Gaza mosque welcomes London attacks

Gaza mosque welcomes London attacks - Preacher welcomes the "blessed
> acts" that took place recently in Iraq and Britain; highlights their
> proximity to selection of Olympic host for 2012 games. In a reaction
> similar to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York, the blood
> spilt in the London terror attacks has been celebrated within the
> Palestinian territories. - Jul 12th, 2005 11:16 AM -
> http://www.forzion.com/full-article.php?news=716
>

 

I know, I know.

And I have been told repeatedly by EVERY Muslim middle eastern government that it wants to kill every last Jew and push the State of Israel into the sea.

They never repudiate these vows, of course, even when they sign peace agreements.

Yet when I say that, as a Jew, I KNOW who my enemy is because he tells me so every damned day, I get accused of being a bigot.

Well, there IS some justice to the claim. I DO argue that this is a War between the Muslim world and the West and that in a war the subjective intent of individual citizens of one side or the other really doesn't matter. But the logical consequence of that argument is that Muslims cannot be trusted wherever they may be found and whomever they may be.

And that's just nonsense.

 

Of course, nonsense or not, it's exactly how the Muslim world seems to view US.

 

I strongly doubt the first clause, and would probably restate the second.

I think that most if not all Arab (and perhaps Muslim, it's not clear what's religious and what's nationalistic) governments don't applaud the creation of the state of Israel and the accompanying ejection of the Palestinians. They would be fools to cheer that, frankly.

But I think that many (all?) of them recognize that Israel isn't going anywhere, so some kind of coexistence is necessary. But it's just not realistic to expect it to be happy coexistence. They will still say that Israel is illegitimate.

It works both ways. I've been called an "anti-Semite" because I defended the idea of a Palestinian state. In fact, the one and only death threat that I've ever received in my life came from the Jewish Defense League after I spoke in favor of Palestinian statehood in the early 70's. The guy who delivered it was an aide to a gentleman who today is a leading Democratic party politician in Los Angeles. (The Republicans harbor similar figures.)

Ironically, hard-liners of the calibre of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have come around to a two-state view very similar to what mine was back then. Times change. But there was a lot more Israeli triumphalism back in the 70's and the militants' call then was to expel all the Arabs across the Jordan. That was to be the "final solution" to the Palestinian problem, I guess.

I'm not sure what to make of those kind of "war of civilizations" ideas. (Despite my sharing some of them.)

There does seem to be a problem with Muslims co-existing with everyone else, not just wih the West. There's violence all around the peripheries, in the Philippines, Thailand, between Pakistan and India, in Africa, all over. Perhaps that's due to Islam's being a polity, a divinely ordained social organization. So it's difficult for Muslims to live comfortably under non-Muslim rule, and that breeds separatist movements.

Obviously the biggest conflict is between Muslims and the West.

Part of that is explained by the fact that the West has historically been just as expansive as Islam was, and much more recently. Most Muslim states are former European colonies. When the appalling idiocy of World War II left the continent broken and prostrate, Europeans no longer possessed the means to be world powers, so they cut their empires loose, washed their hands of them, and concentrated on restoring a sense of domestic normalcy and security, turning into welfare states and born-again anti-imperialists.

But the radical Muslims didn't forget. They couldn't forget, since in a sense the Europeans had created them. The Muslim world had been kind of sleepy and self-satisfied before the arrival of the West, not particularly observant religiously and wih the devout mostly interested in Sufi mysticism.

Western power came as a tremendous shock and caused Muslims to try to root out whatever had led to their own weakness. That in turn stimulated all kinds of "reformist" reactions. Some Muslims tried to emulate the West (the Turks). Others championed anti-Western forms of Modernism that allowed them to appropriate science and industry while simultaneously denouncing their source, becoming Marxists or Baathists. Most of the Arab dictators fit that mold, from Nasser to Saddam.

You have to listen to individual citizens. That's because down there on the street, among the simple people, a radical Islamic resugence was taking place. Fueled by the Imams, there was a call for a return to the fundamentals of the faith, to the purity of faith and observance that that had won God's favor and led to the spread of Islam across half the planet in a single generation. To devoutly religious people, that's the only way for their culture to regain its lost glory and standing vis a vis the West, via a detour to the dark ages and a return to the world-view of the 7'th century.

We see it reflected in the suicide bombers. Each atrocity is an act of faith, a demonstration of total absolute devotion. That kind of behavior was expected from the heros of Christian faith in the age that spawned the Crusades, when knights rode into battle under the banner of the cross, but it's totally alien to us today. It's also why the cheery prognostications in the White House about a democratic post-Saddam Iraq might have been fatally flawed. The people vote, but we can't always assume that we will like the kind of radical social reformers that they vote in.

My emotions say the same thing, and loudly.

I certainly hope so.

I think that I prefer to look at it less as a matter of being anti-Islam, than as opposition to a political-fundamentalist religiosity that can appear in pretty much any religious tradition. We even see subtle hints of it here in the American religious-right. It appears whenever religious believers call for the reform of society in the shape of a religious revelation that they can't justify to outsiders and which is visible only to them.

That's inevitably going to inconsistent with a pluralistic globalizing world.

 

I agree with that. This is not really a war against the Muslim world. Unfortunately, it is way wider than that. It is consumerism versus tribal and religious fundamentalism. Muslims (some Muslims, I must add) are a part of it but there are many more groups that should be included as well. In Spain, for instance, someone today considered that those who voted for Blair and got killed in last Thursday’s blast in London basically deserved it, citing Sartre in a perverse way to corroborate it. The person who wrote that is a member of ETA, the terrorist group that pretends the independence of the Basque country by annihilating all opposition. Furthermore, there have been lots of justifications and rationalization to that brutality in London all over Europe, and not only from Muslims, but also from urban, white, Old Europeans. Funny that American media (Jewish-controlled, I think, but not sure about it) label these people, for instance, as “Basque separatists” and not terrorists who have killed hundreds of unarmed children, women journalists, university teachers, writers, etc,…. Can’t you see that the behavior of those who justify the London killings in Gaza are equally repulsive to those who from their comfortably air-conditioned offices in Atlanta, Georgia do basically the same with other people’s suffering in Spain, for instance? Why don’t we stop using euphemisms to name what is nothing but pure terrorism? I think the war on terrorism is seriously damaged if some forms of terrorism are përsecuted and eliminatedwhile other expresions of it are allowed (and even encouraged). Also the credibility of those who claim t ofight terrorism.

 

I'll probably really set off a firestorm here, but what do I care? That's my specialty.

My wife and I have had good friends (of course, every bigot says that!) who were Muslims: kind, soft-spoken people. All of them highly intelligent, brilliant (I came to know them, not surprisingly, in universities when my wife was studying for her Math degrees). And yet, as kind as these people were, as generous and peaceful individually, when I see Islamic States acting as a whole, when I see Muslims acting collectively, the results are perfectly insane, hostile--evil.

I think this goes back about 4,000 years to Ishmael and Isaac. The first son--the illegitimate one--was prophesied to become a "great nation", but one that, like its patriarch, would be a "wild donkey of a man". The Muslims claim to be ancestors of Ishmael, Mohammed did, though he claimed that Ishmael was the son of the promise, not Isaac.

This is old news; the Europeans exacerbated it, the Ottoman empire may have been corrupt and tyrannical, Bush may even be naive and wrong-headed in going toe-to-toe with the Islamic extremists, but this thing needed no help, really. It's always been there, the nations around Israel have always hated her whenever she's existed.

Ishmael still envies and hates Isaac for being legitimate after all these millenia. And it won't stop until the end of time.

Just my opinion.

 

Little Fauss, you definitely have a point. Postmodernism, postnationalism, post industrialism, .... have basically made those differences you mentioned more evident, and the result is what we see these days. But this is nothing new since every inch of territory the Muslims got they did it by the sword.

 

JLV

The only thing I feel compelled to "call" you on is the idea that the American media are "Jewish controlled".

That's just nonsense. It IS true that the American media tend to support Israel in the face of WORLD media that do not. Thank God for this; the double standard in the European press founded on its extensive history of anti Jewish orientation would otherwise go unanswered.

It is also true that the United States from President Truman forward has been a staunch supporter of Israel both as the Jewish State (a troublesome concept in itself, I agree) and as the SOLE democratic, reasonably honest, fairly uncorrupt, decently human rights concerned state in the Middle East.

It is also true that there IS a U.S. Jewish lobby. Damn straight there is; please remember that Jews alive today remember the murder of their families. I believe that Americans support Israel in part because Americans think that this is the DECENT thing to do.

My God, what Israeli can murder his children because they commit adultery or mutilate his daughters in the name of "culture"? What Israeli court orders the cutting off of hands? What Israeli official can be made to follow the law only by bribery? I do not suggest that Israel is perfect; much of her problems stem from the intrinsic contradiction of being a JEWISH, but DEMOCRATIC state. More of her problems come from having a large and growing minority of non Jewish citizens. But show me ANY Islamic state that even considers religious minorities to be a legal and social problem to be dealt with in a fair and rational way!

Show me a SINGLE middle eastern Islamic state that has regular, free elections for parliament. Just ONE will do. Good luck. (Iraq MIGHT get there. Eventually.)

Other than that, I suppose that I agree with you, more or less.

 

Haven't been paying too much attention to that part of the world in a while ... does Lebanon qualify? Did they ever?

 

Probably not, since until recently they were a protectorate of Syria.

 

Nosborne:

I think we've found something upon which we unreservedly agree. I agree with every single point you made unconditionally. Wonders never cease!

 

Yeah, I pretty much agree with that. There's a process of globalization taking place, the rise of a new homogenized world where cultural differences recede in imporance.

Unfortunately it isn't clear to me that the consensus Westernized path is necessarily the only one, or even that it's the best. There's something to be said for a world in which different visions can successfully coexist. A world mono-culture is dangerous both because it increases our vulnerabilities to the weaknesses of that single system and because it squeezes out alternatives.

Of course, I would personally characterize Islamic fundamentalism (just like Christian fundamentalism) as a disfunctional social atavism. So personally, I can't say that I'd be sorry to see any of those kind of medieval-inspired religious reactions against modernity fade away.

Not controlled. But certainly extremely influential. Jews are about 2% of the US population, but clearly far more numerous than that in New York national media circles. (Also in the LA entertainment industry.)

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Success deserves to be rewarded. And after all, if the Jews weren't there, who would replace them? Christians? Nobody ever worries about the American media being Christian dominated.

Christians are kind of the traditional cultural default-mode. They are invisible because they are 'normal'. Jews aren't, they are 'outsiders'. (Hence American Jews being historically Democrats in overwhelming numbers. The Democrats are the outsider's coalition. That subtle alienation is why Jews are so strikingly prone to joining social-change organizations.

Many Irish Americans have traditionally been very fond of the IRA (and very prominent in funding it). The boys were "freedom fighters", never "terrorists". It was kind of striking to see all the green sputtering and back-pedaling after 9-11 with the spotlight suddenly and uncomfortably directed on fighting terrorism.

Sure, it's hypocritical as all hell.

Part of the explanation is 9-11, I guess. There's violence abroad all the time and the US population just shrugs. ("Damn foreigners!") People just aren't emotionally engaged, except for minority communities with ethnic affinities.

But if somebody attacks US, then suddenly everything's different. That was true at Pearl Harbor and it's equally true now. The US has joined the battle and like Nosborne, we know who our enemies are. That has nothing to do with Jews stirring us up.

Everyone that I've met here in the United States, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, circumspect or outspoken, Jew or Christian, just doesn't like either Islam or Muslims very much. (It's as close to unanimity as Americans come on anything.) There's an almost visceral disgust at those women with the scarves wrapped so tightly around their heads, and at their swarthy and faintly threatening menfolk.

If there's another big terrorist attack here, there could very easily be a pogrom with mosques and homes being burned and perhaps people being lynched. There almost was after 9-11, and Bush felt it necessary to appear almost every day on TV alongside Muslim leaders to head one off. It's not a very pretty picture.

I agree.

 

a wholly civil thread in the politics forum!

Somebody oughta pickle this one and put it in a jar by the cash register!

Intelligent. Civil. Well-disputed. How it spozed to be. Great work, copii.

 

Im my opinion Islamist are using our liberal laws and under the name of Islam they they are changing the face of the planet.

Europe is Eurabia now, the plan in USA the same.

The religeon is used like a Trojan Horse to destroy us and our way of living. We have our weeknesses and beeng nice to them is beeng weak. In my opinion there is no more national security but national business all is for sale, I don't see but corrupted burocrates running the afairs of our country.

I hope it's not to late, they are behind 17 of the conflicts in the World.

Learner

 

Here is an example:

Los Angeles
local madrassa was a hub for Pakistani mulla recruting terrorists to attend traning camp in Pakistan. The father was arested after FBI visit and exposureof him finding his sons training in the terrorist camps, simple humble icereem truck salesman.

LEEDS -- The transformation of four young British men into terrorists appears to have taken place at a government-funded storefront youth centre in Leeds that, according to youth workers, was a hub of radical Islamist activity.

 

What SCARES me, Lerner, is that your, well, "paranoia" leads to exactly the same result as my statement does.

I wonder if we are really seeing clearly at this point. ALL of the serious, violent attacks on the U.S. for the last couple of decades have been mounted by Muslims in the name of Islam (their brand, anyway).

But all save a couple of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi subjects as is Bin Laden himself. Couldn't we just as easily have arrived at the conclusion that Saudi Arabians are the enemy and they just happen to be Muslims?

Am I not painting with a brush that is MUCH too broad?

 

Here's some questions:

Is Islam having a harder time adjusting to world globalization than other cultures? (The violence of the Japanese transformation captivated our parents' generation. The Chinese accomodation traumatized a civilization and isn't entirely over yet.) So, is Islam essentially different, or just the most recent?

If Islam is having a harder time than most, then why is that? I would locate the source of that difficulty in their Jewish-inspired religious legalism. Like Judaism, Islam is a divinely revealed way of ordering human life and human society. But Judaism was always a tribal religion, a matter of blood descent. And because Judaism was always small and got continually kicked around, it introverted, abandoned its ideas of becoming a universal religion (Christianity took those up) and became a private religion for a select community. But Islam's formative experience was unifying the bedouin tribes and then world conquest. So they universalized their revelation and (at least theoretically) put Islamic law to work ordering their world. Now they find it hard to compromise their essentially medieval social order without feeling that they are abandoning both their civilization and their revelation.

So, if there's any truth to that, how might Islam be helped along the path that Judaism has already taken? How can Islam become a private religion for Muslims wherever they are, permitting them to live happily and peacefully in countries (and in a world) where most people aren't Muslims and where shariah isn't mandatory?

What kind of native cultural resources does Islam contain within it? Specifically, what alternatives exist inside Islam besides hardline legalistic theocracies? Historically, many Muslim states weren't especially observant, except in rather nominal ways. Personal religiosity was often a Sufi-inspired matter of seeking religious experience and purifying the heart. The Neoplatonic tradition has remained alive in Islam since late antiquity, while it generally withered in the West. (When philosophy revived here, it was Aristotle that had greatest influence, leading the West in a common-sense this-worldly direction that ultimately led to renaissance humanism and to the scientific revolution.)

What kind of accomodations to modernism have the Muslims already made? There are many Muslim modernists. But modernism seems to have generally been imposed from the top, by the military and by strong-man dictators: Nasser, Mubarrak, Asad, Saddam Hussain, the post-Soviet Central Asian big-men, Musharraf, the Indonesian generals... Even in Turkey, modernism was imposed from above.

So, is promotion of democracy always in our own best interest? Or is this a reflection of our own unspoken enlightenment faith, a faith that assumes that our way is inherently obvious and indisputably desirable, and that all peoples, when given the chance to vote, will automatically do the right thing and choose it? Can we realistically expect that? (There's a natural law theory implicit in that, I suspect.)

How is the globalizing world culture impacting Muslims on the street? What effect is the internet having on Muslim youth? What do they think of music videos and young Western women's aggressive in-your-face sexuality? How is the free expression of ideas making itself felt? What effects are scientific rationalism having on them? In the West, a culture that sought its explanations by applying rationality to empirical evidence ended up leaving traditional religious revelations bloodless and extremely problematic. But if they don't address the world in those militantly secular terms, then how can Muslims survive in a world of high-technology?

Finally, I have to recognize that all of these questions are about how Islam needs to change to accomodate to us. That's how I, a Californian, think.

But it might be valuable to inquire into what the possibilities for cultural diversity might be in this brave new globalized world of ours. Will it really be a world mono-culture where everyone thinks and behaves (and consumes) exactly alike, the world around? Or will opportunities exist for individuals, and for entire societies, to deviate, to follow their own star even if others don't like it?

If not all Muslims choose to fit in, must they? How can those opting out, if that's what some of them want to do, be accomodated peacefully? (In particular, is it realistic to expect to move to Europe, to be welcomed with open arms and enjoy a cornucopia of riches, but to nevertheless continue to live a life that's essentially medieval?) How can fundamentally incompatible social and intellectual worlds coexist, even in separate countries, in the face of world commerce, travel and global communications? Is it even possible to exist together without threatening each other?

 

I get the impression that Islam has already made this choice.

There was time when the Muslim world led in all matters mathematical, medicinal, artistic and scientific. Al-gebra, for instance. Heck, the Persians INVENTED the University. We in the West learned of Greek thought largely through the work of Arab Muslim scholars, IIUC.

But as is inevitable in science, the day comes when it becomes very obvious that one cannot view one's religious text as being revealed word and literally accurate in all things. The Muslim world turned its back upon its own accomplishments and began its long slide into brutality, ignorance, corruption, widespread severe poverty, superstition and decay.

A small group of Muslims are now attacking us. But really, look at the Muslim world! For the VAST majority of Egyptians or Yemenese or even Jordainians, life is nasty, brutish and short. The President is right about this; these people have no hope.

Permit me to point out that there are roughly 750,000 Muslim Israeli citizens, last time I checked. This group would MUCH rather live under Jewish rule in a more-or-less free society (where they even get to VOTE and elect MEMBERS OF THE KENESSET) than emigrate to ANY Muslim country.

Actually, now that I think about it, that Arab 750k might be comprised half and half of Christians and Muslims. Even so. There's been no exodus.

 

Actually, I think if people were to take at least some of those religious texts upon which Muslims rely (certainly it's not the Qur'an I'm talking about here) as revealed word and literally accurate, they would have the answer to the instant problem: this was prophesied almost 4,000 years ago. Is it any surprise as to its accuracy, given that the prophecy came from the Creator of the Universe?

 

Nosborne, I would find it repulsive if the US would support any other country in the Middle East different than Israel. But that wasn´t the point. What I meant by that little remark was that Jewish media, more than anybody else, should be sensitive toward other countries who are also suffering a similar problem. What would Jewish think if the EU stopped condemning those suicide attacks in Israel... or defining them as separatist or independentist actions? If that day ever comes, I will oppose with my all (modest) means to avoid such a shame. That´s what I would expect from editors at the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, etc ....

And regarding the second part of your commentary, I think Turkey could qualify as a couple of steps higher than a nominal democracy. Yes, it is under the tutelage of its Kemalist army, but there has been some progress under the auspices of the EU. Nevertheless, its democracy has lower quality compared to that of Israel.


Regards