Victor Davis Hanson writes in NRO, with thanks to TR.
The three-year-plus war that began on September 11 is the strangest conflict in our history. It is not just that the first day saw the worst attack on American soil since our creation, or that we are publicly pledged to fighting a method — “terror” — rather than the concrete enemy of Islamic fascism that employs it.Our dilemma is that we have not sought to defeat and humiliate the enemy as much as wean a people from the thrall of Islamic autocracy. That is our challenge, and explains our exasperating strategy of half-measures and apologies — and the inability to articulate exactly whom we are fighting and why.
Hello Victor, and welcome to the discussion. We've missed your input.
Imagine that a weak Hitler in the mid-1930s never planned conventional war with the democracies. Instead, he stealthily would fund and train thousands of SS fanatics on neutral ground to permeate European society, convinced of its decadence and the need to return to a mythical time when a purer Aryan Volk reigned supreme. Such terrorists would bomb, assassinate, promulgate fascistic hatred in the media, and whine about Versailles, hoping insidiously to gain concessions from wearied liberal societies that would make ever more excuses as they looked inward and blamed themselves for the presence of such inexplicable evil. All the while, Nazi Germany would deny any connections to these “indigenous movements” and “deplore” such “terrorism,” even as the German people got a certain buzz from seeing the victors of World War I squirm in their discomfort. A triangulating Mussolini or Franco would use their good graces to “bridge the gap,” and seek a “peaceful resolution,” while we sought to “liberate” rather than defeat the German nation.
An interesting analogy, but not really applicable here because the "ideology" supposedly being introduced is, in this case, simply the religion-in-action of well-nigh 100% of the inhabitants of Muslim lands. It doesn't need an introduction.
So to recap: The real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand. They wear no uniforms and are deeply embedded within and protected by Muslim society.
Oh, a tiny minority of extremists, is it? I'm so relieved. Let's see now, by Daniel Pipes' estimate, 10-15% of a billion is...100-150 million. Oops, that's a lot more than "a few thousand," eh, Victor?
Beyond the terrorists, a larger percentage of Middle Easterners, if it cost them little, gain psychological satisfaction when fellow defiant Muslims (terrorists or not) “stand up” to Westerners, who enjoy power, status, and wealth undreamed of in the Middle East.
"wealth undreamed of in the Middle East"?? Victor, are you insane? Some of these people have more money than God. Osama bin Laden once bankrolled the entire public debt of Sudan!
Even if they would hate living under Taliban-like theocrats, millions at least see the jihadists as about the only way of “getting back” at the Western world that has left them so far behind. This passive-aggressive sense of inferiority explains why millions of Muslims flock to Europe to enjoy its freedom and prosperity, even as they recreate there an Islamist identity to reconcile their longing and desire for what they profess to hate.
Oh, come on, Victor. This old "they hate us because they envy us" is starting to wear pretty thin. It's another grasping at straws approach we see in all commentators who profess to understand the conflict without understanding Islam. Give it up.
Still, most in the Middle East wish simply to embrace the human desire for prosperity, freedom, and security within the umbrella of traditional Muslim society — and will support American efforts if (a) these initiatives seem to be successful, and (b) are not seen as American.
Here's another one: We can figure out a way to make our initiatives in the Middle East look like they are not our initiatives, but ones coming from the natives instead. Good luck with that.
Consequently, the United States has not been able to bring its full arsenal of military assets to the fray. It is nearly impossible to extract the killers from the midst of civilian society. Too much force causes collateral damage and incites religious and nationalist anti-American fervor. Too little power emboldens the fascists and suggests America (e.g., Nixon’s “pitiful, helpless giant”) cannot or will not win the war...
Let me offer another suggestion here, our problem is not extracting "the killers from the midst of civilian society," our real problem lies with the religio-social system that produces those killers-for-Allah in the first place. Your analysis has not correctly identified either the jihadists' motivation or their inspiration. Hint: it has nothing to do a)poverty, b)envy or c)feeling politically powerless because they live under dictatorships. Identifying the motivation and goals of the enemy is paramount, and yep, you're going to have to study Islam in order to understand it. Grade: C minus - you will have to study harder to pass this test.
From the Sunday Times
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1631924,00.html
The Sunday Times
May 29, 2005
Wake up, the West is losing
David Selbourne’s book warning western nations they underestimate the threat of extremist Islam failed to find a British publisher. America has taken it up and the arguments are causing a stir, says Sarah Baxter
When David Selbourne flew into America recently, he had good reason to feel he had arrived in the land of the free. His new book, The Losing Battle with Islam, was featured at New York’s Book Expo, the US publishing industry’s trade fair last week, after it failed to find a British publisher.
One glance at the title and it is easy to see why. The Losing Battle With Islam is a blistering critique of the West’s response to Muslim militancy. Publishers in London were far too “pusillanimous” and “PC” to take it on, says Selbourne indignantly. But in America, a nation with greater “intellectual vigour”, Prometheus Books stepped into the breach and it will be published in September.
The manuscript has already been circulating in intellectual circles in “samizdat” form and it may yet find a British publisher now the Americans are leading the way. But the big brush-off is a prime example of Selbourne’s thesis that westerners are displaying a misplaced and muddle-headed sensitivity to Muslim feelings that is not always reciprocated.
I caught up with him in Washington, where he was meeting think-tankers, policy makers and opinion-formers. “It’s a relief to talk to people who are engaged in this matter,” he sighed. “This is the front line of what matters in the world.” He feels the non-Muslim world is ignoring at its peril the challenge posed by a resurgent Islam.
Controversy comes naturally to Selbourne, a veteran of ideological and cultural wars. He used to teach at Ruskin College, Oxford, the trade union college, and was assumed to be a man of the left until he began writing about the breakdown of civil society and morality in essays and books such as The Principle of Duty.
He is wary of libertarianism and the cult of the individual and considers Milton Friedman, apostle of the free market, to be the “evil genius of our age”. With such views, he was always going to be at odds with the Thatcherite right. Yet his arguments against loosening the bonds of family and community led him to be labelled a reactionary sell-out by the post-Sixties left.
Selbourne’s holiday home in Italy became his refuge and, eventually, his permanent base: “I needed a cordon sanitaire between me and the seething world of competitive English intellectuals.” From there he remains engaged in the war of ideas in the English-speaking world, eagerly scanning British and American newspapers and magazines on the internet and fighting every ideological battle as if the barbarians were at his gate.
“I consider myself to be highly progressive,” he says with a touch of indignation and weariness. “I consider it highly progressive to be against fascism and there are elements of Islamic society which are fascist. People are cowed, and it has to be resisted.”
In Italy last week, in an attack on free speech, the veteran polemicist Oriana Fallaci, author of the bestselling The Rage and the Pride, a diatribe against the West’s alleged cultural surrender to Islamists, was ordered by a judge to face trial on charges of defaming Islam, a sign of the ferocity of the ideological warfare now under way.
With his white beard and gentle voice, Selbourne has the mild manner of a don. He considers himself to be a dispassionate, highly sensible voice of reason but he also has the intellectual force of a flame-thrower. In his new book he scorns some Muslims for “taking liberties” with Britain — supporting attacks on the West by Islamists while expecting that their own “civic and other entitlements will be met in full”.
But much of his criticism is reserved for the West, which is only too eager to flagellate itself for its alleged shortcomings while rushing to understand its opponents’ point of view (the Newsweek imbroglio over the alleged desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo Bay detention base, a story it later withdrew, is just the latest example). Even in America, “the political class has lost confidence in itself”, he complains.
The American imperium, Selbourne argues, “is in a state of confusion”. Its time will pass, just as Rome, Byzantium and the British Empire fell away. The West is losing the battle against Islam for the “same reason the British lost the American colonies. They had insufficient forces, their counsels were divided, and they underestimated their opponents”.
Selbourne dates the reawakening of the Islamic world to the Suez crisis and the outbreak of Arab nationalism in the 1950s. He has been studying the phenomenon and building up an archive of material stretching back for decades.
In the 1980s he travelled to Afghanistan — then the training ground for Islamic militancy—– and a decade later visited Kosovo, where he saw that the viciousness of Serbian racism had met its match in the spiritual confidence of Muslims.
When some British Muslim leaders backed Ayatollah Khomeini’s chilling fatwa against Salman Rushdie and an Islamic conference in Bradford endorsed Iraq’s call for a “holy war against western forces” in 1990, Selbourne sensed that these were not one-off aberrations but signs of a profound cultural shift.
“History didn’t begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001,” he says. By chance, he was driving to Cambridge, Massachusetts when the attacks occurred and was impressed by the unity, dignity and restraint of Americans. But that consensus soon dissolved as attacks on President George Bush escalated.
In Selbourne’s view Americans are at a loss to understand why they are so hated, so they are turning their fire on their leader. “When you like yourself well enough, it is very hard to hear that anti-Americanism is rife in the world, so he’s made a scapegoat. Americans don’t want to be tarred with his brush.”
As for the Europeans: “They’re anti-American because of fear of Islam, which is being projected as Bush-phobia. People are very frightened by Islam’s strength and they need to blame somebody for it.”
The worst of it is that people in the West are so willing to suspend their judgment about Muslim extremists, including clerics who issue bloodcurdling anti-semitic remarks or denunciations of women’s emancipation and homosexuality, while vilifying Bush as a liar.
If, like Selbourne, you take the long view, there is not much point in hating the Americans or their president. “The odium for Bush is clouding people’s judgment,” he says. “It’s not Bush’s fault that Islam is advancing. It is being propelled by its own organic power.”
He is pessimistic about the outcome of this religious and cultural war. “We’re up against a terrific foe. The United States and the non-Muslim world are in a desperate predicament. We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t take them on.”
In Iraq, he fears the situation is becoming hopeless and that Bush is chasing an “illusion about the democratisation of the Islamic world”.
“You know what’s happening. The United States is trying to groom democratic liberal figures in the Muslim world and I fear it will lead to the same end as President Diem in Vietnam.” (Diem, America’s placeman, was killed by his own generals in 1963 after he was overthrown in a military coup.) The irony is that history may well be on Islam’s side with or without violent tactics. “I don’t think there’s any need for Islamists to be killing and terrorising people — even though such behaviour is sanctioned in the Koran, no matter what people say,” Selbourne says. “Islam is advancing willy nilly as a moral force, whether you like that moral force or not.”
For Selbourne, the fragmentation of western society has left it intensely vulnerable to a challenge of this nature. “We used to have an animating idea,” he points out. “It used to be a belief in civil society and community. We’re dismantling the social order in which Muslims so firmly believe in their own society.”
Islam is a religion on the rise, winning converts among the poor and needy, from Africa and Indonesia to inmates of American jails. “It’s the politics of the underdog, the marginalised. If it’s the socialism of our time, with an ethic that appeals to the oppressed, it will have the same force.”
We must not forget, he warns, that it is also “the last faith” in the Abrahamic trinity of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. “It’s a very powerful argument because it believes it has superseded the other faiths. It’s clear that the non-Muslim world lacks the moral energy which Muslims are justifiably proud of.”
In other words, if we lose the battle, forget Bush, we have only ourselves to blame.
Key moments in the rise of militant Islam
Suez
The crisis in 1956 is considered to be the most significant turning point in post-war British foreign policy but it also played a key role in reinforcing Arab identity. Britain had joined forces with France and Israel in a military intervention to attempt to prevent General Nasser, president of Egypt, from nationalising the Suez Canal. Nasser saw himself as the leader of the Arab world, promoting Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East. When the British withdrew it signalled the end of British imperialism and the forming of a new sense of Arab pride.
Afghanistan
The Afghan war began in 1978 when fundamentalist mujaheddin moved to overthrow the country’s pro-Soviet government. It fell the following year and the Russians invaded. A long war of attrition ended in humiliation for the Soviet army and a military and ideological victory for Islamic forces.
The fatwa
In 1989, Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or religious decree ordering the death of Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born author of The Satanic Verses who was living in Britain. The fatwa, which remained in force after Khomeini’s death, led to a break in diplomatic relations between London and Tehran and forced Rushdie to go into hiding under police guard. A Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death and an Italian translator and Norwegian publisher were injured in attacks tied to the fatwa. It was technically lifted in 1998.
Osama Bin Laden
The United States has placed a $25m bounty on the head of Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist. But the mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 remains at large on the wild, mountainous border of Pakistan and Afghanistan
As head of Al-Qaeda, the terrorist network that has been responsible for carrying out a string of attacks against western targets across the world from Nairobi to Bali and Madrid, Bin Laden is a hero to many disenchanted young people in the Muslim world.
Spencer's point here is so simple, and yet, to this very day, our leaders from top to bottom do not get it. Billions are being wasted on policies that assume that 'the problem is not Islam'. One cannot even utter that idea. It is forbidden. There is something wrong with you for even thinking it. You are an Islamophobe.
What is it then? What is the problem? Why are millions of people attracted to a devious, violent cause that mortally threatens every citizen of the Western world, quite literally? The foggy, trendy idea of 'globalization', the old cold war thesis 'poverty', the very intellectual sounding 'demographics', that rhymes with 'globalization', a universal gut feeling like envy? Do any of these ideas make any sense at all?
All Spencer does is point out that we should attend to what these people, these people who want to kill us or dominate us, say. Listen to them, and they will tell us why they hate us. How difficult is that to do? Well, it seems that it is a little difficult, because it requires learning the vocabulary and something about the conceptual schemes of the people who want to dominate us and kill us.
And for these elementary ideas, citing and encouraging the reading of Islamic sources, advocating the critical study of Islamic history and practices, reporting on the violence perpetrated in the name of Islamic ideology, Spencer is demonized.
What will it take for folks to simply open their eyes and ears? Read and listen.
In the email Barbara Stock shows in this article, describes PERFECTLY what the real battle is.
It's not envy or any of the other trite excuses people use.
It's pure dominence over everyone who isn't Muslim.
Convert or die. It's just that simple. Read the article and pay particular attention to the email.
Then go and research all the new hate laws these groups are trying to get passed here.
People need to wake up and soon.
The Coming Fall of America
JUNE 1, 2005 | DAVID WATKINS
Posted on 06/01/2005 4:22:29 PM PDT by CHARLITE
A recent law passed in Europe during the 3rd Council of Europe Summit bans the condemnation of Islam as both racist and intolerant while equating it to anti-Semitism. The draft from this summit also included the notion of "Islamophobia" and concluded that such words used in public denote discrimination and intolerance to a person's belief.
What this new law does is equate the denunciation of one's religious beliefs with racism. It will eventually make it illegal to write and/or distribute material denouncing Islam as a religion of terror. Further, it will make it possible for Islamically minded people too sue authors of nationalities other than Islam for speaking out about the current atrocities being perpetrated by the countless Jihad organizations that have permeated every nation of the world including the USA.
This recent act of madness by the 3rd Council of Europe brings to mind a letter submitted by a Muslim to Barbara Stock, the founder of RepublicanandProud.com which stated that:
"We will fight the infidel to death.
Meanwhile American laws will protect us.
Democrats and Leftist will support us.
UNO will legitimize us.
CAIR will incubate us.
ACLU will empower us.
Western Universities will educate us.
Mosques will shelter us
OPEC will finance us
Hollywood will love us.
Koffi Annan will pass politically correct sympathetic statements for Jihadists.
"Our children will immigrate from Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Indonesia and even from India to the US and to the other Western countries. They will go to the West for education in full scholarship. America is paying and will continue to pay for our children's educations and their upbringing in state funded Islamic schools.
" We will use your welfare system. Our children will also send money home while they are preparing for Jihad.
"We will take the advantage of American kindness, gullibility, and compassion. When time comes, we will stab them in the back. We will say one thing on the camera and teach another thing to our children at home. We will give subliminal messages to our children to uphold Islam at any cost. Our children in America will always care more about Islamic Country's interest than US interest."
After reading this small excerpt, anyone can plainly see that this is just the tip of the iceberg that will soon start to infiltrate the political halls of justice in America.
If anyone doubts this they only have to go see the latest Hollywood fairly tale blockbuster called "Kingdom of Heaven" that completely rewrites history and portrays Christians as the bad guys; looting, raping, and pillaging everything inside and outside of Jerusalem, while it portrays the Muslims as the protectors of mankind.
It appears Hollywood forgot their history. Or perhaps they just forgot to mention the fact that most of the Middle East at that time was Christian. This is before the clerics ordered the Jihadists to convert or kill everyone. They accomplished this even before the Muslim Ottoman Empire rose to power and ostracized, killed, or enslaved all non-Muslim nations within all their conquered empire.
Can anyone remember the last time a Muslim cleric or Muslim leader denounced any of the recent terrorist attacks against Christians?
Of course these same Muslim leaders and Clerics are the same people that lash out when they think their rights as Muslim's are in question. They do so even as they spew their hate-filled speeches within the walls of their Mosques.
These are the same Muslim leaders and Clerics that fund all the new Wahhabi Mosques being built throughout the USA. They feel it is their right to print material calling for a nation-wide Jihad against anyone that speaks out against Islam.
Can anyone remember the last time a Christian beheaded or blew-up a Muslim with a bomb strapped too his hips because a Muslim burned the Bible or the US flag?
As an American, I am sick and tired of having my freedom whittled away bit by bit, having my constitutional rights stripped away through the activism of those hiding behind a "religion" that advocates hatred, destruction of mankind, and preaches racism and intolerance in the Mosques, but professes to be a religion of peace to the media.
Perhaps the mainstream media is less sophisticated, but after living and working in Muslim countries for the past 10 years, I can tell you one thing for certain, America is on the Islamic "agenda" and they won't stop until America is ruled by the Sharia law; nothing less is acceptable.
After all, the courts and the American laws will protect them, the ACLU will empower them, the Mosques will shelter them, Hollywood will love them, our Western Universities will educate them, and the Democrats and Leftist will support them. What better start can you have to start your Jihad in America?
They have already taken a foothold in Europe. America is next.
PEOPLESTRUTHFORUM.COM
http://www.peoplestruthforum.com
And one more thought on envy.
Envy requires the desire for what one does not have. But Muslims generally, both those who support (or at least admit they support) the Taliban and Bin Laden, as well as other Muslims say quite emphatically that they do not want to become Western. That is the problem. Western society is the problem, what we are conflicts with their belief system, which demands at first a call to surrender, Da'wa, the call to Islam, then, resistence, a fight, Jihad, and domination, if it is possible.
And envy surely does exist among Muslims in Muslim countries and Western countries, but is that envy the problem? If Muslims generally wanted just what the West has, there would be no problem at all. Envy would invite a solution. Envy would promote industry and creativity to acquire what is desired. And, as people acquire what the West has, envy will diminish, and as envy is diminished, the Jihad will diminish. But this is absurd.
Would that more envy existed. The problem is aversion, suspicion, rejection, alienation, hatred. And what causes such reactions in people?
A belief systems, an ideology...Islam itself.
JTF,
Actually those are my comments on the Hanson article. Just to be clear.
Best, Rebecca
Thanks for the clarification Rebecca, and sorry about not attending more carefully to authorship.
JTF -
No need to apologize. If you really thought I was Spencer, I take that as a huge compliment.
Best, Rebecca
Only few thousand? How many is a few?
As far as prosecuting a successful war against terrorism is concerned, GW Bush works in strange and mysterious ways. His ways would not have been the ways of Genghis Kahn, Hannibal, or the ruthless Roman army. Back then, the only rule of war, was to win. The philosophy now seems to be, win without actually winning, or lose without actually losing, or gain without actually gaining. Reality is disappearing down the rat hole of PC and other insanities.
But then, I dont get to sit in on high level meetings of Bush and the Bushmen/women. Maybe he knows something I dont. Maybe kissing the Saudi on the mouth was just an innocent mistake. Maybe his insistance that Islam is a religion of peace, is due to someone slipping LSD into his orange juice. Maybe Allah is talking to him in his dreams. The only thing I know for sure, is if we could hire Ghengis Khan, the job would get done...
The mountain labored... and gave birth to a mouse.
(And a microencephalic mouse at that.)
Trotting out the same lame horse excuses. As usual, we are the problem. ZZZZzzzzzzzz.....
Read 'em Koran, kemosabe.
Learn 'em bad news.
Koran heap big trouble.
Ugh.
it is about time that it was acknowledged by those who clearly see the eternal problem of Islam, that it is not the few thousand islamofascists who are the "Heretics" but the millions of so called moderate Muslims!
One can obviously understand that it is wahhabism that has made, with the rechanneled oil revenues, huge inroads in the Islamic world.
But is it not the case that they are simply recalling "falloen" Muslims to the true interpretation of Islam?
An Islam that westerners and intellectual Muslim have tried to sanitize for the twentieth century.
To the wahhabist, the Immense oil deposits on Islamic Lands are a signal from allah himself that the time has come for the world to revert to Islam. The western nations have rendered them rich beyond imagination for the accident of nature that has placed the worlds energy resources under their dessert sands.
Only naive westerners would accept that the Infidel dollars would suffice in payment for the "blood" that has been flowing out of sacred lands. Lands which were cleared of infidels long ago.
The real price of oil is the islamization of the western world. Only this will justify the loss of the Holy blood of Arab lands.
susan_b
The link to the Council of Europe's decision is here
http://www.zaman.org/?bl=international&alt=&trh=20050519&hn=19663
Prime Minister Erdogan's has been successful in getting anti-islamism as equivalent to racism. But who is to determine what is anti-islam and what is legitimate criticism if islam. You can take it that it will be defined by the severity of the riots, and Muslims will riot at the slightest opportunity. In effect any criticism of islam or islamism, will be taken as hatred against the religion and prosecuted. All criticism of islam will thus be banished, by abiding the law, fear of prosecution, or death at the hands of the islamists.
This decision along with the UNCHR's decision, needs to be seen as a concerted act by muslims, with Turkey playing the camel's nose in Europe. The dangeruous aspect of these two agreements is that European governments will enact legislation using these two agreements as justification.
It seems that the defeat of the EU constitution was quite unexpected and inconvenient to the EU elite, as it would have allowed the EU to draft the above agreements, as overarching EU laws. The EU constitution defeat came not a moment too soon.
We've had enough of trusting the dhimmi political elite with our civilisations survival. I really cannot think of anyway to preserve our civilisation and at the same time continue to have muslims in large numbers in the West.
What the hell needs to be done to wake the EU political elite. 9/11, Madrid, Beslan, beheadings while chanting allahu akbar, Bali, massacres of Christians in Sulawesi, Nigeria, nothing seems to wake the political elite. There is no end to the cries of the distressed and bereaved at the hands of the islamic fanatics, and yet we slumber on, and our elites drone on. Never, not even in the dark days before WWII, has there been such silence. Or is it confusion and disarray? Whatever it is, we had better get our act together and defeat this idiotic religion.
I know we will win - just as soon as we wake up.
I read VDHs article and thought it was spot on. His point about "envy" was not that the Islamists want to be "the west" we know they do not. What they envy is the West's scientific advancement and technology which they do want.The backwardness and inflexibility of Islamic "culture" make them incapable of producing any of the marvels of the west: computers, the internet, refrigeration, penicllin, electricity, air conditioning. Just to name a few of the thousands of marvels that are a product of western science and technology. Other then oil which Muslims use western science and technology to extract and process, Muslims produce nothing of value that the rest of the world wants.These are the same incompetent Muslims who are told from birth that they are superior to the infidel. Then their own contacts with the west only serve to reinforce their deep down feeling of inferiority. VDH has made the point that Jihadists exist as parasites on the West, using advanced western technology that they are incapable of producing.
At VDH website there is a great article by the other columnist on his site about the dangers of bending over backward to show "respect" for the Koran.
There are always those who really, really want to believe that Islam is not the vile and perverted cult that it is. Indeed, for most people in the West it is inconceivable that about 700 to 800 million Mohammedans are illiterate and live below the poverty line, thanks to the dirty prophet and the Koranic conquest-ideology. And please do not forget that their Saudi 'brothers' have squandered 10 trillion dollars without helping their Muzzie friends even the tiniest bit, apart from building mosques and madrassahs for further indoctrination.
The Europeans, notably the Germans and the French, are the biggest suckers when it comes to 'doing a little business' with the Gulf states.
Unemployent in Europe is precariously high, the Saudis still buy a few cars (and return the favour by building mosques and madrassahs in Europe) who could pass up such an 'important' trading partner'...?
Victor Hanson has strangely failed to understand both the theory and practice of Islam, and only now does he seem to be getting a glimmer of what is going on, which should naturally dampen his enthusiasm for Iraq War #2 (the one where we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars "reconstructing" Iraq, and making it safe for "democracy" which will in turn lead to --- well, lead to something, apparently, but no one knows quite what. In fact, Iraq is the perfect place to let the natural fissures within Islam take their natural course -- the old resentmenets and hatreds that divide non-Arab from Arab Muslims, with their o'erweening ways, and the old hostilities between Sunni and Shi'a Arabs. Instead, the American government seems not only to be unaware of this opportunity, but to think it is in its own best interest to work to minimize such fissures, to make Iraq, a state composed of three Ottoman vilayets (Moseul, Baghdad, Basra) a nation-state that will thrive. What nonsense this policy is, how lacking in cunning, and in understanding of a problem that is not to be solved by addressing "poverty" (the poverty of the OPEC states, which since 1973 have received $10 trillion because of an accident of geology?), nor by bringing "democracy" (which does nothing to diminish the power of Islam, and repeating some mantra about how the whole world yearns for democracy simply will not do as statecraft or warcraft).
One wonders if Hanson still believes in this cockamamie scheme in Iraq. Not in Iraq War #1 (the invasion, the destruction of weapons projects and existing weapons stores, the overturning of the exsisting regime), but rather Iraq War #2, which to Iraq, and misallocates men, materiel, money, attention, and is slowly eating away at the morale of the American army and citizen-army, with permanent consequences for a long-term war of self-defense, by Infidels, against the Jihad being conducted world-wide, funded with OPEC money, spread by new technologies, and by the unprecedented fact that tens of millions of the enemy, in esse or in posse, already exist behind our own Infidel lines.
Hanson has a following, and it is important that he begin to study Islam, before making such remarks as "the real enemy is an Islamic fascist ideology that is promulgated by a few thousand." This shows a continued unfamiliarity, late in the game, with what mainline Islam teaches, and what forms the beliefs of some, the attitudes of others, the habits of mind of all Muslims, whether "moderate" or "immoderate" in their Islam. One wonders just how much attention Hanson has given to Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Perhaps he feels he is exempt from the duty to study, given that his heart is in the right place on such things as Israel, the awfulness of academic life, and so on. But he will not be able to make sense of men and events if he refuses to engage in such study (the summer will do it). He might begin with Spencer's books on Islam, and Bat Ye'or's three books on the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam (The Dhimmi, Islam and Dhimmitude, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam), and her latest book Eurabia. He might read some of the apostates, the defectors from Islam, as valuable and essential as were the defectors from Communist parties, countries, and intelligence agencies -- Ibn Warraq comes immediately to mind. He might look at Ali Sina's website, and spend a week reading through all of the articles. He might, when it comes out later this summer, read Andrew Bostom's important anthology of articles by overlooked or now-forgotten but major scholars of Islam, on how the Jihad came to be, what it means, and how in practice it has, in time and space, been conducted.
Then Hanson should begin to be less of an enthusiast for the primitive statecraft, based on primitive understanding, of the Administration which is missing an opportunity in Iraq -- an opportunity that no other place in the Muslim world presents. That is not the opportunity for "democracy" or even decency, but rather, the opportunity to allow the natural fissures within Islam. The first fissure is that between he non-Arab Muslims, in this case the Kurds, resentful of their treatment at the hands of the Arab Muslims. A free Kurdistan would be a permanent ally, out of self-interest, with the United States, and a permanent source of instability and worry for quite a few Muslim regimes in the area. Furthermore, such a state might inspire other non-Arabs, including obviously Berbers in Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa, into working toward a re-berberization of their own countres (how many of those who claim to be Arab are in fact simply arabized Berbers, made to forget their own past, their own language, their own heritage?).
And the second fissure is of course that between Sunni and Shi'a. Why should American soldiers lift a finger to prevent Sunni and Shi'a, within Iraq, and perhaps aided by outside supporters, from being at each others' throats? Was the Iran-Iraq War a good thing, from the viewpoint of Infidels, or a bad thing? It was a very good thing. Why then, do we not simply withdraw, and allow these fissures to naturally develop, instead of expending so many men, so much money, so much equipment, so much attention, doing the very opposite of what, considering the nature of the enemy, we should be doing? Anyone who thoroughly understands what is going on will have to come to the same conclusion.
Sorry about the repost I fits here better than where I put it.
Gather round and hear a story so frightening it will make your blood run cold.
There were once to camp grounds near here, they were at constant odds stealing each others mascots panty raids tipping over each others outhouses pranks and raids death and mayhem.
they have been at odds since the days of sailing ships at sea and really before that,
These Two camps, one in a deep interlocking self confirming delusional state following a obviously fraudulent divine revelation.
It told them they have the supposed right to rule the world. They must subjugate those who don’t think as they do and when the have consolidated their power eradicate them. and that is gods judgment.
The other camp busied orchestrating a fraud on its citizens trying to convince them that despite what the Quran and hadith say literally, it is radical who have distorted the “holy books” that we respect deeply the religion and the books and those who follow the faith.
They are playing a increasing less convincing wizard of OZ.
The curtain has been flung aside irrevocably. When the books say to subjugate and eradicate none Muslims and you must do this or die trying or you are going to hell it is not radicalism when the words come out and buildings explode ,
These are acts of true believers who follow the doctrine that says disbelief is worse than murder.
Camp two is working to create an illusion who foundation is has been seen and rejected the rand report specifically The report entitled “Civil Democratic Islam” states on page 37 that: “Modernism also applies the principle of Maslaha, or public good,…as something that was thought to override even the Qur’an itself”.
This illusion is supposed to produce a new interpretation of the final word of god the Quran a book so poorly written it can hardly be considered a book in the normal understand of a book
But for what its worth it makes its point the cliff not version say's Mohammed was a prophet of god he has decided that only Muslims deserve to live so you must die.
The end.
I don’t know how you change the word of god but, hey these are the people available .
They are difference between the best available and the currently available to hold the offices in question
While we comfort and delude ourselves with these flights of fancy daydreaming this is the fix..
Camp one nods glassy eyed bemused and smirking signs any meaningless paper we resolve to ourselves this is the solution.
Both sides lying to the same party camp two, camp one doesn’t care that it lies nor does it care that camp two knows it lies.
Camp one has only one purpose ,survive until its numbers are great enough to seize political power
One block, one neighborhood, one voting district, one state, one country at a time.
Once in power it will foment ill will among contrived subsets and minorities forcing gullible softhearted neighboring Camp Two to take the refuges in.
These immigrants will use laws to help import new first wave invaders increase their numbers and grow until they can seize political power one block one neighbor hood one congressional district at a time .Repeat.
Camp two is so practiced and its people are so easy to lie to it they expect it without question. They want to be lied to so the drama plays out on TV. Half the Camp two is so obese they would die of heart failure if they camp leader told them the truth.
The a good part of the rest are so poorly educated by there contemptuous camp leaders that they cant discern truth from fallacy with both hands a flashlight and a blood hound
A third would grab their redneck long guns and start hunting down the invaders from camp one or so they would have us believe. They rest could not care less as long as it doesn’t preempt the reruns of wheel or jeopardy.
In any case come June 8-9 the two camps will have a meeting” to see if they can come up with a mutually agreeable lie .
It will be led By an accomplished piano player and an accomplish liar Kamal Nawash
Who may be the world greatest tap dancer, I dont know he is a product of a think tank known as Rand who ironically enough my uncle used to work for until he was killed for being a communist symapthizer , whose partner in crime, when confronted with the uncomfortable fact that the documents on his website, that presented his arguments for Islamic reform lacked the critical elements required to hold scriptural water replied with a precise “FUCK YOU” .
So lets wish them well as the travel to the land of Don Quixotic and waste our time and money and craft a lie of overwhelming credibility that those in the lands with out toilets and chairs, freedom or liberty ,whose only comfort is the book they want to rewrite will fall for it .
It had better be a good one. I cant wait to see it.
Nite nite sleep tite.
Did I pass?
Good rebuttals and critiques Rebecca and Hugh.
Hugh-
The realpolitik cynic would have only one answer about any positive outcome from the current warfare in Iraq:
-the American and coalition troops are being "blooded" (to use a hunting expression), and gaining fighting skills in the field (the only place it really counts) for the more serious warfare that is inevitable -unless Islamic fence-sitters get their proverbial thumbs out of their asses and start restraining the lunatic terrorist killers within their creed.
As crappy as the day-to-day situation is for the average ground troops in 'Babylon', our soldiers are seeing the enemy first hand, and the enemy is seeing us -in action.
The jihadists realize that: as cruel, suicidal, merciless, dogged and unpredictable as they get, we just plod onward, killing them, catching them, or mopping up their remains.
It removes any mystique of 'the shadowy enemy' from our side.
And shows that however ruthlessly crazy the terrorists get, we just shake our heads and kill more of them. Pitying their joyless kamikazee idiocy, laughing at their vision of the 7th century as 'desirable', and remaining ready to hunt them down -until they lose their hard-core homicidal leadership, -and then maybe the next layer of not-so-hot-to-be-jihadists might realize:
"Damn, that didn't do us any good. And Allah sure as hell didn't come out for his own cause, -letting us get kicked out of power over and over. Maybe something's wrong with this plan?
Let's rethink this...."
Remember, a lot of service personnel are getting a new vision of radical Islam in action, and they will bring it home for their family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.
As bloody as the learning is, it is a knowledge which may save us in the long run.
Thanks to whoever it was above who linked to the Bruce Thornton article on VDH's own site. This article shows a real understanding of Islam. Hanson doesn't have this yet as Hugh points out. The 'money quote' from Thonton's article in my view is:
'If we are serious about winning what has been misnamed the “war on terror,” we need to start by renaming it the “war against jihad”'
That gets round the political problem of calling it war on Islam - when Muslims protest that it's not them and only a tiny minority of extremists we could say 'Fine, you've nothing to worry about then'.
I've got a lot of respect for VDH but I'm often surprised how an intelligent person (not a stupid intelligent person like Chomsky) can know so little about Islam.
On September 10 I thought that Islam was another Abrahamic religion whose peaceful tenets had been hijacked. If I had to compress all my subsequent reading into, say, 8 hour days, I'd say it took me about three weeks to get to my current position on it. One week took me to the view that the religion was a bit dodgy but it was mainly political Islam that was the problem. Another two weeks took me to the stage where I really got it. My ignorance about Islam and its history is still huge, but how much do you really need to know, to 'get it'?
VDH should do a bit of homework.
Is Hanson really so off-base? I never was an enthusiast for large interventions in the Islamic world, but while the MSM trots out the latest US casualty figures, nobody bothers to notice that the US highway system and certain inner cities are far more dangerous (statistically speaking) places for young Americans than Iraq. In two years in a country where everyone has an AK and has been fed a steady diet of anti-American venom, we've lost a few days' worth of World War II casualty figures--and they're even paltry by Vietnam standards, of which Mao Zedong once commented, "They're quitting after only fifty thousand dead? They can't be serious!". There is a new Iraqi government in place, and even the Sunni Arab clerics are wanting in and saying it's foolish to fight the superpower (and a mere 300 boots on the ground in the Krudish area is shockingly low. Someone must've done something right). As for Afghanistan, history gave us absolutely no right at all to hope for even a minute that we'd sponsor an election there--so my guess is that the CIA had some pretty big 1980's vintage chips to cash in in that country.
Apostate_Islam, while I am in wide agreement with your friend Selbourne, and may even buy his book (much as I dislike Prometheus Press and its long history of promulgating Christophobia), I also cannot help but note that the current wave of Muslim immigration in the West is showing signs, at least in America, of possibly ending in a slightly swarthier complexion in America's Evangelical churches; and that a culture that produces chiefly slums surrounded by deserts has a few internal problems of its own. This, as well as Muslims telling on the bad eggs in their midst, is among the reasons why I cannot sympathize for calls for mass deportations and internments.
But, apart from renewing a few moral underpinnings in Western society (I suppose I have a few communitarian sympathies myself) and calling a moratorium on Bush-bashing, what policy suggestions doe Selbourne offer? I, for one, do not see a need to act like a bunch of 12th century Mongols everywhere from Morocco to Mindanao and from the Kama to the Comorros. A more restrained warfare has netted a dividend we dared not hope for so soon in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Plus, perhaps,the unmeasurable effect of a few more people asking, "What is it that makes them First World while we remain Fourth?"
Last of all, I pray God sustains Oriana Fallaci in this trial, and that the dying woman will give some big, fat black eyes to the thin-skinned bullying creeps who sued her and the corrupt, morally bankrupt judge who doesn't respect free speech (yes, much as I dislike Prometheus Press, I still won't send them a letter bomb).
I don't think VDH is off base either. In war you want to choose the field of battle not let the enemy choose. The enemy had hoped to battle unarmed security guards at the local elementary school or Sheriff Andy Taylor in small town USA. Instead the enemy is battling well armed US soldiers in the heart of the dar Islam and being killed by the thousands. The US military has shown in two countries that it can toss out muslim leaders in a matter of weeks not months.The US military has also shown that it can defeat jihadists anywhere. Whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or in the urban cities of Iraq. In Iraq the noose is tightening and there is nowhere jihadists can hide that our military cannot find them.Jihadists have been reduced to blowing up muslims in Iraq in a desperate attempt to create chaos, meanwhile the US military marches on killing more jihadists every day.
Hugh posted: Victor Hanson has strangely failed to understand both the theory and practice of Islam, and only now does he seem to be getting a glimmer of what is going on,
I have posted the same on LGF for over two years. VDH is only just beginning to get an inkling, that the root of the problem is islam. For around two years, VDH has been writing that consensual government will destroy islamic terrorism, and Iraq will become a model for the rest of the islamic world. His thesis rested on the assumption that islamic terrorism is caused by the inability of muslims to voice their opinions in thugocracies or theocracies. Maybe, but islamic terrorism is the exception.
Well Iraq will certainly become a model for the islamic world - a model how to sucker America in, then to get them to fund the re-building of the nation, while at the same time killing American soldiers and civilian contractors alike. This is the best jihad possible- killing infidels while making them pay for it.
Iraq is a region of natural political fissures, much like ex-Yugoslavia. Yogoslvia was stuck together by the dictatorship of Tito - the only way possible. I just do not see how a nation such as Iraq, can be held together by a democratic regime.
Let me make a prediction. The trend of the ongoing war is towards a re-colonization of the Muslim world, especially its heartland from Pakistan to Morocco and from Bosnia to Sudan. Already four Muslim countries - Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan - are armed Western protectorates, where political power flows ultimately from the barrels of Western guns. Everyone is busy looking at Iraq, but the Western control over Bosnia and Kosovo is rather more permanent and intrusive: in Bosnia, the European resident, Lord Ashdown, has not so long ago simply dismissed the political leadership of one half of the country because their proceedings did not satisfy him.
All these protectorates result, one way or another, from the natural violence of Islam and from Islamic incapacity to support a civil society and a stable government. European troops have entered Bosnia and Kosovo to protect Muslims from Serbs; they are remaining, especially in Kosovo, to protect Serbs from Muslims - and as time goes on, the Albanian hope of an independent Kosovo is fading further and further into the distant future.
Meanwhile, even those Muslim countries that are not under Western occupation are forced to put up with Western interference to an extent that few independent governments would tolerate. Turkey had to rewrite half its laws, including its whole criminal code, on orders from the EU; Syria had to quit Lebanon and allow free elections; Pakistan and Sudan had to give up their support for Muslim terrorists and collaborate - however treacherously - with American secret services; Egypt is talking about free elections; Lybia has abandoned all its hopes to become an Arab beacon.
This is not a song of triumph. To the contrary, it represents the increasing involvement of Western forces in a large, hostile, sterile, and expensive territory where they have nothng to gain (the Left's mythology about oil is belied by the facts), simply because that territory exports violence which the West cannot tolerate. And the greater the Western pressure on Muslim countries, the more violent will the reaction be. People are going to identify Western enemies at ever closer and closer range, and the internal violence that once was a problem for Muslim governments alone will become increasingly a Western problem. We are, in short, moving towards building a new colonial empire in Islam without any of the advantages of the old colonial empires, merely in order to hold back the tide of violence that flows from these lands.
The visible and increasing Western involvement in Muslim politics, powered by the wealth of Western economies and the power of American arms, is going to be one front where the great coming war against Islam is going to be fought. I do, personally, wonder whether it would be better for America to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan and for Europe to disconnect itself from Turkey, leaving these countries go in whatever direction they please. However, my view is that it the fighting does not take place in those countries, it will take place somewhere else; that the increasing political-economical-military squeeze on Islam, from Pakistan to Maghreb, is inevitable quite simply because Islam is intruding its own violence into the West, and the West cannot ignore its anarchic, cruel reality. WEstern involvement in Muslim countries, perhaps with the help of India, will continue, driven simply be events - crisis after crisis, war after war.
This is the front, as it runs through every country in the West and in Islam. On the one hand, the overwhelming power of the West, inevitably drawn into the dark heart of the Muslim world; on the other, the amorphous mass of Islam, reaching out into the heart of the West, trying to break its will, to destroy its self-confidence, to reduce it to the same state of violent chaos which is natural to it.
Paolo posted: the amorphous mass of Islam, reaching out into the heart of the West, trying to break its will, to destroy its self-confidence, to reduce it to the same state of violent chaos which is natural to it.
Good post.
I hope that the West's ever increasing involvement in dar ul islam is dependent on Iraq's future. If the Iraq experiment fails, given that it is potentially rich and also claims to have an educated population, and has the best chance of success, then there will be no further grounds for involvemnt in that pit of darkness.