Posted on 05/17/2007 5:39:21 AM PDT by Valin
Who said it was?
‘My goodness you sureare a fast reader.’
Not really - I first saw it two weeks ago when it was published on the UPS oneshots website and remembered the gist of it! :)
Allow me.
Good Muslims follow the tenets of their religion.
The ones who dont are not moderate - they are lapsed.
Sorry, folks, I don’t care what Moslems “think,” because I don’t believe that they’re capable of any rational conceptualization. If any of them were, they would have rallied to our side and supported us, or at least condemned 9/11 and all subsequent attacks, instead of lapsing into the dead-pool silence that typifies the “Moslem moderate.”
Rational people do not riot in the streets over editorial cartoons, nor do they stone their own family members because of purported slights to some weird-a$$ version of religously imposed “honor.”
What continues to boggle the mind is the leftist lean-over-backward attempts to mollify them: Somalis taxicab drivers can violate the American Disabilties Act by refusing to transport persons with “helper” dogs,” and face only possible fines and potential suspension for that transgression, but my employer is penalized with draconian and punitive measures if equal access isn’t guaranteed to disabled workers on the jobsite? Footbaths in schools, airports, and the workplace are created to accommodate Islamic practitioners in their prayer rituals—but I can’t look forward to seeing a creche in the public square at Christmas time because that’s a violation of the separation of church and state? Let’s modify job titles so that the burkha-clad checkout folk at the supermarket don’t have to touch your triply shrink-wrapped pork purchases—instead, you’re inconvenienced while the store attempts to find some clerk who lacks that sharia imposition. My kids can’t attend voluntary Bible-reading classes, whether for secular or religious studies at their schools, because the First Amendment prohibits the use of public facilities for the propagation, promulgation, or simple exploration of comparative religious beliefs; yet the Muzzies get government subsidies to provide scheduling, room space, and whatever other technologies necessary to promote the religion of “peace” in the airports, jails, schools, and every other venue that CAIR has decided is important to the destruction of Western civilization?
We no longer have to fear the so-called “slippery slope”—
Americans are already plunging, willingly, into subservience to the twelfth caliphate.
The Dhimmocrats, the ACLU, and their allegiance to “political correctness” and “multiculturaldiversity” are the pipers luring the vermin out into the streets, rather than consigning them to the hell to which they belong.
And I’m supposed to be concerned about “what Moslems think”?
It is losing ground to traditionalists and secularists nearly everywhere. It is doomed to ultimate defeat.
The article taken in its entirety paints a picture of how the Islamic world is modernizing and how radical Islam either is, or will be, on the wane in such an environment.
So, the best Muslim is a back-slidden Muslim.
Knowing the Enemy—Author Mary Habeck discusses Jihadist ideology and the War on Terror
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | May 17, 2007 | Jamie Glazov
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1835043/posts
Posted on 05/17/2007 7:35:31 AM CDT by SJackson
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Mary Habeck, Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. She is the author of the new book Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror.
(snip)
FP: Why are “moderate” Muslims so silent, in general, in the face of jihadism?
Habeck: There are probably many reasons for this, but I can give at least three. First, many Muslims have spoken out against jihadism, but they have been ignored by Western media. There was, for instance, a huge demonstration against violence carried out in the name of Islam is Morocco not too long ago (late 2005), but I don’t remember reading anything about this is in the mainstream media. I read memri.org and see many, many moderate Muslims speaking out against these guys every day. Second, in many countries these guys control the public arena and intimidate or even murder anyone who speaks out against them. The intimidation carried out in Western countries recently shows the power that just a few fanatics can have. Finally, there is a peculiar dynamic going on in the Islamic world: most people do not trust their governments or media to be reporting the truth, so they refuse to believe that the jihadis are carrying out these terrible atrocities. It’s far more satisfying to believe that the government/US/Zionists are lying about all this rather than to confront the fact that someone has hijacked your religion for their own purposes.
FP: You are right, when moderate Muslims rise up against extremism, the mainstream media does seem particularly silent. Recently in Pakistan and Turkey, masses of Muslims showed up to reject Islamic extremism. Yet the media was almost completely silent about this. You would think they would pump something like this up, seeing that moderate Muslims are our great hope in the war against terror. What explains this silence of the mainstream media?
(snip)
"that any rumors of the impending death of radical Islamism are greatly exaggerated"
He's not saying that Islamic Radicalism is going away soon, only that it is losing power.
Think of the KKK, it was not that long ago that they held a great deal of power in large parts of America (North & South). Today...they're still around but nobody takes them seriously. This is what will happen to the Radical Islamists. Why? they have no positive vision for the future.
They don’t think — they react.
Hello? Hello? (Is there an echo in here?)
“Impending” in a historical context not as in “about to occur tomorrow”.
Precisely. I think that the author gives the impression that radical Islam is going to be marginalized by the modernization of Islam within the next 50 - 100 years ala the KKK example.
With the Islamic mindset (hence post #5), I feel a more accurate timeframe is vastly longer and not one that the west can abide. Hence the necessity for change “from without”.
did you say “Good Muslims follow the tenets of their religion.”?
I am not seeing where religion comes into an Islamofacist political manifesto...
They think WHAT EVER they are TOLD to think..
What do mudslimes think? I’ll tell you — the first mudslime that tries to impose his will on me will *think otherwise* when I’m done with him. Islam is cancer that needs to be cut, poisoned and radiated into remission.
"religion" - It's a smokescreen they use to hide behind. Only one of the useful tools at their disposal...
Good Muslims follow the tenets of their religion...
...the vile examples of deception, violence, territorial conquest and subjugation which muhammad al insan al kamil (the "perfect man"), set for them to emulate.
BTW, the often repeated "1.3 (or 1.2) billion muslims" is an exaggerated claim when one wakes up and wants to follow what their hearts tell them, but are not free to change their faith.
bttt
How many angels dance on the head of a pin ? This situation in Christendom led to the Reformation and the Counter Reformation.
Without a living theology for more than a century, Islam as a religious tradition today simply lacks the vocabulary needed for discussing issues of contemporary import. The character of contemporary Muslim debate has been further secularized by a recent avalanche of new terms into all the main languages of Islam: Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu among others. Almost all of these terms are borrowed from various European languages, especially English and French, and at least implicitly express Western ideas and ideals. How does an Arabic speaker today discuss human rights, civil society, pluralism, accountability, elections, democracy, good governance, the rule of law and social justice without going beyond Islamic frameworks and concepts? It is impossible, which is why even Muslim clergy now regularly appeal to wider audiences by employing the terms of the Western political lexicon. Muhammad Khatami, a former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and a mid-ranking Shi‘a mullah, quotes Hobbes, Hegel and Locke more often than he does any Shi‘i scholar or imam.
Interesting. I heard this as a military brat in Libya, where there were no technological terms in Arabic to use in training their armed forces. Isn't that one of the ideas of Wittengenstein, that language forms reality ?
Not only is debate in the Muslim world today this-worldly, it is overtly political. Seen from the outside, Islam may look to be a monolith. In reality, it is a house of a thousand mansions, as riven by sectarian differences as is Christianity. Shi‘a have as much in common with Sunnis as Anabaptists have with Catholics, and each of the two main schools is divided into dozens of smaller branches that often disagree even over fundamentals of the faith. And that is one of the reasons why current debate has remained predominantly political—at least until very recently—for those engaged in it recognize that conducting it at a religious level would provoke murderous and self-destructive schismatic tensions. Even for those with deep religious convictions, the prudent course is to avoid overt religiosity and to seek a broader Islamic consensus on political issues.
This hasn't prevented Oodles of Muslim-on-Muslim slaughter, far worse than any caused by the West.
For example, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the “guides” of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Arab Sunni movement, can never agree with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Guide of Khomeinist Shi‘i Iran, even on Islam’s basic principles. For Qaradawi, there are three such principles: the unity of God (tawhid), Muhammad’s prophethood (nubuwwah) and the Day of Reckoning (yawm al-ma‘ad). Khamenei, however, adds two more: justice (‘adl) and the rule of the imamate (imamah). It is only in politics that the two can find a terrain d’entente by calling, for example, for the destruction of Israel or the expulsion of the United States from the Muslim world. This politicization of debate in Islam is everywhere to be seen. In most mosques anywhere in the world, even in Brooklyn, God makes only a cameo appearance in sermons delivered to the faithful these days. Instead, worshippers hear about “Zionist conspiracies”, “Islamophobia”, “the corruption of Western civilization” and the U.S. “attempt at imposing its hegemony on the world.”
Among the most appalling aspects of this religion, and one noted by practitioners of other faiths.
This distortion of religion is simply unsustainable, and it is increasingly unpopular. Most people seek religious affiliation for the comfort and stability it brings, for the bonds it provides to family and the solace it offers in times of sickness, disappointment and tragedy. Politicized religion cheapens and denies all this, and Muslims who understand and value their traditions will not allow themselves to be thus dispossessed. Increasingly common are remarks like those of Murad Ahmed, a British Muslim who wrote, after the revelation in late January of a radical plot to abduct and behead a British soldier of Muslim faith: “It’s a failing of our ‘silent majority’ for being silent too long. For cowering in the face of the perceived moral superiority of nutcases because they seem to believe in the faith more than we do. It’s time to get a megaphone and tell these people that they don’t speak for us.”
And we in the West exacerbate this trend by falling all over ourselves to acquiece to the Muslim-grievence groups, which merely opens the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims in a society.
Islamism in its various forms is a mortally wounded beast. It has lost most of the major political debates of contemporary life and is in retreat on most core issues of Islamic political, economic and social practice. But it still manages to maintain a vast audience by appealing to xenophobia: more specifically, to virulent anti-Semitic and anti-American sentiments. In religious and cultural terms, the Jew is the quintessential “other” whom Muslims ought to simultaneously admire and fear. The American represents the “other” in terms of political and military power.
And this is where Islam becomes a problem for us. The rest of it is a problem for Muslims and is theirs to solve. But somehow, someway, Dar es Salaam needs to get the message that their behaviors which threaten our well-being will NOT be tolerated. Afghanistan was a start, but the Democrats have undermined any lesson to be drawn from Iraq. This will redouble the costs to us, in blood and treasure, of convincing the radicals of Islam that their behaviors won't be tolerated.
Which means some bloody decades ahead.
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