Posted on 10/06/2001 5:14:11 PM PDT by Pokey78
THE war of the hour, we are told, is against "global terrorism". So declared President Bush in his speech to Congress on September 20 and Tony Blair in his oration to his Party Conference last week. It is nothing of the sort.
The Soviet Union was once the evil empire challenging the West. Now it is the resurgence, or insurgency, of Islam that looms over the non-Islamic world. The momentum of the Islamic revival has been gathering pace at least since the 1950s. Yet the West's justified fear of this resurgence and a desire to avoid offence to the Islamic faith have had our leaders treading on eggshells over the events of September 11.
The hostile engagement between Islam and the West has not been in doubt for years. Thus, when Baroness Thatcher reminds us that it was Muslims who brought down the World Trade Centre, and Muslim spokesmen express their outrage that anyone should relate the act to Muslims, it is hard to know whether to laugh or weep.
Our very declaration of war - against the "global terror" - is itself bogus. There is no war to declare. There has been a war on for decades. It has included savage hostilities among Muslims (as within Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq, and so on) but, more pertinently for us, between Islamists and the West. Russia and China have been caught up in it too.
When President Bush announced his National Missile Defence Programme, citing the risk of attack from "rogue states", it was not North Korea he had in mind but those Islamic countries with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons already acquired, or being acquired. Moreover, of the seven nations on the State Departments list of terrorist nations, five are Islamic.
With New York skyscrapers turned to rubble and thousands dead, there have been few boundaries, whether of territory or moral principle, of method of combat or falsification of word, that have not been transgressed on this battlefield. Yet taboo, a false tact and short-term memory loss serve between them to cloud our knowledge of what is afoot. US and British bombers patrol Iraqi airspace, Israeli forces carry out assaults in Gaza and the West Bank, and President Clinton launched missile attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan without the declaration of war. There has been no need.
There have been many other wars since 1945 that have nothing to do with Islam. But from the 1950s, and especially once the fall of Communism in 1989-1991 had freed the Muslim states of the Soviet bloc from their straitjackets, Islam has taken the lead in anti-Western activity politically, religiously and militarily. It has brandished guns in one hand and sacred texts in another, demonising America, Zionism and Christianity. But from an explicable desire not to include in our objections "the good Muslim" - of whom there are millions - we avoid saying what we know and fear.
Nevertheless, there are few areas in the world, from the Caucasus to Kashmir, from the Moluccas to Manhattan, from Tunisia to Tanzania, that have not suffered from the Islamic convulsion. In previous upsurges Islam gained an empire from the Indus to the Pyrenees. It created the aesthetic glories and sufferings of Islamic Spain, and brought the Turks and their Ottoman Empire to the gates of Vienna.
Black-masked, flag-burning Islamist militants are hard to connect with their predecessors who created the Alhambra in Granada or Seville's Alcazar, and with the great Islamic philosophers of the Middle Ages, the friends and intellectual peers of Christian and Jewish sages of those times. The "good Muslim" may take his moral distance from hijackings, inter-Muslim brutalities, the blowing-up of embassies, book-burning and so on. But the fount of Islamic energy, of its destructiveness and high aspiration, are the same as they have always been: the desire to protect the purity of the Islamic faith and to vindicate its claim to be the final revealed religion on earth.
Islamophobia has exacted a brutal toll in reprisal for Islamic violence. This includes the shooting down by the US of an Iranian airliner in July 1998, the assassinations carried out by the Israelis, the savaging of Muslim Chechnya by the Russians, the hangings of Islamists in Xinjiang by the Chinese - still continuing - the coalition turkey-shoot of the Iraqi army after its retreat from Kuwait and the near-genocide of Muslims in Bosnia.
But then this is war, undeclared as may be. It has already taken a bewildering variety of forms and struck in many places. In 1972, Israeli athletes were murdered by Islamist militants at the Munich Olympics. The attempt on the Pope's life was made by a Turk whose controllers remain unknown. A Libyan plot brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988. In February 1989, the Iranian fatwah against Salman Rushdie was pronounced by Khomeini. In Sudan, Muslim sharia law was introduced by the Islamist government in 1991 and civil war has raged between Muslim north and Christian south ever since.
The upheavals provoked by the resurgence have taken millions of lives. The Sudanese civil war and famine have led to some two million deaths. The Biafran civil war in 1967 in Nigeria between the dominant Muslim majority and Christian Ibo immigrants killed some one million people. Even the largely unheard-of 1991 Tajikistan civil war, provoked by Islamist secessionists, caused tens of thousands of dead.
In addition to the corpses in this war have been refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers. Millions have fled the Islamic world; some three-quarters of the world's migrants in the last decade are said to have been Muslims. They have been variously escaping sharia law, inter-Muslim conflict, economic chaos, Muslim-Christian violence and, not least, anti-Muslim aggression. Escapees, victims, scapegoats, malefactors and "sleepers" awaiting their moment, they signify that an aroused and angered Islam is on the move.
For politicians simply to call all this "terror", and to promise to extirpate it with precision strikes and the denial of funds is a folly. As the equivocations of Saudi Arabia and a nuclear-armed Pakistan reveal, the Islamic nations know that it is the resurgence of Islam not "terrorism" which has prompted the West's call to action. These nations cannot afford to support this call wholeheartedly, no more than can any "good Muslim" spokesman in Britain, whatever Baroness Thatcher may expect of them.
In every war, the first casualty is said to be truth. In this one, our politicians have not even begun to admit to us what it is really about.
David Selbourne is author of The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of the Civic Order
the nwo and its number one ally, islam.
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In every war, the first casualty is said to be truth. In this one, our politicians have not even begun to admit to us what it is really about.
Let the wars begin.....
I understand almost all of them hate us; many of them want to destroy western civilization; many of them want to kill us, gang-rape our daughters, enslave our sons, and impose their vision of Islamic utopia upon the unenlightened masses world-wide. (In all fairness, there might be five or six muslims living in the U.S. who don't really feel that way about us.)
They're almost as big a threat to us as ALL the Democrats, half the Republicans, all the statist bureacrats, and all the other home-grown aspiring tyrant-wannabees.
But we can work with these people; we can negotiate with them -- get them to see the benefits of living in a democracy (where you only have to brainwash 50 percent plus one to get your way, on their dime). We can show them how to establish a system where you don't have to personally get involved when you want someone dead: you just join the majority party, then send out professional guys-with-guns to burn and pillage in the name of the majority. You can demonize your enemies beforehand to generate a positive media image for the campaign, limit the targets to the small groups and individuals on your list, then move on to other groups and individuals as needed.
It's so immature and unprofessional to blow up people and buildings indiscriminately, without the proper segregating and demonizing required for nearly full public support for your actions. These Jihad critters have so much to learn about this business.
It's so immature and unprofessional to blow up people and buildings indiscriminately, without the proper segregating and demonizing required for nearly full public support for your actions. These Jihad critters have so much to learn about this business.
I have to congratulate you for writing the single most cynical thing I have ever read
We were very much impressed with the extraordinary response of the ordinary people of New York after the disasters.
God Bless Americans.
Oh, I know! As long as you do exactly what they tell you, they really are the nicest folks you'll ever be assassinated by!
ROTFL!
I must have read a different Bible!
I hate to burst your bubble, but these terrorists have been living in western democracies for years--England, France, Germany, and the US, just counting the time until they can set off the next bomb. Tasting and experiencing freedom first hand didn't even help them see the light. It only made them hate us more. As Ken Hamblin often says, two diametrically opposed cultures cannot occupy the same space. I have no intention of giving them mine.
Islamophobia has exacted a brutal toll in reprisal for Islamic violence. This includes the shooting down by the US of an Iranian airliner in July 1998, the assassinations carried out by the Israelis, the savaging of Muslim Chechnya by the Russians, the hangings of Islamists in Xinjiang by the Chinese - still continuing - the coalition turkey-shoot of the Iraqi army after its retreat from Kuwait and the near-genocide of Muslims in Bosnia.
The thing that's going to help me sleep is not going to happen until a lot more people come to the realization that Mr. Selbourne is speaking the ugly truth. I'm afraid that we're about a dozen attacks and a million dead away from coming to that realization. Even then, I wonder if we'll have the stomach for what must be done.
People are in effect saying about bin laden "It's okay, he's Islamic, it's what he has to do, it's his religion".
IT'S NOT OKAY!!!! The man is a psychopath!
When Christians blow up abortion clinics or federal buildings with daycare centers, people aren't saying "oh it says in the bible that one must blow up abortion clinics". People label these nuts as pyschopaths and terrorists, and you have to do the same with bin laden and the talliban, okay?? You can't blame it on their religion, because your giving them an excuse to do what they do.
I have no such bubble to burst.
I know they have been coming here, and to Europe, in droves for many years. Basic arithmetic would suggest that thousands of Really Bad Guys (TM) are included in those millions.
Aside from them, we also have tons of native-born critters, from both sides of the political aisle, who hate America and the U.S. Constitution as much as Islam does. That is the point I was trying to make. Sorry you missed it.
LOL. It seems the more years that pass, the more cynical I get. Or could it be termed wisdom
My bad :( Sorry.
The OT and Talmud are a must reading too. Too many things from there are not very compatible with the Christian way of thinking either.
However, the difference between the OT and the Koran are apples and oranges.
But why take my word for it? Let me give our less informed readers a "taste" of this (under the heading the Ultimatum):
[9:5] Once the Sacred Months are past, (and they refuse to make peace) you may kill the idol worshipers when you encounter them, punish them, and resist every move they make. If they repent and observe the Contact Prayers (Salat) and give the obligatory charity (Zakat), you shall let them go. GOD is Forgiver, Most Merciful.
[9:111] GOD has bought from the believers their lives and their money in exchange for Paradise. Thus, they fight in the cause of GOD, willing to kill and get killed. Such is His truthful pledge in the Torah, the Gospel, and the Quran - and who fulfills His pledge better than GOD? You shall rejoice in making such an exchange. This is the greatest triumph.
Gospel teaches to kill in the cause of God? Speaking of the devil...
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