Islam caters to the ignorant, and strives to keep the people that way. Easier to control them. Worked throughout time.
The bane of Islam is real education.
"Islam itself has become the issue, rather than terrorism, dictatorship, slavery in the Sudan or mistreatment of women."
Root causes and all.
I'm not an Evangelical anything, but I might guess at why they might not like Islam:
Because Muslims glorify death. They aspire to it, and live for it, and- Allah willing- will exterminate just a few more Jews as they go out in a flash of burning clothes and a hail of shrapnel. They reveled, literally, at the sight of the WTC attack, and the hole in the Pentagon, and the hole in Pennsylvania.
People who claim that the public face of Islam has been hijacked by extremists conveniently overlook the inescapable fact that such attitudes and actions as the expremists perpetrate would be impossible without broad support. Therefore, extreme Islam isn't so "extreme" in that light- it's actually the mainstream.
It is indeed, and one of the problems of our contemporary society is that we treat it with the respect we accord to a religion - when we should actually be treating it like a lethal form of Scientology.
I would have liked this article much more had the author not been obsessively using the term "neo-conservatives." Aside from the fact that it bothers me when conservatives start sorting out the sheep from the goats among themselves, this blindness seems to have extended pretty much to everyone in all camps. But there have always been isolated voices desperately trying to call attention to the obvious, and perhaps now they are picking up critical mass.
In addition, the Muslims seem to be doing their best to reveal themselves as the death cult they are; in a sense, Iraq forced them out into the open, and I think this is one reason that we are finally seeing the problem with more clarity.
Well, maybe I should add, Islam allied with the left, because I think the Islamic death-cult would be much less powerful without the support, tacit or otherwise, of the left.
"Apart from complaints about the Prophet Mohammed's marriage to a nine-year-old and suchlike, the Evangelicals have trouble explaining why they dislike Islam."
Apart from Hitler's murder of millions of Jews and suchlike, one has trouble explaining why one dislikes Nazis.
"In a nutshell, Islam, according to Besancon, is not one of the three Abrahamic religions, but a pagan throwback, not a "revealed religion" in the sense of Judaism and Christianity, but a reversion to the "natural religion" of the pagan world."
They still worship that black meteorite, don't they? They still worship the same old Kaaba.
Well let's see--they hate Christians and Jews... I'd say it's been about religion all along...
The whole neo-con deal is why I did not post this article yeasterday when I came over it. But, decided today to post it anyways, because I think some of Spengler's past articles are very interesting.
Did you read the Fallujah one?
Personally, I belive the President (Or I hope he does) does realise that Islam is the main culprit in the WOT. The same with the "neo-cons".
What I think Spengler doesn't quite get is that the whole Iraq campaign's long terms end is to help defang Islam.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=T3Vbc.10222%24NL4.7531%40newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3D%2522THE%2520WAY%2520WE%2520LIVE%2520NOW%2522%2520%2520niall%26num%3D100%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/magazine/04WWLN.html?pagewanted=all&position= THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Eurabia?
By NIALL FERGUSON
Published: April 4, 2004
"In the 52nd chapter of his ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'' Edward
Gibbon posed one of the great counterfactual questions of history. If the
French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of
Poitiers in A.D. 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam?
''Perhaps,'' speculated Gibbon with his inimitable irony, ''the
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford,
and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and
truth of the revelation of Mahomet.''
When those words were published in 1788, the idea of a Muslim Oxford could
scarcely have seemed more fanciful. The last Muslim forces had been driven
from Spain in 1492; the Ottoman advance through Eastern Europe had been
decisively halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
Today, however, the idea seems somewhat less risible. The French historian
Alain Besancon is one of a number of European intellectuals who detect a
significant threat to the continent's traditional Christian culture. The
Egyptian-born writer Bat Yeor has for some years referred to the rise of a
new ''Eurabia'' that is hostile in equal measure to the United States and
Israel. Two years ago, Pat Buchanan published an apocalyptic book titled
''The Death of the West,'' prophesying that declining European fertility and
immigration from Muslim countries could turn ''the cradle of Western
civilization'' into ''its grave.''
Such Spenglerian talk has gained credibility since 9/11. The ''3/11''
bombings in Madrid confirm that terrorists sympathetic to Osama bin Laden
continue to operate with comparative freedom in European cities. Some
American commentators suspect Europeans of wanting to appease radical Islam.
Others detect in sporadic manifestations of anti-Semitism a sinister
conjunction of old fascism and new fundamentalism.
Most European Muslims are, of course, law-abiding citizens with little
sympathy for terrorist attacks on European cities. Moreover, they are drawn
from a wide range of countries and of Islamic traditions, few of them close
to Arabian Wahhabism. Nevertheless, there is no question that the continent
is experiencing fundamental demographic and cultural changes whose long-term
consequences no one can foresee.
To begin with, consider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic
decline. A hundred years ago -- when Europe's surplus population was still
crossing the oceans to populate America and Australasia -- the countries
that make up today's European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the
world's population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by
2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4
percent. The decline is absolute as well as relative. Even allowing for
immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current
European Union members will fall by around 7.5million over the next 45
years. There has not been such a sustained reduction in the European
population since the Black Death of the 14th century. (By contrast, the
United States population is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2000 and
2050.)
With the median age of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards projected to exceed 50
by 2050 -- roughly 1 in 3 people will be 65 or over -- the welfare states
created in the wake of World War II plainly require drastic reform. Either
today's newborn Europeans will spend their working lives paying 75 percent
tax rates or retirement and ''free'' health care will simply have to be
abolished. Alternatively (or additionally), Europeans will have to tolerate
more legal immigration.
But where will the new immigrants come from? It seems very likely that a
high proportion will come from neighboring countries, and Europe's
fastest-growing neighbors today are predominantly if not wholly Muslim. A
youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised
to colonize -- the term is not too strong -- a senescent Europe.
This prospect is all the more significant when considered alongside the
decline of European Christianity. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany,
Sweden and Denmark today, fewer than 1 in 10 people now attend church once a
month or more. Some 52 percent of Norwegians and 55 percent of Swedes say
that God did not matter to them at all. While the social and sexual freedoms
that matter to such societies are antithetical to Muslim fundamentalism,
their religious tolerance leaves these societies weak in the face of
fanaticism.
What the consequences of these changes will be is very difficult to say. A
creeping Islamicization of a decadent Christendom is one conceivable result:
while the old Europeans get even older and their religious faith weaker, the
Muslim colonies within their cities get larger and more overt in their
religious observance. A backlash against immigration by the economically
Neanderthal right is another: aging electorates turn to demagogues who offer
sealed borders without explaining who exactly is going to pay for the
pensions and health care. Nor can we rule out the possibility of a happy
fusion between rapidly secularized second-generation Muslims and their
post-Christian neighbors. Indeed, we may conceivably end up with all three:
Situation 1 in France, Situation 2 in Austria and Situation 3 in Britain.
Still, it is hard not to be reminded of Gibbon -- especially now that his
old university's Center for Islamic Studies has almost completed work on its
new premises. In addition to the traditional Oxford quadrangle, the building
is expected to feature ''a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret
tower.''
When I first glimpsed a model of that minaret, I confess, the phrase that
sprang to mind was indeed ''decline and fall.''
Niall Ferguson is Herzog professor of history at the Stern School of
Business, New York University. His book ''Colossus: The Price of America's
Empire'' will be published this month by Penguin Press.
Read the article about Islam baffling the West.
Islam seems to be an unending litany of rituals and proscriptions and rules applying to the most ridiculous minutiae of daily life.
Indeed, Islam seems to be very much a religion of stagnation and oppression. In some ways, since it is so concerned with ritual purity and how things work in "this world" it is itself a totalitarian ideology in a way that Communism could never DREAM of being.
Islam has always been the issue. It's just now more people are recognizing Islam for what it is.