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
Contrary to some not-so-authoritative officials, I don't find it peaceful, forgiving and kind, unless you are already a Muslim. Rather I find it accusatory and full of anger. That's my impression, having read it. Read and be you own judge.
If you read the Hadith, it makes YOUR point even stronger, though not airtight. The Prophet PERSONALLY ordered the horrible death and mutilation of people who so much as stole a camel (Jesus said of His killers, "forgive them Father, for they know not what they do"). The Hadith is the writings about Muhammad, and what he said and did, by those closest to him---sort of like the Gospels except for the "red letters." He had multiple slaves (Jesus didn't have a slave, but rather preached freedom); he had multiple wives and said women had only a fraction of the brain of a male; he sinned and admitted that he would continue to sin (Jesus was sinless); and he preached holy war against infidels.
LIKE CHRISTIANITY, if you really want to contort the message, you can. In this case, if you really want to misinterpret the overall message, you can get "peace" out of the Koran. But if you apply principles of consistency (what's called in the Bible "in the mouths of two or three witnesses"), then Islam looks to me like a violent religion.
However, we must be very careful with this, and we only need look as far as Israel: Israel is anything BUT an Old Testament theocracy. Modern-day Israel is dominated by so-called "reform Jews." I would guess that 90% of American Jews are "reform Jews." That is to say, they do not accept the most basic teachings of their "holy book" the Torah. So our question with Islam is, are the vast majority of Muslims "reform Muslims" (backslidden Baptists, as we used to say of my church, or "Jack Mormons" in LDS circles), or are they "devout." If they are "devout," and if, as I suspect, Islam is indeed a violent religion, then the author is substantially right.
But the "core" message never changes. The more you are a to-the-letter "believer" the worse you become. As far as the Jews are concerned, I don't know about the reformed, conervative, Hassidic, etc. No idea what theological diffferences exist between them. Don't care either. But the fact is the the OT treats women as gullable and guilty of sin just as the Koran does. I detest all religious "fundamentalists," but absolutely despise "reformed" or "attenuated," or "protesting" believers -- people who spiced up their religious beliefs to make them into something less ridiculous than what the holy books make them.
Christianity and Judaism (two worlds apart) are separate subjects. From what I gather, Islam is the only major religion that professes conversion (submission) by force and treats anyone who is a non-believer, a Pagan (or a Jew) as less then human.
But thenkas for the info. I will look up Hadith. Have a link perhaps?
For seventy years the Communists conquered region after region of the world, and never gave any of what they had conquered back, until Solidarity and the fall of the Berlin Wall brought down the Soviet Union. But the Muslims have been doing it for more than a thousand years. They went into decline with the fall of the Turkish Empire, but even then they did not relinquish any substantial populations or territories. Now they are back in business again.
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.
Waging a war on "terror" is the height of stupidity. The author says that our leaders haven't admitted to us what this war is really about. I wonder if they've admitted to themselves what it's all about.
General Satish Nambiar, head of NATO forces during that time, estimated that the entire Bosnian civil war cost the lives of 60,000 to 80,000 people (of 2,800,000, or 3%), HALF of whom were Serbs native to Bosnia. ANybody who writes that there was anything remotely resembling a "near-genocide"of Muslims needs to learn how to some simple research.
That's exactly the point I 've been making. Moslem literature paints a utopian picture of the world where the entire world is islamic...until that day they will fight the kafir to the death. I hope we're ready for what lies ahead.
FINALLY!! Finally someone just out and says it. Those SOBs are out to get us, always have been, always will be!
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