Bruce Thorton: Doublespeak Unveiled, Muslim “moderates” are true to spirit of Islam

As stalwart as the Bush administration has been in the current conflict with Islamic jihadists, judging from the op-ed in last Saturday's New York Times by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend, it still entertains dangerous illusions about the enemy we are facing.

Hadley and Townsend reprise the narrative the administration has used all along in making sense of our adversary. Those wishing to destroy us are enemies of freedom who espouse a totalitarian ideology akin to fascism and communism. As such, they are driven by a diseased passion for domination that will brook no dissent nor allow for ideals such as tolerance and human rights. And they gain traction from “conditions of despair and feelings of resentment where freedom is denied.” Thus America must promote democratic freedom and prosperity to remove those conditions, for “people everywhere prefer freedom to slavery and will embrace it whenever they can, because freedom is the wish of every human being.” Finally, since these terrorists are enemies of Islam as well, we must support those Muslims who “are speaking the truth about their proud religion and history, and seizing it back from those who would hijack it for evil ends.”

Very Interesting!

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Thus these ideologies were doomed because they denied not just political freedom, but the powerful human need for religious expression and spiritual experience.

The jihadist enemy, on the other hand, is operating on principles and values squarely in the tradition of Islam, and thus unlike fascism and communism is expressing a spiritual need and an orthodox religious mandate

It may be a tradition of Islam, but it is not a "spiritual need". Call me naive, but there is no spiritual gain in wanton violence. The Islamic "mandate" for murder is as counterfeit as a two dollar bill put into circulation by the insane.

Unless I am over reaching here the author is acknowledging something that has been apparent to many of us for a long time.

The religion of Islam is fundamentally incompatable with any other form of society. This has been demonstrated for centuries by the behavior of Islamic believers.

The 64 dollar question to ask any Muslim is "Do you believe there is such a thing as an infidel as described by your holy book?". If the answer is yes, then there can be no peaceful co-existence between Muslims and believers of other faiths.

Imagine if any organized religion in this country had, as a fundamental base, the object of converting or killing every person on earth?

The key to this mistaken interpretation is the short shrift given to the power of spiritual needs — an omission surprising given how religious the media keeps telling us this administration is. That ignoring of spiritual reality is what makes the analogy with fascism and communism false. Both of those ideologies were anti-Christian: fascism was a species of debased Romantic neo-paganism, and communism was blatantly atheist. As such, both ran counter to the powerful Judeo-Christian forces that shaped European and Russian civilization, and so could not satisfy for long the spiritual yearnings of the people, yearnings denied their traditional expressions. Thus these ideologies were doomed because they denied not just political freedom, but the powerful human need for religious expression and spiritual experience.

What Hadley and Townsend are talking about can be found in
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (Hardcover)
by Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1594200084/ref=ase_immaculate-books/103-2383722-0816649?v=glance&s=books

Book Description
A pioneering investigation of the lineage of anti-Western stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself.

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others.

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders-often Jews-pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision.

(Note: A small but densely packed book, and IMO a must read)

Its a fair question that you pose.

The problem is that historically the Muslim community has proven to be incompatable with their neighbors.

The most radical elements are funded by and eminate from the heart of the religion in the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia.

So as long as that element is in place you will have their hatred to deal with in your community if you also find the influence of the Saudi's there. Since the Saudi's have spent millions in funding Mosques and in promoting their particular brand of the Muslim religion (up to 80% of the total money spent) in the US, you can assume that the incompatable portion of the relationship is going to present itself to you sooner or later.

When 20% of the Muslims polled in Britian said they would do nothing to prevent a known terrorist act against non Muslims in their own country (Great Britain) that is enough "buy in" for me.

The silence of the Muslim community in this country speaks volumes.

I am of two minds on this issue (as can be glanced from my postings). I see the danger coming out from the Muslim world, but I am uneasy to announce that we have the whole Muslim world (a billion and a half of people!) as our enemies. It is not prudent, and it may not be true.

It is absolutely clear that the danger comes from within the Muslim world. It is also clear that Islamists, or the term I prefer: Jihadists, draw inspiration and justification from within Islam itself. On another hand, It is also clear that the Jihadists are not a majority in the Muslim world so far. What is not clear to me is what this majority really thinks about them, how the majority accepts or not the Jihadists' claim that they, the Jihadists, are the only true believers.

We know that there are Muslims opposing Jihadists. Yes they are there and their mere opposition, if not the fight, is difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, I think we are very justified in our criticism of the Muslim world that this fight is not so widespread and is not so satisfyingly visible to us. We are comparing their reaction to ours when an atrocity is committed in the name of Christianity or Judaism. Just one example, when Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 praying Muslims, there was a stumped at the microphone to condemn him. Yes there are few who support him, but they are margins on the margins. And note, those who condemned him did that without any reservations, ifs and buts.

Our media bends backwards to negate the Jihadists' actions to the margins of the Muslim world as well. But we don't see a similar rush to condemn their atrocities, and too often the condemnation is clarified with reservations, ifs and buts. So yes, we are not satisfied. Still, I would not rush to count the enemies in the billions. For one simple reason that the behavior of majority IS different than of the Jihadists. No, they are not allies, but also, not enemies. They are sitting on the fence waiting to see who the winner is going to be. They show conflicting signs of not wanting to be involved, not wanting to be targets, not wanting to live under sharia, but also smugly happy when we are bleeding (kind of cheering for the escaping robbers in a police flick - is there anybody not guilty of at least once cheering for the robbers?).

Do they realize that they will be (and often are) the first targets of Jihadists when the Jihadists move into the neighborhood? I think some do.

So, do they consider themselves to be "good muslims" versus "bad Jihadists"? What is it to be a good muslim then?

I know that arguments between catholics, protestants, orthodox christians about what does it mean to be a good christian are very entertaining. While differences sometimes worded sharply, for an outsider, there is no danger that the common ground will include murdering unbelievers. Some orthodox jews might deny jewsness to conservative and reformists jews. Still, to outsiders it is just an academic interest.

It is not an academic interest for an outsider to be worrying how the Muslim world as a whole will decide this question: What is it to be a good muslim?

“It is also clear that the Jihadists are not a majority in the Muslim world so far. What is not clear to me is what this majority really thinks about them, how the majority accepts or not the Jihadists' claim that they, the Jihadists, are the only true believers….We know that there are Muslims opposing Jihadists. Yes they are there and their mere opposition, if not the fight, is difficult and dangerous. Nevertheless, I think we are very justified in our criticism of the Muslim world that this fight is not so widespread and is not so satisfyingly visible to us…I would not rush to count the enemies in the billions. For one simple reason that the behavior of majority IS different than of the Jihadists. No, they are not allies, but also, not enemies. They are sitting on the fence waiting to see who the winner is going to be. They show conflicting signs of not wanting to be involved, not wanting to be targets, not wanting to live under sharia, but also smugly happy when we are bleeding (kind of cheering for the escaping robbers in a police flick - is there anybody not guilty of at least once cheering for the robbers?).”

Very insightful. I couldn’t agree more. In our demands for renunciation, we’re asking for more than they are capable of giving right now. Still, the Jihadists are basically a death cult, and their future is literally a dead end. That’s not spirituality. It’s a hysteria promulgated for evil ends.

What is it to be a good muslim?

That question will be answered in the march of time. The Middle East can look backward only so long before it’s populations realize they are left behind and start looking forward to survival.

The problem is that historically the Muslim community has proven to be incompatable with their neighbors.

You could say the same about most groups of people. You don't have to go back too far in European history to find different branches of Christanity merrily hacking each other and burning each others towns.

The most radical elements are funded by and eminate from the heart of the religion in the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia.

Pakistan is another center and lets not forget the godfathers of modern Islamic terror the Muslim brotherhood.
For more on this I recomend "Jihad" the trail of political Isalm by Gilles Kepel
A little dry, not what I would call a "fun" read, but a good history of modern Islamic terror.

When 20% of the Muslims polled in Britian said they would do nothing to prevent a known terrorist act against non Muslims in their own country (Great Britain)

OR you could say 80% of British Muslims would do what they could to prevent an act of terrorism.
Which (IMO) proves my point That we are not at war with Islam but a sect/branch(?) of Islam.

Our media bends backwards to negate the Jihadists' actions to the margins of the Muslim world as well. But we don't see a similar rush to condemn their atrocities, and too often the condemnation is clarified with reservations, ifs and buts.
Agree

From Egypt

The Big Pharaoh
http://www.bigpharaoh.blogspot.com/

A bridge too far
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1536304,00.html

Egypt's police took a dim view of an innocent protest on the Nile condemning the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings, Brian Whitaker learns from some beleaguered bloggers

Rantings of a Sandmonkey
http://egyptiansandmonkey.blogspot.com/

Glenn Reynolds recently wrote a piece about the very subject

Ignoring the anti-terrorist Arabs?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8636700/#050724

The pigeons from the London and Sharm El Sheikh bombings are coming home to roost, as a lot of people seem to be undergoing a mood change regarding terrorism. Among those people are a lot of Arabs and Muslims.

Egyptian blogger Karim Elsahy tried to organize an anti-terror march in Cairo. And it worked -- though as another Egyptian blogger reports, it was broken up by Egyptian police:

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