Naushad Shamimul Haque writes in the Arab News about those bad old "extremists" (thanks to Skeetstreet):
They thrive on militancy and violence. They seek to strike terror and they kill and maim, yet they claim to serve the cause of Islam. These misguided people are found everywhere and unfortunately their number continues to swell - thanks primarily to poverty, injustice and the West's double standard.
Yes, it's all our fault. I would like to get into a little discussion of history with Naushad Shamimul Haque, and find out how he explains all those jihads that were waged by Islamic empires at a time when those empires had an overwhelming military superiority over Western non-Muslim lands. Was it poverty? Injustice? Double standards that led Muslims to conquer Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Eastern Europe, North Africa, Spain, India, etc. etc. etc.? The people in those lands were not bothering the Muslims. They posed no threat, military or otherwise, to them. Today's jihadists speak in terms remarkably similar to the way the jihadists spoke in those days: about the necessity and merit of waging jihad for the sake of Allah (jihad fi sabil Allah). If that is so, is it really poverty that motivates them? Yet study after study has shown that jihadists today tend to be wealthier and better educated than other Muslims.
But Naushad Shamimul Haque indicates that he actually knows the truth:
More youngsters are lured into this dicey business of terrorism with promises of perks and paradise. Some of these young people who may have little or no knowledge of religion or who may never have prayed regularly say they aspire for "martyrdom" - the most lofty ambition a Muslim can have.
In other words, he knows that jihadists appeal to young Muslims by means of the Qur'an and core Islamic teachings about jihad and Paradise.
They are brainwashed by people who have vested interests; they are driven by misguided teachings. Violence and militancy are alien to Islam, the religion of peace, that teaches its followers tolerance and amity. But extremists, though few in number, seem to hold sway over the moderate majority. That is the dangerous phenomenon taking hold these days.
And why do "extremists" hold sway over the "moderate majority"? Could it be because the moderates have not been able to prove to their fellow Muslims that the teachings of the "extremists" are really "misguided"? Indeed it could.
On April 19, a group of radicals broke into a news conference held by moderate Muslim groups in London in connection with the May 5 British polls. Around 20 protesters, many wearing scarves to hide their faces, ripped a locked door off its hinges at one of London's main mosques and burst into the event organized by Britain's main Islamic lobby group, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).They pushed their way to the front of the room, stood on chairs and shouted slogans against the MCB, Jews, Christians, apostates and the entire British political system.
The protest laid bare tensions within Britain's 1.6 million-strong Muslim community.
After about 20 minutes of commotion, the protesters - young and wearing traditional Muslim dress including caps and flowing robes - left of their own accord.
In leaflets handed to reporters, they identified themselves as belonging to a group called "The Savior Sect." Muslims in Britain have condemned the protest.
Fiyaz Mughal, chairman of the opposition Liberal Democrats' group for ethnic minorities, said the protest "in no way represents the history of Islam" and cited Bosnia and Moorish Spain as examples of "societies where Muslims and non-Muslims had lived in peace."
More ahistorical whitewash. Of course they lived in peace -- as long as the non-Muslim dhimmis knew their place. You can read more about this in my book Onward Muslim Soldiers, but here is one piece of evidence from Bosnia, as related by the acting British Consul in Sarajevo, James Zohrab, in an 1860 letter:
The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is intense. During a period of nearly 300 years they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice of their masters existed....Oppression cannot now be carried on as openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed that, because the Government employés do not generally appear as the oppressors, the Christians are well treated and protected. (Quoted in Bat Ye'or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, p. 423.)
[[how he explains all those jihads that were waged by Islamic empires at a time when those empires had an overwhelming military superiority over Western non-Muslim lands. Was it poverty? Injustice? Double standards that led Muslims to conquer Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Eastern Europe, North Africa, Spain, India, etc. etc. etc.? The people in those lands were not bothering the Muslims. They posed no threat, military or otherwise, to them.]]
Bullseye.
Nobody says it better.
I want this explained and expounded every time I hear another self-pitying taqiyya whinge about the Crusades and the 'greatness', 'tolerance' and 'magnanimity' of Islamic civilisation.
Extreme deception speaking about extreme violence.
Both are extreme.
"Adherents of militant Islam account for some 15-20 percent of the Muslim world..."
www.meforum.org/article/168
Zico:
What the likes of Naushad Shamimul Haque and the various authors of the recently published UN report on the status of Arabs is that Arabs living within the State of Israel and the "occupied territories" enjoyed a far better standard of living than their bretheren living elsewhere in the region, until the return of Arafat and the establishment of the PA. The violence perpetrated against Israelis after orchestrated and fraudulent outrages such as the infamous Mohammed Al-Durrah case is what led to the lock-downs, checkpoints, security barriers, etc. and not the other way around. Neither will they talk about what Arafat did with all the aid money paid to the PA in the decade he ran the place.
Proof of this is found in the enormous growth in the Arab population after Eastern European Jews started to immigrate to the area, vastly improving the desolate local economy. (Of course, the actual population has been proved to be grossly overstated.)
Can't go wrong with blaming the west:
For a Muslim, this is standard procedure, none of them wants to stick his neck out. Honesty is in short demand in the ME, where lying is a way of life.
Our own (apologists) are much worse:
They have the freedom, they have the means and all the information is readily available. Plus nobody would harm them.
Then you see that Hollywood suffers collective amnesia, our political comedians show their true colors (gray with gray in gray) and nobody, nobody apart from a few bloggers pull their hair out over this idiocy...
"Adherents of militant Islam account for some 15-20 percent of the Muslim world..."
Where does this figure come from? Why not 30%? Or 50%? Or 80%? Or, as some ex-Muslims, such as Ali Sina insist, allMulsims are potentially adherents of militant Islam, for when the dormant virus of Islamic belief is fully awakened, it necessarily carries with it a whole host of murderously hostile attitudes, that are kept in check only because many Muslims are ignorant, wilfully or otherwise, or are unobservant in their practice, and quiet dissenters in their belief.
But if some personal crisis, or some political one, were to cause them to re-examine that faith, to become more observant in practcie, less nonchalant in the faith -- then what?
"thanks primarily to poverty, injustice and the West's double standard."
---from an article in the Saudi-supported Arab News
From the Arab News, that appears in, and is supported by, one of the richest countries in the world, the main beneficiary of the greatest transfer of wealth (and entirely unmerited wealth at that) in human history (some $10 trillion from oil-consuming nations to the OPEC members, almost all of them either Arab or predominantly Muslim), comes a remark that attributes the behavior of Muslims, in Muslim countries, and in non-Muslim countries, to "poverty." This is a hard sell, not least becuase Osama Bin Laden came from the second richest family in Saudi Arabai, Ayman al-Zawahiri came from one of the most prosperous and prominent Muslim families in Egypt (his great-uncle Azzam Pasha was the first Secretary-General of the Arab League), and was himself a surgeon; Mohammad Atta was the spoiled member of an upper-middle-class Egyptian family. Every study of Muslim terrorists shows them to be far above average in their education (including education in the west) and in the economic status of their families. The problem for Infidels is not Muslim "poverty" but Muslim wealth, the wealth that since 1973 has funded mosques and madrasas around the world (which of course help Muslim migrants plant Muslim roots in non-Muslim Europe). Another problem is not merely the wealth, but the idleness which that enormous accidental wealth creates. If the Saudis had to work the way that, for example, Americans and Japanese do, they would have less time to spend going to mosques, memorizing the Qur'an, taking to heart what the imams say in the khutbas. They would even have to worry about pleasing Infidel customers. And the great wealth of some Muslims (all those with oil and gas) has not lead them to share any of it with the poor Muslims. Somehow the preposterous assumption has not only been made, but apparently accepted by all concerned, that it is the Infidels who should be keeping afloat Egypt, and Pakistan, and the "Palestinians" and the Jordanians -- any Muslims at all who don't happen to live over a sea of oil. Instead, it would be far better to constantly turn the spotlight on the greed, and failure to share with fellow Muslims (except insofar as they may be rewarded for activities as Muslim martyrs, or to pay for terrorist activities, or for the direct spread of Islam and the conduct of Da'wa) of the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and denizens of the Emirates.
They will share the wealth for one reason and one reason only: to further the Jihad. Infidels pick up the slack -- building subway systems and water-treatment plants and power plants, and roads and bridges, and schools and hospitals. It is time for that Infidel Jizyah to end; it buys no friends, it helps to suppress the anger of poor Muslims which should rightly be directed at their wretched governments, and at the rich Arabs (such intra-Arab and intra-Muslim resentments should be encouraged, always and everywhere -- for they are based on a truth that we allow to remain unremarked, and by Infidels, unexploited).
As to "injustice" -- there is certainly a great deal of injustice within Muslim countries. And that reflects Islam itself, but we do not allow Muslims to see the connection between the nature of Islam itself, with its Total Regulation of Life, its Total Explanation of the Universe, and its Total Submission to Authority (for the habit of such submission is not limited to the prostrations in the mosque, but create a habit of mind that cannot easily be shaken). But presumably the writer of this Arab News squib means such "injustices" as -- "Palestine" or "Iraq." In the former case, 0.2% of the land area possessed by Arab Muslims has been reclaimed, from the Ottomans who owned it (there was scarcely any private land-ownership in the vilayets that became Mandatory Palestine), by the tribe that had originally lived there, and which gave "Palestine" everything of value that it had ever produced. The "injustice" is that which the relentless Jihad against the Jews, beginning with the million that might have been saved had not the British, appeasing the Arabs,prevented immigration by Europe's Jews all through the 1930s, even though Rumania's Black Sea ports remained open, and a million Jews might ahve been saved, has caused. What the Arabs call "the Arab world" is nothing of the sort; there are Kurds, Berbers, Armenians, Jews, Maronites (why use Arabic but are not Arabs), Copts, and many much smaller groups, reduced over time by the circumambient Muslim Arabs.
As for the "injustice" in Iraq -- that is a strange way to refer to the American invasion that finally removed a monstrous regime that had been in place for 35 years and was prepared to remain for another 35 years. The Iraqis are not grateful ("The Iraqis hate us [the Americans]" one interpreter, himself an Iraqi who identified with the American effort, despairingly told Anne Barnard of The Boston Sunday Globe; but so what? It is not an "injustice" to have rescued the Kurds and the Shi'a even if some of them are not grateful. And what are the Americans doing now, if not (foolishly) expending money and lives on trying to make Iraq a better place? During the 35 years of Saddam Hussein's reign not a syllable of protest came from any member of the Arab League about his mass murdering of Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, or of his oppression of those Sunnis who did not fully accept him. But the Americans not only removed him, and his sons, and his aides, but have poured money into the country to rebuild schools, hospitals, water-treament and power plants, and done so much that is hardly mentioned and for which they have received no real or permanent gratitude from the Iraqis, save for a tiny group of Western-educated (Kanan Makiya does not, alas, represent Iraq -- not even close).
And then there is the third in the Muslim roundup of Usual Suspects -- the "West's double standard." What "double standard" would that be? Would it be turning a blind eye to the persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims all over the Islamic world, while Muslim migrants are not only allowed in, by the millions, but allowed to build mosques and madrasas freely while Christians in Saudi Arabia are seized and tortured merely for meeting for private worship? Is that "double standard" the one that assures that the aggression of Muslims against non-Muslims, as in the southern Sudan, northern Nigeria, Isarel, the Moluccas, East Timor, the Hindus persecuted and murdered in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Bangladesh, will almost never be brought to the atteention of the so-called (but non-existent) "International Community" and its main expression, the Islamintern-dominated United Nations?
There is a "double standard." In Muslim countries non-Muslims are treated with contumely and worse. In non-Muslim countries, Muslims take to the streets ("Death to France" they chanted in the middle of Paris), or use mosques to store false papers and weapons, or demand that the indigenous Infidels modify their own ways of life, their customs and manners, their laws, to accommodate quite different customs, manners, and laws of Muslims, or make threats to intimidate political figures who show some gumption, or even kill those they do not like among the local political and cultural figures (Theo van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn).
Yes, he got it right, that Arab News reporter -- on one thing. There is a "Western double standard." And those who contribute to Jihadwatch, and related sites, are determined to put paid to that double standard, everywhere in the Western world.
Islam needs some bigger and better apologies.
After meditating and connecting up with "miharbI repooH, of RAIC,(everything is reversed in the astral), this is what he told me...
There are only a few of these fanatical extreemists...Three in number actually...but they are a very busy three...you think there are a lot of terrorist in the world, but no, it's almost all due to these three...they just move fast. And, they would not wreak all this havoc if not for greedy JOOOO's and the west who keep them down and in poverty. Of course it is only these three who "mis-understand",Islam, the rest have it right. If we could only get rid of those three fanatics there could be peace in the world...I cant tell you who these three are, but two of them are named "Abu" and the third "Barnard". "Bernie" seems to be the brains of the outfit. Bernie is personally responsible for giving Islam a bad name. So you see, it's not Islams fault, Islam is peaceful...muslims are peaceful...It's Bernie's fault, and abu-abu.
The Islamic Curley, Larry and Moe...Mis-understanders of Islam....
duh_swami-
I thought it was Big Mo, Abu-Lahree and Abu-Kehrli? Quran sura 54:40 (hike!).
I guess I misunderstood?
Salami, salami, baloney!
Big Sleep...those are code names..."Salami, salami, baloney", is code also. You seem to have a good grasp of code-ology. I was impressed that you pegged "Lahree" on the first try. Maybe you should write a book...haha..have a good day...swami
Ralph Peters describes the Islamic penchant for displacement in his brilliant book "Beyond Terror", wherein he states that "The stasis of Islamic civilization is the most colossal failure of our time..." and that its "greatest strength lies in its ability to shift blame."
Of course, this historic inability to engage in self-examination and self-criticism will only plunge the Islamic world into ever increasing poverty and bitterness, and instead of addressing their own shortcomings, they will thrash out in impotent rage at a world that is neither responsible for their culture's shortcomings nor capable of solving this problem for them.
Islam had problems LONG before 1776 and
1948,but it is a real tragedy that the 1 percent
of the good Muslims are having their faith
tarnished by the other 99 percent that misunderstand the Arabic versions of the Quran
that teach Tolerance,Peace,and Pluralistic societies.
Oh,and it also reveres Jesus since he was a Muslim and not a Christian as all us misinformed
followers have believed for 600 years before Muhammed showed up and decyphered the whole
history of God and what he really meant.
"they will thrash out in impotent rage at a world that is neither responsible for their culture's shortcomings nor capable of solving this problem for them."
In the case of some Muslims it is "impotent rage" -- but unfortunately for us, there is also a good deal of "potent" rage, and nuclear weapons could make that rage especially potent.
And while the model of blaming others is certainly true, it is also true that this only tells part of the story, or explains only part of the problem.
The richest Arabs, who therefore see themselves as the most successful ones (they are unembarrassed about the source of their wealth, which depends on an accident of geology), use their wealth to spread Islam (mosques, madrasas, etc.) not because they are flailing out in helpless rage, but because they are doing what Muslims do naturally whenever they can -- which is to engage in Jihad, in order to spread Islam, against all those who in any way can be seen as impeding the spread of Islam. And they will use what weaponry they possess -- and money is, for now, their best weapon. It buys them the other kind of weaponry, from the Infidels themselves, and buys them the services of many Infidels, including ex-government officials, intelligence agents, journalists, and university teachers.
And the "frustration" is not the frustration of not succeeding, but the frustration of not dominating the Infidels -- in other words, it is the frustration of all Muslims, everywhere, who find that Islam does not prevail, and Muslims rule over non-Muslims, wherever they may be. That is the "frustration."
The trouble with the argument that focusses too much on "frustration" as opposed to relating current behavior to the doctrines that arise naturally from Islam, that are its central teachings, that have been put into practice whenever and wherever possible over the past 1350 years, is that this "frustration" idea can play unwittingly into the hands of Muslims who tell us that just fix their "poverty" and the "injustice" they suffer, and everything will be okay.
Whether unhinged by wealth, or damaged by poverty, Muslims will wish to dominate non-Muslism, and be outraged whenever that does not happen, or where non-Muslims dare to resist. Whether educated or uneducated, whether Sunni or Shi'a, whether Arab Muslim or non-Arab Muslim, the True Believer in Islam will naturally, in the end, tend to reflect those doctrines that any reasonable reading of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira would naturally inculcate in someone calling himself a Muslim.
There are exceptions -- the non-observant, the nonchalant, even those who are perilously close to apostasy but can't quite bring themselves to declare it (and with reason). But the world of Infidels cannot tell who means it and who is feigning, or who means it now, but can change his mind in the future, should something untoward happen and the previously unobservant Muslim suddenly become fervent, with all that that implies.
Peters attributes to psychological setbacks what should in many cases be more properly attributed to the doctrines of Islam. If there is more obvious blaming of others in all possible circumstances, it is because Muslims simply cannot dare to recognize that their real problem is Islam itself. They simply can't. That would be a psychic impossibility, for all but the completely lucid and independent-minded. Such people are always rare, and not only in Islam.
Hugh:
They do it because it also helps to consolidate and perpetuate their power and control. Their religious dogma dictates that their vast wealth is Allah's will, but the poor should be content with their lot in life and if only they could rid the Middle East of every last Jew, American or whomever is their particular target of loathing for the moment (remember Saddam hated Persians as much as he hated Jews).