The problem - What is wrong with the Islamic world?
After 9/11,
when thousands of American innocents
were killed by Islamic extremists
for no reason,
the central question
is not: "Why do they hate us?".
The central question is not:
"What is wrong with American foreign policy?"
The central question is:
What is wrong with the Islamic world,
and how will it reform?
The basic problem is very clear.
It is that millions of people
in the Islamic world do not
believe in free speech, freedom of religion,
democracy, a secular state, free enterprise and human rights.
Millions of Muslims also have a hatred for Israel and America
that has no rational basis.
Who is our enemy?,
by Steven Den Beste,
has a hard time defining who exactly is the west's enemy,
but correctly points out it is not just
a small group of terrorists.
Much of the Islamic world
- and almost all of the Arab Islamic world
- must change.
"This war will continue until the traditional crippled Arab culture is shattered.
It won't end until they embrace reform
or have it forced on them.
Until a year ago, we were willing to be patient and let them embrace it slowly.
Now we have no choice: we have to force them to reform because we cannot be safe until they do."
"what we have to do is to take the 14th century culture of our enemies
and bring it into the 17th century. Once we've done that, then we can work on bringing
them into the 21st century
...
But they've got to accept their own failure, personally and nationally and culturally.
That is the essential first step. They've got to accept that the cause of their failure
is their own culture
...
And they've got to accept that the only way to succeed is to change.
That will be a difficult fight, and it's going to take decades.
Along the way it's going to be necessary to remove many governments
which come to power and yet again try to embrace the past"
The war will last decades:
"This war will end when they change, but not before."
We (the west)
don't want to do this.
We would far prefer to let them stay in their own failed societies.
Who on earth would volunteer for the job of reforming the Middle East?
What a pain that after finally winning the Cold War,
and entering what we hoped was a new era of peace and prosperity,
the west now has to sign up
for this endless exhausting job.
We don't want to do this.
We (the west) have to do this.
Because they threaten us.
Because they will destroy one of our cities with nuclear weapons
as soon as they get a chance.
So we have to reform them.
They have forced us to.
"Future War", 11 May 2007,
captures how annoying it is that we have to deal with these people (the Islamists).
It is almost embarrassing that these medieval savages
are the future we have to deal with.
He notes that despite having a centuries-out-of-date medieval philosophy,
they do know how to fight
a 21st century media war against soft democracies:
"The future is armed to the teeth and is highly motivated, it is dispersed across an ever wider landscape, and
it is not waiting for us to arrive: it has begun its relentless assault regardless, chanting the ancient slogans of religious bigotry and blood for a vengeful god. Unless we step into it and learn to fight the future war more effectively than our enemies, we have already lost."
"A warning from history".
Copy here.
Iran and Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, before sharia came.
People think that sharia is the natural state of these countries.
But of course, it is merely the thing that is currently winning,
having defeated the liberals, for now.
The lessons of the video are:
Sharia's victory in those places is recent, and so can be made temporary.
It can be reversed.
Sharia was losing, not winning, in those countries when I was young.
And hopefully it will be losing again, not winning, when I am old.
Sharia can win in other places that are currently liberal.
Even in Western or Westernised countries.
And people will forget that things were ever different.
They will view sharia as "natural" in those places.
One of the most depressing aspects of the modern crisis
has been how little soul-searching there has been
in Islam since 9/11.
The West has done far more soul-searching, even though it is not to blame.
There has been depressingly little discussion
among Muslims
of what is wrong
with the Islamic world
to have: (a) produced these evil butchers
(and thousands more like them),
and: (b) to have so many poor and unfree and violent countries.
Apart from a couple of days pause,
there has been just the same old Islamic arrogance,
as if it's the West that has to apologise
for being rich and free.
There are a few brave voices in the Muslim world,
but so few it is depressing.
Profile:
"My modest hopes are to create the determining factors needed to create a reformation
and enlightenment for Islam. That may sound ambitious.
But the people who are needed to create the conditions needed for that are us
- the Moslems of the West.
My ambitions are - apart from making integration less painful - to show that Islam and democracy
can be made to be compatible.
If the Moslems of the West can not reform Islam, nobody can."
"It is an irony that I am today living in a European democratic state
and have to fight the same religious fanatics that I fled from in Iran many years ago"
"as a parent I feel a responsibility to fight, so that my children will not have to live
under Islamist dogmas. They shall be able to live free in this country."
"Mr Tahmasebi adds that he believes the imams are one of the biggest problems Denmark
is facing today."
"Indeed, there are indications that the main culprits for the integration problems
are the imams, who tend to be much more extremist than many of the ordinary Muslims."
Arabs are Still Unwilling to Accept that They Carried Out 9/11
by Abd al-Hamid al-Ansari.
He understands, as
western leftists don't,
that the 9/11 killers were not poor, or oppressed:
"Why don't we want to acknowledge that these young people
[who carried out 9/11]
were the sons of a culture
that is hostile toward the world, not idiots or mad. No one enticed them,
and they did not suffer from oppression, repression, or poverty. They carried out the operation
because of their belief that it was Jihad and martyrdom."
"Muslims love to live in the U.S. but also love to hate it. Many openly claim that the U.S. is a terrorist state
but they continue to live in it. Their decision to live here is testimony that they would rather live here than
anywhere else. As an Indian Muslim, I know for sure that nowhere on earth, including India, will I get the
same sense of dignity and respect that I have received in the U.S."
"It is time that we acknowledge that the freedoms we enjoy in the US are more desirable to us than superficial solidarity with the Muslim World. If you disagree
than prove it by packing your bags and going to whichever Muslim country you identify with."
"Imagine that a sect of fanatical Jews blew up three American buildings,
killing thousands. Imagine that this sect of Jews issued a declaration of holy war
on the United States, in the name of Judaism."
"What do you think would have been the response of the rest of the Jews in America
and around the world? Our ears would have been deafened by the roar of Jews' moral outrage,
their resounding support for America, and their demands for the destruction
of the radical sect. You wouldn't be able to turn around in NYC or any urban center
without seeing Jews wearing some insignia to show their love for America
and hatred for the sect. There would be endless TV spots sponsored by Jewish organizations,
there would be T-shirts with "Those killers aren't Jews,"
there would be multitudes of young Jews volunteering to go into the military
to fight the sect."
Why didn't Muslims do this?
Thomas Friedman, 3 Dec 2008, on the hypocrisy and silence of the Muslim world after
Mumbai:
"After all, if 10 young Indians from a splinter wing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party traveled by boat to Pakistan, shot up two hotels in Karachi and the central train station, killed at least 173 people, and then, for good measure, murdered
the imam and his wife
at a Saudi-financed mosque while they were cradling their 2-year-old son - purely because they were Sunni Muslims - where would we be today? The entire Muslim world would be aflame and in the streets."
As
Ed Morrissey
says:
"Has Friedman seen massive protests in the streets against radical Islamist terrorists in these Muslim countries, ever? Did any of them protest the 9/11 attacks, or the Madrid attack, or any of the large-scale attacks on Western civilians or previous attacks in India at all?"
A lot of Muslims "against terrorism"
turn out to be anything but.
You have to examine each case.
Huffington Post Lists Known Terrorists As Opponents of Terror, August 27, 2014.
The Huffington Post cherry-picks comments to come up with a slideshow titled "Muslim Leaders Condemn Terrorism".
"the Huffington Post's slideshow included terrorist supporters and financiers as well as leaders of the known terrorist group Hamas".
The crackpot websites of
Harun Yahya
(or Adnan Oktar)
of Turkey
illustrate clearly the state of denial
of so much of the Islamic world:
Islam Denounces Terrorism
- sounds great doesn't it?
Sadly, no.
In fact, it
blames terrorism on
atheism and Darwinism,
rather than Islam.
(Harun Yahya is a leading Islamic "creationist".)
Islam Denounces Antisemitism
blames anti-semitism on
atheism and Darwinism,
rather than Islam.
(Not that he is necessarily against anti-semitism.
Harun Yahya has a track record as an enthusiastic anti-semite
and Holocaust denier.)
Harun Yahya
has been running a successful campaign in Turkey
to
ban websites that criticise him,
including Richard Dawkins' site.
Edip Yuksel
talks about "Islamic reform"
and opposes creationism.
Queen Rania of Jordan
illustrates the hesitant, narrow-minded approach of Muslim elites to these issues.
Her YouTube channel
is mainly a load of requests that non-Muslims stop stereotyping all Muslims
just because of the vast amount of Islamic violence in the world.
While obviously such stereotyping is wrong, this misses the point.
The main point is the vast amount of Islamic violence in the world.
Non-Muslims having a more subtle or less subtle view of this violence
is going to do nothing to actually stop the violence.
To stop the violence would require addressing the popular ideology of Islamist terror and jihad,
which is popular in Jordan and surrounding countries,
and which has its roots in the Koran
and the violent life of Muhammad.
It seems unlikely that she will ever address these issues.
Queen Rania does condemn the Jordan bombings:
which is a start.
But it would be more convincing if she demonstrated her horror at
similar bombings in Israel,
especially given that
the majority of her fellow Jordanians support them.
If she ever addresses the fact that the majority of Jordanians
support terror bombings of Jews in Israel,
please let me know.
The Minaret of Freedom Institute looked good first time I saw it.
It claims to support democracy and free markets in the Islamic world.
But on a closer look,
it supports sharia,
opposed the Iraq war,
is extremely anti-Israel,
and gave a platform to
Sami Al-Arian.
Not so impressive.
It's a joke, but actually, it's serious too.
Imagine, for just one second, that the above could happen.
Imagine what a future of freedom and prosperity there would be for the Islamic world.
Will it take centuries
before the Islamic world gets sense, and becomes rich and free like us,
or will it only take decades?
From The People's Cube.
Don't get your hopes up.
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri
supports the death sentence for blasphemy:
"My point of view was, and I managed to get this made into law,
that whoever commits blasphemy against the Prophet,
Moslem or non-Moslem, man or woman ... their punishment will be death!
... blasphemy against the Prophet
will not imply any possibility for repentance or forgiveness, rather, he must be executed immediately!
...
And those who open their mouths,
Moslem, Jew, Christian, believer, infidel, man or woman,
will be executed like a dog!"
I think we will find that the "terrorism" he condemns
is something other than what we mean by "terrorism", and
does not include, say, terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
If
"Fatwa against Terrorism"
ever condemns terror
against Israel, please
tell me.
In 2013, I tweeted to both
fatwaonterror
and
TahirulQadri
to ask them did they condemn terror against Israel, and if so, where.
They did not reply.
Two anti-Israel lefties,
Gerry Casey
and
"Voodoo Criminology",
rushed to their defence.
But no condemnation of terror against Israel appeared.
"Voodoo Criminology" later blocked me.
Robert Spencer
notes that
the "Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide Bombings"
simply ignores the difficult Quran verses on violence, rather than addressing them.
"There is a difference between reform and deception. Reformers confront what they are wishing to change. They show why they think the established view is wrong and offer an alternative. Qadri does not do that. He simply ignores key elements of the jihadist understanding of the Qur'an, offering no refutation or alternative explanation of verses that all too many Muslims believe are commanding them to do violence."
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri,
the guy behind the "Fatwa against Terrorism", attacks Israel, 2014.
He does not condemn terror against Israel.
Has he ever condemned terror against Israel?
Maryam Namazie,
an atheist, ex-Muslim, activist from Iran,
deserves a category all of her own.
She is anti-jihad and anti-Israel.
That makes no sense.
Very few people in the world are in that category.
2006 interview
shows she regards the US war against the jihad as "terrorism".
"There is also another pole of terrorism in the world today, which is US state terrorism
- an example of which can be seen by looking at the situation in Iraq."
Spencer
is unimpressed by Namazie being anti-Israel and yet also claiming to be anti-jihad:
"An anti-jihadist who doesn't support the country on the front lines of the global jihad? Pull my other leg."
Maryam Namazie, 16 Oct 2015, compares UKIP to ISIS:
"Most Syrians despise ISIS just like most Brits despise UKIP".
Insane.
Maryam Namazie blocked me on Twitter for unknown crimes (basically, not being left-wing).
She later unblocked me.
She does not really like any allies against sharia unless they are far left.
And since most of the far left are pro-sharia, it is a daft strategy.
It's a shame she cannot be more broad-minded.
When she had me blocked,
I said:
"She is admirable in many ways. She's the only person who blocks me that I would say that about."
The Iraqi Shiite cleric, Sayyid Iyad Jamaleddine after the liberation
- "We want a secular constitution. That is the most important point.
If we write a secular constitution and separate religion from state, that would be the end
of despotism and it would liberate religion as well as the human being.
...
The problem of the Middle
East cannot be solved unless all the states in the area become secular.
...
The neighboring countries are all tyrannical countries and they are wary of a modern, liberal Iraq.
...
That is why they work to foil the U.S. presence.
...
If the U.S. wants to
help Iraqis, it must help them the way it helped Germany and Japan,
because to help Iraq is really to help 1.3 billion Muslims.
Iraq will teach these values to the entire Islamic
world."
The future of Islam
Caution about the likelihood of an Islamic "reformation"
by Theodore Dalrymple
- It may not go inevitably the same way that Christianity did.
"Devout Muslims can see (as Luther, Calvin, and
others could not) the long-term consequences of the Reformation and its
consequent secularism".
On the other hand, instead of a reformation,
Muslims may simply lose their faith
as they are exposed to the modern world and its ideas.
And remember the majority
of them have not yet been exposed to it.
If you disagree, show me
any website
in the Islamic world
which explains the arguments for atheism
that have been developed in the west over the last 400 years.
Wrestling with Islam
by David Warren
argues that Islamism
is a reaction to the fact that
the Muslim world is losing its faith.
In fact, Dalrymple, an atheist,
does think that ultimately Islam will go the same way as Christianity.
Later in the article above:
"The
control that Islam has over its populations in an era of globalization
reminds me of the hold that the Ceausescus appeared to have over the
Rumanians: an absolute hold, until Ceausescu appeared one day on the
balcony and was jeered by the crowd that had lost its fear.
...
ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy,
withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not
just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do
not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its
death rattle."
Ali Sina
also compares Islam's hold over its people with communism
- brittle, and about to collapse.
An Iraqi blogger
condemns the Iraqi Islamofascist "resistance"
- "Islam indeed excuses such barbaric acts.
...
So yes, Islam is the problem here.
Poverty, economic conditions, abuse by so called colonialism, and political frustration are not.
Similar conditions elsewhere in the world have not prompted non-Muslims to commit suicide bombings
or fly planes into towers. Islam, along with favourable cultural, tribal, and social values existing in the Arab world
has prompted that drive. Islam and the Quran alone are the root cause.
The solution is not however to alienate all Muslims, or to expel them, or annihilate them.
It is up to "moderate" Muslims and their clerics to carefully examine their scriptures and to reform,
the same way Jews and Christians did."
"unlike most Muslim-majority nations, Kosovo is overwhelmingly pro-American,
and its relations with Israel are excellent
...
In 2004, a Gallup survey measured popular opinion of U.S. foreign policy around the world. Only ten countries rated American foreign policy favorably, and among those, Kosovo scored highest, registering 88 percent approval.
...
Kosovars are fans of George W. Bush, both because he recognized Kosovo's independence and simply because he's the president. Graffiti in one Kosovar village proclaims THANKS USA AND BUSH. "You should have seen President Bush's face when he came to Albania," says a Kosovar Albanian ... "All over Western Europe he was met by protests, but the entire country of Albania turned out to welcome him."
And Bill Clinton, who ordered the 1999 military intervention, is lionized."
"Kosovo's brand of Islam may be the most liberal in the world. I saw no more women there wearing conservative Islamic clothing - one or two per day at most - than I've seen in Manhattan. There is no gender apartheid even in Kosovo's villages. Alcohol flows freely in restaurants, cafés, and bars, where you'll see as many young women in sexy outfits as you'd find in any Western European country.
...
Religion in Kosovo is a private matter, not a public one. "We never talk about it," Berisha says.".
[Kosovans]
"offer the hope that Muslims need not be enemies of Christians, Jews, and the West, and that Muslim societies are not inherently opposed to religious pluralism and democracy.
...
while the jihadist movements in the Middle East may appear to be an inevitable product of Islam, in many ways they are simply a religiously themed manifestation of the Arab world's political backwardness."
Western women in the Islamic world.
There are parts of the Islamic world
that tolerate - for the sake of western money - westerners behaving in ways that the locals would never be allowed to.
These women are bringing the dress codes of the
1950s-1960s sexual revolution
- an important part of western culture -
to the beach in
Abu Dhabi.
Photo 2010.
From here.
Let us hope that decadent western culture destroys
traditional Arab Islamic culture over the next few decades.
Let us hope that their young people are seduced by the glamour of the West.
Let us hope that their traditional ways are lost forever,
and the vulgar secular consumerism of the West triumphs.
I am not kidding.
I really do hope this will happen.
Even the Muslim victims of the jihad need to do self-criticism
Question for the suffering Muslims of Iraq and Syria:
How many of you stood up against jihad in the past, before it went this far?
How many of you stood up for America in the past, and said jihad against American troops was wrong?
How many of you stood up for Israel in the past, and said jihad against Israelis was wrong?
Almost none of you, is the answer.
And that is the problem.
It is sad, given its current state,
to think that
the Middle East was once
the greatest place on earth
- the centre of human civilization,
the heart of all human knowledge.
Will it ever be a great place again?
Only if it changes its entire present culture,
which may not involve abandoning Islam,
but will certainly involve becoming more secular.
Egypt's lost glory:Ancient Egypt
was the greatest country on earth,
at the vanguard of humanity's glorious civilization.
And then the torch passed to other places,
and Egyptians adopted ideas of little importance to human progress.
It is sad to consider Egypt now,
compared with what it once was.
Even the discovery of Egypt's glorious past
was done by westerners
-
not by Egyptians, who were largely uninterested in the topic.
In fact, in 1196
Egyptian Muslims vandalised the Pyramids
and tried to destroy them,
and it was recorded that in 1378
Egyptian Muslims vandalised the Sphinx.
Let us hope that some day Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries
are again at the frontier of human thought.
For that ever to happen, they must change, and abandon the culture
of their ancestors.
Raymond Ibrahim
uses the above pictures to make the same point.
What kind of brain could you have to regard the woman on the left as "progress" from the woman on the right
4,000 years ago?
"Helping construct a stable democracy after decades of dictatorship is a
massive undertaking. Yet we have a great advantage. Whenever people are
given a choice in the matter, they prefer lives of freedom to lives of fear.
Our enemies in Iraq are good at filling hospitals, but they do not build any.
They can incite men to murder and suicide, but they cannot inspire men to
live, and hope, and add to the progress of their country. The terrorists' only influence is violence, and their only agenda is death.
Our agenda, in contrast, is freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people.
...
Our coalition has a clear goal, understood by all
- to see the Iraqi people in charge of Iraq for the first time in generations.
Like every nation that has
made the journey to democracy, Iraqis will raise up a government that reflects their own culture and values. I sent American
troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free,
not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history, and find their own way. As they do, Iraqis can be certain, a free
Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America.
We believe that when all Middle Eastern peoples are finally allowed to live and think and work and
worship as free men and women, they will reclaim the greatness of their own heritage. And when that day comes, the bitterness
and burning hatreds that feed terrorism will fade and die away. America and all the world will be safer when hope has returned to
the Middle East."
-
George W. Bush, May 2004,
on Iraq.
Such incredible generosity in saying
"Iraq will always have a friend in the United States of America" -
after Iraq had threatened the USA and its allies
for so many years.
America is fast to forgive, once a country changes.
If the Arab Middle East can change
and adopt
modern ideas of freedom, everyone there can be free, rich allies of America.
Heaven on earth
is there for the taking.
"Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people
in the West have a hard time accepting:
All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not.
...
It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women
and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism and corruption.
The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.
...
Instead of affirming the value of tribal lifestyles, people in the West
- activists, thinkers, government officials - should be working to
dismantle them."
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Nomad
(2010).
"The Shariah law is the best justice, not the Western democracy which gives us bad regimes like Assad's."
- A Syrian jihadist bastard called
Abu Omar al-Shesheni
comically says that Assad's brutal, Oriental dictatorship
was somehow "Western democracy",
which is now discredited,
and Islamism is the answer.
"People, you have tried secular rulings (republic, Baathist,
Safavids)
and it pained you. Now is time for an Islamic state."
- Maniac jihadists
ISIS take over Mosul, June 2014,
and comically claim that secular democracy has been tried
and is now discredited.
Abu Omar al-Shesheni
and ISIS
sum up what is wrong with the Islamic world.
They will try anything -
Islamism, Shariah, theocracy, caliphate,
tribalism, pan-Arabism, Marxism, communism, fascism, strongman dictatorship,
royal family dictatorship.
Anything, anything except liberal democracy.
which is a start.
But it would be more convincing if she demonstrated her horror at
similar bombings in Israel,
especially given that
the majority of her fellow Jordanians support them.
If she ever addresses the fact that the majority of Jordanians
support terror bombings of Jews in Israel,
please let me know.
