Terror Free Tomorrow recommends jizya as an antidote to terror. Aethelred the Unready Alert: "Analysis: Aid could impact Muslim opinion," by Aaron Rupar for UPI, with thanks to DP:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Foreign aid could be a vital tool in the struggle to win over hearts and minds throughout the Muslim world, according to new polling data.During the past six months, Terror Free Tomorrow has administered polls in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan -- the world's three most populous Muslim countries -- in which at least half of all respondents replied that American aid "makes them more favorable to the U.S."
"The bottom line is that American aid is the single most important action the people of the three largest Muslim countries want from the United States," writes Ken Ballen, TFT president, in the report's executive summary. "And here's the key to winning hearts and minds: deeper American assistance directly to the people, following their expressed priorities."
Terror Free Tomorrow is a non-partisan, non-profit organization, whose mission includes understanding the popular support behind global terrorists. Its advisory board includes Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
At a press conference publicizing the report, Ballen argued against the media-fueled misconception that "the U.S. is public enemy number one" in the Islamic world. Ballen used TFT's polling data to suggest the majority of Muslims throughout the Middle East and Asia don't dislike the United States, but "do not have a recognized voice" through which they can express their views.
However, in order to change the opinions of those sections of the Islamic world where anti-American sentiment runs deep, Ballen argued increased U.S. aid can play a remedial role. "We should reach out more forcefully to deliver aid directly to the Islamic world" in order to further swing public opinion behind U.S. policy, he said.
While TFT's report emphasizes the positive role of foreign aid, it also recognizes the significant negative impact that the war on terror has had on Muslim public opinion. "The same consensus view on the approval of American aid is mirrored by an equally strong unfavorable view of the anti-Muslim character of the U.S.-led fight against terrorism," the report states.
Ballen emphasized that simply piping money into Islamic countries is not enough. Equally important as the quantity of aid is the way in which aid is administered. "Aid is important, but interaction between Americans and Muslims and people-to-people contact is perhaps more important," he said.
To illustrate his point, Ballen cited the example of Egypt, which was the second-largest recipient of official U.S. aid in 2004. Despite the nearly $43 billion which Egypt received from the United States, Egyptians generally remain highly anti-American. Ballen argued the situation in Egypt could be changed if American diplomats made a concerted effort to establish their presence on the Egyptian street by getting out from behind the fortified walls of the embassy. Although this strategy could potentially put the security of American diplomats at risk, Ballen argued that without such efforts the impact of American aid is nullified.
Others, however, argue that TFT's suggestions regarding aid are superficial to the deeper issues which are affecting Muslim opinion of the United States.
Roberta Cohen, a senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, told United Press International that American policy must be fundametally altered in order to affect a serious change in Muslim public opinion.
"You can't really buy favorable public opinion," Cohen said. "Frankly, I think a change in U.S. policies would be more beneficial -- changed policies towards Iraq, global terrorism, the Middle East, detainee treatment, and a more sustained effort to get an Israeli-Palestinian settlement."
Ah. A different kind of jizya: give them what they want peacefully, and they won't need to fight for it.
Im ready to try anything but that.
Dear Terror Free Tomorrow:
I'll send you a check for $50 US dollars if you shut the @#$% up and go away.
Love,
A Plague on Both Houses.
Here's an even better idea. Let them send their money our way. If they sent me $10,000,000 I sure feel a whole lot more friendly towards them.
slightly OFF Topic but interesting
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/aikman200312220001.asp
"Lopez: What do Chinese Christians tend to think about the U.S.?
Aikman: China's Christians tend to be very pro-American. They tend to support the war on Iraq and Washington's support for Israel. They greatly admire U.S. religious freedoms and the vigorous functioning of democracy. Most are not naïve about American social and cultural shortcomings."
USA, side with decent people, don't waste time with muslims
Were they asked how long they would stay pro-American upon receipt of the bri...er... foreign aid payment?
i.e., "How many pro-American hours (minutes? seconds?) can we buy per dollar?"
That might help us decide how much foreign aid they need.
I'm totally flabbergasted. How insane and stupid can people get?
After the Dutch mayor Cohen drank thee with an imam after 9/11 I thought I had seen everything. It clear that I didn't.
"Roberta Cohen, a senior fellow of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, told United Press International that American policy must be fundametally altered in order to affect a serious change in Muslim public opinion."
How 'bout if we bomb Israel, prohibit pork and alcohol, and give a free pass for any mohametan interloper to help himself to any immodestly clad "meat" he encounters in the U.S.? Would they like us then? (please, please!)
Protection, black hand extortion it's as old as the human race.
otherwise known as mafia
TOO MANY useful idiots of the peanut Khadr variety seem to get 'a fair share' of publicity these days, too many 'give peace a chance' stuck-on stupid-in-the-sixties hippy types are holding postitions they shouldn't hold, which shows that our guilt-ridden, Chomsky-infected society, (more than half the population) is unwilling to face reality...
"Why do they hate us?" is a question I reject.
Fact is: THEY HATE US and nothing we can do will change that unless WE MAKE THEM CHANGE or until THEY WHACK US into submission and we convert to Islam....
That change will not come about by singin' 'Kum-bay-aaah' and by the pink brigades 'lets get naked and hate Bush' types, but if it comes, if comes by education, by understanding the nature of Mohammedanism...
... and the first step on the way to defend our interest is a daily dose of JW/DW and LGF...
Danegeld only made the Norsement more eager to plunder England further. The same principle's at work with these Muslim terrorists and looters.
In retrospect, foreign aid was one of the greatest mistakes American foreign policy ever made. Had the Marshall Plan died aborning, all of Europe, not just its eastern parts, would probably be either wiped out in internecine inter-Communist wars, or spiritually regenerated. In Asia, Taiwan is one of the few cases where a receiver state wisely used US aid--and they got dropped like a drowned rat by Nixon and Carter. Aid has kept an uncounted number of dictators of both right and left in power.
If I were president, I would make it clear that anyone who wants a handout from the USA had better accept that it will probably come from private sources--and risk Christian missionary penetration (I doubt secular liberals will provide much when it isn't imposed by taxes, but dependent on freewill donations). History is going to happen, and it's high time that Uncle Sam got off his Messianic high horse.
This obsession with what muslims think and what it will take for them to like Americans is pathological. Who cares what how muslims feels about us? If they stayed in their world and we stayed in ours, there would never be a clash of civilizations.
''This obsession with what muslims think and what it will take for them to like Americans is pathological. Who cares what how muslims feels about us? If they stayed in their world and we stayed in ours, there would never be a clash of civilizations.''
I totally agree with you, who gives a rats ass what they think, the only thing you can guarantee is that they want US funds to build more bombs with. Is that not how the Pakistani's became nuclear in the first place?
Time for them to care about what the world thinks of them, and join the civilized world.
Niv
A reference was made in the previous string to Dracula. He too was out to win hearts and minds, but had a slightly different take. As polling data was not available and John McCain was not consulted, the solution was not as fancy.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1719347/posts
''This obsession with what muslims think and what it will take for them to like Americans is pathological. Who cares what how muslims feels about us? If they stayed in their world and we stayed in ours, there would never be a clash of civilizations.''
I agree that fretting about our public image among our inveterate enemies is patently insane. However, the point here on JH is that, partly because of ethereal immigration policies and political correctness, they won't stay in their world.
We don't have any reference point to understand things like suicide bombing and sleeper cells, because we have lives, and enough Judeo-Christian influence to understand the idea of getting over ourselves and not harboring long-term grudges. Our enemies, however, are still trying to avenge the breaking on the Siege of Vienna in 1683. You have to be very careful with crazies abroad, and especially ones we are allowing into our country in copious numbers.
Millions for defense. Not one damned penny for tribute.
Here’s an idea!
Instead of buying those jihadis off we should use the money to fund National Service. Imagine every 16 – 18 year old regardless of ethnicity or religion being forced to serve instead of expecting to be served.
There is no reason why this can’t be done in Britain; it would not be setting a European precedent.
We could use the two years wisely by sending them to learn building trade skills and engineering with the REME, or sending future chefs to the Army Catering Corp. Budding Doctors and Nurses could serve with the RAMC and do shifts in casualty departments.
The myriad of objectors could be offered places in the NHS and Ambulance service or positions on public works projects that benefit the society. Something like taking old age pensioners to the seaside for the day would do, or taking a special needs teenager to the cinema.
Prospective Muslim jihadis taking old war veterans to the British Legion for a Rum and black and a few war stories would make me smile.
Even if this did work, which it won't because they're too violent, Islamic countries just become frightening parasite nations like North Korea. They'll pull out a nuke when their standard of living goes down and continue to suck blood from their betters. Sorry can't tolerate that either.
It is absurd to think that Muslim hearts and minds can be won. They can be rented, not bought, and rented only for the shortest of periods. Meanwhile, the rent -- that is the further transfer of wealth from the Camp of the Infidels to the Camp of Islam -- only helps to pay for mosques, madrasas, world-wide campaigns of Da'wa, armies of Western hirelings who conduct public relations and disinformation efforts on behalf of Saudi Arabia, the Arabs and Muslims more generally, and Islam.
Sixty billion dollars has been given by successive American governments to Egypt. Egypt today has still failed to honor any of its solemn commitments under the Camp David Accords (save for that not to engage in open warfare, a commitment that it keeps for the same reason that Syria does not attack Israel -- because of the likely consequences). Tens of billions have over many decades gone from the American government to Pakistan, a country whose military actively encouraged A. Q. Khan in his theft from Western laboratories of nuclear secrets and his subsequent effort to share those secrets with, inter alios, North Korea and Iran. That same Pakistan was not deterred by Western aid from nurturing the Taliban, and then helping its fighters to take over Afghanistan, giving diplomatic and other kinds of support, nor in today, Janus-faced, continuing to protect or support the Taliban members in Pakistan. The billions sent by European countries and the United States to the "Palestinian" Authority has been used to fill the private coffers of Arafat and then of his widow, and his associates, and to allow them to live in luxury in apartments bought outside the area, and also to the subventions to a dozen different groups of armed men, so-called "security services," all of which are dedicated to attacking Israel in any way they can, whatever jostling for money and power among themselves they may also engage in.
Where is the evidence that more such payments will help, since there is not the slightest evidence that the payment of a disguised Jizyah does anything except encourage Muslim attitudes that this Infidel aid must be given, is given as a duty, and what is even more sinister, the Infidel donors behave as if this is indeed the case -- that they cannot stop such payments for fear of the reaction of the Muslim donees.
This is madness from top to bottom. That some in the government think this way, even for a second, shows how little they comprehend of Islam, of its unambiguous tenets and the natural attitudes that flow from them, in any society suffused with Islam. And the ignorance of so much history, some 1350 years of it, and over such a wide swath of different territories once held by so many different peoples, all of them conquered and subjugated, and forced to endure the status of dhimmi -- up until the last half of the 19th century, when Western power forced a change upon a most reluctant Ottoman Empire, and in Muslim countries today, the reversion to persecution of non-Muslims has everywhere led to a great reduction in their numbers -- in the Arab countries (both Jews and Christians have left), and in Pakistan and Bangladesh(where it is primarily Hindus whose percentage of the population has gone down to about a fifth, in Bangladesh, and a tenth, in Pakistan, of what it was at Partition). Then there is the slow demographic conquest of Malaysia, where Muslims now lord it over HIndus and Chinese, and force the local indgenous tribes to accept Islam wherever possible. And the persecution of Christiains in the Moluccas, and East Timor, and of Hindus in all the islands where they contiue to live except, possibly, Bali, and sometimes even there, shows that even in supposedly "moderaate" Indonesia the mistreatment of non-Muslims continues.
It is not right that those whose ignorance explains their policy prescriptions should be listened to with respect, should be listened to at all. They have no right to make the rest of us, to make the entire Western world, suffer because they cannot spare the time, or lack the intelligence, to study and to comprehend Islam as a total system.
They should be mocked out of whatever offices, and whatever power or unearned authority, they may currently be said to possess.
"The bottom line is that American aid is the single most important action the people of the three largest Muslim countries want from the United States," writes Ken Ballen, TFT president, in the report's executive summary. "And here's the key to winning hearts and minds: deeper American assistance directly to the people, following their expressed priorities."
-- from the article above
Absolute idiocy. Palpable, obvious, total idiocy.
Muslim states are not and cannot be our friends. Every once in a while their interests, and ours, may superficially coincide. Saudi Arabia wished the Soviet Army to be defeated in Afghanistan, and so did the United States. But each had reasons completely different from the other. Saudi Arabia wanted the Soviet Army defeated because it was an army of Infidels. The United States wanted the Soviet Army defeated because it was the military force of the Soviet Union, the most powerful Communist power. The American government was against the totalitarianism that Communist power in the Soviet Union emboded. The Saudi government had no objection at all to totalitariian belief-systems as long as those belief-systems consist of Islam, Islam, Islam -- it was merely Infidel Russia, or its avatar the Soviet Union, that was the enemy, that had to be defeated. After that defeat, the Americans paid little attention to the rise of the deplorable Taliban, which finally they saw, too late, as a threat to the liberal democracies of the West. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, saw nothing wrong with the Taliban and indeed recognized the Taliban regime (aside from Saudi Arabia, only the U.A.E. and Pakistan did so).
We don't need to win them over. We need to diminish their power, especially their financial power, and to exploit the natural fissures, sectarian and ethnic and economic, that already exist, and permanently, within the Camp of Islam. That this is not discussed, that this is not even considered, astounds. No one in the history of warfare has ever decided to abjure playing upon the weaknesses of the enemy.
But, of course, the "enemy" has not been identified correctly. In the lemmming atmosphere of official Washington, or of the chanceries of the West, the "enemy" is "terror" and the fight is that "war on terror" of which we have heard quite enough.
That's it. Constraint Islam. It won't change, or it won't change for a hundred years if ever. How could it? The canonical texts are immutable. The Qur'an is the uncreated word of God. Nothing can be changed. The hadith cannot be rewritten or assigned new ranks of authenticity, not after more than a thousand years of authority cling to Bukhari and Muslim. The figure of Muhammad cannot be changed, the details of his life that Muslims find so inspiring cannot be changed.
Why is this so hard to comprehend? It is so hard because the difficulties it suggests are just beyond the wit and imagination of so many to begin to think of ways of dealing with, that they prefer to pretend that the problem isn't there, to wish or deny it away. It is possibly the most fantastic situation in the history of conflict, possibly the most threatening situation in the entire history of the West.
Who will come to his senses? How many? And when?
I am spending money on ammo, which I will freely share when the muslim hordes get within range. I suggest others save a little ammo for a rainy day. I would draw a line in the sand but I spent a small fortune on landscaping, so all they get is an imaginary line. If any muslim feels cheated, I respectfully request you (Insert CENSORED rant here)
While there is poverty in our own countries, we're being asked to give money to people who want to destroy us?
Drop these dhimmis an e-mail, I'm sure they would like to hear from us.
Be polite.
info@terrorfreetomorrow.org
The last time I checked, Palestinians were receiving some insane amounts of aid for decades. Didn't make them stop burning US flags and dansing every time an American is killed.
If you stop giving your aid to everyone, and put very tough conditions, starting from pro-US (and that includes pro-Israel, as well as, say, pro-Australia!) position, it may actually help.
Buy giving aid to everyone, you admit that you do not deserve your wealth, you are guilty and giving away your fortune to apologise. You need to stress that you take money form US sick and unfortunate to benefit from better world, not to die from jihad.
Not one damn penny for the bastards!
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- Foreign aid could be a vital tool in the struggle to win over hearts and minds throughout the Muslim world, according to new polling data.
POLLING!!!!!!!!??????
Ok.. President Clinton wanna-be's. Here is a clue, I, as an America citizen, will NOT have my tax dollars, support people who: behead other people, repress women, and believe in enforcing their non-democratic laws on the world.
Here is a bigger reality check: Like Somalia, the money would NOT get into the pockets of the poorest of the poor, unless through a terrorist organization such as Hamas, but would end up arming terrorist groups. We know they use U.S. money to buy weapons to blow up U.S. interests. Gosh darn it! HOW freakin STUPID are our elected leaders? Stop the polling and try getting some common-sense instead!
Have they never heard the old saw "Once you pay Dangeld, you never get rid of the Dane?"
I read an Op-ed piece recently which suggested we could win hearts and minds in the Muslim world if we "started to send aid".
I found this astonishing--besides the general ongoing aid from the West to countries like Egypt and Turkey and the "Palestinian Authority", we have responded to the crisis in Bosnia, to the Indonesian tsunami, to the Pakistani quake, and countless famines and droughts over the years in Muslim countries.
What has this gotten us? Many Jihadis have cited *Bosnia* as radicalizing them (yes--this makes no sense--I guess it was just the idea of "non-believers"presence in lands considered Muslim).
As for the purely humanitarian response to natural (or not so natural) disasters, I'm sure that some individual Muslims have been grateful. Generally, though, many have considered it their due, and have said as much. Also, there have been lots of complaints about some of the aid groups being Christian, or "culturally insensitive". In Indonesia, a shopping and housing complex built free-of-charge by the British for local use was torn down by the local government as an anti-English act.
As for the suggestion that American diplomats spend more time on the Egyptian street, you can see how uncaring Ballen is at the thought of putting embassy staff at risk. Insane.
(TFT's)advisory board includes Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Can't this man get anything right? Losing badly to the egregious Hillary will be his rock-bottom. After that, hopefully he will shut the hell up and to home for good.
This obsession with what muslims think and what it will take for them to like Americans is pathological. Who cares what how muslims feels about us? If they stayed in their world and we stayed in ours, there would never be a clash of civilizations.
Posted by: 3812Michelle
Exactly right, Michelle!
Noone seems to care if you or I like moslems, which I am proud to say we don't and never will. We like where we live and we have no desire to go to them. They're the ones coming to US and ruining our way of life!
"And here's the key to winning hearts and minds: deeper American assistance directly to the people, following their expressed priorities."
-- from the article above
Absolute idiocy. Palpable, obvious, total idiocy.
Posted by: Hugh
What is SOWdi Arabia doing to win "hearts and minds"? How much are they paying? Not a penny, I bet! let's stop our dhimwit pols from kidding us!!
I shall send an email to terrorfree.org to let them know what I think!
Terror Free Tomorrow recommends jizya as an antidote to terror. Aethelred the Unready Alert: "Analysis: Aid could impact Muslim opinion," by Aaron Rupar for UPI, with thanks to DP:
Why do we have to buy them off? Can't we just kill them instead? please...?
Sheesh, paying people to like you is a high school ploy. Only adolescents worry that much about popularity.