical perspective. There are any number of reasons why a particular individual may be drawn to the Jihad (the above mentioned factors that can vary indefinitely), but once you've accepted it, the belief is all that matters as it defines the struggle, the cause, the goal and the outcome; it redefines the individual in whole. Islamic fantacism does not arise solely from economic disadvantage and "oppression," -> from the 7th to the 15th centuries, evangelical Islamists were not "oppressed," but amongst the most successful and advanced cultures, materially speaking, in the world. The Jihad that was waged from Spain to Borneo in that time frame, a fact that's is forgotten in all these discussions of economic "oppression" and "inequality," and by and large it was a very successful Jihad!

It wiped out the civilizations of Coptic-Hellenic Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia, stifled Byzantium, and very nearly overtook India and Indochine in whole, with the only difference being that there were much fewer Mithraists, Manichaeists and Zoroastrians, etc. than Hindus and Buddhists in Asia; too many to convert or kill, so they just had to implement taxation (the eternally hated "jiyza"). Modern Islamic zeal/anger arises partially from capitalistic economics, sure (ironic, considering that millennium of jiyza), but is also wholly manipulated by those who exploit the age old, sheerly indisputable literalism that martyrdom is glorified as the highest ideal in the Qu'ran. I mean, c'mon...it is related to the martyrdom of The OG Jihadist, Husain at Karbala (with his 72 co-warriors!! why you get 72 virgins - since thats how many of them there originally were), grandson of Muhammad and the archetypal hero for all Shia, role model for all Mujahedeen; to die an honorable death in battle is respectful towards him.

Hand in hand with this handwringing is also the reluctance to acknowledge that traditionally Islam does label those who are non-believers (historically Zoroastrians and idolatrous Hindus, for Christians and Jews were theoretically accepted as "Dhimmi / People of the Book), as "khafirs," and therefore deserving of death. Conversion by the sword was not practiced in isolated cases of radicalism, but en masse; the Da'wa or "invitation" in Arabic, to Islam, could be a "forced invitation," for the good of the ignorant non-believers. Before anyone shouts "dONt U rEMemBeR teH CRUSADES WTF" - of course militant evangelism or religiousity was not limited to Islam, but in its historical expansion, the verses from the Qu'ran that justified enforced conversion and holy war aided its growth in far greater proportion. And of course, it's the very memory of those Crusades that is also used to drum up justification for a modern revival of Jihad, with Americans analogous to medieval Europeans. The notion of Islam being "under threat" in a "death-fight for survival" is psychologically a very deep one, going back even further than this, to the days of Muhammad's Hejira.

Regardless of who is at fault for the resurgence (yet even that is arguable, "resurgence" - for the past century and a half can also be seen as an "interruption,") of these ideologies (the US or not), these facts about historical Islam make Westerners, in particular, uncomfortable to discuss. And honestly, I think such emotions leads to distortions of Islam or its history. Upthread, there have even been suggestions made that there are multiple variations of Islam, or that, by extension, Islam is not coherent...

...well the Muslim members of my family would object to that, of course. And the Jihad does not have any room for those who are unprincipled, sorry. The Muslims I know would take umbrage at any suggestion that there are schisms in Islam, for even within the mystical aspect of Sufiism, strict concordance with Sharia is to be obeyed (with modern adherents to American versions of Sufiism-lite not being accepted). You either adhere to the Sharia and belong to the Ummah or you don't, and while I'm positive there are a multitude of modern re-interpretations and relaxations and accomodations of various and sundry doctrines, historically speaking there weren't compared to other world religions.

I think a large part of these indications stem from the modern value system we have here in the West, and the prism with which we look at the world. Modern Westerners - in particular Leftists - have taken the mantle of secularism upon themselves, and therefore, must see every situation in the world first through that several, several layers of secular filters, from which any stance of religiously motivated action, but _particularly_ that would actually lead to the death of Self (the aggradizement of which has been key to Western society and individualism), as being...nonsensical. Wealth is what is most valued by modern, Western societies - the attainment of Wealth being the highest value, - and so, economic reasons are attributed to the "resentment" and "rage," of people who may not be either, but simply may believe they are being pious and holy, and earning their promised salvation.

There is a tragic loss, then, in understanding a different value system, one that prizes self-negation. It's really important to note here that the word "shaheed," which means "martyr" in Persian, also has a very strong connotation with "immortality." (Even the word "Paradise" derives from the Persian "pairi-deasa" - which furthers the suspicion that the entire concept of that "paradise afterlife" was a foreign, Islamic concept that has never been justly understood in our endless oversimplification, Bill_Maher-ization of it in the media). By extension then: these heroes, who perform Allah's will, who destroy the enemies of Allah (for anyone's refusal to convert is magnified into a personal rejection of God), shall not only become exalted martyrs of the Faith; they shall become Immortal, for this death will mean nothing; this death will grant Everlasting Life. And honestly, I don't think there is or perhaps ever was anything in Western cultures that comes close to that ideal of heroism, in which committing this one act of self-negation for the Greater Cause is parlayed into immortal, eternal glory; it's the highest attainable ideal precisely because it asks everything from the giver, without any manifest guarantee that he will get anything but temporary and terminal pain in return.

In a way, I think that sort of self-sacrifice is beautiful. In abstraction. In practice, we already know what it produces, but I think the reason so many Europeans may have a more complicated response to Islam is because secular Europe has a collective memory of dealing with Islam and its expansion, even if at its periphery. America doesn't; to Americans, Islam is new and alien, a foreign universe of ideology that can be easily distorted or misperceived to constitute a personal threat.

The funny thing is, those Jihadists would perhaps not take America to be the Great Shaitaan ("Devil") if America didn't maintain the military presence it had there; only Israel would be conferred with permanent-enemy status,. But the great flexibility of Jihad is that it can be stretched to include anyone who isn't Muslim as an "enemy of Allah," as a target, however, I reckon that many of these people _don't_ have deeply personal animosity with Americans per say, but rather, as so many have already commented (elsewherre, not upthread), take greivance with the irreligious and unsactified form of life that in their view many Westerners live. In response, they are going to perform the ultimate act of piety against the impious, and in this regard, they are not mindless, naive creatures, duped into giving consent to a suicidal murder, who are masterminded by a few despots either.

They are simply following their own genuinely and deeply believed path towards their salvation.

I guess I should add here my disclaimer that I don't need to be reminded that every Muslim is NOT a Jihadist, that relatively very few ever were or are, proportionately speaking, and that many moderate Muslims strongly disapprove of any form of martyrdom in action, even if they may glorify the legacy of, say, Husain at Muharram. I know that, but when I'm making this sort of post I also know it's worth repeating.

Finally, I'd just like to note that the subtext of my third point is most interesting to me personally, and that is that Leftists must ascribe economic motivation to Jihadists because they see world through the lens of economic opportunity, but in effect...the reason behind this is because religion, in whatever form, cannot be taken seriously by them. To describe only the economic motivations of those taking up Jihad, instead of acknowledging the face value of their spiritual desire, yearning or conflict, is redundant with saying that religion is meaningless, for you are devaluing their value system, and trying to supplant it with yr own newer one. I resent this, and reckon it arises from modern Western secularism as assuming that the world's psyche lies on a blank ideological slate outside of the Western liberties that are taken for granted (freedom of religion, etc) - when in reality, they cannot even percieve how differing civilizations, some much older than themselves, view them and the universe through a starkly alternate mindset. One that is so, so, so far removed from the irreligious "blank slate," that it cannot be accurately described, much less fathomed.

Yet Religion - east or west - is meaningless, "irrational," (oh here we go again), and regressive, so the "true cause" of this barbarism must be...financially based? Perhaps if more of us came to accept Jihad's claims at face value, without attempting pathological-sociological analyses of its roots, they might get a clearer picture of it...In'Shallah!

no one is going to even read that.

i want these 4 hours of my life back1!!

What I mean with those last two paragraphs, partially, is that there is a sort of (conscious or not) condescencion on the part of those who loosely or strongly adhere to Marxist ideals, upon Muslims (or adherents of any religion) in which an attitude of disbelief prevails regarding the motives behind a religious action such as martyrdom. So economic and classist motives are prescribed, and the blank slate of secularism = progress is assumed, maintained, and ultimately hoped for, even if inexpressed.

What I meant in all those other paragraphs, partially or in whole, you're upto your own to translate =)

I did.

What do you mean, they do it all the friggin' time!

but when you say "removed" do you mean "killed"? or is it just hypothetical? i just see it a lot and i think it's pretty disturbing because either way it's a terrible maxim.

xpost

I know it's a terrible maxim, and I meant it along the lines of 'no longer spreading their hateful influence', by any means natural, or not. I guess I meant it hypothetically, but now I realise that such a 'hateful influence' is a thoroughly demonising and simplistic way of dealing with people who teach their laws with a certain integrity and reason regardless of whether these laws are A Good Thing or not. And I do believe in the power of negotiation.

The supposedly clear-headed conservative approach is to identify problems here and then say "we'll make them go away," just by sheer force and will. That's not so much a plan. The liberal approach we're talking about here -- to look at our own actions -- doesn't stem from a desire to blame America, but a desire to figure out what actions and changes we actually have within our power to achieve certain objectives. Bush talked quite a bit during his first campaign about running the country with the acumen of a CEO, but if any CEO took that first approach to sales -- "we'll make them buy it" -- he'd be gone in seconds; the second, the "what can we do to change this," is the accepted wise route in pretty much every other sphere of life.

can someone with Photoshop skillz and a photograph of nabisco please take appropriate action

http://www.panoptika.net/por_harold_pinter.jpg

You won't eliminate the drive that some have towards fundamentalism/authoritarianism, but you probably will not have the same amounts of people pissed off.

Oh yeah, and if you don't torture folks.

I think the left (and a good deal of the right as well) in europe have the same problem with Islam that they have with the Christian religiosity in the US. It is an incredulity, a disbelief that anyone can reject the achievements of the chain of history from Reformation to Enlightenment to Industry to Liberalism to Socialism and the post-war social contract. 'Why would anyone throw that away for a fantasy that belongs in the 12th century?'. There is a lack of understanding as to what would possess someone to possess 'outmoded belief'. I have thoughts like that all the time.

The idea that there is a logic that compels people into suicide bombing just doesn't fit with that mindset and by and large I think that even idea of fighting to the death for a cause is pretty dead in most Left leaning western minds.

Perhaps the religious left of centre (Tony Blair) and the Right have a better handle on how to deal with the problem of militant Islam. I for one can't see how a solution that has brought so much death and destruction can be the right one, but also I can't see now how a socio-economic solution would be effective now, 30 years ago, maybe. Maybe if the Shah hadn't been so corrupt or the US had kept out of Afghanistan in the 70s and 80s, then what? Who knows, it doesn't really help us now.

If socio-economic factors don't play a role in creating militant islamists then what factor mean that indonesia and malasiya (reasnobly economically developed nations with less inequality than Saudi Arabia or and without the low economic circumstance Muslims in Britain compared with the rest of the population) appear to produce fewer militant islamists?

Leftists must ascribe economic motivation to Jihadists because they see world through the lens of economic opportunity

It would be pretty odd if to be left wing meant simply to reduce everything to questions of money. This ignores huge parts of leftism. Something like Marxism contains a politics, a philosophy and an anthropology as well as an economics, and there's clearly a cultural left being left out of Vic's picture, a left for whom Islamism is a struggle for cultural particularity, otherness, identity, and so on.

And in fact it's very easy to see how this "cultural left" can sympathize with the Iranian revolution of 1979, as justified by the Ayatollah Khomeini in his interview with John Simpson, reported here. Simpson says:

"For almost 30 years, the West has concentrated on the religious, fundamentalist aspect of Iran's Islamic Republic... We have forgotten that Khomeini's revolution was also a declaration of independence from British and American control... For [President Ahmadinejad] it is all part of the same process that Ayatollah Khomeini started, 27 years ago, when he overthrew the American- and British-imposed Shah."

Now, is that about "paradise" or about "dollars"? It escapes the binary altogether. It's about politics and culture and the quest to have an independent identity. To respect and sympathize with that side of the story is to be a "cultural leftist".

That's not contra Momus at all, it's completely a "cultural leftist" line to take, and I agree with it, although it's an argument I'd personally associate with Akbar S. Ahmed's book Postmodernism and Islam.

xpost

bit early for that

I want to clarify that I never meant to say that whatever we are calling "Islamic fundamentalism" (aye - at the time of this posting I realize how bothersome such semantics are going to get) is not at ALL related to "socioeconoimics." I think it partially may be. But I really want to emphasize the other aspects of what constitutes a desire to take it on, that are seemingly not discussed enough.

I'd like to asnswer in depth, again - particularly on what M. White picked up as "nationalism" in his post, since it especially has to do with the present re-awakening of Persian identity and Iranian national consciousness (as opposed to "Arabization," = "Islamification," a conflation Persia has struggled with for the last 1300 or so years) - but I likely won't be back for 12 or so hours.

But very quickly: 1) Momus, you don't have to oversimplify what I was saying , I know there are cultural components to Marxism, and I didn't mean to slander the Left; I apologize if I made it sound like "all Leftists..." when I meant "some" (and I WASN'T talking abt anyone on ILE, Marx forbid, anyway). But Horseshoe's conjecure about I mean, it's worth examining how the West became secular when thinking about how the values of the Muslim world might possibly change. is striking...

...since in my opinion, Marx definitely, as well as Freud, had a great deal to do in making the West secular in the first place, after the first wave of 18th cent. rationalist philosophy. And again, you're just NOT going to get that ("progression" - again, _you're_ defining it as "progression," I could very well call it apostasy) in another civilization by either hope or force, one that has adamantly followed its own cultural dictates, and fantasizing about how their values "might possibly change," not only sounds fantastical or naive, but kind of wrongheaded. Isn't there a value judgment being made here - why should anyone's values match yours for convenience, even if they are a millennium and a half "outdated" (Allah probably hasn't changed his mind just because you invented I Dream of Jeannie)? We already know that modernization doesn't have to = complete westernization, for Japan has maintained its own identity by design but there remains a subtext of "these people will stop killing and become 'more civilized',' like us!" that I find bafling here. (And Japan in no way comes close to equaling any aspect of Islam)

Attempting to communicate value-laden concepts to a whole other civilization can sometimes seem impossible (an exprience I know in depth from whenever I attempted to explain Hindu astrology's cosmology in a mere theoretical manner on here...in vain, the divide unable to be breached )(but that's probably my own limitations), when one is unfamiliar with what the other values in the first place. It's like communicating with people onanoher planet, and hey really might as well be in another world, as their conception of it is so different than yours. A Jihadist is not desiring for "puppies and roses," (as per Nabisco's suggestion), and " peace and prosperity"shall be doled out to the merit-earning faithful on "Qayamat - Judgment Day; a Jihadist wants glory. nd yes, Momus, of course in many instances their are manipulations, and some are earning dollars here and there both by inciting and profiteering off of jihad....but does the Jihadist himself, the shaheed that has sacrificed all for Allah's name and safety...does he enjoy the dollars after his act?

No. He either risks it all in vain (assuming, um, the Qu'ran is "wrong"), or enjoys Paradise (the Qu'ran ain't wrong, foo!). And even if the Left picked up on some admirable traits in 1979 or got a boner when it heard the word "revolution," (even if unpredictably attached to "Iranian,") I can assure you, that in those sorts of Islamic eyes the "cultural sympathy" of any Maxists would be met with alarm, along with justified suspicion.

For me, everything comes down to civilizational differences; those who harbor (oil) pipe dreams that Western-style "democracy" or whatever-"ism" (modern, secular, etc) will "take root," in Islamic countries, wheher they're George Bush or die-hard libertarians or libberals or Momusians etc., are living in the fool's Paradise. Even the value of "life" as you experience it is a modern/Western construction (no option of Everlasting Life! ever. after....), and therefore suicide is no longer considered an honorable way to die, as in Roman times... whoa, there is no concept of "honor" either, that could explain why some would kill their families/themselves to preserve "izzat" (save face, honor) (and that's not just in Islam, but elsewhere). But the very notion that the word "socioeconomic" is used when talking about all this, and descrbing it all as a, um, "problem" - well..it's very Western-centric. Why would becoming shaheed ever be considered a "problem," ? You're an infidel; I'm going to take care of you and my glory both with one stone. Do you see what I'm getting at? It's very simple. This nagging notion that somehow, it is not my Faith in Allah that compels me but some "disenchantment," - it's ludicrous...

....and all the subtext in these discussions is that, well, if you think my Faith, my Faith in Allah which compels me to give my life for Him, is symptomatic of
a PROBLEM. A problem that could be solved if onlyI were better off - why, THAT'S INSULTING.

But it is logical. From where you're sitting. Certainly logical. The Western mind (again, I'm using brush strokes, again forgive me - I'm not meaning ALL esterners when I say that) is incapable of understanding why, if one is materially comfortable, one would renounce his life and material possessions, those "puppies and roses," for no apparent reason. It gives the greatest importance to economics; it can't understand why some haven't, as Ed put it succintly, moved "past" the pull of Faith.

If I was a Jihadist, this would hurt. To imply that my Faith is simply a medieval aberration can be bought off - well, if I was a Jihadist (for real =) and I heard this, not only is the West coming across now as corrupt and decadent, but disgustingly vulgar and venal as well.

2) Kingfish, yr an old friend, but man if you didn't give me a perfect example of much of what I was trying to express:

There are both direct and indirect reasons for this thing, i.e. that you can cut down on the numbers on the disenchanted & disenfranchized(sp) if they actually have, y'know, enough food/running water/electricity/decent employment.

You won't eliminate the drive that some have towards fundamentalism/authoritarianism

Wow. So only people who are starving/thirsty/ hounding in darkness and unemployed...only they will turn to one of the most cherished lionizations in islam to express their Faith?? Your words are a perfect example of trying to confer causality to materialistic factors - in effect, it says that rich, well-adjusted Muslims have no need to become shaheed since roses, puppies, Coca Cola and pink-pastel GIFs of Jenna Jameson should make them happy/CHEERY - but discredit all practitioners of Jihad as being poor retarded bastards. There is only something "wrong" with Jihad in the non-Islamic world; it isn't a "problem" in Islam, comprehende ? Some of the most successful Jihadist movements were formed under quite wealthy auspices - the Ummayad Caliphate or Emperor Aurangzeb, anyone? - and again, on its own terms, there's a bit of dissonance when discussing such a spiritual goal in clinical materialst terms.

It's worth repeating:

This underlying belief that what you are calling "fundamentalist" or, um, "problematic," I tried to explain is a central tenet in the Islamic belief system, even if isn't practiced by most of the religion's moderates...Jihad is NOT some sort of "fringe" David-Koresh-like reinterpretation of the Qu'ran; it has been practiced since day one by "mainstream" adherents, but in the two few centuries, it waned under imperialism, coinciding with Islam's temporary lull in growth. Which leads to

3) No. I sharply disagree. In response to some other posts which ponder whether Jihad is a "modern invention" of the 20th centiury. Sure the olfder tenets have been exploited by those with 20th century intentions (including wealth or power), but remember in my first post I attempted to a) differentiate between the "masterminds," who may ber responsible to introducing the young'n'impressionable to Jihad, and those who actually practicei it, with their often stark difference in motive (respectively - and not always - material gain/profit vs. salvation), and b) state that Jihad is _flexible_ and has been used as a pretext or justification for a LOT of things, always using the rallying cry that "Islam is under attack!" Whether it be for land stabilization (kashmir, Palestine), or evangelical expansion (where hasdn't it been?) or whatever reason, the same verses can be quoted, the same scriptures can be cited to instill the motivation unto others.

Remember that there are the non-literailsts too, and that in Sufi terms "jihad" was often described as the death of the ego in relation to Allah's all-encompassing being. But when it was necessary, the metaphorical can always be emphasized into being literal; sound familiar? Ideologies always come in handy when they can be bent.

And as to why Indonesia or Malaysia is not as susceptible - well, tell that to the relatives of those who've died in the multiple bombings in Bali. The Jihadist movements in these countries don't get as much attention, but they do exist; they've been extensively documented even as far back as VS Naipul's "Among the believers" back in 1981 (which was inspired by the Iranian Rev.,). I again don't think this has to do with perceived economic stability as much as it does civilizational difference, for Southeast Asia never comfortably fii into Islamic civilization as even did South Asia (with its proximity to Arabia), and wasn't as influenced by tribal Arabian culture. Fuurthermore, Jihad simply doesn't have as strong a tradition here as this was _the_ furthest extent of eastward Islam anyway - nowhere left to go, to proslytize - and so the politics of evangelical reliion, or "Islam under threat," didn't ring as dramatically.

This is what I meant, when I said there is an unconscious "condescencion," with modern secularists and untenable aspects of traditional religion.

Oh, and doesn't Momus always cherry-pick his quotes? How else could he function in his free-form. line-item, pixalated post-modern way? =)

Note what happened to Iranian Communists after the Revolution.

Some of the most successful Jihadist movements were formed under quite wealthy auspices - the Ummayad Caliphate or Emperor Aurangzeb, anyone? - and again, on its own terms, there's a bit of dissonance when discussing such a spiritual goal in clinical materialst terms.

Uh, Bin Laden anyone?

I'm not necessarily espousing any of this as a solution. I don't have one.

I lean toward the second view, obviously. I think you're making a slight mistake by imagining that this just means prosperity -- like Momus says above, there is a whole lot to socio-cultural placement and group psychology than simply money. For instance, a lot of present-day violent extremists come from places that are very wealthy, yes, thanks to oil -- but there are also often places where young educated men are chronically underemployed, have no opportunity to put any of their energy into their own political processes, have no opportunity to put their energy even into arts or culture or even dating and chasing after women, until there is literally nothing there to absorb their energy, attention, and frustration other than religion, potentially with extreme results.

And I would submit, judging by what we say during the Clinton administration (w/r/t abortion-clinic shootings, white separatists, American militias, or Timothy McVeigh) that there are any number of Americans who hold very deep beliefs that could put them on the level of Islamic militants. What is it that, for the most parts, prevents them from taking violent action on the same level? It's not just money and material comfort. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it has to do with being invested in their own society to a point where they don't genuinely want to destroy it; they need it too much. The issue isn't that cash and pop culture and Jenna Jameson are going to deradicalize Islam, or even lead Muslims to change any deep radical beliefs they might have. The idea is that there's a level of opportunity and investment in one's own society that makes a person infinitely less likely to give his life over to militarism or terrorism -- even if he believes many of the same things a terrorist does.

xpost

exactly, that's what i was talking about earlier. that there are conditions that cause folks to sign up for the bombin'; you have can have a particular belief system that could allow for violent action, but it takes a bucketful of alienation before you act on it.

I think this has to be right. I've pretty much not stopped thinking about this since September 11th, because I know Muslims whose stated views/perspective on the world doesn't strike me as that much different than those of people who do desperate things (God's law > man's law; the U.S. is a diseased society, etc.) (And yes, I know many whose views are not at all scary). And even though they'd be quick to criticize many, many aspects of American society, they're far too comfortable within it and too dependent on it, in short, too much a part of it, to ever act to destroy it.

"I'm prepared!"

OTM

But isn't Vic's whole point that the ideology of Islam inherently makes it more likely to produce martyrs? When people make this argument they're usually dismissed as paint-'em-all-with-the-radical-brush types, but I'm not inclined to take it so lightly here. I don't think there can be any argument that the war, martyrdom, sacrifice, and glory are fundamentally different things in the theologies of Islam and of New Testament Christianity. The usual counterargument is that "Christians ignore and reinterpret a lot of stuff in the Bible", but I just don't necessarily believe it's a given that the Koran allows for that kind of reinterpretation, and there are a whole lot of factors -- socioeconomic, political -- conspiring against that kind of liberalism taking root right now anyway.

I also find myself wondering what Vic thinks the way forward is, because if everything you say is true, I find it difficult to imagine that WWIII -- a real WWIII, in which tens of millions of people die -- isn't on its way, as so many people want it to happen...and destruction is so cheaply sown.