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
Read [the Koran] and be you own judge.
I don't think that's too much to ask.
Considering that the OT predates the Qu'ran by thousands of misogyinistic years, you might take note of Deborah the Judge and Esther the clever liberator of her people. Miriam, Zepphorah? Rahab the canny harlot was in the line of Christ. How about Ruth (also a pagan, and also in the line of Christ) and her independent mind? Leah and Rachel provided an object lesson of the struggle in a polygamist household, Sarah and Rebecca had thier own hearts and wills, and their personalities were clear in the old texts. They were PEOPLE, not concubines, little girls, objects of a prophet's self-justifying lust, or captive rape victims.
And in the New Testament, Christ ministered early and often to the women. Called one, "daughter of Abraham." Spoke out against exploitation of divorce...
Not exactly, "Talaq, talaq, talaq"--"I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you"--which was an innovation under the Koran to leave an unwanted wife helpless and destitute.
I've been doing some looking at Islam for the first time, myself. I see nothing approaching equivalence between the OT and the violence of the Koran. The closest thing to it was God's injuction to the conquering Hebrews to dispose of the pagan Canaanites swiftly and ruthlessly--and the Jews disobeyed. This was only one such directive, and it contained the promise that Israel held the divine deed to the Holy Land.
Perhaps we have the descendents of those pagans now to deal with, ourselves.
Religion, if one must believe in something, should be a personal matter, something one does in the privacy of his or her life, and not an institution or polics of conquest.
I wish he could have shown me which Gospel calls on the believers in Christ to kill, but I also know that believers in Christ took it upon themselves to interpret their "duty" to kill in the name of Christ on too many occasions.
I also find it somewhat perplexing that the Koran is the litteral word of God (voices!), yet it should be interpretted allegorically. How does one interpret allegorically Sura, Chapter 9?
Yes, but it took Paul's politics and gentle armstwisting to convince the Christian church in Israel to depart from Jewish rituals and make Christianity a world religion rather than a Jewish sect. I am not so sure Jesus intended to depart from Judaism.
Anyway, all this is intriguing because it's 21st century and we are still waging crusades over things that, to me at least, seem as wild fantasies more than anything else.
My only concern is that religious fanatics believe they are doing some God's work by killing people and I want to see such insanity stopped. I hope that when all the dust settles the world will abolish origanized religion and allow people to worship whatever they prefer in the privacy of their homes.
Christ was rather saying, "Don't expect sweetness and light in this mortal lifetime." He was warning his hearers that the earth was under a reign of darkness, which we clearly have evidence as truth.
We are being told that Islam is being perverted to the ends of a madman, but if you read the Koran in even a cursory way, the violence is clear. I don't see how it can be allegorized away. If Muslims are "moderate," they are very distant, indeed, from their religious text.
The absence of religion is not the answer you would appear to seek. Communism, which killed sixty million in one century, was non-religious.
Perhaps you seek a total absence of ideology? Then you would seek to defy the human nature even more than the Communists or the temptation of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil...
Mamzelle, is that in line with Christ's teachings? That is what someone who wrote the New testament, years after Jesus' death claims Jesus said.
The absence of religion is not the answer you would appear to seek. Communism, which killed sixty million in one century, was non-religious
I don't care if people pray to a Unicorn. That's their business. I have a problem with organized and institutionalized religion which is as far from that "personal relationship with God" as it can get. If religion is such a personal relationship with some imagined deity, then let it be just that -- personal, not public, not institutionalized. Let it be no different than any other personal relationship, or the private business in the confines of a home.
I have a problem with people who carry on "in God's name," the self-rigteous, self-appointed messangers of "God." We are in the 21st century and we are subjectedo to religious crusades. Religion resisted progress -- and still does. Take a look at religious countries -- Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. In Europe, religious auhtorities blamed the plague on the Jews, the Devil and "God squads" were burining 1,000 "witches" a year for 300 years in Europe, and the only reason why the Crusades did not kill sixty million is because there were not sixty million to kill and -- more importantly -- they didn't have the means!
Communism was not about atheism. It was anti-religious because the class struggle Marxism waged against the establishment was backed by organized religion, as part of that establishment. The only officially atheist communist country was Enver Hoxa's Albania.
Communism was repressive and brutal because its staunchest believers felt they were doing the "right (if not God's) thing." Socialism was, ironically -- like many religious movements, born as a "salvation." It evolved from liberal humanism of the early 19th century and it raised its voice against social injustices of the 19th century Industrial Revolution, the abominable work conditions of the labor class, child labor and women's lack of rights. Communism, or more correctly Marxism (Bolshevism in Russia), was a violent, rabbid "fundamentalist" offshoot of socialism. Its atheism was only coincidental, in context of the times, and wholy reactionary, but never the main driving force.
Communism, like all ism's, is/was a human notion. Your expectation of living in some universe where no *notions* have power over you or your liberty is a non-starter. Only life among machines would provide such a thing for you. People will forever be imposing values on others because they believe they know best what's good for you. It's what I call the fundamental of SELF-CONGRATULATION. Example: Hillary would do any cruelty that she could get away with because of her smug assurance that she is a "good guy" and, prima facie, must always perforce do the good thing. Even if she's putting you in prison...
In an imperfectible universerse, we are left with fallible reason/experience/proportion to decide about the superiority of one idea over another. Nothing, I assert, has proven itself through history and experience, as being as good for individuals (liberty and prosperity) as the Christian-influenced Hellenic Westerners.
If you'd like to attack an assertion that I have actually made, there's one for you.
Man's manture is to overpower, just as any other predatory animal. We have only added some of our "higher" goals. By pretending (and that's all religion really is) that the thoughts and ideas come from some god, and not from us, we justify our actions in the name of that god.
It's not about religion; it's about man's domination over mankind. It's not the goal, but the means that differ.
As for your assertion that "Nothing ... has proven itself through history and experience, as being as good for individuals (liberty and prosperity) as the Christian-influenced Hellenic Westerners", you are preaching to the choir. That's self-evident. All you have to do is read what the "competition" has to offer:
Hadith 001.002.028 The Prophet said: "I was shown the Hell-fire and that the majority of its dwellers were women who were ungrateful."
Hadith 001.006.301 "The women asked, "O Allah's Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?" He said, "Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?" They replied in the affirmative. He said, "This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn't it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?" The women replied in the affirmative. He said, "This is the deficiency in her religion."
Hadith 001.009.490 The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, "Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people)."
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