Are we at war with Islam?

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by Martin

Just one thing that I find a little odd about this proposal in regard to Indonesia: Then why isn't the whole population out on the streets to rid their country of the infidels?

Martin

I would/will address this after some thought, but for now remember most of the masses are "sheeple".

To allow such atrocities without an "enormous" outcry from the sheeple majority is, IMO, a passive go ahead or nod of approval.

TS
Unbeliever

[frostfire]

Originally Posted by Martin

Just one thing that I find a little odd about this proposal in regard to Indonesia: Then why isn't the whole population out on the streets to rid their country of the infidels?
My thoughts:
It seems like the government would have a hard time keeping that under wraps.

just an eye-witness account:

When I was there, cinemas (American movies) are packed more than they are packed here, fastfood esp. McDonalds (American food) are crowded nearly 24/7, people would spend 2 days to 2 weeks worth of salary for BigMac...and feeling "cool like in the movies," folks were also following the silly red carpet ordeal, fashion, etc. etc. you got the point.

To get the whole population out on the streets, the radicals have to bring the rest of the "believers" to their level of commitment.
....and they do, non-stop. If you dig recent Jakarta Post articles, the radicals are banning less-radical teachings and destroying their mosques and houses.

I'm looking forward to the day when they face the consequences of oppressing freedom.

[Doc]

End beheadings – shoot hostages, orders al-Qaeda
By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor


AL-QAEDA has abandoned hope of defeating the US-backed Government in Afghanistan and instead is concentrating on driving American forces from Iraq, even if that means ditching its brutal methods.

According to the Pentagon, the strategy is set out in a 6,000-word letter sent by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in July.

Al-Zawahiri warns al-Zarqawi that his brutal tactics, which include beheading Western hostages, killing hundreds of Shia Muslim civilians and murdering Iraqi officials, could alienate Muslim public opinion. He allegedly recommends shooting, not decapitating, prisoners.

The letter, which the US military claims was intercepted in Iraq, makes clear that al-Qaeda aims to spread jihad to other Arab states and Israel.

Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor, is al-Qaeda’s ideological head and responsible for its day-to-day operations. In August he claimed responsibility for the July 7 bombings. His letter offers al-Zarqawi advice on tactics and a grand vision for the next stage in the jihad against the West and its Middle Eastern allies.

He predicts victory in Iraq — which he calls the site of “the greatest battle of Islam in this era” — but insists that it is only the first stage of a campaign across the Arab world. He sets out how an Islamic Caliphate must be established in Iraq and then the war taken to neighbouring Syria, from there to Lebanon, then Egypt and finally a battle to destroy Israel.

He considers a clash between Sunni and Shia Islam inevitable but questions the wisdom of bombing Shia targets and reminds al-Zarqawi that half of the battle against America is being fought through the media.

However, beheadings and suicide bomb attacks against Shia targets have continued unabated. This could indicate that al-Qaeda lacks control over al-Zarqawi. Although respected among Islamic militants, al- Zawahiri is a fugitive living on the Afghan-Pakistani border, while bin Laden has not been heard of for nearly a year.

Al-Zawahiri admits that al-Qaeda’s lines of communication and funding have been severly disrupted.



Doc

Also a non-believer

[Bellerophon]

Originally Posted by Doc

According to the Pentagon, the strategy is set out in a 6,000-word letter sent by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in July.

Is this the letter? http://www.dni.gov/release_letter_101105.html

[Team Sergeant]

I believe we’ve made a colossal mistake and should lay down our arms and embrace islam. It’s quite apparent the world’s islamic leaders mean the western world no harm.

Team Sergeant
Disarming for allah.

(hey former president carter, its once again time to take your southern baptist habitat building ass over to iran and negotiate world peace, again. Be sure to take the Rev al sharpton, jesse Jackson, diane feinstein and ted kennedy so the iranians know that you mean business. )


Iranians Rally Against Israel, U.S.
Friday, October 28, 2005


TEHRAN, Iran — Tens of thousands of Iranians staged anti-Israel demonstrations across the country Friday, repeating calls by their ultraconservative president for the destruction of the Jewish state.
World leaders have condemned Wednesday's remarks by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who repeated the words of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic revolution, by saying: "Israel must be wiped off the map."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,173784,00.html

[casey]

(hey former president carter, its once again time to take your southern baptist habitat building ass over to iran and negotiate world peace, again. Be sure to take the Rev al sharpton, jesse Jackson, diane feinstein and ted kennedy so the iranians know that you mean business.

You may be on to something here TS.... After all, if carter and crew just explain to the misunderstood religion of peace represenatives that they really want to "get they're story of peace and tolerance to the world" all would be well again. Hey, that "lets sit and talk" tact worked well for Daniel Pearl during his interview with the JM group in Pakistan, right???

I will put up the money so as to add cindy sheehan to that bus/boat trip.

[QRQ 30]

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=47103

[aricbcool]

Originally Posted by QRQ 30

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=47103

QRQ 30,

Good read. Thanks for posting it.

--Aric

E-Qaeda: A special report on how jihadists use the Internet and technology to spread their message (video, Washington Post).

Martin

[jatx]

A Year of Living Dangerously
Remember Theo van Gogh, and shudder for the future.

BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
One year ago today, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had his throat ritually slit by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Muslim born in Holland who spoke fluent Dutch. This event has totally transformed Dutch politics, leading to stepped-up police controls that have now virtually shut off new immigration there. Together with the July 7 bombings in London (also perpetrated by second generation Muslims who were British citizens), this event should also change dramatically our view of the nature of the threat from radical Islamism.

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going "over there" and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture. In a traditional Muslim country, your religious identity is not a matter of choice; you receive it, along with your social status, customs and habits, even your future marriage partner, from your social environment. In such a society there is no confusion as to who you are, since your identity is given to you and sanctioned by all of the society's institutions, from the family to the mosque to the state.
The same is not true for a Muslim who lives as an immigrant in a suburb of Amsterdam or Paris. All of a sudden, your identity is up for grabs; you have seemingly infinite choices in deciding how far you want to try to integrate into the surrounding, non-Muslim society. In his book "Globalized Islam" (2004), the French scholar Olivier Roy argues persuasively that contemporary radicalism is precisely the product of the "deterritorialization" of Islam, which strips Muslim identity of all of the social supports it receives in a traditional Muslim society.

The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the United States, few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.

Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan. Integration is further inhibited by the fact that rigid European labor laws have made low-skill jobs hard to find for recent immigrants or their children. A significant proportion of immigrants are on welfare, meaning that they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labor to the surrounding society. They and their children understand themselves as outsiders.

It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief. Religion is no longer supported, as in a true Muslim society, through conformity to a host of external social customs and observances; rather it is more a question of inward belief. Hence Mr. Roy's comparison of modern Islamism to the Protestant Reformation, which similarly turned religion inward and stripped it of its external rituals and social supports.

If this is in fact an accurate description of an important source of radicalism, several conclusions follow. First, the challenge that Islamism represents is not a strange and unfamiliar one. Rapid transition to modernity has long spawned radicalization; we have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang. The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not.

Further, radical Islamism is as much a product of modernization and globalization as it is a religious phenomenon; it would not be nearly as intense if Muslims could not travel, surf the Web, or become otherwise disconnected from their culture. This means that "fixing" the Middle East by bringing modernization and democracy to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will not solve the terrorism problem, but may in the short run make the problem worse. Democracy and modernization in the Muslim world are desirable for their own sake, but we will continue to have a big problem with terrorism in Europe regardless of what happens there.

The real challenge for democracy lies in Europe, where the problem is an internal one of integrating large numbers of angry young Muslims and doing so in a way that does not provoke an even angrier backlash from right-wing populists. Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.

The first has already begun to happen. In recent months, both the Dutch and British have in fact come to an overdue recognition that the old version of multiculturalism they formerly practiced was dangerous and counterproductive. Liberal tolerance was interpreted as respect not for the rights of individuals, but of groups, some of whom were themselves intolerant (by, for example, dictating whom their daughters could befriend or marry). Out of a misplaced sense of respect for other cultures, Muslims minorities were left to regulate their own behavior, an attitude which dovetailed with a traditional European corporatist approaches to social organization. In Holland, where the state supports separate Catholic, Protestant and socialist schools, it was easy enough to add a Muslim "pillar" that quickly turned into a ghetto disconnected from the surrounding society.

New policies to reduce the separateness of the Muslim community, like laws discouraging the importation of brides from the Middle East, have been put in place in the Netherlands. The Dutch and British police have been given new powers to monitor, detain and expel inflammatory clerics. But the much more difficult problem remains of fashioning a national identity that will connect citizens of all religions and ethnicities in a common democratic culture, as the American creed has served to unite new immigrants to the United States.

Since van Gogh's murder, the Dutch have embarked on a vigorous and often impolitic debate on what it means to be Dutch, with some demanding of immigrants not just an ability to speak Dutch, but a detailed knowledge of Dutch history and culture that many Dutch people do not have themselves. But national identity has to be a source of inclusion, not exclusion; nor can it be based, contrary to the assertion of the gay Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn who was assassinated in 2003, on endless tolerance and valuelessness. The Dutch have at least broken through the stifling barrier of political correctness that has prevented most other European countries from even beginning a discussion of the interconnected issues of identity, culture and immigration. But getting the national identity question right is a delicate and elusive task.
Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of the main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well.

Mr. Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins and chairman of the editorial board of The American Interest.

There was a really good article linked to on RealClearPolitics a few weeks ago, where the case was made by Jews that for someone to be integrated they need something to integrate to.

You do no one a service by forgetting and forgiving who you are to accomodate someone else who probably don't have a clue how he or she is expected to act and has no basis, hence no reason, for adaption. That means to not forget responsibility when sharing freedom. Requiring responsibility will raise the stakes immediately and make pretty clear where people are heading.


TS, regarding my previous question to you. I don't have an answer, and to be perfectly frank you make a lot of sense. If one is asked to judge a game and you close your eyes as a specific team's member is tripped, you're at least not on that team's side.

I have a problem in addressing the question, because even though I have met my fair share of immigrants from the middle east, Magreb and Malaysia/Singapore, read and talked to a few knowledgeable people, my experience in dealing with these Muslims is limited - I don't have a clear fix on their world view. The QPs opinions weigh heavily, you have a tendancy to be right.

With that said, I'm thinking that long term and cultural fear's effect on the person may have something to do with the answer of why the west is still allowed there - complacency - as well as need and greed, and image. But I really don't know, that's why I asked.

Martin

[jatx]

Not to beat a dead horse after my Fukuyama post abpve, but I am more worried about the products of French suburbs (and others like them) than I am about madrassas in Muslim nations. They are producing mass quantities of alienated, angry Islamic youths who can move easily through Western society without causing alarm.

Chirac Appeals for Calm as Violent Protests Shake Paris's Suburbs

By CRAIG S. SMITH

Six nights of violence in the city's immigrant-heavy northern suburbs threatened to spiral into a political crisis.
The violence, primarily the burning of cars, began as a protest over the deaths last Thursday of two North African youths who were electrocuted when they jumped over a fence surrounding a high-voltage electrical transformer. Some relatives and witnesses said the youths were running from the police, though the official account said the police were not pursuing them.

But as the car-burning spread from Clichy-sous-Bois, the suburb where the youths died, to neighboring suburbs on Wednesday, the government expressed concern that the incident could ignite broader unrest among frustrated first- and second-generation North African immigrants, who have borne the brunt of France's economic weakness.

"Emotions must quiet down," Mr. Chirac told government ministers on Wednesday, a government spokesman reported.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has seized control of the government's response from his rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in what appears to be an effort to assuage anger in the country's North African population over Mr. Sarkozy's blunt authoritative style. Mr. Sarkozy, who had raised temperatures with tough remarks this week, did not speak Wednesday at the government's weekly question-and-answer session before the legislature.

Burning cars as a form of protest is not unusual in the largely immigrant, working-class neighborhoods. Unemployment rates there are 30 percent or more, while the national rate is 10 percent. More than 20,000 cars have been set ablaze in France so far this year, according to a government report cited by the newspaper Le Figaro.

The periodic violence highlights France's failure to integrate immigrants into the country's broader society, a problem that has grown in urgency as the unemployment rate climbs. Most of the country's immigrants are housed in government-subsidized apartments on the outskirts of industrial cities. They benefit from generous welfare programs, but the government's failure to provide jobs has created a sense of disenfranchisement among the young. A highly observant form of Islam has grown popular among the mostly Muslim population.

But the spread of violence over six nights has particularly alarmed the government, which is already preoccupied by a contest between Mr. Villepin and Mr. Sarkozy to become the governing center-right party's presidential candidate in 2007.

Mr. Sarkozy has made zero tolerance of crime part of his tough law-and-order platform.

"If it continues, people will start to look for who to blame," said Dominique Reynié, a professor of French political life at the National Foundation of Political Sciences, referring to the violence.

According to an account by Mr. Sarkozy, the incident last week began when a group of youths in Clichy-sous-Bois were returning home after playing soccer and the police received a report that someone had broken into a nearby construction site. The police arrived, gave chase and took six youths into custody.

Mr. Sarkozy said police logs showed that the police and their detainees arrived at the local police station at 6 p.m., while a power failure caused when the two other youths made contact with the transformer did not occur until 12 minutes later. He said one youth who had survived the transformer episode confirmed that the police were not chasing him and his friends at the time.

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by jatx

Not to beat a dead horse after my Fukuyama post abpve, but I am more worried about the products of French suburbs (and others like them) than I am about madrassas in Muslim nations. They are producing mass quantities of alienated, angry Islamic youths who can move easily through Western society without causing alarm.

Geeze it took you that long to figure that out?

Now just where do you think the cowerdists are getting their sub-human, low IQ, islamic cruise missles from?

TS

[jatx]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

Geeze it took you that long to figure that out?

Now just where do you think the cowerdists are getting their sub-human, low IQ, islamic cruise missles from?

TS

Been worried for awhile, but the heat is definitely building!

[frostfire]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

I think that the Muslims are further defining the conflict every day.

While I am a trained hearts and minds kind of guy, desperate times call for desperate measures. They are with us, or against us.

Before 9/11, I would have said that the potential for a global religious war was relatively low. Now I believe that it is approaching certainty.

With every additional act of butchery by Muslim extremists, encouraged by so many of their religious leaders, the attendant denials by their people, and the lack of Muslims taking actions against these swine on their own accord, these terrorists alienate more and more of the moderates (and apologists) around the world who have been urging caution.

Eventually, they are going to hit the infidel population hard enough that the gloves are going to come off and it will be open season in a real war on Islam. If pushed hard enough, we can push back. We have interned our citizens and deported our detractors, waged total war, and unleashed Hell on Earth before. If the Muslims do not help get this under control, assist us with tracking these people down, and drag themselves and their faith into the 21st Century, the day may come when we DO have to view all Muslims as threats and deal with them accordingly.

What would we do if NYC, LA, and Chicago were burned off the face of the planet tomorrow, or hemorraghic plague were to kill millions of our people, in the name of Allah? Blame the 19 directly responsible, or their supporters and enablers?

If the millions of "peaceful" Islamic people care about their future, they had better wise up quickly, before too much damage is done.

TR

History News Network, October 10, 2005
Selective Muslim Silence
By Judith Apter Klinghoffer
Ms. Klinghoffer is senior associate scholar at the Political Science department at Rutgers University, Camden, and the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East. She is also an HNN blogger.

Where is the sane moderate peace loving Muslim world? Why is its voice so rarely raised in condemnation of Islamist atrocities? It is a question which has been raised in ever increasing urgency since 9/11 and not only by Westerners. A few Muslim commentators have raised it too, but they remained the exception rather than the rule. Last time I raised the issue, it was in the context of a number of cased involving the charge of “insulting Islam,” a charge which led to anti-Coptic riots as well as to the imprisoning a 78-year old Iranian Ayatolla and an Afghani editor of a woman’s magazine.

.........

However, the same Muslim countries, organizations and pundits can be plenty vocal and aggressive when in comes to protecting Islamists from the consequences of their own actions. In fact, they often support their causes. As human rights activist Abu Khwala explains, “fighting infidels until they either convert to Islam or submit to Muslims as 'Dhimmis' is still considered by Islamists to be a religious duty." Hence, any actions undertaken by Muslims towards that end must be vehemently defended with a total disregard of the means used and that is precisely what supposedly non Islamist Muslim leaders do.

Consider the following headline: "Muslim embassies complain over Mohammed caricatures." It all started with editors of Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper hearing reports that artists were reluctant to illustrate a book on Mohammed for fear of Muslim retribution. So, they asked cartoonists to send them drawings of Muhammad. “The cartoons,” they argue, “were a test of whether the threat of Islamic terrorism had limited the freedom of _expression in Denmark.” It should be noted that Denmark, unlike Germany, has no laws prescribing free speech. In fact, for years Nazis and Islamists have used Denmark as a safe haven from which to continue to promote their heinous totalitarian ideologies.

Islamists may be happy to exploit Danish freedoms and publish material demeaning to Christians and Jews but what is good for the goose is apparently not good for the gander. The Muslim response came fast and furious. The Danish imam Raed Hlayhel dismissed arguments about free press arguing that "This type of democracy is worthless for Muslims. Muslims will never accept this kind of humiliation. The article has insulted every Muslim in the world." This same Imam shocked Danes when he said in a sermon during Friday prayer, that Danish women's behavior and dress invited rape. In any case, Muslim organizations not only protested vigorously. The cartoonists received death threats which led to the arrest of a 17 year old. Threats to bomb the building led to the positioning of security guards around it.

The affair was not only reminiscent of the Salman Rushdie affair but for the first time, as Danish political science professor Mehdi Mozaffari points out “acts of private individuals, and not the Danish state, could lead to the country falling prey to a terrorist attack.” The Middle East Times reports:

Last week as many as 5,000 Muslims demonstrated in Copenhagen against the paper and the drawings, which depicted Prophet Mohammed in different settings. In one of the drawings he appeared with a turban shaped like a bomb strapped to his head.

...........

Suddenly, the ever silent Muslims states found their tongues. 11 ambassadors including those from a number of Arab countries, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Indonesia entered the fray not to calm the excesses of their coreligionists or condemn the threats of violence but to complain about the cartoons and Danish Islamophobia! The Turkish ambassador even seconded the Imam’s sentiments, berating the paper for “abusing Islam in the name of democracy, human rights and freedom of _expression.” The ambassadors wrote a letter to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen notifying him that they were offended by the caricatures, demanding an official apology from the newspaper and asking for a special audience “to express their concern about what they perceive as anti-Muslim and anti-Islam campaigns in the press and certain far-right political circles.“ The Prime Minister turned down the request for a meeting pointing out that he (unlike Arab tyrants whose papers are full of anti-Semitic propaganda) has no control over the press.

At first, the Egyptian Ambassador Mona Omar Attia embarked on a direct political attack against the Prime Minister by telling a Danish news broadcast that the group planned to meet to discuss contacting other parliamentary leaders, some of whom had urged the PM to meet with the ambassadors. Eventually, a decision was reached “to let international Muslim groups take over the cause, allowing groups such as the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to try to influence the prime minister.” “It's out of our hands,” said Egyptian ambassador Attia, “Now it is moving up to the international level. Therefore, we will not try to contact Denmark's political leaders.” One could imagine that “the Arab League will weigh in soon.”

So, here we are: part of the Muslim community is in the thrall of a totalitarian ideology which turns young Muslims into human bombs. Photos of Muslim and non Muslim civilian body parts flying in the middle of markets, mosques, discos and hotels have become routine. Beheadings of Christian and Jewish men and women are no longer surprising. And what do the ever-silent and passive-defensive Muslim countries, Organization of Islamic Conference and the Arab League vociferously condemn? They are condemning the publication of cartoons featuring Muhammad in a Danish paper. The absurdity of this action is only matched by its hypocrisy.

http://www.hnn.us/articles/17589.html