Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

This war is not about terror, it's about Islam
The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 10/07/2001 | David Selbourne

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


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS:
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-93 next last

1 posted on 10/06/2001 5:14:11 PM PDT by Pokey78
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Yep -- 'frad so!
2 posted on 10/06/2001 5:40:00 PM PDT by RAY
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
I suggest anyone willing to comment on this should read the Koran first.

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.

3 posted on 10/06/2001 5:42:22 PM PDT by kosta50
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
“Relentlessly and Thoroughly” - Historian Paul Johnson Analysis of Islamic Warriors Throughout History
4 posted on 10/06/2001 5:47:36 PM PDT by Fred
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: kosta50
I've read it, or at least, segments of it. I also was involved in a project that required me to read the Hadith, which, according to the authoritative "Introduction to Islam," is considered to be the spiritual equivalent to the Koran. Betcha didn't know that.

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.

5 posted on 10/06/2001 5:57:36 PM PDT by LS
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Fred
Paul Johnson's article is a must-read. Islam may be capable of "moderation" in the Western world as a "minority" religion, but as long as it's dominated by wahhabi fanatics, it poses a serious threat to all of civilization.
6 posted on 10/06/2001 5:57:42 PM PDT by ikanakattara
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: LS
if you really want to contort the message

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?

7 posted on 10/06/2001 6:21:01 PM PDT by kosta50
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: LS
There's an additional consideration, as this article hints when the writers says that the first thing to go out the window in wartime is the truth. Namely, we need to use every propaganda weapon at our disposal, and one of the most important tools is "divide et impere," divide and conquer. We certainly need to do whatever we can to divide Shiite Muslims from Sunni Muslims, educated Muslims from uneducated, Wahabis from moderates, and so forth. But we all wonder, I am sure, whether Islam is not an intrinsically violent religion, a religion of implacable conquest--which is what a thousand years of history suggest, regardless of how "civilized" some of the ancient caliphs and Islamic philosophers may have been.

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.

8 posted on 10/06/2001 6:24:12 PM PDT by Cicero
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 5 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Good post, we need to fight whoever is fighting us. That's what self defense is all about
9 posted on 10/06/2001 6:41:41 PM PDT by spycatcher
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Cogent and to the point. Would that President Bush would read it.
10 posted on 10/06/2001 6:48:41 PM PDT by father_elijah
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Comment #11 Removed by Moderator

To: Pokey78
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.

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.

12 posted on 10/06/2001 7:02:04 PM PDT by pgkdan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: father_elijah
The article as posted mostly makes sense, except for his little crack about the "near-genocide of Muslims in Bosnia". Anybody who has read about the very successful propaganda coup carried out by the Muslims in the Serbian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina (and their allies in the American media) is aware of how the Muslims were able to lie to the world -- using such tools as the picture of the tuberculosis victim standing OUTSIDE a fence. portrayed as a victim of starvation by the Serbs INSIDE a fence, and going on from there to the Bosnian Muslim government shelling theri own people as at the Markale marketplace (to incite calls for NATO to bomb the Serbs in supposed "retaliation") and the US being immediately ready to blame it on the Serbs without any proof whatsoever.

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.

13 posted on 10/06/2001 7:03:46 PM PDT by wildandcrazyrussian
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: kosta50
Contrary to some not-so-authoritative officials, I don't find it peaceful, forgiving and kind, unless you are already a Muslim.

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.

14 posted on 10/06/2001 7:04:29 PM PDT by pgkdan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
I thought it was about murder.
15 posted on 10/06/2001 7:08:03 PM PDT by Letitring
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
My father is an expert on Islam. This post is right on the money. But, as usual, almost no one is listening (or reading).
16 posted on 10/06/2001 7:08:37 PM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: wildandcrazyrussian
Yes. I quite agree. Folks should read the Bosniak Muslim Alija Ali Izetbegovic's writing. He has some pretty genocidal ideas of his own, and he was the former President of Bosnia. I read recently that he was a friend of Osama bin Laden, but I cannot recall the source.
17 posted on 10/06/2001 7:12:12 PM PDT by father_elijah
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: kosta50
The question to ask a Moslem is whether he worships the same God as Osama. If he answers yes then he is also the enemy.
18 posted on 10/06/2001 7:16:58 PM PDT by Mike Darancette
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Mike Darancette
Also, another good question to ask them is if they would like to see the USA turned into an Islamic State, if they would like to see their Sharia become the law of this land.
19 posted on 10/06/2001 7:20:57 PM PDT by GuillermoX
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: Pokey78
Moreover, of the seven nations on the State Departments list of terrorist nations, five are Islamic.

FINALLY!! Finally someone just out and says it. Those SOBs are out to get us, always have been, always will be!

20 posted on 10/06/2001 7:29:31 PM PDT by Anamensis
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-93 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson