Clash of Civilizations? It's Not That Simple

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Tuesday, March 30, 2004 | GEORGE MELLOAN

[presidio9]

It's only March, but the political debate in the U.S. is going full blast. One argument is that invading Iraq was a mistake because it only aroused Muslim ire and turned the "Clash of Civilizations" that Samuel Huntington envisioned eight years ago into a bloody reality.

[Helms]

"All the above can hardly be called a clash of civilizations. Muslims are not homogeneous in either language, belief or attitudes."

I find that this author is ignoring the threat that Huntington saw:

Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" Online Text...................... http://astro.temple.edu/~alistair/CLASH

[petercooper]

Islam - The Religion of Peace?

[Valin]

Muslims are not homogeneous in either language, belief or attitudes. And neither are Westerners.

YES!!

[Valin]

Pang

[Valin]

Sometimes it is.
Example

http://www.islamdenouncesterrorism.com/this_site.html
About This Site

This website is launched to reveal that any kind of terror and barbarism is against Islam, and Muslims share the sorrows of the victims of terrorism. You may write your own comments and share your thoughts at this web site.

Our aim is to help to define the concept of "international terrorism", which has been in great focus since the brutal terrorist attack against the United States of America on 11 September 2001, a day wickedness which has destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people. It is true that the world faces a big danger called international terrorism. The executors and supporters of this evil should be brought to justice. But while searching for the ideological source of this phenomenon, it will be a great error to point to Islam. Islam does not encourage any kind of terrorism; in fact, it denounces it. Those who use terrorism in the name of Islam, in fact, have no other faculty except ignorance and hatred. The solution lies in the understanding of the true Islam and the presentation of it with effective models.

All the written material in this site are taken from the books and articles of Harun Yahya, a well-known Turkish author and one of the promiment Muslim intellectuals of our times.

[petercooper]

Islam does not encourage any kind of terrorism; in fact, it denounces it.

I'm still laughing at this one..

[BayouCoyote]

I'm still laughing at this one..

Yep, that one should keep me chuckling all day.

[JmyBryan]

Thanks for the link. Good stuff.

[nuconvert]

Thanks.

We keep plugging away............

[nuconvert]

muslim pong

[AdmSmith]

The Wahhabis killed and tortured their competitors i.e. other brands of Muslims since they entered a joint venture with the House of Saud in 1747. If it was not for the oil-dollars from Saudi Arabia that the "royal" family is stealing from the country and using as their own pocket money for spreading the sectarian views of Wahhabi/salafist Islam we would not have this problem with the Muslims.


Actually it is a fight between the Iranian distorted version of Shia and the Saudi distorted version of Sunni. It all began to spread after the Iranian revolution in 1979 when Khomeini tried to stir up trouble and as a countermeasure the Saudis started to take over the Mosques around the World to stop any Shia advance.

Unfortunately we can not let these two bastards fight each other as their war will not stop at their palaces, they will kill each other including their innocent population. The Iranian nuke is not primarily directed against us, it is against Saudi, and to a lesser degree against the other Sunni Arabs. That is why you see the former Egyptian foreign Minister ElBaradei working so hard to stop the bomb. Iran is now fed up with the Mullahs and it is just a matter of time until we have a regime change in Tehran. Hopefully the transformation will be relatively peaceful, but it is up to the clerics to decide the level of violence. In a few years time we will be confronting the fall of the House of Saud. It will take a lot of work to make sure that the present corrupt regime will be transformed into a better one. The problem is that more than 50 % of their population are followers of the crazy version of Wahhabi.

[Eva]

I am constantly confused by the use of the terms progressive and liberal in current useage. Writers seem to vacillate between the old definition of liberal and the current one. Progressive always means socialist, but yet the writers try to pass it off as meaning forward movement or thought. Without properly defining these terms, this article appears to be a nothing but double speak.

[nuconvert]

Muslim Pong

[nuconvert]

ping pong

[KC_for_Freedom]

Just remember that the income tax is a "progressive" tax and you can't go wrong.

Liberal is one who would use the income tax to redistribute wealth.

[Eva]

I think that the problem for me arises from the fact that the socialists have adopted the term "progressive" as a synonym for socialism because, in their own words, they thought that the Black population was afraid of the term socialist.

[Wombat101]

I've posted on this quite a number of times, but I feel I have to once more.

The War on Terror IS a Clash of Civilizations: one civilization being secular and free, dynamic and advancing and the other stifled, poor, and mired in a 7th century ideology, ordained by God, no less.

When Khomeini called the United States the "Great Satan" he did not mean to tar us as evil (Satan does not have the same connotation in Islamic thought), he instead pictured us as the "Great Deceiver". In other words, the benefits of Western life were not a means to improve a people, but rather a trap intended to destroy a people. Only the virtuous, i.e those that avoid watching Brittney Spears' belly button on TV, those not obsessed with wealth, etc, would be saved and only the virtuous have a right to rule the world. Materialism and seduction via appliances, television, popular music,etc, was to be avoided. This was at a time when many of the countries of the Middle East were emerging from the Ottoman past and leaping headlong into the 20th century.

This was a powerful message in Iran under the Shah whose obvious wealth was unimaginable, while his people often lacked. Khomeini set himself up as Lenin with a religious aura, and the message spread across the Muslim lands where nothing resembling an opposition to autocracy had ever existed. It was powerful stuff at the time, since every system of government and Pan-Arabism invented up to that time had utterly failed.

He also set back anything resembling progress for God-only-knows how long.

Now, imagine that you are a Saudi or Jordanian man, you are young, you are educated (typically in the West, no doubt)and you cannot find a job or afford to marry because your country is a) in the hands of a despotic regime and b) everything in your culture MUST be viewed through the lens of religious orthodoxy and judged as either useful or a tool of evil. How long do you think it is before you either go crazy or start joining some lunatic fringe group?

The point is that Islam is backwards and corrupt and the people know it, however, due to the fact that they live in a society which is EXACTLY the way in which God ordained it to be, they cannot believe that God would have screwed them in this way. Therefore, it must be SOMEONE ELSE'S fault --- and the easiest scapegoats are (in no particular order): Jews, Westerners, Infidels, who have all screwed with God's master plan in the Islamic lands in one way or another. In psychology we call this phenomena "Transferrance".

Those ways include imperialism, materialism, socialism, merchantilism, realpolitik. Only when the Middle East is purged of Western influence, and then the planet purged of Westerners in total, will the Caliphate (i.e. Muslim paradise on earth) be recognized. It says so in the Koran (look it up).

This is a clash of civilizations no matter how you slice it since they make no distintions between Westerners (we're all the same to them), the guilty or the innocent. The difference is that it is a clash they can never win and they have not realized that...yet.

[AdmSmith]

Sorry, I missed that ElBaradei was not foreign minister he was a special assistant to the Foreign Minister of Egypt.

[nuconvert]

Whoa