Posted on 08/17/2014 7:24:16 AM PDT by Innovative
For decades, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been to support “moderates.” The problem is that there are actually very few of them. The Arab world is going through a bitter, sectarian struggle that is “carrying the Islamic world back to the Dark Ages,” said Turkish President Abdullah Gul. In these circumstances, moderates either become extremists or they lose out in the brutal power struggles of the day. Look at Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya and the Palestinian territories.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Where does the Islamic State’s fetish with beheading people come from?
Our generational struggle against a poisonous ideology
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, David Cameron warns of terrorist caliphate on the shores of the Mediterranean if Islamic State succeeds.
“Because if we do not act to stem the onslaught of this exceptionally dangerous terrorist movement, it will only grow stronger until it can target us on the streets of Britain. We already know that it has the murderous intent.”
Just went to the CAIR website. As you might expect, not a word about ISIS on the home page. I admittedly didn’t search the site-I was too creeped out just being there.
There maybe moderate muslims; there is no moderate Islam.
LA Times discovers the REAL reason for terrorism — it’s all caused by climate change!
The road from beggar to Islamist militant in Nigeria
http://www.latimes.com/world/africa/la-fg-nigeria-economy-boko-haram-20140817-story.html#page=1
“Meanwhile, Lake Chad and its fishing catch began to shrink, caused by overuse and climate change.”
It is long past time to put Islam in the same box with totalitarian ideologies like Naziism and Communism.
One of the greatest miscalculations in human history, the search for democracy and the Islamic moderate in the Middle East. It just doesn’t exist, and probably never will, at least in my lifetime. If I was put in charge for do overs, Afghanistan would have been handed over to the local warlords, all on the CIA payroll. Iraq would have had two options, one, make a deal with Saddam to fight the War on Terror on our side. With the right carrots it could have been done. Second, after overthrowing Saddam, install another Baathist thug as dictator, except he does our bidding, of course for a handsome fee in a Swiss bank account of his choice. In many ways this is what we did during the Cold War, and guess what we WON.
ping!
The idea of the 1990s agreements was to “Create Moderates” by having the Palestinians teach their children that Jews were humans too, and deserved to be treated like humans.
The Palestinians, of course, IGNORED those agreements and continued with their hated-filled teaching. The rest of the world knew what was going on, but looked the other way, treated it like a “phase” that the Palestinians were going through and therefore didn’t have much meaning.
The hate-teaching worked, now Israel has to fight those SAME CHILDREN.
Moderate Muslims are apostates. Or they are simply "cultural Muslims" who don't really believe in the faith, but go along, because frankly they like to keep their heads.
“Moderate” Muslims are MINOs.
> said Turkish President Abdullah Gul
Yeah, good one.
Gul founded the Islamofascist party running Turkey; he’s served as their faux-secularist figleaf during the period between the founding and the alteration of the Turkish constitution by his party, which allowed Erdogan to ascend to the PM.
Erdogan brooks no rivals, and shoved him aside. There’s been a controversy for months about whether Gul would become PM, or a puppet of Erdogan would be made PM. IOW, whether Turkey would start to have a dictatorship with some windowdressing, like the dictator Putin uses in Russia. The reality is, there was never much doubt that Erdogan would win this one.
Gul also gave a speech saying that Islamophobia was a big problem in the world; he was in favor of breaking relations with Israel, and (while he won’t say so explicitly) opposes Israel’s right to exist. My hope is that Erdogan has him snuffed and everyone knows Erdogan did it — IOW, not unlike Hitler’s purge of Rohm et al. It’s past time for the mask to fall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_G%C3%BCl
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17992010
A significant portion of the FSA left and joined ISIS recently.
How was that even possible if they were really “moderate” to begin with...
"Over 38,000 people recently participated in a global survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The results constitute the first publication of its Global Attitudes Project entitled ‘What the World Thinks in 2002.’ The survey included the following questions, posed only to Muslims:
Some people think that suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies. Other people believe that, no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified?
Before we look at the results of this study, we should appreciate the significance of the juxtaposed phrases ‘suicide bombing’ and ‘civilian targets.’ We now live in a world in which Muslims have been scientifically polled (with margins of error ranging from 2 to 4 percent) as to whether they support (‘often,’ ‘sometimes,’ rarely,’ or ‘never’) the deliberate murder and maiming of noncombatant men, women, and children in defense of Islam. Here are some of the results of the Pew study (not all percentages sum to 100):
"If you do not find these numbers sufficiently disturbing, consider that places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were not included in the survey. Had they been, it is safe to say, the Lebanese would have lost their place at the top of the list several times over. Suicide bombing also entails suicide , of course, which most Muslims believe is expressly forbidden by God. Consequently, had the question been ‘Is it ever justified to target civilians in defense of Islam,’ we could expect even greater Muslim support for terrorism.
"But the Pew results are actually bleaker than the above table indicates. A closer look at the data reveals that the pollsters skewed their results by binning the responses ‘rarely justified’ and ‘never justified’ together, thus giving a false sense of Muslim pacifism. Take another look at the data from Jordan: 43 percent of Jordanians apparently favor terrorism, while 48 percent do not. The problem, however, is that 22 percent of Jordanians actually responded ‘rarely justified,’ and this accounts for nearly half of their ‘No’ responses. ‘Rarely justified’ still means that under certain circumstances, these respondents would sanction the indiscriminate murder of noncombatants (plus suicide), not as an accidental by-product of a military operation, but as its intended outcome. A more accurate picture of Muslim tolerance for terrorism emerges when we focus on the percentage of respondents who could not find it in their hearts to say ‘never justified’ (leaving aside the many people who still lurk in the shadows of ‘Don’t Know/Refused’). If we divide the data in this way, the sun of modernity sets even further over the Muslim world:
"These are hideous numbers. If all Muslims had responded as Turkey did (where a mere 4 percent think suicide bombings are ‘often’ justified, 9 percent ‘sometimes,’ and 7 percent ‘rarely’), we would still have a problem worth worrying about; we would, after all, be talking about more than 200 million avowed supporters of terrorism. But Turkey is an island of ambassadorial goodwill compared with the rest of the Muslim world.
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