Posted on 09/14/2001 11:20:18 PM PDT by Billy_bob_bob
Is our enemy Terrorism or Islam?
By Billy_Bob_Bob.
I have been doing a whole lot of thinking about the sneak terror attack of September 11, 2001. I have been thinking about how the attack was waged, who did the attack, and the horrifying results of the attack.
How we got here no longer matters. The simple fact is that we are at war. The question remains, at war with what or whom? Are we at war with a nation? Are we at war with a band of pirates? Are we at war with an ideology?
I am personally convinced that this is nothing less than a clash of civilizations, civilizations that have been clashing for over a thousand years, and will continue to clash until one prevails over the other. The frightening conclusion that I keep coming back to is that we are at war with nothing less than Islam itself.
If this conclusion is correct, the consequences and ramifications of the approaching conflict will be breathtaking. I very much want to believe that we are not going to war against every Islamic nation on Earth, but I am very afraid that this is exactly what we are about to do.
I realize that every Islamic nation has issued strong denouncements of the terror attack, but I'm seeing nothing more than the flow of crocodile tears from their eyes and lies from their lips. When I see pictures of the spontaneous celebrations that broke out in Egypt, Palestine and who knows where else, I become convinced that all of Islam wants to see our nation in flames.
Considering how many billions of dollars we send to Egypt every year, to see their people dancing in the streets celebrating our suffering convinces me that they are not on our side, that they never have been, and they never will be. It is not much of a leap to suspect that if our so-called "ally" Egypt feels this way, then the other, less "moderate" Islamic nations out there can only harbor even more bitter feelings.
Furthermore, I am convinced that even if we start out carrying out a war against "terrorism", that this campaign will very quickly escalate into a war against Islam. In fact, it is my belief that the more effective our campaign against "terrorism" is, the more rapidly the conflict will escalate into a full-scale war against Islam.
I have found FreeRepublic to be a valuable source of information and intelligent analysis of current events. I would very much like to hear what other people have to say about this. I look forward to all of your inputs. Please try to keep the dialogue as civil as possible, since I know that we are talking about an extremely incendiary subject here. Thank you.
We will never forget or forgive the sneak terror attack of September 11, 2001.
There are many, many, many moderate Muslims. Most of the people itching to wage war on Islam as a whole are either
We need to view this as a war of liberation. We have to liberate Islam from the tenets of Fundamentalist Islam.
just kill em all
This is false as a matter of history. Islam broke up internally and did so relatively early, because as a single civilization it had made no stable arrangements for political rule, succession, and loyalty of a military to the political ruler. Later Islamic states did continue to expand by conquest where they could, and Islam as a whole also spread by conversions without conquests, especially south into Africa and east through Asia, both central and south. The Crusades occurred after the internal break up on the one hand, and did not halt the expansions on the other.
Externally and militarily, Islam was checked in the west at the battle of Tours in the 8th century AD. Advances on Vienna by the Turks - only one polity within Islam but a dominant one later on, in the middle east and southeast Europe - were not definitively turned back until the 18th century. They had not conquered Constantinople until the 15th century.
But the main issue in Islamic political history was internal break up. The first dynasty after the death of Muhammad was based in Syria and run by an Arab nobility enriched by the early conquests. It did not last because this aristocracy grew soft, ceasing to be military in nature, with more of the rigors of army duty falling to Persians (from what is north-eastern Iran today). A balancing act was attempted between Arab and Persians in the army. Eventually Turkic mercenaries and then slaves were brought in from central Asia in an effort to keep the Persian faction from dominating the army. The dynasty shifted to what is now Iraq, half-way between the Syrian and Persian heartlands. But the Turks proved uncontrollable in turn, and were soon setting up rulers on their own account, much like what happened with the Praetorian guard attempt in the case of Rome. Their puppets were not recognized by the western provinces, which broke away - Moorish north Africa and Fatamid Egypt. Islam was splintered into half a dozen states at the time of the first crusade.
The crusades produced an attempt to reunite portions of the Islamic world, which was only partially successful. Saladin, from a base in Syria, conquered Egypt and reunited much of what today we call the middle east. But never controlled north Africa or Spain (then Islamic of course). This base of power proved sufficient to repulse the crusaders - eventually. But the whole Islamic world east of Africa was then smashed to kindling by the Mongols, who remained animist at the time. In the aftermath of Ghengis, many of the successors converted to Islam and then fought among themselves for the spoils of his former empire. Tamerlane reunited the western portion of Ghengis' conquests, laying much of them waste in the process. After his death, the Moguls (a later Mongol-successor faction and Islamicized) took over the previous position in northern India (today Pakistan), while the Turks took over the western portion. The Turks continued to fight westward, the whole previous Islamic world ahead of them dissolving into conflicting warlords - except for Moorish Spain and north Africa.
In was in late medieval or early modern times that the "reconquista" drove the Moors from Spain, while at the same time the Turks drove the Byzantine Greeks from Asia Minor. Eventually the Turks took Constantinople - the last of the eastern Roman empire - and Castille and Aragon took Grenada, driving the Moors from Spain - both in the 15th century. That left the pattern that basically lasted down to the 19th century, with the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) controlling all of what today we'd call the Middle East, from Egypt to Iraq. The Turks pressed to the gates of Vienna more than once, in their long rivalry with Austria for control of the Balkans.
Then in the 19th century France took northwest Africa, Britain took Egypt and later Sudan to secure the Suez canal, important to their holdings in India. For a long time British policy supported the Ottomans to avoid Russian aggrandizement, notably in the Crimean war in the middle of the century. In WW I, however, the Ottomans backed the central powers and Britain took the occasion to lead an Arab revolt against Turkish dominion. As a result of which, the UK disposed of the Middle East effectively as it pleased in the aftermath of the war. France received Syria and Lebanon, and Britain allowed the Jews to settle in Palestine. The rest they gave to Arab kings of the house of Faisal (originally Syria too, but the French backed out and deposed that one).
This is hardly a picture of "only stopped by overwhelming force", or any unified monolith, or of a civilization that never brought in outsiders to settle internal power struggles. The central Asians were such outsiders originally. The British certainly were in the rivalry between Arab and Turk. They fought at least as many wars within as without.
Learn a little history before indulging such sweeping generalizations. You will discover what your own experience of mankind ought to tell you anyway, that it is always messier than that, and the natural tendency of most power blocks is to break apart for internal reasons, as soon as external movements, either way, slow down.
First the bible, and it's instruction to depopulate Canaan ...and then there is the way that most Christians conduct themselves....really peaceful...but able to change into a radical Nazi warrior if the mood hits right...mob mentality?...I don't know...cultural influence and pressure will turn a lot of so called 'peaceful' Christians into goosestepping Nazis in my opinion.
Would you take that seriously? Would it deserve to be taken seriously? All you have to know is a little bit about human nature to know it is ludicruous.
But does the silliness of the parallel line above mean there never were any Nazis on the soil of historic Christendom? No. Does it mean that ideology wasn't extremely dangerous, and worth resisting, and resisting by force because nothing else would serve? Again, no.
There is a real problem in the Islamic world today. They have an international political faction with followings in many countries, that is a truly nasty ideology, and in its impotence that faction resorts to external terrorism, in order to score internal points for audacity and defiance. This is very dangerous because it means there is nothing outsiders can do that would end the attacks, except to root out and defeat that ideology.
It is an unappeaseable hostility - that part of your perception is quite accurate. It just isn't the only, or even the majority, view, in most Islamic countries today. Any more than the extreme and truly dangerous ideologies of the 20th century in Europe were equivalent to the whole civilization of Christendom.
I do not expect any State in the Islamic world to overtly support our efforts to punish bin Laden and his lieutenants and thugs. But I have a sneaking suspicion that we will receive covert assistance. Bin Laden is a loose cannon even for that region. It appears he has been running a terroristic protection racket against "moderate" regimes, and I think most of the political and religious leaders in that sphere would be pleased as punch if he were gone. He's like Albert Anastasia during his "Murder Incorporated" spree ... a liability to even the most fervent believers in the "cause".
The audacity of this week's evil attack must have shocked the leaders of every Islamic state around the world. No matter which of the four groups you highlighted they belong in. I imagine initial reaction of the Taliban leaders to the attacks was something the Afghani equivalent of "oh sh*t! Here it comes."
It is very interesting indeed, as are your subsequent posts. I certainly hope you've opened some eyes and dispelled some misconceptions about a monolithic Islamic world.
Our war must be against the evil satanic wing of Islam. If a Moslem is good then they will want to help us eliminate the evil destructive ones. There can't be any ambivalence now, they are either with us or against us.
I'm wondering about the actual statistics of this. Has there ever been a survey to determine how many people,broken down country by country, support the more radical parts of Islam? It seems that even if the Islamists are a minority in these problem countries, it doesn't matter. The Islamists are in control and they will be for the forseeable future. This is what we are forced to deal with.
Could one make this point about Christianity? Of course, but there are significant differences. One is the fact that Christianity does have a central authority, which can trace its lineage to Peter. Even while this is rejected by some Christians, it does (and always did) function as a locus for some governing authority and also imposes a certain uniformity. Islam, to my knowledge, does not have this. Judaism does not have it, either, but on the other hand, Judaism is not a prosletysing religion. Either you're born into it or you're not. But Islam is a prosletysing religion which lacks a central doctrinal authority and any type of central control or even point of appeal.
The other is that in Christianity, the relationship between the Church and the State has been a matter of discussion since very early on. It has also been the cause of many wars and bloody disputes in which kings and the Church constantly attempted to define (and then exceed) the limits of their power. However, it has been a subject of discussion and the matter has been more or less worked out; again, to my knowledge, this is not so in the case of Islam.
One thing that has not been mentioned anywhere is the strange alliance that has cropped up in some places between varieties of Islamic fundamentalism and a very hard-line type of Marxism. I have always felt the fact that many of the most radical Marxist terrorist groups are known to have trained in the Middle East and have Middle Eastern connections is something that we, in our delight at the collapse of the Soviet Union, completely overlooked. In general, I feel that the only way the West can be said to be responsible for any of this is that we have been blissfully ignoring all of the warning flags that have long been fluttering in various parts of the globe. Perhaps knowledgeable contributions such as that of JasonC will give us some indication of how to respond to this new (but very old) reality.
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