Posted on 12/12/2007 11:36:39 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
“Saying American foreign policy needs a change in tone and attitude, or an opening up and a reaching out, is as obvious as saying O. J. Simpson might be having a bad month. This Administration’s bunker mentality has been counter-productive both at home and abroad. They have done as poor a job of communicating and consulting with other countries as they have with the American people.
“A more successful foreign policy begins at home with better communication to the American people about Islamic terror. Six years after 9/11, it is still difficult for us, with our religious tolerance, our separation of church and state, to grasp how these people think. After we attend different churches on Sunday, or no church, Americans share meals or movies -- we don’t slaughter each other. We have thrived on our diversity – religious, ethnic, racial -- to become the world’s only superpower. We don’t merely tolerate diversity, we embrace and celebrate it. To Islamic extremists, the concept of a melting pot is as alien as the concept of a theocracy is to us. It takes an enormous leap of imagination to understand what these people are about, that they really do want to kill every last one of us and destroy civilization as we know it.
“The Administration has never done an adequate job explaining the theology and ideology behind Islamic terror, never done an adequate job of convincing us of their ruthless fanaticism. The first rule of war is “Know your enemy,” and most Americans don’t. To grasp the magnitude of the threat, we first have to understand what makes Islamic terrorists – and their suicide bombs – tick, and the Administration has not explained it well. Very few Americans are familiar with the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian radical executed in 1966, and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose call to active jihad, influenced bin Laden and the rise of Al Qaeda. Qutb is to bin Laden as Karl Marx is to Lenin. Qutb raged against the decadence and sin he saw around him and sought to restore what he considered the “pure” Islam of the seventh century. Besides opposing non-Muslims, besides opposing Shiites, he was a Sunni who opposed Sunni governments because he believed they required their citizens to worship them like “gods,” and so were guilty of a polytheism forbidden by Islam. To him, the only answer was a return to a theocratic caliphate without national borders, and he saw nothing decadent or sinful in murder to achieve that end. Americans, who go to extreme lengths to save lives, can’t comprehend human beings who delight in taking lives, it just doesn’t compute. In our culture, the death of a child is about the worst trial a person can endure, while parents of suicide bombers feel joy, not grief. We believe that every individual has intrinsic worth and value. This culture of life is a cornerstone of our society, illuminated by the conflict with the Islamic jihadists and their culture of death.
“It is also difficult for us, with our culture of assimilation, to understand that life for European Muslims is different from life for American Muslims. Muslims in Britain or the Netherlands or Germany are second-class citizens because those countries have more homogenous populations that don’t readily integrate outsiders. Instead of melting pots, Europe has separate pots boiling over with alienation and despair. In some countries, like France, it is more a lack of economic integration, while in others, like Britain, it is more a lack of cultural integration, but whatever the reason, Europe is a much more fertile breeding ground for terror than the United States. Unintentionally, some of our closest allies are producing some of our clearest threats. Because of our special relationship with Britain and all our similarities with them, most Americans don’t realize that it is very different to be a Muslim citizen of Britain than a Muslim citizen of the United States, so we have trouble accepting that doctors in Britain become terrorists. We have to understand that while educated Muslims in Europe may not be materially deprived, many of them feel socially and emotionally deprived by a lack of acceptance. Earlier this month we saw the arrest of German citizens plotting a terror attack against American targets there. Also this month we saw Danish citizens arrested for plotting an imminent bombing. Both plots had links to Al Qaeda.
“Besides the threat of small groups of educated people launching isolated attacks, we face the danger of mass movements of the dispossessed and discontented rising up in the Islamic world and overthrowing their governments, movements like those that led to the current government in Iran when the Shah was overthrown and to the Palestinians’ election of Hamas and then their takeover of Gaza. To create havoc in the world, you need educated people to provide the intellectual underpinnings and poor, desperate people to provide the manpower. Before the Russian Revolution, the rural peasants who formed the overwhelming bulk of the population weren’t sitting around reading Karl Marx, they were illiterate. It took a small number of intellectuals to provide the theory and then rally oppressed peasants behind them. The ruling class is the spark, but the underclass is the fuel. A strong middle class is the firewall.
“Our biggest challenge in the Arab and Muslim worlds is the lack of a viable moderate alternative. On the one hand, we have existing repressive governments that stay in power by force and suppression of basic human rights -- many of which we support, either with our oil money, like the Saudis, or with our foreign aid, like the Egyptians, who are our second largest recipient. On the other hand, we have radical Islamists, who are willing to fight dictators with terror tactics that moderates are too humane to use. This is how Iran went from the brutal Shah to the brutal Ayatollahs, despite all the Iranians who wanted a moderate government then and who want one now.
“We can’t ‘export’ democracy as if it was Coca Cola or KFC, but we can nurture native moderate forces in all these countries where Al Qaeda seeks to replace modern evil with medieval evil. This moderation may not look like or function exactly like our system, it may be more of a benevolent oligarchy, it may be more tribal than individualistic, but both for us and for the people of those countries, it will be better than either the dictatorships they have now or the theocracy they would have under the radical Islamists.
“We see this potential in the way Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq, who had been working with Al Qaeda, have now turned against them and are working with us. They couldn’t stand living under Al Qaeda’s fundamentalism and brutality. The people of Afghanistan turned against the Taliban for the same reason. To know these extremists is not to love them.
“My goal in the Muslim world is to correctly calibrate a course between maintaining stability and promoting democracy. It is self-defeating to try to accomplish too much too soon, you just have elections where extremists win, but it’s equally self-defeating to do nothing. First, we have to destroy the terrorists who already exist, then we have to attack the underlying conditions that breed terror, by helping to improve health and basic quality of life, create schools that offer an alternative to the extremist madrassas that turn impressionable children into killers, create jobs and opportunity and hope, encourage a free press, fair courts, and other institutions that promote democracy. We have to help other governments mount an active counter-insurgency wherever the terrorists are to be found, but we also have to help them improve their infrastructure to make future terrorists unwelcome. Our strategic interests as the world’s most powerful country coincide with our moral obligations as the world’s richest country. If we don’t do the right thing to make life better in the Islamic world, the terrorists will step in and do the wrong thing. (Continued)
Whoa! This line evokes memories of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" debacle.
Rebuilding Iraq's damaged infrastructure is one thing. Taking it upon ourselves to "make life better" for one billion Muslims as a matter of foreign policy is something else entirely.
Watch out for your pocketbooks.
LLS
LLS
Unfortunately many who call themselves Social Conservatives are in the same boat...
BTTT!
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LOL!
“At which point a Burkha would whisk over, grab the other boy by the arm and haul him away. Three out of three.
It ain’t because they haven’t been hugged. It’s because they have no desire to be hugged. Instead, they want to rule.”
This should satisfy most questions on the matter, as well as show Huckabee to be wrong for our country because he will sacrifice what is right in favor of political correctness.
Huckabee is too weak to be president.
Hillary.
Dennis Kucinich?
OK, you got three solid replies of valid criticism to Huckabee’s speech - from WOSG, JohnBovenmyer, and myself.
Care to reply to any of them?
Funny. I just ran into this post from googling Huckabee and Islam. I wanted to know how much he understood and whether he would make the same mistakes President Bush did looking for “moderate” Muslims to deal with in this country.
The first thing that came to mind when reading this piece was “I wonder who wrote it for him?” ;)
Perhaps that is because the first article I saw came from a February 10th AP article that said, “Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Friday warned that the country is at war with a perversion of Islam and that any bending of U.S. resolve will let the jihadists destroy America.”
Bad code words: “perversion of Islam.”
No it isn’t, Mike. It’s the real deal.
““Wonder who wrote this for him?”
“Very good question......then again, he probably did”
Somehow I doubt that. Mike has been so busy, he didn’t even have time to catch the news about the NIE.
Wow..this is really good. Almost reads like a think tank article.
“Wow..this is really good. Almost reads like a think tank article.”
More like wikipedia. Huckabee seems to think “radical” Islam has about as brief a history as Mormonism.
"The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It’s special also because the idea of liberty wasn’t fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti-Americans of the good-it-serves-America-right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!)"~From Anger and Pride by Oriana Fallaci.. Her first essay about the 9-11 attack
Ah! But Fallaci knew the fanaticism began with Muhammad and his followers.
No one said anything about condemning Muslims, but Islam itself is an ideology which can be condemned. There is no comparison between the goodness of Christ and the evil of Muhammad. There have been bad periods in Christianity by fanatics, for instance when Christians did horrible things during the Crusades (to regain what was taken during the first jihad), but brutal acts were condemned by various popes. King Ferdinand used a weak pope to retain power. Ferdinand was not a nice guy.
The point is that Islam, as per the Qur’an, is a pretty bigoted piece of work that lends itself to violence because that was its original intent - to subjugate all, especially Jews.
If Islam is to continue in any form, then it is time to shine the light of truth on its founder and rewrite the Qur’an.
Exactly..and we will never accomplish that, nor will we avoid WWW III, unless we somehow get our foot in the door in the Middle East. We won't do that by flushing Qur'ans down the toilet.
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