A very important and illuminating piece from Barry Rubin of GLORIA, via FrontPage (thanks to EPG):
The following may soon be true: the good news is that Islamists are not committing terrorism; the bad news is that they are running the governments.Welcome to the latest Western debate: should Islamists be helped to run in elections in order to moderate them. Both in Washington and Europe this idea is seizing people's minds. The European Union advocates dealing with Hizballah and may decide the best way to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace is to strengthen Hamas. In Washington, the main example is to help the Muslim Brotherhood run in fair Egyptian elections.
The easy answer is that radical Islamists will not be moderated by participating in elections or gaining power. The Bolshevik (Communist) party in Russia and the Nazi party in Germany ran candidates for parliament. But there is only one point in responding to the latest bad idea--there certainly seem to be a lot of them, don't there?--in the Middle East debate. For example:
• Remember the Oslo peace process was based largely on the idea that once Yasir Arafat and colleagues governed Palestinians and dealt with daily problems they would be more moderate, responsible, and abandon terrorism.
• In Algeria an imminent Islamist electoral victory sparked a military coup and bloody warfare. Even if Islamists play fair encouraging them means more civil wars and instability.
• Many American experts predicted in 1978 that once Islamists gained power in Iran they would be easy to live with.
Then comes this about Turkey:
This does not mean pious Muslims cannot be real democrats. A Middle Eastern equivalent of European Christian Democratic parties might eventually emerge. Turkey, however, is quite different from Arab countries, having a more moderate brand of Islam and entrenched democracy. Its governing Islamic party knows it must act moderately enough to avoid antagonizing the secular-oriented majority and army.In addition, in Turkey three vital preconditions creating Islamist democrats don't exist in the Arab world:
• There must be a clear split between radical Islamists and moderates.
• A charismatic leader must have the courage to reshape Islamism.
• An explicit and real change in ideology is required.
This somewhat obscures the fact that Kemal Ataturk didn't establish modern secular Turkey by having "the courage to reshape Islamism." He did it by going to war with Islam itself, and prevailing, although adherents of political Islam have been chipping away at his victory ever since. The difference between Islamism and Islam is yet another conceptual distinction that means a great deal to Western non-Muslim analysts, but little or nothing to Muslims themselves.
Still, there is much that is good in this article. Read it all.
Kemal Ataturk's Turkey was a nice try but eventually, it failed. Of course, in theory, materially destroying Islam would do the trick. But that is hardly an option, or is it? And if we want to destroy Islam, the problem that Islam is, for good, how are we to do that thoroughly and humanely, as good men are supposed to do?
We need a schism. We need a big bunch of Muslims who say Islam is not what is in the Koran; Islam is this and that, for these and those reasons. If that new Islam is a good religion, and if those reasons are good, that might be the end of it.
33.23. Among the believers are men who have been true to their covenant with Allâh [i.e. they have gone out for Jihâd (holy fighting), and showed not their backs to the disbelievers], of them some have fulfilled their obligations (i.e. have been martyred), and some of them are still waiting, but they have never changed [i.e.they never proved treacherous to their covenant which they concluded with Allâh] in the least.
http://www.road-to-heaven.com/quran/english/33.htm
I posted this in the wrong area; it more appropriately belongs here:
Waiting for Moslems to reinterpret their book is a waste of time. First, they won't do it; second, even if some did, the vile text still remains. The reality is, as long as there are Moslems, the civilized world will be at risk.
Well, who is talking of "waiting"? Who is talking of reinterpretating? Let's rewrite it with them.
Posted by: KAOSKTRL at June 2, 2005 03:19 PM
Gold Star for you today!!
LOVE THIS PART!!
HIS EYE IS ON THE MONEY!!!
http://www.sperryfiles.com/media.shtml
IN THE MEDIA
Know thine enemy
Frank Gaffney Jr., Washington Times, May 17, 2005,
Flash: Newsweek has apologized. The magazine’s editor says he is sorry for printing a possibly mistaken article that accused US interrogators at Guantanamo of throwing copies of the Koran into prisoners' toilets. Evidently, Newsweek particularly regrets the murderous anti-American rioting the erroneous report set off in various parts of the Muslim world.
Ironic though it may seem, we might just owe Newsweek a debt of gratitude for its shoddy reporting. After all, it provided a wake-up call to see how quickly and how skillfully our enemies seized upon evidence of America's purported hostility to Islam to advance their own agenda.
But who exactly is the enemy and what is their agenda? The instigators of the riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan and their counterparts elsewhere are adherents more to a political ideology — some call it Islamism, others Islamofascism — than to a faith. Using organizational and coercive tactics taken right out of the Bolsheviks' play-book, this Islamist minority seeks first to dominate the Muslim faith's non-Islamist majority, then the rest of us.
For the Islamofascists, material like the fallacious Newsweek report is a godsend. They portray it as proof positive of undifferentiated western hostility towards all Muslims. Armed with such evidence, the Islamists then strive to persuade their heretofore peaceable and tolerant co-religionists that there is no choice but to subscribe to the most virulently intolerant interpretations of the Koran and to join in a divinely-ordered violent struggle (jihad) intended to subjugate infidel nations and populations.
The implications of the Islamofascists' concerted, highly-disciplined and organized and well-financed efforts are ominous. Unfortunately, this is true not only for places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Islamists have held sway for some time, or in Saudi Arabia, the financial and ideological well-spring of modern Islamofascism. Islamism is on the march in such disparate places as Western Europe, Bosnia, Indonesia, Latin America and Africa.
Worse yet, Islamofascists are also increasingly a force to be reckoned with in America, as well. A chilling new book by noted author and investigative reporter Paul Sperry makes clear that the Islamists are well advanced in their efforts to bring jihad to a country near you.
In Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington, Sperry describes in well-documented detail the inroads being made by mostly Saudi-funded Islamist operations in the United States. Many of these operations are headquartered in what he calls the Wahhabi corridor communities in northern Virginia within a few miles of the nation's seat of government. Evidence of their progress to date includes:
• The take-over of non-Islamist mosques throughout America. Typically, this is accomplished by way of mortgages provided on favorable terms by Saudi financial institutions. Along with the financing come Wahhabi clerics, textbooks and other materials and the transformation of religious schools into Saudi-style madrassas.
• Islamist recruitment in US prisons. Sperry describes how Sister Susan VanBaalen, who administers the federal prison ministries, has naively allowed problematic organizations tied to Saudi Arabia to proselytize in unsupervised meetings with inmates.
• Muslim chaplains in the American military have been selected, trained and certified by Saudi-funded organizations founded by one of this country’s most prominent and best-connected Islamists, Abdurahman Alamoudi. Alamoudi is himself now in federal prison, having pled guilty to plotting to engage in terrorist acts
• Islamist inroads are also being made into the student populations of hundreds of colleges and universities across America by chapters of the Saudis-bankrolled Muslim Student Association.
Sperry's most alarming insights, however, concern the success Islamist organizations have had in penetrating and influencing key government agencies. He documents how the FBI has employed translators of suspect loyalties without adequate background checks. He details how political correctness has replaced common sense as federal agencies like the Pentagon, State Department, law enforcement, the intelligence services and even the White House have reached out to groups known to be sympathetic — if not actually tied to — Islamist terrorism.
In some cases, such outreach has served to legitimate the Islamists in question. For example, Sami al-Arian, an erstwhile professor at South Florida University, is defending himself against some 40 federal charges of involvement in terrorist financing and activities on the grounds that he was included in numerous meetings with senior government officials, including George W. Bush.
At the very least, these meetings have facilitated political influence operations aimed at obscuring the distinctions between non-Islamist Muslims and the Islamofascists. Sperry suggests that they have also made possible the placement of individuals who may be affiliated with the latter in key posts inside the US government.
Paul Sperry’s Infiltration comes at a time when more and more Americans are recognizing the danger to our security, society and way of life posed by Islamofascists. They see TV dramas like Fox’s 24 in which the enemy lives and works among us, even as they plot our destruction. They hear that, by some estimates, as many as 70,000 people described as “other than Mexicans,” — many of whom are believed to be from Middle Eastern nations — slipped illegally last year across our inadequately secured borders.
Thanks to Newsweek’s explosive gaffe, we now have further reason to recognize the need to isolate and destroy our Islamofascist foes, even as we seek to reach out to and empower truly non-Islamist Muslims. The latter hold the key to defeating our mutual enemy and, thereby, to avoiding the potentially apocalyptic clash of civilizations sought by that enemy.
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is the President of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for the Washington Times.
Part of the American Tribe
Squirrel Hunter
Spider Killer
GOD BLESS THE COUNTRIES WHO HAVE HEROS AMEN
pity the countries who need them NOT!! Amen
The good thing about the basic extremism in the Koran is that it will finally galvanize those whom it threatens with death to destroy it.
Since it gives them no choice.
Meanwhile, its most ardent adherents are those most fatalistic and nihilistic, and most willing to kill and die for the rehashed garble of Old Testament and gnostic nonsense that Mohammad spewed.
Which will bring their doom upon them that much sooner.
It is a Catch-22 for these 7th century imbeciles:
-tell people you are going to kill them openly and you warn them to kill you first -if they believe you. As more die from the Islamicists' actions, even more will be steeled to strike them back harder.
And harder. AND HARDER.
The optimistic thing is that Civilization will always carry the Biggest Stick.
The only short-term problem is that the West has humane restraint.
But that will vanish once the terror becomes intolerable.
We aren't there yet. BUT ITS COMING.
We're patient and tolerant and compassionate, but we're not crazy.
Luckily, they are.
One of the assumed dutys of gov are to protect it's citizenry from the "bad" guys. This is made on the assumption that it is the "good guys" who are in charge now. Yet hard as I look, I cant find a truly "good guy" anywhere in any gov.
Tolstoy said this about that...paraphrasing a little..."The good cannot seek power, nor retain it. To do that men must love power and the love of power is inconsistant with goodness, but quite consistant to its opposite qualities, pride, cunning and cruelty".("The Kingdom of God is Within You". Leo Tolstoy 1894).
If Tolstoy was right, there are no "good" people in charge of govs anywhere. This applies to muslims also...we already see how absolute power corrupts absolutly in muslim politics.
An Islamic superstate should not be permitted to come about... if it does, it will be required, by the rest of the world, to destroy it...