Radical Islam Rising

[Johnny Yuma]

Radical Islam Rising
One percent of one billion is a lot.
By Arnaud de Borchgrave

In a truly free election in Saudi Arabia with the royal family on the sidelines bereft of the divine right of kings, and Osama Bin Laden as a candidate for prime minister, the world’s most wanted terrorist would win hands down. So spoke, albeit privately, one of the most important non-royals who manages a big chunk of the royal family’s portfolio of financial assets.
Bin Laden, a member of a powerful and rich as Croesus non-royal family, is seen by countless millions of fundamentalist Muslims as the successor of several famous Islamic theologians going back all the way to Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya. Born in AD 1269 , Taymiyya was prolix on jihad (holy war) against transgressors of the word of Allah as conveyed by the Prophet. This contemporary of Dante elevated jihad to the same level as the “five pillars” of Islam—prayer, pilgrimage, alms, faith (“No God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet”), and Ramadan.
The Age of Sacred Terror is a remarkable new book by two of the Clinton White House’s counter-terrorist directors that delves into the roots of militant Islam and its jihad duties. Anyone who opposes jihad is an enemy of God.
“By asserting that jihad against apostates within the realm of Islam is justified—by turning jihad inward and reforging it into a weapon for use against Muslims as well as infidels—- [Taymiyya] planted a seed of revolutionary violence in the heart of Islamic thought,” wrote co-authors Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon.
These two experts argue correctly it was precisely the weapon of jihad that heavily armed Muslim extremists turned to when they invaded and occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979. The House of Saud was momentarily paralyzed; they could not send security forces into the most sacred site in all of Islam with orders to shoot it out with the jihadists in the tunnels around the mosque. The royals turned to the French for help. The tunnels were flooded and high voltage cables dropped into the water. Most of the jihadis drowned or were electrocuted.
Any leader of a Muslim country who does not rule according to a strict interpretation of the sharia (Islamic law) is fair game for jihadis, as jihadi-in-chief Taymiyya ordained. It was Taymiyya’s fatwa (religious decree) in 1303 against Mongol invaders and occupiers that turned the tide against Mongols who had converted to Islam.
If Taymiyya was Osama’s first role model, the second was Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, born in 1703 in Arabia, then a remote, neglected part of the Ottoman Empire. He was steeped in the works of Taymiyya that became religious pillars of back-to-basics Wahhabism. Its creed was that “innovation” was a grave sin against Islam. Takfir was proclaimed, which meant innovators were to be put to death.
Wahhab, allied with a local sheikh, Muhammad ibn Saud, fought to restore a strict interpretation of the faith. By the time he died in 1792, Wahhabism had conquered most of central Arabia.
The descendants of al-Wahbab and Ibn Saud continued this close alliance of religious zeal and territorial conquest—and forced the rest of the Arabian peninsula into zealous compliance.
Key modern-day literary firebrands on the side of Muslim revolutionary fervor included Abu al-Ala Maududi and Rashid Rida. They linked Islam with the rhetoric of communism and fascism, which is one of the keys to the success of Islamist extremists in the Oct. 10 elections in Pakistan.
A similar fusion occurred in Iran in the late 1970s when the ayatollahs and the underground Tudeh (Communist) party merged their efforts to undermine and overthrow the shah.

.....continued

[Johnny Yuma]

On Jan. 26, 1952, the fiery Muslim Brotherhood suddenly exploded on the Cairo scene by burning down some 300 buildings. King Farouk survived six more months until a military coup of “Free Officers,” led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, abolished the monarchy and allowed the king to sail on his yacht into comfortable exile in Monte Carlo.
The chief theoretician of the Muslim Brothers was Sayyid Qutb, who wrote non-stop during his desert imprisonment by Nasser. Hanged in 1965, his books are still bestsellers throughout the Middle East. His manifesto, Signposts, merged all the essential elements of revolutionary Islamism.
Qutb’s views of America—derived from his stay in Greeley, Colo., while working on a master’s in education—are widely shared today throughout radical Islam, and presumably derived from his works. Repelled by America’s admiration for Israel, as well as the licentiousness and racism that pervaded the country, he decried American culture as foul and empty.
From Yasser Arafat’s attempt to take over Jordan in September 1970 (dubbed Black September) and overthrow King Hussein, to the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, Sayyid Qutb’s outpourings provided the rationale to kill America’s puppets.
The other branch of militant Islam sprang from anti-colonial sentiment in British-ruled India in mid-19th century. Known as Dar ul-Ulum (Realm of Learning), it took root at Deoband, in Uttar Pradesh. Deobandism, dedicated to the salafi conception of Islam, and Wahhabism are the two wings of Islamist fanaticism that continue to vie for influence in present-day Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Ninety-nine percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims are moderate and see jihad as a self-cleansing process to get back on the path of spiritual excellence. Presidents Mubarak, Musharraf, Ben Ali (Tunisia), Kings Abdullah II of Jordan, Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed VI of Morocco, and other moderate Muslim leaders, all have told this reporter in the past two years that Islamist extremists are no more than 1 percent of their population.
When we reminded Musharraf that one percent of 140 million is 1.4 million, he said, “you’re right, but I’d never thought of it that way.” Now he realizes it’s a lot more than one percent as politico-religious extremists won the provincial government in the Northwest Frontier Province adjacent to Afghanistan, a share of the Baluchistan government, and 20 percent of the seats in the new national parliament.
One percent of 1.2 billion is 12 million Muslim fanatics who believe America is the Great Satan, fount of all evil, to be attacked and demolished. Whether al-Qaeda is centralized as it was before 9/11 or decentralized, as it appears to be after Bali and Mombassa, is immaterial. Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion. From Sweden (660,000 Muslims out of 5.8 million people) to Switzerland (also 10 percent), Senegal and Somalia in Africa, Sumatra and Singapore in Asia, and South America (especially Brazil and Venezuela), there are Wahhabi and Deobandi mosques. And that’s just the countries beginning with the letter S.
Islamist terrorist groups have plenty of places to hide—from the tri-border area of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay where camps have been reported, to Colombia (where FARC terrorists have been hiding for 38 years), to Somalia in Africa, to Sumatra in Indonesia, Mindanao in the Philippines, even remote areas of the United States where radical Muslims were located, ostensibly engaged in peaceful pursuits.
Muslims are a majority in 63 countries. Of the 30 conflicts now under way in the world, 28 concern Muslim governments or communities. Amir Taheri, an Iranian author and journalist, says two-thirds of the world’s political prisoners are held in Muslim countries, which also carry out 80 percent of all executions each year.

....continued

[Johnny Yuma]

Most imams in the thousands of mosques in European countries can preach anti-U.S. and anti-Saudi-royal-family sermons with impunity. They carefully refrain from attacking the host country because intelligence services are probably listening. In Washington, D.C.’s principal Saudi-administered mosque, the imam gives politics a wide berth. Many diplomats friendly to the United States usually attend Friday prayers. Vehement anti-U.S. tirades, however, are average Friday fare throughout the Muslim world. Imams do pretty much their own thing. Islam has no pope, no pictures of the Prophet, and no simulated portraits of Allah, who is genderless. Hate-mongers among the radical clergy use western freedoms in order to denounce them.
Many of the imams in America’s 2,000-plus principal mosques (for a population of five million Muslims) are recently naturalized U.S. citizens who were sent over as missionaries from both Iran and Saudi Arabia.
We are spreading the good word of our faith in America,” said the imam at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, who came over from Iran ten years ago, “just as you send Christian missionaries to sub-Sahara Africa.” He also chided his interlocutor for dismissing his contention that 9/11 was a combined operation by the CIA and Mossad.
Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who is now serving a life sentence in the United States for his part in the World Trade Center truck bombing in 1993, is revered by Muslim radicals the world over.
Vatican sources concede they have been steadily losing ground in Africa to “the Muslim penetration” for the past 30 years.
In Pakistan, a friendly allied country at the Musharraf-Bush level, flat-earth clerics who educated the Taliban leaders have refused any reform of the madrassas, the Koranic schools that inculcate the fundamental belief that America and Israel are the new crusaders hell-bent on destroying Islam. They proselytize a great apocalyptic war, the War of Armageddon that will end in the Muslim conquest of Rome and all of Europe, and later America too. Some 750,000 young Pakistanis are presently in 11,000 madrassas where they are taught that jihad is the noblest of human endeavors.
Gen. Hamid Gul, a former Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence chief who hates America with a passion, boasted that a greater Islamic caliphate was fast approaching, one that would marry the oil riches of Saudi Arabia with the nuclear weapons of Pakistan, “which could then deal with America on an equal footing.”
In Singapore, long before Gul’s prediction, Lee Kuan Yew, known as Asia’s Henry Kissinger, told UPI that the “greatest threat facing civilization over the next 10 years was an Islamist bomb and, mark my words, it will travel.”

....continued

[Johnny Yuma]

It is hard to escape the conclusion that a U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam and replace him with a pro-American government will be seen throughout radical Islam, and large segments of moderate Islam as well, as yet another defeat that must be avenged with acts of terrorism. As the extremists read history, the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683 triggered a reversal of Islam’s fortunes that has continued ever since.
Is Islam, as President Bush keeps repeating, “a faith based upon peace and love and compassion” committed to “morality and learning and tolerance”? Yes and no. Radical Islam is committed to jihad against the United States and Israel, or a war of civilizations between the Judeo-Christian West and the impoverished Muslim world. The Wahhabis and Deobandis hate all things American, and are intolerant vis-à-vis all religions outside their own warped view of Islam.
Moderate Islam is yet to find a voice that will roll back the extremists, a sort of Islamic Martin Luther, or at least a Martin Luther King.

[L@mplighterM]

A long read but I believe that the 1% is to low a figure, still some 13,000,000 psychotic radical Muslims is an impressive figure. When you factor in the supporters (could be anywhere from 2% to 100%) a picture emerges that should grab anyone’s attention.

Considering the growth curve of Radical Islam from say 1950 to the present you’d end up with a graph that has a line that’s almost 90º. This isn’t an issue that’s going to go away it’s bound to grow with leaps and bounds.

[Revkha]

Radical Muslims Killing Muslims

By Zahir Janmohamed
Wednesday, June 25, 2003; Page A23
When Pakistan was created, its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, famously declared, "You are free, free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the state." Fifty-six years later, I wonder what Jinnah would tell my family and countless others who lost loved ones because of rising religious intolerance in Pakistan. On April 2, 2000, my uncle, Sibtain Dossa, a doctor, was gunned down at his medical clinic by Islamic radicals seeking to cleanse Pakistan of its minority Shiite Muslims.

Over the past few years, extremist Islamic groups in Pakistan have mounted a unilateral terror campaign. But Americans and Christians have not been the only victims. Women, secular advocates and even Muslims -- Ahmadis, dissenting Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims -- have also come under attack.
Recently two gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a truck full of policemen, killing 11 and wounding nine in the Pakistani town of Quetta, near the Afghan border. Nearly all the victims belonged to the minority sect of Shia Islam. The attack on Shiites was the third in Quetta in less than two weeks. Speaking of the attack, Rahmat Ullah, a Pakistani senior police official, accurately noted, "It was sectarian terrorism."

The gruesome cycle of violence against Pakistan's minority citizens could not have occurred without the complicity of the Pakistani government. Consider the example of Azam Tariq, a religious cleric and former leader of the radical, Saudi Arabia-inspired Sipah-i-Sahaba. In an interview with the BBC in 1995, Tariq openly praised the Taliban and endorsed attacks on Shiites in Pakistan. Instead being brought to justice, Tariq was rewarded. Today he is a member of Pakistan's National Assembly.
There is a tendency to view the Muslim population as a monolith, with a uniform agenda and little dissent. This outlook on Islam has prompted a slew of articles with titles like "Why Do They Hate Us."

But in Pakistan, many Islamic radicals hold equal (and sometimes more) animosity toward dissenting Muslims (particularly Shiites) than toward westerners. The Sipah-i-Sahaba have even killed many of their own Sunni clerics, because the clerics rejected their divisive agenda. Often, implementing a skewed understanding of Islamic sharia (religious law) -- and not hatred of the West -- is their prime motivation.

If the United States wishes to gain credibility in Pakistan, it should pressure Pakistan to protect all of its residents who stand threatened by the rise of Islamic radicalism in Pakistan -- not just westerners and Christians.

As Muslims lobby the United States to treat its religious minorities with respect, Muslims themselves have averted their gaze while minority groups -- particularly Ahmadi and Shiite Muslims -- are butchered by their "fellow" Muslims. Indeed, much of the Muslim world looked away when Saddam Husssein was executing Shiites in Iraq and ignored the Taliban's mass beheading of Shiites in Afghanistan. [emphasis added]

This does not absolve Shiite Muslims of guilt. Many Shiite clerics have irresponsibly inflamed sectarian tension by denouncing beloved Sunni icons or, worse, endorsing retaliation. But a Muslim group that condemns violence when Islamic radicals kill Christians, then remains silent when Islamic radicals kill Shiite Muslims, is not a human rights group but a PR firm.

Pakistan can curtail the rise of sectarian violence and prevent the spread of extremist Islam by doing three things: punish (instead of reward) those who commit unprovoked acts of aggression against innocents of other faiths; block Saudi Arabia from flooding Pakistani schools with textbooks that preach draconian interpretations of Islam; and restore civil society in urban centers so that extremist groups cannot exploit Pakistan's woes to promote their divisive agendas.

My last memory of my uncle was sitting with him in the sprawling garden next to the tomb of Jinnah in Karachi. I asked if Pakistanis -- particularly Pakistani Shiites -- still respected Jinnah.
"We do," he told me. "Because at least Jinnah tried to create an open Islamic country where all could flourish."
That seems to summarize the history of Pakistan: It has always tried but never achieved Jinnah's goal.

Zahir Janmohamed is writing a book about the rise of religious violence in South Asia.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28807-2003Jun24.html?nav=hptoc_eo

[Johnny Yuma]

By Bruce A. Miller / Special to The Detroit News

In the effort to gain the support of so-called moderate Muslim and Arab states (they are not necessarily the same), Americans have, from President George W. Bush down, instituted a new form of political correctness. It is now considered off limits to have a frank discussion about the reactionary character of Muslim fundamentalism.
One stands to be branded a religious bigot if he is critical of the extremist form of a legitimate religion. I am reminded about how communists were the unintended beneficiaries of Joseph McCarthy and used "McCarthyism" as a weapon to silence their critics.
It is instructive for the purpose of making this point to contrast the debate about Catholicism and Islam. It is considered mainstream and enlightened in some circles to criticize Catholicism because it requires celibacy of its priests, limits the role of women in the religious service and advocates a culture of life that puts it in opposition to birth control, abortion and assisted suicide. No one taking these positions is accused of being anti-Catholic or bigoted, although some are.
But the Catholic Church, unlike Islam, has no armies. It does not sponsor terrorist activities. It does not undermine and attack democratic institutions.
On the contrary, the church supports democracy and was the main force that brought down, through peaceful means, the Soviet Union. Women are not required to sit separately from men in churches or to cover their faces and endure polygamy. The church defends the rights of women and minorities in secular society. Its members were not among the anti-abortion terrorists who bomb clinics. And the few renegade priests involved in terrorist or quasi-terrorist anti-war activities during the war in Vietnam did not speak for the church, whose members were major victims of the North Vietnamese.
But with Islam, it is different. In countries where Islam is dominant, there is no separation of church and state. What is religiously required is secularly imposed.
These states carry out policies that by any standard of decency are immoral, indecent and reactionary. Moderate Saudi Arabia may treat its women better than the Taliban, but that treatment is better only as a matter of degree. It engages in public beheading, severs body parts as punishment for crimes, stones moral malefactors, prohibits democratic expression and seeks to export its reactionary social system to secular democratic societies.
Polygamy is illegal in the United States, although at one time it was a tenet of an American religious group. The practice of polygamy in Islamic states goes virtually uncriticized, even though this abominable practice, which is dictated by men and sanctified by religion, is a cardinal element in the subjugation of women.
It is not bigoted to say something is wrong. Bigotry is an unreasoned and irrational dislike for others based on innate characteristics. There is nothing more immoral than suspending critical judgment to fill an empty oil can. And it is a mistake to assume that, in these Islamic and Arab secular totalitarian countries, the reactionary medieval ruling elites necessarily speak for the people they ruthlessly suppress. Americans have witnessed in Afghanistan the joy of the liberated people of Kabul and other cities. Those liberated, we must not forget, are like their Taliban oppressors Muslim. They just do not embrace the reactionary, anti-democratic creed preached by the oppressing mullahs. I would venture that upon the demise of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Syria's Bashar Asad there will be dancing in the streets in Baghdad and Damascus.
Americans blunt our moral mission when we adopt the cultural relativism that says no criticism of Islam in its radical fundamentalist variant is permitted. It is only by calling a spade a spade that we can hope to create an atmosphere that will allow Muslims victimized by these oppressive regimes to breathe the fresh air of freedom.
Americans must not allow these reactionary states to use the religion of the people against them.

Bruce A. Miller is a Detroit labor attorney.

[Revkha]

Originally posted by Johnny Yuma
By Bruce A. Miller / Special to The Detroit News

In the effort to gain the support of so-called moderate Muslim and Arab states (they are not necessarily the same), Americans have, from President George W. Bush down, instituted a new form of political correctness.

In the last hundred years how many times has America gone down that slippery slope to appease elements who support tyrannical rule over a country. History definitely repeats itself.

I wonder if Norquist is behind this policy. Nah, it was probably Bush Sr and James Baker. Or maybe all three.

[andak01]

Congratulations Johnny on an interesting, thought provoking thread. Let me try to respond in parts.

[andak01]

Originally posted by Johnny Yuma
Bin Laden, a member of a powerful and rich as Croesus non-royal family, is seen by countless millions of fundamentalist Muslims as the successor of several famous Islamic theologians going back all the way to Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya. Born in AD 1269 , Taymiyya was prolix on jihad (holy war) against transgressors of the word of Allah as conveyed by the Prophet. This contemporary of Dante elevated jihad to the same level as the “five pillars” of Islam—prayer, pilgrimage, alms, faith (“No God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet”), and Ramadan.

IF Bin Laden is who we are told he is, then Ibn Taymiyya and Sheik Wahhab should be our source of information on his influences. This then de facto rules out the possibility of ties from him to Saddam or to Iran as both of these sources would be dispised by him and his followers to a point that they would not be able to hide it. In fact, this is being born out by the captured Al Qaida operatives who say that Bin Laden never took anything from Saddam. Iran, a Shiite regiem is even less likely.

I have read a little of the writings of both Taymiyya and Wahhab and I know several people who have studied in Saudi Arabia. Saying that they are responsible for what is going on today is like blaming the holocaust on Nietsche. It is possible to interpret them in a certain way, but it is a stretch on the original.

The extreme followers of Taymiyyah resemble the Almohads of Morocco and, I believe, the Protestants like the early Lutherans or Cromwell's men. Even their places of worship are limited to white plaster walls with no statues or stained glass. There is also a zenophobic streak that goes back in reaction to the Mongol invasion. The period following Taymiyyah was the time when non-believers began to be forbidden to enter Mecca and Medina.

[andak01]

Originally posted by Johnny Yuma
It is hard to escape the conclusion that a U.S. invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam and replace him with a pro-American government will be seen throughout radical Islam, and large segments of moderate Islam as well, as yet another defeat that must be avenged with acts of terrorism.

Sad but true, and one of many many reasons that I was against the invasion. If it made us and them safer and freer, it would have been a noble cause. Evidence is it did neither. But I'm still waiting to be proven wrong. It doesn't make me happy to think that my most cynical fears were correct.

[jewbyc]

Originally posted by Johnny Yuma
By Bruce A. Miller / Special to The Detroit News

In the effort to gain the support of so-called moderate Muslim and Arab states (they are not necessarily the same), Americans have, from President George W. Bush down, instituted a new form of political correctness. It is now considered off limits to have a frank discussion about the reactionary character of Muslim fundamentalism.
One stands to be branded a religious bigot if he is critical of the extremist form of a legitimate religion. I am reminded about how communists were the unintended beneficiaries of Joseph McCarthy and used "McCarthyism" as a weapon to silence their critics.
It is instructive for the purpose of making this point to contrast the debate about Catholicism and Islam. It is considered mainstream and enlightened in some circles to criticize Catholicism because it requires celibacy of its priests, limits the role of women in the religious service and advocates a culture of life that puts it in opposition to birth control, abortion and assisted suicide. No one taking these positions is accused of being anti-Catholic or bigoted, although some are.
But the Catholic Church, unlike Islam, has no armies. It does not sponsor terrorist activities. It does not undermine and attack democratic institutions.
On the contrary, the church supports democracy and was the main force that brought down, through peaceful means, the Soviet Union. Women are not required to sit separately from men in churches or to cover their faces and endure polygamy. The church defends the rights of women and minorities in secular society. Its members were not among the anti-abortion terrorists who bomb clinics. And the few renegade priests involved in terrorist or quasi-terrorist anti-war activities during the war in Vietnam did not speak for the church, whose members were major victims of the North Vietnamese.
But with Islam, it is different. In countries where Islam is dominant, there is no separation of church and state. What is religiously required is secularly imposed.
These states carry out policies that by any standard of decency are immoral, indecent and reactionary. Moderate Saudi Arabia may treat its women better than the Taliban, but that treatment is better only as a matter of degree. It engages in public beheading, severs body parts as punishment for crimes, stones moral malefactors, prohibits democratic expression and seeks to export its reactionary social system to secular democratic societies.
Polygamy is illegal in the United States, although at one time it was a tenet of an American religious group. The practice of polygamy in Islamic states goes virtually uncriticized, even though this abominable practice, which is dictated by men and sanctified by religion, is a cardinal element in the subjugation of women.
It is not bigoted to say something is wrong. Bigotry is an unreasoned and irrational dislike for others based on innate characteristics. There is nothing more immoral than suspending critical judgment to fill an empty oil can. And it is a mistake to assume that, in these Islamic and Arab secular totalitarian countries, the reactionary medieval ruling elites necessarily speak for the people they ruthlessly suppress. Americans have witnessed in Afghanistan the joy of the liberated people of Kabul and other cities. Those liberated, we must not forget, are like their Taliban oppressors Muslim. They just do not embrace the reactionary, anti-democratic creed preached by the oppressing mullahs. I would venture that upon the demise of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Syria's Bashar Asad there will be dancing in the streets in Baghdad and Damascus.
Americans blunt our moral mission when we adopt the cultural relativism that says no criticism of Islam in its radical fundamentalist variant is permitted. It is only by calling a spade a spade that we can hope to create an atmosphere that will allow Muslims victimized by these oppressive regimes to breathe the fresh air of freedom.
Americans must not allow these reactionary states to use the religion of the people against them.

Bruce A. Miller is a Detroit labor attorney.

When a religion allows the honor killing of women, hate to gays, jews, other religions and repress's its people it has reached the point where it either becomes marginilized or it becomes something else. I think radical Islam is that something else. Its manta is hate!!! It sounds a lot like nazism to me. The Idea of love thy neighbor as thy self is beyond Radical Islam.

[andak01]

Originally posted by jewbyc
When a religion allows the honor killing of women, hate to gays, jews, other religions and repress's its people it has reached the point where it either becomes marginilized or it becomes something else. I think radical Islam is that something else. Its manta is hate!!! It sounds a lot like nazism to me. The Idea of love thy neighbor as thy self is beyond Radical Islam.

It may well be like naziism. Which would prove that it isn't just the Lutherans and Catholics than are capable of dehumanizing the Jews and others that don't believe as they do.

[Mil]

IF Bin Laden is who we are told he is, then Ibn Taymiyya and Sheik Wahhab should be our source of information on his influences. This then de facto rules out the possibility of ties from him to Saddam or to Iran as both of these sources would be dispised by him and his followers to a point that they would not be able to hide it. In fact, this is being born out by the captured Al Qaida operatives who say that Bin Laden never took anything from Saddam. Iran, a Shiite regiem is even less likely.

I have read a little of the writings of both Taymiyya and Wahhab and I know several people who have studied in Saudi Arabia. Saying that they are responsible for what is going on today is like blaming the holocaust on Nietsche. It is possible to interpret them in a certain way, but it is a stretch on the original.

The extreme followers of Taymiyyah resemble the Almohads of Morocco and, I believe, the Protestants like the early Lutherans or Cromwell's men. Even their places of worship are limited to white plaster walls with no statues or stained glass. There is also a zenophobic streak that goes back in reaction to the Mongol invasion. The period following Taymiyyah was the time when non-believers began to be forbidden to enter Mecca and Medina.


Ah - common. I can give you tons of examples when even the most secular regimes in the modern Arab World have used religious oppostion against each for terrorist activities. If anything I am 100% convinced that Al Qaida had contacts with Saddam - if only in their mutual dislike of the house of Saud.

[Johnny Yuma]

Can Any Good Come
Of Radical Islam?
A modernizing force? Maybe.

BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA AND NADAV SAMIN
Thursday, September 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

What is going on in the Muslim world? Why does it produce suicide hijackers on the one hand and, on the other, lethargic and haphazardly capitalist societies that have delivered neither economic development nor democracy? A good if partial answer to these questions--partial because it is limited to the Arab region of that world--can be found in a United Nations "development report" issued in July. As the U.N. assessment concludes, the entire Arab sector, with all its oil wealth, is "richer than it is developed." Its economies are stagnant, illiteracy is widespread, political freedom is hardly to be found, and its inhabitants, especially its women, are denied the basic "capabilities" and "opportunities" of the modern world.
The U.N. report--written, significantly, by a group of Arab intellectuals--was commissioned well before last fall's attacks on the U.S. But its pertinence to those attacks has seemed clear enough to commentators. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times called it the key to understanding "the milieu that produced bin Ladenism, and will reproduce it if nothing changes." An editorial in The Wallstreet Journal found "little wonder" in the fact that "such an isolated culture became a breeding ground for the Islamic fundamentalism that spawned September 11."
The Islamism of Osama bin Laden and his followers is indeed inseparable from the developmental failures of the world's Arab societies. All the same, however, it would be a mistake to conceive of the Islamist movement as nothing more than an expression of those failures. The phenomenon of radical Islam is more complicated than that, and in all sorts of surprising ways its long-term effect on the entire orbit of Islamic society may turn out to be more complicated still.

Last September's attacks against the United States were carried out by a group of Muslims led by a gaunt, bearded ascetic sitting in a cave in Afghanistan and spouting unfathomable rhetoric. So all-consuming was the hijackers' hatred of America that they were willing to blow themselves up for their cause--something that set them apart from earlier generations of terrorists. Where did this zeal, so foreign to the modern democratic temperament, come from?
On the part of many observers, the immediate impulse was to attribute it to deep cultural factors, and in particular to the teachings of fundamentalist Islam. And of course there was, and is, much to be said for this view. In particular, the fact that, far from repudiating bin Laden, Muslims and Westerners tended to line up on opposite sides in their interpretation of the events of September 11 gave credence to the paradigm of the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who predicted a number of years ago that the post-Cold War world would give rise to a "clash of civilizations."
Still, foolish as it would be to downplay the role of religious or "civilizational" factors, it will not do simply to call Osama bin Laden an Islamic fundamentalist. For the Islamism of which he is a symbol and a spokesman is not a movement aimed at restoring some archaic or pristine form of Islamic practice. As several observers have argued, including most recently the Iranian scholars Ladan and Roya Boroumand in the Journal of Democracy, it is best understood not as a traditional movement but as a very modern one.
Groups like al Qaeda, the Boroumands write, owe an explicit debt to 20th-century European doctrines of the extreme right and left. One stream of influence can be traced to Hassan al-Banna, the schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. From Italy's Fascists, al-Banna borrowed the idea of unquestioning loyalty to a charismatic leader, modeling the slogan of his paramilitary organization--"action, obedience, silence"--on Mussolini's injunction to "believe, obey, fight." Taking a cue from the Nazis, he placed great emphasis on the Muslim Brotherhood's youth wing and on the marriage of the physical and the spiritual, of Islam with activism. Unsurprisingly, al-Banna also taught his followers to expect not encouragement but repression from traditional Islamic authorities.
A second European source of Islamism can be traced to Maulana Mawdudi, who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami movement in Pakistan in the early 1940s. A journalist well-versed in Marxist thought, Mawdudi advocated struggle by an Islamic "revolutionary vanguard" against both the West and traditional Islam. As the Boroumands observe, he was perhaps the first to attach "the adjective 'Islamic' to such distinctively Western terms as 'revolution,' 'state,' and 'ideology.' "

[Johnny Yuma]

These strands of the radical right and left eventually came together in the person of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian who became the Muslim Brotherhood's chief ideologist after World War II. In his most important work, "Signposts Along the Road," Qutb called for a monolithic state led by an Islamic party, advocating the use of every violent means necessary to achieve that end. The society he envisioned would be classless, one in which the "selfish individual" of liberal societies would be abolished and the "exploitation of man by man" would end. This, as the Boroumands point out, was "Leninism in an Islamist dress," and it is the creed embraced by most present-day Islamists.
Though developed among Sunnis, this virulent ideological mix reached the Shiite world as well, most notably through its influence on Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. Indeed, the Iranian revolution of 1979 conferred on Islamism a degree of religious respectability that it had never before possessed. But the fact that the movement could so easily bridge the bitter Shiite-Sunni divide also suggests just how sharply divorced it is from Islamic history and custom. As the Boroumands conclude, the key attributes of Islamism--"the aestheticization of death, the glorification of armed force, the worship of martyrdom, and 'faith in the propaganda of the deed' "--have little precedent in Islam but have been defining features of modern totalitarianism. The seeming rigor of Osama bin Laden's theology belies the reality of his highly heterodox beliefs.

So much for the ideological side of things. On the sociological side, there is still another close parallel between Islamism and the rise of European fascism. Though Hitler was a great entrepreneur of ideas, the roots of his movement, as described in classic analyses like Fritz Stern's "The Politics of Cultural Despair" (1974), lay in the rapid industrialization of central Europe. In the course of a single generation, millions of peasants had moved from tightly knit village communities to large, impersonal cities, losing in the process a range of familiar cultural norms and signposts.
This rapid transition--captured in Ferdinand Toennies's famous distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society)--was perhaps the most powerful impetus behind modern nationalism. Deprived of local sources of identity, displaced villagers found new social bonds in language, in ethnicity and--ultimately--in the mythopoetic propaganda of Europe's extreme right. Though the various right-wing parties pretended to revive ancient traditions--pre-Christian Germanic ones in the case of Nazism, Roman ones in the case of the Italian Fascists--their doctrines were really a syncretic mishmash, old symbols and new ideas brought together by the most up-to-date forms of communications technology.
Islamism, as the late Ernest Gellner was among the first to note, has followed a similar path. Over the last several decades, most Muslim societies have undergone a social transformation not unlike that of Europe in the late 19th century. Large numbers of villagers and tribesmen have moved to the vast urban slums of Cairo, Algiers and Amman, leaving behind the variegated, often preliterate Islam of the countryside. Islamism has filled the void, offering a new identity based on a puritanical, homogenized creed. Syncretist in the manner of fascism, it unites traditional religious symbols and rhetoric with the ideology of revolutionary action.
Some observers, especially after September 11, have suggested that the real engine of Islamism's growth is poverty, but this is not the case. According to the recent U.N. report, for example, the Arab world actually compares favorably to other developing regions when it comes to preventing abject want. Rather, like European fascism before it, Islamism is bred by rapid social dislocation. More often than not, its leaders and propagandists are newcomers to the middle or upper classes. Islamism introduces these educated but often lonely and alienated individuals to a larger umma (community) of believers, from Tangier to Jakarta to London. Through the magic of the cassette tape recorder (in Khomeini's case) or video (for bin Laden), they become members of a vibrant, if dangerous and destructive, international community.

[Johnny Yuma]

Seeing Islamism for what it really is goes beyond correct taxonomy. It also points us in the direction of an important, if seemingly perverse, question: Could it, like both fascism and communism before it, serve inadvertently as a modernizing force, preparing the way for Muslim societies that can respond not destructively but constructively to the challenge of the West?
The question is not as absurd as it may sound. Comparisons are especially tricky here, but the Bolsheviks succeeded in creating an industrialized, urbanized Russia, and Hitler managed to get rid of the Junkers and much of the class stratification that had characterized prewar Germany. Through a tortuous and immensely costly path, both of these "isms" cleared away some of the premodern underbrush that had obstructed the growth of liberal democracy. There are, of course, much safer and more peaceful routes toward modernization, such as those taken by countries like South Korea or Britain or the United States, and less expensive paths to modernity were surely available to Russia and Germany. But one has to deal with what one has, and in Islamic cultures, in any case, there is arguably much more underbrush to be cleared away. If Islamism is directed as much against traditional forms of Islam as against the West, could it, too, be a source of such creative destruction?
There are myriad ways in which not only Islamic practice but the rigid legal framework within which it is encased has obstructed change. The economic historian Timur Kuran has documented in painstaking detail a series of traditional Islamic institutions whose inflexibility and legalism have served as immense barriers to development. Interest rates are fixed by religious authorities, schooling focuses on rote learning of religious texts and discourages critical thinking, women are kept out of political and economic life, and so on. Even an institution like the waqf, or traditional Islamic charity, which could serve as a bulwark of civil society in a reformed Islamic order, fixes the bequests of wealthy individuals in perpetuity, with no opportunity for adaptation to changing circumstances.
Many of these same constraints existed historically in the Judeo-Christian West, and were eliminated or ameliorated only after long struggle. All of them continue to exist in the Islamic present, and can only be removed through the exercise of political power. Islamism has already demonstrated the capability of doing this, and even of accommodating Western norms when it has to. Though Khomeini brought back the chador, or veil, for women, he also reluctantly sanctioned women's right to vote in Iranian elections, a practice (won under the shah) that he had once likened to prostitution.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood as well as other, even more radical Islamist organizations have created a layer of voluntary associations standing between the family and the state. It was, for example, Islamist charities that stepped into the breach at the time of the 1992 Cairo earthquake, providing important social services unavailable from the inept and corrupt Egyptian state. The Islamists clearly hope to reunite religion and political power one day, which would be a disaster. But they are learning--and inculcating--habits of association and independent action that, if somehow divorced from their radical ideology, might yet help lay the groundwork of a true civil society.

[Johnny Yuma]

There is another area in which the reactionary ideas of the Islamists may play a potentially progressive role, and this has to do with the fundamental sources of authority and legitimacy in the Islamic world.
The traditional system of Islamic jurisprudence--with its rigid rules and hierarchies--has been under attack, in one way or another, since at least the 19th century. The most important early figures in this effort were modernizers, like the Iranian Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1839-97) and his student, the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905). Abduh was among the first to depart from the rigidly textual form of interpretation that had characterized the Sunni world since the earliest caliphates. In his view, human reason was the only appropriate tool for applying the fundamental truths of the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the Prophet). Appointed mufti of Egypt toward the end of his life, Abduh issued rulings reflecting, in the words of one scholar, his desire "to render the religion of Islam entirely adaptable to the requirements of modern civilization."
The implications of this turn were profound. Though the institutional base of orthodox Sunni Islam remained intact, the long-sealed gates of doctrinal explication were unhinged. Like a Muslim Luther, Abduh shook up the clerical establishment by reviving, under the influence of his mentor al-Afghani, the possibility of independent legal interpretation. His example gave unprecedented latitude to all subsequent construers of Islamic tradition, whether saints or demagogues--the latter including anti-Western radicals like the Muslim Brotherhood's Sayyid Qutb and, eventually, Osama bin Laden.
In the battle for interpretative power, it is no coincidence that the primary breeding ground for Islamism has been the brittle oligarchies of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Both regimes have co-opted the traditional clergy, forcing the populist current of Islam into back alleys and storefront mosques and turning it into an ideological guerrilla movement. Detached from the moorings of tradition, the Islamists have proved adept at manipulating the symbols of faith and appropriating them for their own revolutionary purposes.
Osama bin Laden's famous 1998 fatwa, in which he declared jihad on the United States and any American fair game for his followers, is a case in point. Though the content of this declaration is itself contrary to traditional Islamic moral teachings--as the eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis has observed, "At no point do the basic texts of Islam enjoin terrorism and murder"--the most notably radical thing about it is the identity of its author. Osama bin Laden has no credentials as a religious authority and no right, under traditional Islamic practice, to issue a fatwa. It is a bit like Hitler issuing a papal encyclical, or Lenin a decree in the name of the Russian Orthodox church. The mere fact that bin Laden was willing to cross this line shows the extent to which Islamism has undermined traditional Islamic legal authority. But a line crossed in the name of waging all-out war against the West may yet be crossed in the name of healthier purposes.

We should not kid ourselves. The modernization of Islam is hardly imminent, and it will not occur without enormous struggle. There are several deeply imbedded obstacles in Islamic society, not least the often-noted lack of a tradition of secular politics. To many Muslims, what may simply seem more "natural" is a totalizing ideology that seeks to unite society and the state within a single revolutionary whole. Nor is it clear, despite the UN's recent report, that the Muslim world is capable of the realistic self-appraisal necessary for a modernizing shift to occur.
Many non-Western societies, after all, have tried the path of violent resistance to the enormous military, economic and cultural power of the West. It was only when faced with defeat and domination that nations like China and Japan undertook a serious study of what, in Mr. Lewis's phrase, "went wrong." Joining the West when they could not beat it, they adopted a variety of Western institutions while retaining a core of their own culture. This process of social learning has been much slower in Muslim societies; for Arabs in particular, it has been all too convenient to blame Israel and the United States for their own lack of progress.
If the wait for Muslim modernization is likely to be a long one, how, then, should the West respond in the short term as it faces the continued prospect of terrorism, suicide bombings and weapons of mass destruction? The determined application of military power is certainly part of the answer. European fascism did not fall because of the inherent wickedness of its animating ideas; having brought havoc to the societies that embraced its doctrines, it lost legitimacy because it was crushed on the battlefield. Just as Osama bin Laden and his cause gained status and support with the successful attacks of September 11, so the rout of al Qaeda from Afghanistan and continuing U.S. operations against radical Islamic terrorism are absolutely key to dampening Islamist fervor.
But the more important struggle must take place within the Islamic world itself. For too long, genuine Muslim modernizers have sat in the wings while traditionalists and Islamists battled one another on center stage. The great need now is for Western-oriented Muslims to take advantage of the turmoil created by September 11 to promote a more genuinely liberal form of their religion.

[Johnny Yuma]

There is reason to think that such an opening exists. Though many Muslims continue to favor Islamism in the abstract, the movement has left a disastrous record everywhere it has come to power. Saudi Arabia, home of the extremist Wahhabi strain of fundamentalist Islam, is one of the most corrupt and mismanaged regimes in the contemporary world. Even with the country's vast oil wealth, per capita income fell in real terms from $11,500 in 1980 to $6,700 in 1999. As for Afghanistan under the Taliban, ordinary Afghans were overjoyed to be liberated from their yoke, and eagerly returned to such simple modern pleasures as watching cheesy Indian movies on their long-buried VCR's. :D
It is the Iranians, who, having lived under Islamist rule for the past generation, are most likely to lead the Islamic world out of its current impasse. Though Western hopes for the seemingly reform-minded President Khatami have proved misplaced, there is one basic demographic fact working in favor of eventual liberalization: 70 percent of Iran's population is now under the age of 30, and from all reports these young people tend to abhor the Islamic theocracy. Having brought the first Islamist regime to power, Iran would set a powerful example for the rest of the Middle East--and beyond--if it were to move toward liberalization on its own steam.
In the end, it is as important not to overestimate the strength of Islamism as it is fatal to underestimate it. It has little to offer Arabs, much less the rest of the Muslim world. Its glorification of violence has already produced a sharp counterreaction, and--provided it is defeated--its "successes" may yet help pave the way for long-overdue reform. If so, this would certainly not be the first time that the cunning of history has produced so astounding a result.

[jewbyc]

Originally posted by andak01
It may well be like naziism. Which would prove that it isn't just the Lutherans and Catholics than are capable of dehumanizing the Jews and others that don't believe as they do.

No!! All it means is that Radical Islam is just a bunch of murdering thugs whose only purpose on this planet is to kill maim and inflict pain on anyone or thing they disagree with. Guess what every group has tried to take down judiasm look where it got them. The Romans extinct, the Babylonians no more . the Phoenician alass gone for good :o. The Greeks dust . The nazi's gone but not forgotten :mad:. The Jews have survived them and a lot more and we will survive Radical Islam

[andak01]

Originally posted by Mil
Ah - common. I can give you tons of examples when even the most secular regimes in the modern Arab World have used religious oppostion against each for terrorist activities. If anything I am 100% convinced that Al Qaida had contacts with Saddam - if only in their mutual dislike of the house of Saud.

The House of Saud, if you will remember, is the one constantly being trumpeted as the purveyor of Wahhabi ideals. They were after all founded with the assistance of Sheik Wahhab's followers. If he is against the House of Saud, he has branched off from Wahhabbism and is something else again, which I rather believe. Otherwise, either he is not what the media portrays or the Sauds are not what the media portrays. One way or another the Islamaphobic myth of Muslims as a monolith starts to break down, just like the Anti-Semitic myth of a world Jewish conspiracy does.

I also believe that Al Qaida tactical methods are the same as those taught at the School of the Americas. The CIA was training Mujahhiddin in Pakistan to fight the Russians. These Mujahhiddin became Taliban and expanded their operations. I'm not saying that CIA trained Al Qaida, but it isn't a stretch to imagine a CIA trained Mujahhiddin supervising an Al Qaida training camp. There are only so many ways to kill people and America has made killing a science. When 3000 civilians are killed, it is said to be one of the greatest acts of evil (and I agree that it was). On the other hand, when Hiroshima (66,000 killed immediately, thousands more died of radiation) or Nagasaki (39,000 killed immediately, thousands more died of radiation) or Dresden. Associated Press used the most conservative means possible to arrive at a civilian death toll in Iraq of over 3500. In Afghanistan, the number of civilians killed was over 6000. Al Qaida should give up and go home. They are terribly inefficient at killing civilians. And the ones that kill the most civilians (by their own accounts), not only win the war, but also claim the moral high ground.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/abomb/mp10.htm
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/abomb/mp09.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm

[Mediocrates]

Before you flew off the handle there you were on the right track, at least theoretically. But its kind of silly, no? to think that modern terrorism is in fact modern at all or that the SOA has anything new to tell us?

Truck bombings have been around for as long as there have been trucks. Neither the goals nor the techniques of terrorism have changed in the last several hundred years. All that's different is the flag, logo or bible people use to recruit new terrorists with. Hell we had a president assassinated by an anarchist terrorist, one of the bomb throwing 'many'. It was even the root cause of the formation of the FBI and not the Mafia as many people think. And you can back further than that if you want.



One way or another the Islamaphobic myth of Muslims as a monolith starts to break down, just like the Anti-Semitic myth of a world Jewish conspiracy does.

Yes and no I think. There are forces and groups and countries that nominally hate each other who are all joined in marriage of convenience in their hatred of America, Israel, Jews (and Muslims too) and others. Certainly there is no monolith just as there is no world Zionist conspiracy. But that matters rather little to the people who believe it.

Muslim Nazis in Croatia and Bosnia.

"Peace Rallies" with the World Workers Party, the Klan and the Nation of Islam shoulder to shoulder screaming about the evil Jews.

An Indian man is mugged and beat up and gets $5,000 from a fund because his attackers thought he was Arab so it's a hate crime.

[Mil]

Posted by Andak:


The House of Saud, if you will remember, is the one constantly being trumpeted as the purveyor of Wahhabi ideals. They were after all founded with the assistance of Sheik Wahhab's followers. If he is against the House of Saud, he has branched off from Wahhabbism and is something else again, which I rather believe. Otherwise, either he is not what the media portrays or the Sauds are not what the media portrays.


I can give you a ton of examples of when Sunnies went against Sunnis. Or Christians against Christians, or Jews against the Jews. Just open up "Judaic Wars" by Flavius.


One way or another the Islamaphobic myth of Muslims as a monolith starts to break down, just like the Anti-Semitic myth of a world Jewish conspiracy does.


OF COURSE!!!!! Actually the Arab world is not very united politically at all - in reality they all hate each other's guts. Saudia Arabia and Iraq, for example, have been at each other's throat since probably the 40s. Each side used islamic-terrorists for hire, as Palestinian Abu Nidal, since probably the fifties. Ben Laden has very big problems with the house of Saud (which is not very popular among the masses in SA either), non-religious problems, making his contact with Saddam quite possible since Saddam was very notorious for such machinations. This has nothing to do with religion but pure and simple politics, but for which religion is used to arouse the masses and to justify the causes and the means. Pretty medieval, if you ask me, given the secular regimes.



I also believe that Al Qaida tactical methods are the same as those taught at the School of the Americas.


Like what would be the example?


The CIA was training Mujahhiddin in Pakistan to fight the Russians.


Russians also taught Palestinian radicals and other "freedom fighters" all over the world. So did Britain, France, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and even Cuba. In Syria in the seventies Assad had established very large Palestinian military training camps, which existed till the mid 90s. What do you think was taught there?



These Mujahhiddin became Taliban and expanded their operations. I'm not saying that CIA trained Al Qaida, but it isn't a stretch to imagine a CIA trained Mujahhiddin supervising an Al Qaida training camp.


US supplied weapons to Afganis fighting against the Soviets and probably did train some in military art. So what? At the time, in the 80s, the enemy was the Soviets and not the terrorists. Actually Russia trained the Vietcong for exactly the same reason.




There are only so many ways to kill people and America has made killing a science.


Andak people were killing people since the beginning of time.... Many countries have proffessional military schools which teach to kill people including all the Arab countries.


When 3000 civilians are killed, it is said to be one of the greatest acts of evil (and I agree that it was). On the other hand, when Hiroshima (66,000 killed immediately, thousands more died of radiation) or Nagasaki (39,000 killed immediately, thousands more died of radiation) or Dresden.


Andak, your moral comparisons are recognized but WWII comparisons are pretty bad for such an observation. For example, the Germans army and the Finish army put an entire city of Leningrad (5 million population) in a blockade for a year and a half from the fall of 1941 to the winter 1943, which resulted in the death of 2 million civilians (60% population of Finland at the time). This means that the death toll for the 500 days was 4000/day or in 10 days it would have reached the proportions of Dresden and in 25 days the death toll of Hiroshima/Nagasaki . Hell in the Soviet Union alone the Germans killed and were responsible for the death of over 19 million civilians. Also, out of 4.5 million Red army soldiers captured only 1.5 came back - some scarry stuff. I think Dresden was very morally justified and was very well within the bounds of WWII. Actually compared to the Nazi and Japanese attrocities the allies were toooooooooooo good.

Lets put it differently - in 1962 Nasser, at the time the president of Egypt and the beacon of Arab Nationalism, entered Yemen to fight a Saudi sponcered insurgency against a pro-Nasser-Egyptian regime . In the 4 years, in Yemen, Nasser has killed the estimates run from 70 to 100 thousand civilians. It was also the first time that poison Gas was used against civilians since WWII making Saddam's Kurd attrocities look very benign. No wander Israel was scared in 1967 - that idiot could have used gas against the Jews. Or Assad of Syria in 1982 following an Islamic revolt in the city of Homs in the three weeks level half the city and killed over 10,000 civlians, mostly Sunnis. Or the French responsible for the death of over a million Algiriens in the 50-60s. Belgium 100% responsible for the Congo civil wars the death toll from which keeps on rising and rising into huge millions probably exceeding Belgium's own population number by now. Go talk to Belgium - they got a court there you can probably file a law-suite.


I can go on and on. However, my general advise to you is - America, given the history of the last century and compared to all else can only be viewed as a very-very-very-very compassionate country.




Associated Press used the most conservative means possible to arrive at a civilian death toll in Iraq of over 3500. In Afghanistan, the number of civilians killed was over 6000. Al Qaida should give up and go home. They are terribly inefficient at killing civilians. And the ones that kill the most civilians (by their own accounts), not only win the war, but also claim the moral high ground.


No country in the world - and certainly no country in the Islamic/Muslim/Arab world - can be put on a moral scale with US. US is just too far up there to be even considered for any comparison. America simply leaves everyone else in the dust. These are not slogans I know my history very well.

[minusthejihad]

If you're a "Blame America Firster", then get the hell out of America.

[minusthejihad]

I just don't get it, when converting to Islam, do you have to sign a waiver that says, I promiss to become a "Blame America Firster"?

[L@mplighterM]

'One day the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street', By Ori Golan


Some of the most radical Islamic groups in the world are using Britain as their strategic base. Why are they allowed to conduct their activities unimpeded?

Anjem Choudray is a man with grand designs. "One day the black flag of Islam will be flying over Downing Street," he says.

As the spokesman for the Al-Muhajiroun ("the immigrants"), a radical Islamic movement in Britain which seeks to establish Islamic supremacy and calls for a jihad against opponents of Islam, he is determined to get his message across.

"Lands will not be liberated by individuals, but by an army. Eventually there'll have to be a Muslim army. It's just a matter of time before it happens."

Last year, on September 11, the group celebrated the attacks on the World Trade Center under the banner "A Towering Day in History." In 1999 it issued a fatwa, calling for the assassination of Russian president Boris Yeltsin and more recently intimated that Prime Minister Tony Blair is a legitimate target for terrorism abroad.

Britain operates as a strategic base for some of the most radical Islamic groups which preach hatred, incite to violence and recruit volunteers for terrorist activities. Last January, British military intelligence working in eastern Afghanistan discovered a list of 1,192 names of British citizens, all Muslims, who trained with the al-Qaida network in Afghanistan.

More recently, Asif Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, one from west London, the other from Derby, became the first British nationals to serve as human bombs in Israel when they carried out the attack at Mike's Place in Tel Aviv. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who masterminded the kidnap and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, was from London, as was Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight in December 2001 using a bomb planted in his shoe.

It was a British-born Muslim extremist who rammed a lorry packed with explosives into an army barracks in Kashmir, killing 32 people; seven British Muslims captured in Afghanistan are currently held in Guant namo Bay. And according to British security sources, five more British Muslim terrorists are poised to strike as suicide bombers against Israel.

What unites these terrorists is that they attended mosques in Britain where fundamentalist messages are routinely issued and young, impressionable Muslims are exhorted to take up arms against Jews, Hindus and other "infidels."

Across university campuses, Al-Muhajiroun and its affiliate, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, are busy recruiting adherents. According to Michael Phillips from the Union of Jewish Students, they target Jewish students, predominantly in Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull%26cid=1056598259409



The black flag is already flying in the mosques and it’s spewing from the mouth of Muslim religious leaders.

[andak01]

Originally posted by minusthejihad
I just don't get it, when converting to Islam, do you have to sign a waiver that says, I promiss to become a "Blame America Firster"?

The American system was built on self criticism and a structure of checks and balances. To suggest that criticism of America is unAmerican is McCarthyism. I'd like to think we are past that, but recent events are not encouraging.

Read the Declaration of Independance and you will see that it is the duty of a free people to constantly monitor their freedoms. That means protecting Civil liberties as defined in the Bill of Rights by internally as well as externally.

Someone will certainly respond that the Arab world doesn't have such a Bill of Rights. Freedom of Religion was much more honored in the time of Muhammad (SAW) than in most times since. Non-Muslims were allowed in the cities of Mecca and Medina until the 14th century. Given the huge casualties incurred by the Muslims in retribution for 9/11, I suggest that the best form of Jihad would have been to rise up against rulers like Saddam.

As for my relation with our pseudo-secular system (where the President invokes God in his speeches and publicly prays before Cabinet meetings). I don't have any problem with it so long as I am not prohibitted from practicing my religion. It is following the Sunna to support any government that does not prevent us from our religion. Any religious person will tell you that God comes before country. But loving one doesn't mean you have to hate the other.

I was critical of our government prior to my conversion to Islam. I think a lot of this has to do with my exposure to people of many nations. At my daughters recent birthday party, there were people from eight different countries. I have also travelled a fair amount (for an American) and seen how we are perceived by others first hand.

I don't think it is a healthy stance, or for that matter particularly American to want to drive away everyone who is critical of our government to another country. The saddest thought I can think of is for people to arrive at the shores of another nation and say that they are political refugees FROM AMERICA!

“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.
From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”



http://cyberistan.org/islamic/treaty22.html

[red crabtree]

What I don't get andak though, why only be critical of the American govn't or the American way of life? Why not have the same expectations of Muslim govn't as you have of American govn't?

The British soldiers killed last week in Iraq pulled out pictures of their wives and children as they begged for their lives, they were murdered anyway. 3 were found in a bunker shot execution style, lumped together with their pictures laying on the ground around them. I suppose this is ok since they were not civilians?

Militant Islam is a very real danger not only to the middle east, but to all the world. They get fuel from those of the Muslim faith that refuse to confront the evils they are perpetrating. When I hear people who say the Catholics did it etc... as if past misdeeds by other religions somehow absolves terrorists today, or bringing up Hiroshima etc... done in a time of declared war somehow absolves terrorists that kill and main whoever is in their way, it leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth. It is nothing more than excusing behavior that is wrong no matter how you look at it.

[ibrodsky]

Originally posted by andak01
The American system was built on self criticism and a structure of checks and balances. To suggest that criticism of America is unAmerican is McCarthyism. I'd like to think we are past that, but recent events are not encouraging.

The U.S. government was designed as a system with checks and balances. This was to prevent one branch of government, or one individual, from acquiring a monopoly of power.

Citizens are free to criticize the government. But our government was not built on "self-criticism." In fact, you are misusing the word: "self-criticism" means criticizing oneself.

You have been criticized for what many of us perceive as consistently anti-American comments--comments that often seem sympathetic to America's self-admitted enemies. Yet when we criticize you, you call it McCarthyism.

As the Frito-bandito says: "It is better to give than receive, so give!" Likewise, you are all for "self-criticism" as long as we join you in criticizing ourselves. But some of us can't help but notice that you consider yourself immune; hence, the "McCarthyism" charge.

(If I'm mistaken and we have caused you to lose your job and be blacklisted from future employment, please set me straight. Otherwise, I know of nothing anyone here has done to you other than disagree.)

Read the Declaration of Independance and you will see that it is the duty of a free people to constantly monitor their freedoms. That means protecting Civil liberties as defined in the Bill of Rights by internally as well as externally.

Andak01, you make many small but important errors, and it is amazing how fast they add up. It may seem picayunish, but nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does it say or imply its is "the duty of a free people to constantly monitor their freedoms."

This country's founding documents are not about the people's duties but their rights.

You have the right to criticize the U.S. We have the right to criticize you. Get used to it.

Someone will certainly respond that the Arab world doesn't have such a Bill of Rights. Freedom of Religion was much more honored in the time of Muhammad (SAW) than in most times since. Non-Muslims were allowed in the cities of Mecca and Medina until the 14th century. Given the huge casualties incurred by the Muslims in retribution for 9/11, I suggest that the best form of Jihad would have been to rise up against rulers like Saddam.

Yet you opposed the U.S. deposing Saddam... Nor do I hear you calling for the overthrow of totalitarian governments in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran.

So what are we to conclude? It seems that in theory you are for overthrowing some or all of these regimes. But in practice, you insist it be accomplished in unrealistic ways. The net effect is that these brutal and oppressive regimes get to stay because the people under their thumbs are generally in no position to overthrow them.

As for my relation with our pseudo-secular system (where the President invokes God in his speeches and publicly prays before Cabinet meetings). I don't have any problem with it so long as I am not prohibitted from practicing my religion. It is following the Sunna to support any government that does not prevent us from our religion. Any religious person will tell you that God comes before country. But loving one doesn't mean you have to hate the other.

You have no more understanding of separation of church and state than the Declaration of Independence.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to prevent the establishment of a state religion. The President invoking God in speeches or praying before cabinet meetings is not establishing a state religion.

It's amazing that you complain about this when Islam opposes separation of mosque and state on principle.

I was critical of our government prior to my conversion to Islam. I think a lot of this has to do with my exposure to people of many nations. At my daughters recent birthday party, there were people from eight different countries. I have also travelled a fair amount (for an American) and seen how we are perceived by others first hand.

That's nice, but none of it means anything about how right or wrong you are. I've traveled extensively (20+ countries), too. I have customers and business colleagues in dozens of countries.

I suspect you travel in narrow circles, because one thing that's obvious to me is that how the U.S. is perceived abroad depends very much on the level of education of the persons doing the perceiving.

I don't think it is a healthy stance, or for that matter particularly American to want to drive away everyone who is critical of our government to another country. The saddest thought I can think of is for people to arrive at the shores of another nation and say that they are political refugees FROM AMERICA!

Nor is it healthy to be blind to the difference between the exercise of free speech on one hand and, on the other, exploiting our institutions and rights in order to undermine our system in support of terrorism.

No, I am not talking about you, but I am talking about the Muslims who immigrate to Western countries and funnel money to phony "charities" while working towards the goal of imposing Sharia on their host countries.

Most Muslims seem totally unwilling to admit this is going on even though some of the people doing these things freely admit it. It has not escaped some of us that there are Islamists who are perfectly willing to use Western "rights" as a cover. They demand "rights" that they secretly disdain simply because they know those rights--if they are clever about it--enable them to conspire against the host government with impunity.

There are some Muslims who are loyal citizens or immigrants and know what is going on and oppose it. You are not one of them, but that is your choice--not mine.

[andak01]

Originally posted by ibrodsky
(If I'm mistaken and we have caused you to lose your job and be blacklisted from future employment, please set me straight. Otherwise, I know of nothing anyone here has done to you other than disagree.)

That remark doesn't even deserve a reply, but I do note it. In brief, I don't blame anyone here for anything that happens in my life. This is after all only a bulletin board.

Andak01, you make many small but important errors, and it is amazing how fast they add up. It may seem picayunish, but nowhere in the Declaration of Independence does it say or imply its is "the duty of a free people to constantly monitor their freedoms."

http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/charters_of_freedom/declaration/declaration_transcription.html
...that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,

And how do we determine if a Government has become distructive of those ends? And how would we establish a long train of abuses without monitoring and recording such things.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

This country's founding documents are not about the people's duties but their rights.

The only rights mentioned in the document are life, liberty and persuit of happiness. The greater part of it is spent listing the aforementioned abuses. But the part I find particularly attractive is this:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

In a word, this document gives us a tool towards assuring a just government, but one that must be used prudently. Therein lies the difference between being critical and being combative.

You have the right to criticize the U.S. We have the right to criticize you. Get used to it.

Used to it??? I'm a fish in water!

Yet you opposed the U.S. deposing Saddam... Nor do I hear you calling for the overthrow of totalitarian governments in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran.

It was the duty of the Iraqi people to depose Saddam. Our intervention is only justified by some real danger he posed to us. If we say that any tyrannical state deserves intervention, then we had better go to war with China, North Korea, Congo, Liberia, Columbia, Myanmar, etc. Further, any other nation has the right to use that justification against us. Why do we alone define who is a tyrant and who is not? Our reason for going to war with Iraq was the perception of a real threat. Yet, as time goes by, rather than establishing the truth of that perception, the opposite is occurring. The WMDs that we were told we already knew about have never shown up. Neither has the evidence for Saddam's ties to Al Qaida.

So what are we to conclude? It seems that in theory you are for overthrowing some or all of these regimes. But in practice, you insist it be accomplished in unrealistic ways. The net effect is that these brutal and oppressive regimes get to stay because the people under their thumbs are generally in no position to overthrow them.

What you are to conclude is that I believe in self determination. If the real upshot of the war in Iraq is that the people of Iraq are pulled from tyranny and allowed to determine their own fate, hen the war was well worth it. If instead, it requires a twenty year occupation for us to force them to our way of thinking, that's not democracy. You can't say: "I support democracy as long as my candidate wins the election." Democracy is accepting the will of the people whether you like it or not.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to prevent the establishment of a state religion. The President invoking God in speeches or praying before cabinet meetings is not establishing a state religion.



It's amazing that you complain about this when Islam opposes separation of mosque and state on principle.

I was pointing out that our system is not purely speaking a secular one. It is easy to make a case that Sharia states are not purely theologic.

I suspect you travel in narrow circles, because one thing that's obvious to me is that how the U.S. is perceived abroad depends very much on the level of education of the persons doing the perceiving.

I suppose that the implication is that anyone with my views is uneducated. At least Bill O'Reilly recently stated that in one of his editorials. Anyone who was against the war in Iraq, is, according to him uneducated.

Nor is it healthy to be blind to the difference between the exercise of free speech on one hand and, on the other, exploiting our institutions and rights in order to undermine our system in support of terrorism.

On the contrary. I don't think it was necessary to completely change the makeup and structure of our government in response to 9/11. It is a natural outcome of our freedoms that we are more prone to such attacks. However, taking away our freedoms in order to protect us is the mantra of every dictatorship ever launched. Arafat is a perfect example of that. While I still feel that we are far from such a dictatorship, my freedom to criticize is a barometer of just how far.

No, I am not talking about you, but I am talking about the Muslims who immigrate to Western countries and funnel money to phony "charities" while working towards the goal of imposing Sharia on their host countries.

Most Muslims seem totally unwilling to admit this is going on even though some of the people doing these things freely admit it. It has not escaped some of us that there are Islamists who are perfectly willing to use Western "rights" as a cover. They demand "rights" that they secretly disdain simply because they know those rights--if they are clever about it--enable them to conspire against the host government with impunity.

There are some Muslims who are loyal citizens or immigrants and know what is going on and oppose it. You are not one of them, but that is your choice--not mine.

Every Muslim organization in the United States has been investigated. Many were shut down before any evidence was presented for ties to terrorism. There is NO operating Muslim organization in America with known ties to terrorism. If you are suggesting that I don't oppose funnelling money to terrorists, that is slander. You don't deserve your position as moderator. You can feel free to ban me from this board for saying so.

[MichaelC]

Originally posted by andak01
That remark doesn't even deserve a reply
Now, here is a line that I've come to expect from you when you can't handle the conversation. I guess with you, it is either this or the "ignore function".

I have not bothered to retain the quotes that you made from America's founding document, but would like to make the observation here that the use of them, in my opinion, is certainly illustrative of what Ibrodsky said:
Originally posted by Ibrodsky
Most Muslims seem totally unwilling to admit this is going on even though some of the people doing these things freely admit it. It has not escaped some of us that there are Islamists who are perfectly willing to use Western "rights" as a cover. They demand "rights" that they secretly disdain simply because they know those rights--if they are clever about it--enable them to conspire against the host government with impunity.
Originally posted by andak
It was the duty of the Iraqi people to depose Saddam. Our intervention is only justified by some real danger he posed to us. Your opinion does not represent anything by which anyone is required to live. Your views will allow the death and destruction meted out by adherents of islam to continue abated. Many others feel that it should be handle in the region from which it arises.
Originally posted by andak
Why do we alone define who is a tyrant and who is not?
Well, because your method of allowing the terrorists to define these things does not serve the needs of our national security.
Originally posted by andak
I suppose that the implication is that anyone with my views is uneducated. At least Bill O'Reilly recently stated that in one of his editorials. Anyone who was against the war in Iraq, is, according to him uneducated.
I myself have never thought of you as uneducated, though I do think of you as narrow minded and self serving. When you make comments about how many different nationalities were represented at your daughter's birthday party and how well traveled you are, the language in which you phrase your comments implies that these things somehow raise your own perceptions above the rest of us, as though the rest of us lack such experience, or that we lack vision due to a supposed under-exposure to more than our own ethnicity.

Presumptuous reasoning, in my opinion.
Originally posted by andak
On the contrary. I don't think it was necessary to completely change the makeup and structure of our government in response to 9/11.
A bit of a hyperbolic statement, don't you think. It may be that there are problems that should continue to be discussed concerning how we respond to the clear and present danger of bloodthirsty islamism, but making a few adjustments, however controversial, does not constitute, "a complete change in the makeup and structure of our government."
Originally posted by andak
Every Muslim organization in the United States has been investigated. Many were shut down before any evidence was presented for ties to terrorism. There is NO operating Muslim organization in America with known ties to terrorism. If you are suggesting that I don't oppose funnelling money to terrorists, that is slander. You don't deserve your position as moderator. You can feel free to ban me from this board for saying so.
More hyperbole combined with commentary that is becoming typical in your posts, i.e.- if you don't like what people have to say about your positions, you put them on ignore and/or accuse them of.......whatever.

A little testy, don't you think?

[ibrodsky]

Originally posted by andak01
That remark doesn't even deserve a reply, but I do note it. In brief, I don't blame anyone here for anything that happens in my life. This is after all only a bulletin board.

The point was your caviler use of the term "McCarthyism." You said "To suggest that criticism of America is unAmerican is McCarthyism." This is nonsense. Criticism of you is not the same as using a position of power to harass or blacklist you.

If anything, invoking the "McCarthyism" charge is an attempt to intimidate those who criticize you by raising what the Left seems to think was the mother of all political crimes.

...That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, [/i]

And how do we determine if a Government has become distructive of those ends? And how would we establish a long train of abuses without monitoring and recording such things.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

You try to pass yourself off as someone who condems and opposes U.S. policy out of a sense of duty. The criticisms against you, however, are that you are always quick to blame America and excuse those in Muslim countries who hate the U.S.

The Declaration of Independence is about why the citizens of America threw off British rule and declared independence. Similar arguments could be used to justify the overthrow of totalitarian Arab governments.

The point is that some of us feel you are more concerned about defending Islam than criticizing the current administration to protect our rights and system of government. You use the latter to excuse the former.

The only rights mentioned in the document are life, liberty and persuit of happiness. The greater part of it is spent listing the aforementioned abuses. But the part I find particularly attractive is this:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The word "rights" is used repeatedly; "duty" is used once. "Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" are not just three rights--they are terms denoting entire categories of rights.

In a word, this document gives us a tool towards assuring a just government, but one that must be used prudently. Therein lies the difference between being critical and being combative.

The Declaration was a tool for declaring independence. The Constitution established rights within the new state.

My point is that while you have the right to condemn and oppose U.S. government policy, it is not a duty incumbent upon all of us as you suggest.

It was the duty of the Iraqi people to depose Saddam. Our intervention is only justified by some real danger he posed to us. If we say that any tyrannical state deserves intervention, then we had better go to war with China, North Korea, Congo, Liberia, Columbia, Myanmar, etc. Further, any other nation has the right to use that justification against us. Why do we alone define who is a tyrant and who is not? Our reason for going to war with Iraq was the perception of a real threat. Yet, as time goes by, rather than establishing the truth of that perception, the opposite is occurring. The WMDs that we were told we already knew about have never shown up. Neither has the evidence for Saddam's ties to Al Qaida.

That is your interpretation. I think others can make a very strong case that Iraq's government was aggressive and militaristic, that Saddam Hussein had a motive for supporting terrorists, that he knowingly supported terrorists, and he certainly possessed WMDs (unless you claim the Kurdish and Iranian victims were faked) and refused to destroy them in any verifiable way.

The fact that the WMDs have not been found does not mean they don't exist. Nor do I accept yur assurances that he had no links to Al Qaida. He certainly had links to the likes of Hamas... and another group that had a training base in Iraq. The bottom line is that your claim Saddam posed no threat to the U.S. doesn't hold water. A "threat" is not limited to siezing a beachhead along the east coast.

You admit he was brute that deserved to be deposed, but turn around and act is if we was innocent. You can't have it both ways. Iraq paid the families of Palestinian mass murderers. Iraq harbored known terrorists. I'm not aware of governments in China, North Korea, Congo, Liberia, Columbia, Myanmar doing this.

What you are to conclude is that I believe in self determination. If the real upshot of the war in Iraq is that the people of Iraq are pulled from tyranny and allowed to determine their own fate, hen the war was well worth it. If instead, it requires a twenty year occupation for us to force them to our way of thinking, that's not democracy. You can't say: "I support democracy as long as my candidate wins the election." Democracy is accepting the will of the people whether you like it or not.

I never said anything about democracy. Nor have I heard this offered as a key justification. Saddam Hussein was a threat to his own people and those of neighboring countries. He supported terrorism. The only thing that stopped him from further acts of aggression was military defeat. Your complaints and excuses don't wash.

I was pointing out that our system is not purely speaking a secular one.

It's hard to imagine a more secular one. What do you suggest--that we impeach Presidents who dare to use the word "God" in speeches? Or who practice their religion's rituals?

Somehow, I think if we elected a Muslim President and he was upfront about being a practicing Muslim you would approve.

I suppose that the implication is that anyone with my views is uneducated.

Outrageous: I was referring to the perceptions of people in other countries. I said their perception of the U.S. often depends upon their level of education. To wit, the "street" may chant "Death to America!" because they swallow all of the conspiracy theories and lies, but the better educated are much more likely to admire our freedoms and principles, having studied them.

On the contrary. I don't think it was necessary to completely change the makeup and structure of our government in response to 9/11. It is a natural outcome of our freedoms that we are more prone to such attacks. However, taking away our freedoms in order to protect us is the mantra of every dictatorship ever launched. Arafat is a perfect example of that. While I still feel that we are far from such a dictatorship, my freedom to criticize is a barometer of just how far.

Many excuses are made for taking away freedoms. Only I don't see any freedoms being taken away from U.S. citizens.

Unfortunately, I do see some Islamist apologists (I am not referring to you) who are constantly sounding the alarm. Of course, they are upset that their ability to operate here is being disrupted.

There may be some alien residents who are losing privileges. I admit that. In fact, I applaud it. We have been far too lax. I'm sorry about anyone who is unfairly deported. But we did not ask for Islamists bent on destroying the West...

Every Muslim organization in the United States has been investigated. Many were shut down before any evidence was presented for ties to terrorism. There is NO operating Muslim organization in America with known ties to terrorism. If you are suggesting that I don't oppose funnelling money to terrorists, that is slander. You don't deserve your position as moderator. You can feel free to ban me from this board for saying so.

Many innocent people are investigated. The only thing that matters is whether they are investigated fairly and allowed to continue if found innocent.

I don't know how you can be certain there is "NO operating Muslim organization in America with known ties to terrorism." We know there is widespread support or at least sympathy for terrorists in the Muslim world. We know that many of these people go to great lengths to hide or camouflage their support.

See http://disaffectedmuslim.blogspot.com/

[minusthejihad]

Its one thing to criticize your country or goverment, heck, we all should at times. But when all you hear out of Andak is criticisms and blame, and NEVER hear any positives, he looses his credibility as an objective critic and quickly becomes a "Blame America Firster". That's all I'm sayin'

[minusthejihad]

Originally posted by ibrodsky


See http://disaffectedmuslim.blogspot.com/

Wow, thanks for pointing out this Blog Ibrodsky,

My favorite line was:

"It's the same old I read all the time in Muslim publications and on Muslim websites, but it's always a shock to me to actually hear it said out loud. But what makes it hard to take is that this imam has attended numerous interfaith meetings, and even a Thanksgiving multifaith service in a synagogue, calling for peace between religions. I'll be honest: if I were Jewish and knew what I know about Muslims' attitudes towards Jews, I'd have a hard time trusting Muslims unless I knew for sure that they were not antisemites."

Well, my good Palestinian friend R is coming into Detroit to visit me this weekend, I trust him wholeheartedly as he was like a brother to me when we were roommates, yet I will always remember when his mom said, "I was the best one she ever met". I bet she never met any other Jews but heard an earfull about us monkeys from her Imam. Bummer :(

[jewbyc]

Originally posted by minusthejihad
Wow, thanks for pointing out this Blog Ibrodsky,

My favorite line was:

"It's the same old I read all the time in Muslim publications and on Muslim websites, but it's always a shock to me to actually hear it said out loud. But what makes it hard to take is that this imam has attended numerous interfaith meetings, and even a Thanksgiving multifaith service in a synagogue, calling for peace between religions. I'll be honest: if I were Jewish and knew what I know about Muslims' attitudes towards Jews, I'd have a hard time trusting Muslims unless I knew for sure that they were not antisemites."

Well, my good Palestinian friend R is coming into Detroit to visit me this weekend, I trust him wholeheartedly as he was like a brother to me when we were roommates, yet I will always remember when his mom said, "I was the best one she ever met". I bet she never met any other Jews but heard an earfull about us monkeys from her Imam. Bummer :(

I read this blog!! It makes me sick to my stomach to think anyone can treat women in such away and Muslims have the nerve to say anything bad about jews.

[red crabtree]

Just curious andak, if the President, any President invokes God in a speech is that in your mind, breaching separation of church and state? Is the President not allowed to express his or her(someday God willing) religious beliefs in public? Will we take the clause of separation of church and state so far that public officials, President or otherwise, are not allowed to express their own particular religious beliefs in public at all?
At what point do we draw a line that is common sense too, that people regardless of what they do, have a right to express their religious beliefs? Or are we so afraid of offending someone somewhere that the clause regarding church and state is taken to mean that public utterances by public officials constitute imposing particular religious beliefs on those that may not subscribe to them? Is the President also not simply an American who has the same basic rights as other Americans, including the right to practice his religion as he sees fit? Or is it to be made that he may do so only in the privacy of his own home?

[jewbyc]

Originally posted by red crabtree
Just curious andak, if the President, any President invokes God in a speech is that in your mind, breaching separation of church and state? Is the President not allowed to express his or her(someday God willing) religious beliefs in public? Will we take the clause of separation of church and state so far that public officials, President or otherwise, are not allowed to express their own particular religious beliefs in public at all?
At what point do we draw a line that is common sense too, that people regardless of what they do, have a right to express their religious beliefs? Or are we so afraid of offending someone somewhere that the clause regarding church and state is taken to mean that public utterances by public officials constitute imposing particular religious beliefs on those that may not subscribe to them? Is the President also not simply an American who has the same basic rights as other Americans, including the right to practice his religion as he sees fit? Or is it to be made that he may do so only in the privacy of his own home?

You dont know how much it pains me to side with this poor excuse for a human who calls him self 'andak' but
I was offended by Bush's Inauguration. It didnt leave much room for the rest of us where his church guy Basically said if you dont believe in Jesus you are going to Hell that went a little to far.

But you are right he has just as much right as the rest of us to practice his religion as long as he respects mine and everybody else's

[andak01]

Originally posted by red crabtree
Just curious andak, if the President, any President invokes God in a speech is that in your mind, breaching separation of church and state? Is the President not allowed to express his or her(someday God willing) religious beliefs in public? Will we take the clause of separation of church and state so far that public officials, President or otherwise, are not allowed to express their own particular religious beliefs in public at all?

In a truly secular state, such statements do nothing to serve the constituents. It should be assumed that any statement of faith would be found offensive by someone in a multi-cultural nation.

At what point do we draw a line that is common sense too, that people regardless of what they do, have a right to express their religious beliefs? Or are we so afraid of offending someone somewhere that the clause regarding church and state is taken to mean that public utterances by public officials constitute imposing particular religious beliefs on those that may not subscribe to them? Is the President also not simply an American who has the same basic rights as other Americans, including the right to practice his religion as he sees fit? Or is it to be made that he may do so only in the privacy of his own home?

Over the Fourth, I watched part of a Christian religious program on TV devoted to the founding fathers. In fact, the Christian stations were in a frenzy of patriotism that made them indistinguishable from the rest of the celebrations of the fourth, with uncle sams walking on stilts at the front of the chapel.

Anyway, there was a historian talking about the founding fathers and how they were intimately connected with the colonial church. That doesn't mean that there is no separation of church and state. But it does give us an idea of the moral backbone that built this nation. Frankly, I think it was a good thing. I don't think that our modern secularists could have conceived of such a just system of checks and balances.

Having the President express his faith as something heartfelt is acceptable. Cozying up to the far right by playing the religion card is repulsive.

http://www.christianamerica.com/foundingfathers/ben_rush.htm
Benjamin Rush (signer of the Declaration of Independance)
"The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty- - -"7

On March 28, 1787 when Dr. Benjamin Rush proposed his plan for public education in America he wrote:

"Let the children who are sent to those schools be taught to read and write - - - (and a)bove all, let both sexes be carefully instructed in the principles and obligations of the Christian religion. This is the most essential part of education - -"8

Benjamin Franklin
I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing I see of this truth: "that God governs in the affairs of man. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without
His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his Aid?

George Washington
"I consider it an indespensible duty to close this last solemn act of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God and those who have the superintendence of them into His holy keeping."

[MichaelC]

Originally posted by andak01

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever."

-Thomas Jefferson
America certainly seems to have done well for itself since Tom uttered those words. Either that, or the Deity still sleeps.

[Mediocrates]

I'm not sure its entirely relevant to dissect 18th century politicans' speech with the tools of the 21st. Jefferson was the closest thing we had to an openly atheist president yet he wrote the Virginia declaration of religious freedom and tolerance. Franklin was a Quaker but deconstructivists love to talk about him as a Libertine.

There is a thread in 18th c. political thought that providence is 'divine' but it's never really explained the nature of that divinity. I doubt there would be much agreement. After all this is shortly after Spinoza and Hume who thought of "God" as a natural force and not a personality. And consider that Hamilton, the bastard son in Jamaica was educated at the local Hebrew school because no one else would take him . He read Hebrew, Torah and Talmud and his conception of diety would have been different from those of say Washington or Madison or John Marshall. Not the least difference is that he would have understood that the Torah is in part a description of the FAILURE of merging spiritual and civic power in the same hands.

My only point is that the 1A is about the limits of governmental force, not about the efficacy of merging spiritual and political thought. I will stop rambling now.

[red crabtree]

I agree cozying up to the religious right is repulsive, but then too is excusing repulsive things in Islam.

The founding father's of this country as you noted in your quotes had a Christian faith, their own faith, they did not hesitate to publicly express that and neither did they hesitate to make the diffference between belief in God and the ideals that Jesus represented and that of organized Christian religion that had brought war and destruction to Europe, as well as the burying of individual rights. Allow me to quote some here, and will you please instead of reading them as thoughts on Christianity but instead as if they were Muslim instead. Think about it.

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not." - James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes." - John Adams, letter to John Taylor

"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose." - Thomas Jefferson, to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814

I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but what we did." - Benjamin Franklin letter to his father, 1738

Now remember that each of these professed a belief in God and did so publicly. There beliefs in separation of church and state did not mean that people should shut their mouths in public for fear of offending someone.

[Johnny Yuma]

Isn't it ironic that, when you talk to G_d, it's considered prayer, but when he talks to you, you're considered insane?

[andak01]

Originally posted by red crabtree
Allow me to quote some here, and will you please instead of reading them as thoughts on Christianity but instead as if they were Muslim instead. Think about it.

Fortunately, I am armed with the experience of both having been a Christian and of being Muslim. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate the statements from both sides.

What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not." - James Madison, "A Memorial and Remonstrance", 1785

I am interested to know who he is talking about. Presumably the then fairly recent religious wars and Cromwell were much closer to his mind than any eastern example. The King of England was then head of the Church of England as is Queen Elizabeth today.

"The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. And ever since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality, is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes." - John Adams, letter to John Taylor

Here we have ancient nations, and I think, though it may not be PC to mention it here that Mr. Adams is including the Jews in this statement.

http://adlusa.com/fathers.htm
I don't know about Adams, but there was a significant amount of anti-Semitism among some of our other founding fathers.


GEORGE WASHINGTON: They (the Jews) work more effectively against us, than the enemy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in... It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pest to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America. (From The Maxims of George Washington by A. A. Appleton & Co.)

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. The menace, gentlemen, is the Jews.

THOMAS JEFFERSON: Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in. (From 'THE AMERICANS' by D. Boorstin)


"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose." - Thomas Jefferson, to Horatio Spafford, March 17, 1814

I think vital religion has always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue. The scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined on what we thought but what we did." - Benjamin Franklin letter to his father, 1738


I love this quote and feel it is a just one. It is a perfect encapsulation of tenets which are shared both by Christianity and by Islam.

BTW, Jefferson was an Arian, which makes him closer to a Muslim or a Jew than his fellow Christians.

[Johnny Yuma]

Originally posted by andak01
Fortunately, I am armed with the experience of both having been a Christian and of being Muslim. Therefore, it is possible to evaluate the statements from both sides.

GEORGE WASHINGTON: They (the Jews) work more effectively against us, than the enemy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in... It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pest to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America. (From The Maxims of George Washington by A. A. Appleton & Co.)


The Truth About This Quote (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/thejews.htm)

I'm certain it was an error on your part, but it appears as though you may have picked the one most often used by those who like to misquote Washington to make him look anti-semitic.

[Johnny Yuma]

Originally posted by andak01
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. The menace, gentlemen, is the Jews.


You're right about Franklin. :( He was a pr*ck, when it came to his views of the Jews. About him, I must agree with you, and I won't put in the obligatory quip "as bad as I hate to admit it." This time, you're right on about him. However, the reference to agreeing with Washington is not about the Jews. Don't take it out of context.

And, at first blush, although Jefferson appears to be a flaming anti-semitic, on closer examination, his arguments stopped just slightly short of the people, and seem to be more directed at the religion and as a ethical system, and not the people per se:

Source: "Syllabus Of An Estimate Of The Merit Of The Doctrines Of Jesus, Compared With Those Of Others," written in April 1803
"[The Jews’] system was Deism; that is, the belief of one only God. But their ideas of him & of his attributes were degrading & injurious. Their Ethics were not only imperfect, but often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason & morality, as they respect intercourse with those around us; & repulsive & anti-social, as respecting other nations. They needed reformation, therefore, in an eminent degree... Jesus corrected the Deism of the Jews, confirming them in their belief of one only God, and giving them juster notions of his attributes and government."

Source: A letter to Dr. Joseph Priestley, written in Washington on 9 April 1803
"I should then take a view of the deism and ethics of the Jews, and show in what a degraded state they were, and the necessity they presented of a reformation."

Source: A letter to John Adams, written at Monticello on 12 October 1813
"To compare the morals of the old, with those of the new testament, would require an attentive study of the former, a search thro' all it's books for it's precepts, and through all it's history for it's practices, and the principles they prove. As commentaries too on these, the philosophy of the Hebrews must be enquired into, their Mishna, their Gemara, Cabbala, Jezirah, Sohar, Cosri, and their Talmud must be examined and understood, in order to do them full justice. Brucker, it should seem, has gone deeply into these Repositories of their ethics, and Enfield, his epitomiser, concludes in these words. `Ethics were so little studied among the Jews, that, in their whole compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral subjects. Their books of Morals chiefly consisted in a minute enumeration of duties. From the law of Moses were deduced 613. precepts, which were divided into two classes, affirmative and negative, 248 in the former, and 365 in the latter. It may serve to give the reader some idea of the low state of moral philosophy among the Jews in the Middle age, to add, that of the 248. affirmative precepts, only 3. were considered as obligatory upon women; and that, in order to obtain salvation, it was judged sufficient to fulfill any one single law in the hour of death; the observance of the rest being deemed necessary, only to increase the felicity of the future life. What a wretched depravity of sentiment and manners must have prevailed before such corrupt maxims could have obtained credit! It is impossible to collect from these writings a consistent series of moral Doctrine.'"

[red crabtree]

No, Thomas Jefferson was not an Arian. Historians identify him as a deist, and he idenified himself as a Uniterian. The specific doctrines of Arius do not enter into it.

Next, you did not either read my question to you or opted to ignore it, not sure which. What I was trying to get across and obviously failed in, was for you to understand the founding fathers of this country meant that when priests and orthodoxy takes over a society they take away liberties and the abiity for people to be free and think for themselves. This is not limited to simply the Christian religion. My post was not intended to be used a vehicle to show the the founding fathers as Jew haters. Just like the fact that many of our founders were slave holders, they were as much a product of their time as we all are. They were learned and brillant men who had did not only have the recent experiences of religious intolerance in Europe to draw on, the vast majority of the founder's of this country were well read in the classics of Greece and Rome, the rights of man by John Locke, and of the man who would be called the father of Capitalism, Adam Smith. These were men of the Enlightenment.
Better educated than most our in our day and age. Yet they were also a product of their times.

To me rather then look at the strongly held beliefs of the founder's that religion allowed to run rampant where priests dictate to the masses removing their freedom of thought and reasoning as something that is a threat to true freedom, you instead brought in how they didn't like Jews, the same could be said in how they thought of Catholics by the way. You skirted the iss