At State Dept., Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate

WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the “noble resistance” in Iraq.

So Mr. Jawad, one of two Arabic-speaking members of what the State Department called its Digital Outreach Team, posted his own question: Why was it that many in the Arab world quickly condemned civilian Palestinian deaths but were mute about the endless killing of women and children by suicide bombers in Iraq?

Among those who responded was a man named Radad, evidently a Sunni Muslim, who wrote that many of the dead in Iraq were just Shiites and describing them in derogatory terms. But others who answered Mr. Jawad said that they, too, wondered why only Palestinian dead were “martyrs.”

The discussion tacked back and forth for four days, one of many such conversations prompted by scores of postings the State Department has made on about 70 Web sites since it put its two Arab-American Web monitors to work last November.

The postings, are an effort to take a more casual, varied approach to improving America’s image in the Muslim world.

I see mention of justice. Assuming that the Koran is God’s will, then what is just can not be known except by reading the Koran, maybe the habiths and the commentaries. That measn that the just man is one who submits, and submits to the commands mediated through Mohammed. Natural justice as we understand it, is pretty much a fiction in the Muslim world.

I was amused by the following: These men of the Arabian desert were not the usual conquerors. The cultures of the countries they occupied were not destroyed, as had been the fate of civilizations overwhelmed by other victorious armies, but preserved. Later these cultures were absorbed and enriched to form the Arab-Islamic civilization which was to be mankind’s pathfinder for many centuries.

When one looks closely at what actually happened, it is more like the Norman conquest, where the Conquerors laid tribute on the Saxons and subjugated them. Or the British conquest of India and the rule which is usually referred to as colonialism. The British brought law and order to India and a common language as well. They also brought constitutionalism as well asmodern goods transportation and modern medicine to the people. Yet in the multiculturalism view, we have a kind of universal harmony, and an Arab civilization that owed far more to Greek, Roman, Syrian, and Persian cultures than to the rude Arabic culture of the desert or even to Islam. Ironically, as these people increasingly converted to Islam to escape the tax, these civilizations faded. It was left to the Turks to revive their civilization by repeating the pattern of conquest , imperialism, and exploitation. "...and inevitable decline. What did Mohammad bring that was new?"

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