Managing Islam's civil war

Managing Islam's civil war

Jonathan Kay, National Post
Published: Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Less than six years after 9/11, the great Clash of Civilizations has fizzled out. It's been replaced by a civil war within a single civilization. Consider these news events from recent weeks, and the pattern becomes clear: - In Pakistan, government troops laid bloody siege to the Red Mosque in the centre of Islamabad, precipitating a string of retaliatory suicide bombings in other parts of the country.

On Wednesday, Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda's second-in-command, urged revenge against Pakistan's government. ("This crime can only be washed by repentance or blood.")A secret Pakistani interior ministry document recently disclosed by The New York Times warns that Islamist insurgents in the country's northwest tribal areas -- the same ones fuelling the civil war in Afghanistan--may soon threaten Pakistan's central government. - In Gaza, Islamists loyal to Hamas decisively routed Fatah, the once-unrivalled Palestinian movement founded by Yasser Arafat. Fatah-affiliated President Mahmoud Abbas described Hamas as "terrorists" (a word familiar to us, but taboo within Palestinian society -- until now). - In Lebanon, government troops waged war on remnants of the extremist Islamist group Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. The country's governing coalition is also confronting an ongoing political challenge from Iranian-sponsored Islamist terrorist group Hezbollah. - In Iraq, sectarian killings between Shiite and Sunni death squads continue apace.

A doctor attends to a Pakistani man injured during a
suicide bombing in Dera Ismail Khan on Sunday.
CREDIT: Ali Imam, Reuters

Last week, more than 100 people were killed when a jihadi-driven truck filled with tons of explosives blew up in the town of Amirli, in a region claimed by both Arab and Kurdish Muslims. Meanwhile, American troops are waging war against al-Qaeda-linked death squads, fighting in collaboration with Sunni sheikhs who, until recently, were considered terrorists themselves. - In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-line theocrat who is seeking to summon Shiite Islam's "12th Imam" from his ethereal slumber, is facing mounting criticism from disenchanted citizens amidst a brutal state campaign to enforce Sharia law --including the death by stoning of adulterers. - In Somalia, a grenade attack against soldiers loyal to the Ethiopian-backed interim government prompted troops to open fire on civilians. The army has since closed down Mogadishu's main market and is rooting out the Islamist insurgents that infest it. - In Algeria, which this month hosted the Africa Games, a suicide bomber blew up a refrigerator truck full of explosives outside a military post, killing 10. Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility.

Everywhere, the basic plot is the same: traditional Muslim sheiks and autocrats battling with murderous jihadis for control of Muslim lands. In each case, it is Muslims themselves -- not Western soldiers or politicians -- who will decide the outcome.

Of course, Muslims are still trying to blow up infidels in London and Glasgow, not to mention Tel Aviv, Kashmir and a hundred other places. But with every passing month, Muslim violence becomes more self-directed. By the time Iran gets its Shiite Bomb, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia may be as much at risk as Israel.

In an obvious sense, this is good news for the West. But the trend also means that we are losing our ability to shape events. After 9/11, George W. Bush and his international supporters were swept up in a grand Wilsonian project to revamp the political culture of the Muslim world. But six years later, we're largely back on the sidelines, feebly exhorting our chosen autocrats -- Pervez Musharraf, Mahmoud Abbas, Fouad Siniora, Nouri al-Maliki, King Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah -- to "do more to fight terrorism." Without realizing it, we have gone from realists to democratic utopians back to realists again.

The trend will be hard to reverse. In democracies, voters support wars when they see clear, morally compelling arguments for waging them. That wasn't a problem when the stakes were credibly cast as between good and evil. But the war now is murkier. Most of the Muslim leaders we now are supporting are not democratic folk heroes, but compromised autocrats. Even Afghan President Hamid Karzai, by all accounts a decent fellow, is beholden to drug dealers and local warlords to maintain power.

These men are a lot saner than the Islamists they're fighting, of course. But in the long run, Western voters won't risk the lives of their sons and daughters to prop up a lesser evil fighting one side of an alien, often barbaric civil war.

jkay@nationalpost.com

All of the crisis in our world is because of people who do not eat pork....The only civilized people in the world are the ones who eat pork.

Good grief. What were your ancestors eating 2500 years ago? Were they civilized?

Historical vegetarianism, so far as written records are concerned, goes back into the obscurity of time, and some of the world's most brilliant intellectual giants and reformers have advocated a fleshless diet as a matter of principle.

In the root-religions, from which most others have borrowed and modified, the unity and sacredness of life have been an essential part with the natural corollary of vegetarianism.

The priests of ancient Egypt were, according to Clement of Alexandria forbidden flesh foods. Brahminism [Hinduism], Jainism and Zoroastrianism, which have no dated origin, have the same concept. Buddhism, founded in the sixth century B.C. with its main basis of harmlessness to all living beings, has 400 million adherents, many of whom are strict vegetarians, especially the priests. This ethical philosophy was not a new cult but a revolt from the sacerdotal practices of a degenerate Brahminism, which in those times had fallen away from its original simplicity. Buddhism became a practical exposition of the Brahminical postulate of a divine Godhead-Brahma -- the single Divine source of life.

In the Western world the first definitely vegetarian community consisted of the followers of Pythagoras, who gave an unsurpassed lustre to Greece of the sixth century B.C.

Less than six years after 9/11, the great Clash of Civilizations has fizzled out. It’s been replaced by a civil war within a single civilization.

The radical loser (Long Read)
Der Spiegel ^ | 1/12/05 | Hans Magnus Enzensberger
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1694568/posts

snip)

The radical loser has not disappeared either. He is still among us. This is inevitable. On every continent, there are leaders who welcome him with open arms. Except that today, they are very rarely associated with the state. In this field too, privatization has made considerable advances. Although it is governments which have at their disposal the greatest potential for extermination, state crime in the conventional sense is now on the defensive worldwide.

To date, few loser-collectives have operated on a global scale, even if they were able to count on international flows of cash and weapon supplies. But the world is teeming with local groupings whose leaders are referred to as warlords or guerrilla chiefs. Their self-appointed militias and paramilitary gangs like to adorn themselves with the title of a liberation organization or other revolutionary attributes. In some media, they are referred to as rebels, a euphemism that probably flatters them. Shining Path, MLC, RCD, SPLA, ELA, LTTE, LRA, FNL, IRA, LIT, KACH, DHKP, FSLN, UVF, JKLF, ELN, FARC, PLF, GSPC, MILF, NPA, PKK, MODEL, JI, NPA, AUC, CPNML, UDA, GIA, RUF, LVF, SNM, ETA, NLA, PFLP, SPM, LET, ONLF, SSDF, PIJ, JEM, SLA, ANO, SPLMA, RAF, AUM, PGA, ADF, IBDA, ULFA, PLFM, ULFBV, ISYF, LURD, KLO, UPDS, NLFT, ATTF ...

“Left” or “Right”, it makes no odds. Each of these armed rabbles calls itself an army, boasts of brigades and commandos, self-importantly issuing bureaucratic communiqués and boastful claims of responsibility, acting as if they were the representatives of “the masses”. Being convinced, as radical losers, of the worthlessness of their own lives, they do not care about the lives of anyone else either; any concern for survival is foreign to them. And this applies equally to their opponents, to their own followers, and to those with no involvement whatsoever. They have a penchant for kidnapping and murdering people who are trying to relieve the misery of the region they are terrorizing, shooting aid workers and doctors and burning down every last hospital in the area with a bed or a scalpel – for they have trouble distinguishing between mutilation and self-mutilation.

(snip)

There is also no mistaking other similarities, such as the fixation with written authorities. The place of Marx and Lenin is taken by the Koran, references are made not to Gramsci but to Sayyid Qutb. Instead of the international proletariat, it takes as its revolutionary subject the Umma, and as its avant-garde and self-appointed representative of the masses it takes not The Party but the widely branching conspiratorial network of Islamist fighters. Although the movement can draw on older rhetorical forms which to outsiders may sound high-flown or big-mouthed, it owes many of its idées fixes to its Communist enemy: history obeys rigid laws, victory is inevitable, deviationists and traitors are to be exposed and then, in fine Leninist tradition, bombarded with ritual insults.

The movement’s list of favourite foes is also short on surprises: America, the decadent West, international capital, Zionism. The list is completed by the unbelievers, that is to say the remaining 5.2 billion people on the planet. Not forgetting apostate Muslims who may be found among the Shiites, Ibadhis, Alawites, Zaidites, Ahmadiyyas, Wahhabis, Druze, Sufis, Kharijites, Ishmaelites or other religious communities.

(snip)

Contrary to what the West appears to believe, the destructive energy of Islamist actions is directed mainly against Muslims. This is not a tactical error, not a case of “collateral damage”. In Algeria alone, Islamist terror has cost the lives of at least 50,000 fellow Algerians. Other sources speak of as many as 150,000 murders, although the military and the secret services were also involved. In Iraq and Afghanistan, too, the number of Muslim victims far outstrips the death toll among foreigners. Furthermore, terrorism has been highly detrimental not only to the image of Islam but also to the living conditions of Muslims around the world.

The Islamists are as unconcerned about this as the Nazis were about the downfall of Germany. As the avant-garde of death, they have no regard for the lives of their fellow believers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the fact that most Muslims have no desire to blow themselves and others sky high only goes to show that they deserve no better than to be liquidated themselves. After all, the aim of the radical loser is to make as many other people into losers as possible. As the Islamists see it, the fact that they are in the minority can only be because they are the chosen few.

(snip)

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