[enlightenment06]

Originally posted by _Opi_
I think that you've been duped by the media, rudey. Radical Islam didn't grow, because there is no such thing. The situation with Alqieda and other terrorist groups are rather complicated, and have a very long history. In this case, I would suggest in reading up on the Muslim brotherhood (Egypt 1928), Middle-eastern conflicts since the fall of the ottoman empire, the hanbali sect of Islam that Saudis practice (especially the wahhabi movement). There is just too much history for the media's short-attention span to put together for the public. So they resort to name-shortening like Islamists, "Jihadist", Islamics, fundamentalism (not even in its original form) and sensationalising the heck out of it. In restrospect, this is not about Islam but rather politics and a strong dislike for western policies and the oil trade.

So back to the original question, is "Radical Islam" on the rise? It depends, do you think that these terrorist orgs can find recruits in the middle-east whom they can easy turn towards their cause (anti-western)? Heck yeah, you can find a large base in Iraq post-war, and Afghanistan post-war. You have alot of angry displaced guys who might view american soldiers as colonizers. And trust me, these guys are doing it for nationalistic purposes than for God. However, we can speculate all day long whether its growing or not, but the truth of the matter is, these al-qieda and the like have been barking for over 3 decades, and we've only decided to hear them now. and only after they attacked american soil. So its not really a defunct sect of Islam growing, its peoples's resentment for the wars and the willingness to fight a false-jihad.

The problem with these discussions are that people don't really know a inkling about Islam, and therefore talk about the regular stereotypes of Islam (ie burkas, which are worn in generally in Afghan) and the term "infidels" (generally used by arab-speaking folks). What most people don't seem to understand is that there are variety of denominations of Islam, much like Christianity. Also, like moe.ron stated, Islam encompasses alot of countries, ie South east Asia, Africa, N. America, S America. Not all these muslims say words like "infidel" in their regular vocab like the media portrays us to be, and not all of us speak Arabic.

As an American, a Muslim, and a human being I agree 100%