An interesting bit on civilizational conflicts (aka the West v Islam)

[woqqqa]

A little something I came across over breakfast...ugh, religion (or for that matter any idealogical fervor) depresses me.

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1002

[Khorum]

Originally Posted by Salman Rushdie

“If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of Al Qaeda by one jot. It’s not what they’re after,” he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans forward. “Yes, it’s a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there’s an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it’s not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you’re on the same side as them. If you don’t want that, you’re not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left.”

Within this Talibanist morality, there is room for great slabs of delusion and hypocrisy. In ‘Shalimar the Clown’, Salman shows sparingly how the jihadi fighters of Afghanistan have sex with adolescent boys, and the next day chop to pieces men they have dubbed ‘homosexual’. “One of the great untold stories of Al Qaeda is that they are all these men who fuck little boys. They all have these disciples who they’re ostensibly training in the way of the warrior, but they’re also enjoying. For a while, then they go off – and they have their wives and families at home. It’s like Classical Greece.” Does he think Osama Bin Laden has done it? “I wouldn’t like to say,” he says tactfully. “He’s an Arab, he’s not an Afghan. But Mullah Omar, he’s another story…”

He senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say. “One of the things that’s commonly said by Islamists is that it’s acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die – that’s all Bin Laden wants you to do. It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you’re not married to.” He pauses. “It’s about life.”

If you wanted to know how you can get a Fatwa declared against you by the leaders of Jihadist islam, this is how.

[Eomer]

Hah, hasn't he had fatwa's against him for decades now? And numerous countries have convicted him and sentenced him to death in absentia too.

[Khorum]

Yep, 18 years now. Ironically IRAN revoked their fatwa in 1998... but the wahhabbist muslims want him dead. He's actually Pakistani (like most breto-indians), which has been a rich breeding ground of fundamentalist terrorism---richer than even egypt. Something about growing up muslim in whitechapel must flip the pork-and-miniskirt-hating gene.

[brekk]

Originally Posted by Salman Rushdie

“If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of Al Qaeda by one jot."

NO SHIT

That's like saying if tomorrow the Russia/Chechnya issue was resolved it wouldn't stop terrorism on the US.

No matter what some people think, our connections to Israel is not a driving force behind terrorism against the US. Palestinians are not liked by the rest of the middle east. The 3 big groups of muslims in the middle east are Sunni, Shiite, and Palestinian, they do not get along. The only thing getting them support is that the other muslim groups hate the jews more then them.

these countries, and the terrorists they harbor are pissed because of the economic stranglehold we try to control them with. We want their oil, they want our business, but if they do not fall in line with what we want we throw Tariffs on them. Do you think these hurt the billionaire kings, and oil moguls? No, they hurt the common people who cannot get imports, and their government blames their economic issues, on the blocks on imports by the US and its allies. Just look at something like the Food for Oil program, full of corruption on both sides, and in the end who suffers? the common folk.

and even if the actual suffering is being caused by their leaders, we are still doing enough to make ourselves the perfect scapegoat.

[Dabamf]

Originally Posted by brekk

NO SHIT

That's like saying if tomorrow the Russia/Chechnya issue was resolved it wouldn't stop terrorism on the US.

Not really, seeing as how we are strong supporters of israel, a country that all of the middle east hates. We have no significant involvement in your example. I don't think it is unreasonable to think that some of the hate for the US is based on our meddling in the middle east, or if nothing else, our meddling gives them an excuse to hate us (I think the underlying hatred is based on the West's success which in a way challenges the legitimacy of their irrational way of life). Though I don't believe it, it is a reasonable belief to think that our involvement with Israel is a significant enough part of their hatred for us that resolving it would curb terrorism at least a bit.

[Soriak]

“If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of Al Qaeda by one jot."

I don't think that's true... AlQaeda may not care about the regional conflicts, but that's where ordinary people decide to become terrorists. It's no coincidence that Iraq started to become a huge recruitment camp after the US invasion.

Your family getting killed by an airstrike, your country "occupied", etc - those are reasons for people to blow themselves up somewhere for revenge. Changing the world to conform to your ideals? That seems to me more like something the guys masterminding the terror network would be interested in - not the guys who end up dieing.

If the conflicts ended tomorrow it may not be the end of AlQaeda, but they sure would have a recruitment problem.

[Khorum]

LOL it really IS an interesting article.

For people like Soriak, Salman Rushdie made clear his sentiments on misguided cultural relativism:

Originally Posted by Salman Rushdie

It horrifies Salman that so many people in his natural political home – the left – don’t get this. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. They are not, he stresses. They mean what they say. “I think the left is misreading the situation for two reasons. The worthy reason is a desire to understand rather than condemn, to go out of your way to see what they’re on about.”

But “so much of the left always seems to fall for fascist bastards pretending to be speaking on behalf of the masses. They’ve done it before with communism in its various forms, and here’s another bunch of fascist bastards claiming to be speaking for the downtrodden masses, and they’re falling for it again.”

There are plenty of downtrodden folks in the world, and there are many activist bodies expending real effort to improve their lives. Al-Qaeda, Hizbullah and the Taliban do not fall in that category.

Here's another wonderful observation:

Originally Posted by Salman Rushdie

“When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say – the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that have for hundred of years have been acceptable – satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary – why the hell not?”

“But you see it every day, this surrender,” he says. He runs through a list of the theatres and galleries that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests. He mentions that the entire British media – from the BBC down – placed itself in purdah during the Mohammed cartoons. “What I fear most is that when we look back in twenty-five years’ time at this moment, what we will have seen is the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They’ll say that in the name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own throats. One of the things that have made me live my entire life in these countries is because I love the way people live here.”

Salman sees surrender stamped on every one of the ‘faith schools’ being constructed by Tony Blair. “To say the solution to the problems religion has caused is more religion… it’s just crazy,” he says. It will only reinforce the sealing-off of Muslims from the world that is symbolised by the veil, which he sees as a hideous anti-feminist shroud, “a one-woman tent”.

Yeah, Peace in Our Time all over again.

I disagree pretty strongly with a lot of his opinions of course, being a god-fearing freedom-loving American, but he's pretty close to the mark. He SHOULD be afraid of Pakistan's inventory going into Jihadist hands.

This isn't a war of civilizations yet, nowhere close. It's not even a lively argument. The Jihadists blew up a couple buildings and we retaliated by invading, subduing and occupying two sovereign muslim nations. Precisely the sort of shit that history-rich region doesn't forget for countless generations. What do you think the Wolfowitz doctrine demands as fair retribution for a nuclear strike on American soil? Now THAT will be a war of civilizations, THAT war won't have an ambiguous 'exit strategy', a nuclear attack on American soil will yield a direct, geometrically disproportionate and conclusive response.

[Tirinal]

Originally Posted by Soriak

stuff

People who have lost a loved one don't declare war on an ideology, they declare war on a country or demographic. Eventually either they will run out of suicide bombers or we will run out of bombable targets and that will be that. The truly scary people long-term, the ones who have declared war on ideology and think all progress should have stopped in 600AD, really could give a damn about Israel and Palestine as anything other than a blip in history. They never have.

I always have this vague sense of unease when what I'm saying sounds like Christopher Hitchens, but there you go.

Edit: You know, we really should be blaming the Byzantines for most of this. If Heraclius wasn't such a bumbling twit Islam would still be confined to a 4x7 patch of desert.

[Etadanik]

There's always a few nutheads who think that progress is the devil, like the Luddites in the West (the most famous of whom is the Unabomber), but they typically gain no great audience and have no real influence until some threat to the masses comes to light. And in that respect we're still fighting the aftermath of Israel's creation, since Israel's existence and subsequent invasion of its neighboring Arab countries has become the rallying cry of the Islamic fundamentalist, and they've used it masterfully as a unifying threat. Course, now they have a few more rallying cries in Iraq and Afghanistan - and perhaps in Iran, too, if situations turn bloody there.

The real way to combat these people is to stop giving them situations by which they could exploit the sympathies of the masses. The Bush administration is doing a terrible job at this and that's why this war can't be won. The great conquerors of the ancient world accomplished what they did by one of two means: through spreading their religion/culture, and thereby converting the natives, or by being so brutal that no one dared to oppose them. The West, with respect to Islam, is capable of neither because the "faith" in democracy and capitalism is weaker than the faith in Islam and brutality is antithesis to our notions of civilization.

[woqqqa]

On a vaguely related note, here's something about Bush, the Iraq War and his rural/exurban base:

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/200...wisconsin.html

[Soriak]

Originally Posted by Tirinal

People who have lost a loved one don't declare war on an ideology, they declare war on a country or demographic. Eventually either they will run out of suicide bombers or we will run out of bombable targets and that will be that. The truly scary people long-term, the ones who have declared war on ideology and think all progress should have stopped in 600AD, really could give a damn about Israel and Palestine as anything other than a blip in history. They never have.

That's what I said?

For people like Soriak, Salman Rushdie made clear his sentiments on misguided cultural relativism:

He's not really addressing it, other than throwing a punch at the left. There are no "evil" people who only intend on doing harm... no, Hitler or Stalin weren't evil - they believed what they did was right and had a tremendous ability to influence and manipulate people. You just have to read "Mein Kampf" to quickly realize Hitler is just stupid. I really wish I could read the original in german (banned here ), if it's anything like the translation/interpretation (not banned - no, doesn't make sense ) it'd be the best argument against the Nazis.

And no, this isn't 'invoking hitler' to try and win an argument - he just serves as an example of a person one could classify as "evil" and could be replaced by pretty much any other dictator. There are many factors - greed, power, illusions of grandeur... none of which can be dumbed down to plain "evil". Not to mention the opposite doesn't exist either: no leader is inheritently "good". They may have all sorts of favorable attributes, but in the end there are short and long term motivations behind their decisions that can be explored and evaluated. Just saying leader A is "good" and B is "bad" is making things way too simple. This has absolutly nothing to do with trying to justify actions, but it's far too easy to ignore circumstances and absolve oneself of all blame by just claiming the other guy is inheritently evil and nothing can be done about it.

So, yes... I think the people calling for the beheading of a journalist are doing so for two reasons:

I) Revenge for a harm (real or perceived) they have endured and blame on something the victim is associated with
II) As an effort to rally the troops for some idealistic goal.

In either case, it's important to make the distinction between terrorist leader (bin laden and co) who mastermind attacks, and the common terrorist who ends up executing them. They can't be thrown in the same group, because you'd never see bin laden actually carry out an attack himself.

[Gahid]

I blame the media.

No, wait, I actually do this time.