What is your view of terrorism?

3/17/2007

What is your view of terrorism?

Terrorism, as we have increasingly experienced it during the last 30 years or so, is a deliberate and murderously focused effort to destroy Western Civilization.
First of all, for this statement to be credible one has to become thoroughly aware of what has happened within Sunni Islam since the 19th century and before. Actually, the 14th century Islamic scholar, Ibn Tamiyah, was the first intellectual to formulate the need for Muslims to go back to the strict roots of their religion by mercilessly exterminating anyone who did not adhere precisely to the doctrines of their faith as promulgated by Mohammed and his followers.

It is the conviction of Tamiyyah as well as later Islamic scholars, such as Masuddi, Hassan-al-Banna, starter of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammed-al-Wahhabi purifier of the Sunni sect and the most recent dogmatist and others that the Quran does not allow for any other interpretation except the most dogmatic one they prefer.

These scholars have made it their life's work to selectively interpret the Quran in a manner that provides cover for their convictions that all deviant Muslims must be killed as well as all infidels, meaning Christans and Jews. They urge the Islamic world to subdue the whole world till everyone is either converted or dead. When 80 years ago, serious oil money started to put enormous resources at the disposal of the Wahhabi tribe and its clerics, they could finally organize their narrow Quran- based education and organize their murder squads to follow through on their fanatic beliefs.

This is no metaphoric fancy but a deadly serious business. It is because of these religious underpinnings that so many Muslims have been persuaded to become terrorists, because the Quran tells them to murder infidels whenever and wherever they can. It's explained as being the purpose of their lives and it also explains why so many of the 9/11 group of terrorists were so dedicated yet relatively well educated. They grew up with the "modified" Quran and deeply believed its many inimical tenets.

It is a cult of death, not a religion in our sense of the word. But it explains the kamikaze attitude of so many of their followers, which has proven to be such a horribly effective way of fighting a powerful enemy (the West) with relatively small resources of their own. Their biggest resource may well be the willing martyrs and their utter will to destroy anyone in the way of establishing Muslim hegemony in the world.

Yet, we need to make a distinction between Muslims who do not subscribe to this death cult interpretation of the Quran and the Jihadists who do. Because fear of religious reprisals has increasingly led ordinary Muslims to keep quiet and their heads in the sand. For a long time already militant Imams have used their mosques to spread their version of fanatic Islam and so far there have been few instances where a mosque congregation has been able to rid themselves of these fanatic preachers. The preachers make sure they have a number of bullies among their followers to intimidate the unwilling.

It reminds us of what Hitler and Stalin and their bullies did in the 30-ies to intimidate themselves into the greatest menace of the 20th century. Having learned the price and cost of those lessons we should not be reluctant to prepare for an all out war against Muslim radicalism today.

This is a long way to explain why our being in Iraq is an essential step in this effort to regain our international footings and protect our homeland as much as possible from more terrorist attacks.
Taking the fight to Afghanistan and Iraq has provided us with a Middle Eastern battlefield which has been attracting many thousands of Jihadists to come in and try to kill Americans and their coalition partners. At a significant sacrifice of our own people we have eliminated many thousands of their fanatic fighters and as a result kept them away from western targets of opportunity. So far.

At the same time and to the extent possible this effort may provide an opportunity to create a more open, partially secularist, political system with the promise of peace and economic growth for the region. There are many in the Middle East who want this to happen, but like Hitler's Germany the good people cannot destroy these fanatics without outside help. That's why we are there, because not doing this, bailing out in other words, would eventually cause us to meet these Jihadists here at home to fight them on our own soil while they have, by then, a long string of successful ventures behind them and all the resources they need. We will have lost the opportunity to save Western Civilization and instead will have delivered the world back into the hands of barbarism.


I wonder what Washington, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson would think of that epitaph. !!?

Another lesson of history

1/17/2007
Another lesson of history


While I am no sociologist, the historic record, available to anyone who’s interested in it, indicates that the people of the Middle East continue to be strongly divided into tribes, clans and sects as subgroups under the Shia or Sunni religious umbrellas. Much, if not most of Middle Eastern political life, continues to be largely based on these age old divisions hence what is happening in Iraq is a first, painful attempt at bridging some of these historic schisms. As an example, Iraq was brutally “governed” by the Tikriti for a long time, since Tikrit is where Saddam Hussein and some of his closest collaborators came from. They were Sunnis but really a secular political power. Only during the 1990-ies did Hussein try to give his regime a minor semblance of religion by building some mosques, etc. in order to gain favor with the Shias. The Shias, although the single largest population contingent in Iraq, hated Hussein and didn’t participate in the government and were sometimes brutally repressed.

Saudi Arabia has been the personal fief of the Saudi family since the 1920-ies. The Saudis are also Sunnis from the Wahhabi tribe. It is this tribe, based on the atavistic dogmas of some Sunni intellectuals like Sayyed Qutb, al-Banna and Muhammed Rashid Rida, that developed the current anti-Western, anti-Christian movement in the Middle East which has been spreading far beyond in the form of very dedicated but extrememly dangerous, radical and militant terrorist gangs.

The current multi-party Iraqi government, if it holds together, would be one of the key achievements of the American involvement in Iraq, notwithstanding the ongoing insurgent carnage. A considerable number of intelligent and dedicated people have realized that this may be their only chance, for a long time, to bury the worst of the old enmities and to try to create a more modern country able to grow and mature economically and socially in order to achieve a much better future for itself and its neighbors.

What Iraq is doing in the face of the visceral dislike for it from these neighbors, requires a significant extension of US military protection. The development of an effective Iraqi military, police and intelligence apparatus and the reorganization of the Iraqi economy to pay for it all will take time and much US (and European?) support. The alternative to this cannot be on the table, except in the dark, cowardly and uncomprehending minds of some of our politicians and much of the media and educational establishment.

Because of the fact that the neighboring countries are also basically still tribal or clan affairs they also feel threatened by this potentially promising Iraqi example, but that’s exactly one of the things that are so fundamentally wrong with the Middle East.
We must not forget that Europe went through similar stages of political growth many hundreds of years ago, but we grew out of it, very painfully. It is these lessons of history that the West is trying to convey, without much success so far, to many countries in the world that are struggling with the creation of multi party, secular political systems strictly apart from religious control but culturally imbued with the ethics and morality in their operations of what we know as Judeo-Christian ethics, the equivalence of which could be adopted by anyone.interested in running a halfway decent government.

But without that kind of cultural premise in place, it is virtually impossible to grow the sort of vibrant, creative and productive (both good and bad) social and economic structures that will provide people with opportunities for decent, rewarding and honorable lives. Until those western experiences sink into a country’s political system there is little hope for their future. China and India are the current major examples of how successful such changes in political systems can be.

General education needs to become a key priority of struggling countries. But too often, either the money isn’t there or the government educates only its own elite children to perpetuate itself in power. That’s still tribalism. Instead, all minds, rich and poor need to be educated as much as each individual one is capable of. While that will take many years to accomplish, even the West still has its problems with it, a wise government will forego many expenditures in order to focus on education.

Another major drawback in creating a vibrant Middle Eastern economy is to deny half the population the right and opportunity to get educated and participate in the economy and/or manage a growing family, if preferred. But to exclude a majority of women from getting educated is narrow minded, male chauvinistic foolishness.

The third major problem in many Muslim societies is the way boys and girls basically grow up separately, with the boys clearly being favored over girls. This Spartan approach to, particularly, teen-age growth and beyond, has led to exactly the same results as in the days of Athens and Sparta. Too many men grow up overly sensitive about their masculinity, develop unbridled aggressiveness because their sense of pride is always at a hair trigger, always ready to draw the sword so to speak, which together with their habit of overly and loudly exaggerating everything they do, suggests a basic sense of inferiority and fundamental immaturity. The much vaunted, but essentially worthless Spartan culture lasted almost 500 years. This current Islamic attitude about the rest of the world has just about run the same period of time. The big question is, will Western culture prevail this time or will we fail, like Athens eventually failed during the Peloponnesian Wars.

History is there to tell us what happened and it is not pretty.