The growth of radical Islam

[Shortfuse]

Originally posted by Rudey
How are they comparable? Muslim radicals are using terrorism to kill non-believers and to spread Islam. And that is also what is happening in Sudan. There are Muslim and Arab Northerners who control the government and are massacring those that are not only different but also imposing their government on them. And before you say it, because I know you will, yes, America should also be there. Not only should America be there but so should other countries. The genocide is horific by all counts.

-Rudey

Which leads me to say that we shouldn't talk about "giving liberty to oppressed people of the world" when we're not ready to back that up 100 percent. All that freedom giving "chest-thumping" you heard from our government was only going to open a can of worms that hte US isn't ready to deal with as of yet.

So you're saying only Muslim governments are imposing thier will on their people? But I understand we're only talking about Muslim governments so I'll leave it at that.


So now why are we REALLY in Iraq?

As John Quincy Adams put it: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

[PhiPsiRuss]

Originally posted by Shortfuse
So now why are we REALLY in Iraq?

The reason is geopolitical. Its that simple.

[Rudey]

Originally posted by Shortfuse
Which leads me to say that we shouldn't talk about "giving liberty to oppressed people of the world" when we're not ready to back that up 100 percent. All that freedom giving "chest-thumping" you heard from our government was only going to open a can of worms that hte US isn't ready to deal with as of yet.

So you're saying only Muslim governments are imposing thier will on their people? But I understand we're only talking about Muslim governments so I'll leave it at that.


So now why are we REALLY in Iraq?

As John Quincy Adams put it: "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

No I'm not saying only Muslim governments impose their will on their people. In Venezuela, Chavez imposes his will on his people and I bet he's Catholic if anything.

But let me say 2 things:
1) I don't want to talk about Iraq here. There are 50,000 threads on Iraq and the war. If it's in a different context I am game, but I am tired of saying the same things and others saying the exact same things, you know?

2) This also isn't a thread about war solely.

Now that I've said those 2 things...

I do think war is the answer in many places. War is not desirable. I don't pleasure the thought of pain and death, neither ours nor theirs. But I think that it can help spur something.

If we are able to set up democracies like Afghanistan that really do give people a voice then, in time, freedom will prevail. I don't think Afghanistan is heaven but it damn sure is better than it was under the Taliban. And in time, the citizens will not use religion as a crutch and will build their societies.

I think the biggest thing for the world's countries to do is to pursue those who fund terrorism and these schools. Get these damn Saudis to stop funding hateful madrassas. If we can choke the money supply, I think we can stop terrorism.

-Rudey

[RUgreek]

Originally posted by Shortfuse
So you're saying only Muslim governments are imposing thier will on their people? But I understand we're only talking about Muslim governments so I'll leave it at that.

We have all types of governments doing bad things to their people, that's for sure. I don't want to compare muslim and non-muslim governments, because that's sounding like I disapprove of a muslim government being fair. I think problem is more simple than that.

Radical islamics are hindering the progress of free and democratic governments. They get into power and use the blame game to control the population. It's unfortunate, but most of the people living in these places are so uneducated and brainwashed in religious services that they follow them because they feel like they don't have a choice

But then you have a place like Iran, where the people are not dumb and are pushing for revolution. This is inspiring and does not need a big outside influence to go through. The people are protesting and the government is listening. I think the situation is going to be unique in each country.

[moe.ron]

Please define radical Islam.

[RUgreek]

lots of websites discuss it, just google it... Here's one about the report released in December:

Dutch Intelligence: Radical Islam Spreads (AP)
Radical Islam in The Netherlands: A Case Study of a Failed European Policy

Case in point, even if there was peace between Israeli and Palestinians, the hatred of western culture would not disappear. The idea behind radical islam is world domination supposedly. I don't understand it since Islam is a peaceful religion, but this is the type of idealogy trying to be wiped out. I think if the muslim community joins in the fight against these extremists and tries to discourage the spead of this radicalism, then things will be better. I guess it's difficult on all sides to fight a strong force that so many support.


RUgreek

[Rudey]

Originally posted by RUgreek
lots of websites discuss it, just google it... Here's one about the report released in December:

Dutch Intelligence: Radical Islam Spreads (AP)
Radical Islam in The Netherlands: A Case Study of a Failed European Policy

Case in point, even if there was peace between Israeli and Palestinians, the hatred of western culture would not disappear. The idea behind radical islam is world domination supposedly. I don't understand it since Islam is a peaceful religion, but this is the type of idealogy trying to be wiped out. I think if the muslim community joins in the fight against these extremists and tries to discourage the spead of this radicalism, then things will be better. I guess it's difficult on all sides to fight a strong force that so many support.


RUgreek

There is no such thing as a peaceful religion. Religion has been taken as an opiate for centuries and interpreted as seen fit. Islam is one of those religions. As I have pointed out repeatedly in this thread, those that are terrorists do not believe in peace, are not outliers of Islam, and feel their interpretation is not only the right one but not open to discussion.

-Rudey

[moe.ron]

Originally posted by RUgreek
Case in point, even if there was peace between Israeli and Palestinians, the hatred of western culture would not disappear. The idea behind radical islam is world domination supposedly.k

I would disagree with this particular statement. Not all who espouse radical Islam want world domination or even want to hurt anybody. Take the case of Tabligh and Darul Arqam from Indonesia. These two organizations is a strict scriptualist who support the establishment of sharia'a. However, they have no connection with any terrorist organizations and according to the Rand corporation, they have low propensity to political violance. Also, they rarely engaged in political affairs, instead wish to be left alone.

[Rudey]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/in...gue.html?8hpib

March 4, 2005
THE HAGUE JOURNAL
2 Dutch Deputies on the Run, From Jihad Death Threats
By MARLISE SIMONS

THE HAGUE - Every evening, plainclothes police officers escort two members of the Dutch Parliament to armored cars and take them to hiding places for the night. One of them, Geert Wilders, has been camping out in a cell in a high-security prison where his life, he said, has become "like a bad B-movie." His colleague, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has grown increasingly miserable sleeping on a military base.

The special treatment would certainly seem warranted: both have received a deluge of death threats since they strongly criticized the behavior of militant Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands.

After two previous political assassinations, Dutch officials are taking the threats seriously, treating the safety of the two lawmakers both as a matter of personal protection and as an issue of national security. Several politicians have said that in the country's present polarized mood, public violence could erupt if either of the two were killed.

But the two legislators themselves have disturbed the officials' plans, choosing to reveal their whereabouts to protest the conditions under which they live. Neither has had a permanent home since November, when a filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, was shot and knifed to death on an Amsterdam street. A 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan, Muhammad Bouyeri, has been charged with the murder.

The decision by Mr. Wilders and Ms. Hirsi Ali to reveal their secret lives, one in a jail cell, the other on a naval base, has raised a question that is troubling many Dutch: is it acceptable for legislators in a Western democracy to be forced to go into hiding, to live like fugitives on the run in their own land?

"Of course this is an outrage," said Abram de Swaan, a prominent sociologist. "It's not bearable. The government must come up with better solutions, like putting them in protected homes. That's the way it happens in other countries."

The NRC Handelsblad, a leading daily newspaper, ran an editorial recently headlined "Unacceptable." A situation in which legislators are "hampered in carrying out their tasks puts democracy in question and makes terror successful," it said, adding that the official bureaucracy evidently "does not know how to deal with the new reality" in which Muslim terrorism may also threaten Dutch politicians.

Officials point out that the government is prosecuting several men for death threats and has adopted tough laws against terrorism suspects, including voiding their Dutch nationality. Late last month the Justice Ministry announced that it planned to expel three Muslim preachers for spreading radical Islamic ideology at a mosque in the city of Eindhoven.

Mr. Wilders's isolation becomes quickly evident on a visit to his closely guarded office in the attic of the Dutch Parliament. In his small, windowless room, far from his colleagues, he can receive visitors only if they are carefully screened and escorted at all times.

He no longer answers his own telephone, but the threats keep showing up in his e-mail, in Internet chat rooms and Web logs. Offering some samples, he switched on his office computer and a short video appeared, featuring his photograph, the sound of gunfire over Arab music and a voice that said, "He is an enemy of Islam and should be beheaded."

"The people who threaten us are walking around free and we are the captives," Mr. Wilders said. The government has told him that he will have to wait until September for a secure home. Until then, he said, he presumably has to continue his spartan life, sleeping in a cell at Camp Zeist, deprived of family and friends. The security detail schedules weekly private meetings with his wife.

Mr. Wilders, a rising right-wing politician, feels an affinity with neoconservatives in Washington and recently visited the United States "to gather ideas." He contends that Islamic dogmas and democracy are incompatible, and has called for a five-year halt to "third world immigration," the closing of radical mosques in the Netherlands and the preventive arrest of terrorist suspects, whom he has labeled "Islamo-fascist thugs."

It was Ms. Hirsi Ali, though, who first decided to go public with her own and Mr. Wilders's hiding places, out of frustration at the government's seeming foot-dragging over finding appropriate housing. Her own proposals were regularly rejected as unsafe, she said.

Her bodyguards, she said, have deposited her on many weeknights on a naval base in Amsterdam, or hustled her off to sleep in different hotels. "They are keeping me alive, but I cannot concentrate on my work," she said. "I need a place where I have my desk, my books, my papers, a home where I can meet with people." In the past year, her handlers have twice taken her secretly to the United States

Ms. Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born refugee who arrived in the Netherlands in 1992 and became a member of Parliament in 2003, was under police protection even before the murder of Mr. Van Gogh, with whom she had made a short television film that denounced violence against Muslim women. Some Muslims found this deeply offensive.

The Dutch government pressed Ms. Hirsi Ali to go abroad for two months after Mr. Van Gogh was killed and a letter was found on his body threatening her. When she returned to Parliament in January, she was warmly received by her colleagues. But the pressures continue.

The wife of an Islamist militant who is in police custody told a local newspaper that Ms. Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim, would be slain by Muslim women. That would make more impact than being punished by a man, the woman said. "The sisters are patient," the woman said. They will wait, "even if it takes 10 years."

Ms. Hirsi Ali concedes she is struggling with the question of how long she can continue in politics, denouncing what she regards as the excesses of Islam. In the past she has shown she is not easily cowed, but she said a deep fatigue was setting in. "I am willing to sacrifice a great deal, but I don't know if I can live like this for a lot longer." She put her inexorable quandary this way, "The real problem is, I cannot stop because that will only serve and stimulate the terrorists."

-Rudey

[Rudey]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/08/op...iedman.html?hp

July 8, 2005

If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Yesterday's bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In part, that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally, England, is almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it's because one assault may have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this terrible jihadist weapon into the heart of a major Western capital. That would be deeply troubling because open societies depend on trust - on trusting that the person sitting next to you on the bus or subway is not wearing dynamite.

The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers take their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies are never again quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little freedom yesterday.

But maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations.

That, too, is deeply troubling. The more Western societies - particularly the big European societies, which have much larger Muslim populations than America - look on their own Muslims with suspicion, the more internal tensions this creates, and the more alienated their already alienated Muslim youth become. This is exactly what Osama bin Laden dreamed of with 9/11: to create a great gulf between the Muslim world and the globalizing West.

So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be easy. Why? Because unlike after 9/11, there is no obvious, easy target to retaliate against for bombings like those in London. There are no obvious terrorist headquarters and training camps in Afghanistan that we can hit with cruise missiles. The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells.

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village.

What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. Many people said Palestinian suicide bombing was the spontaneous reaction of frustrated Palestinian youth. But when Palestinians decided that it was in their interest to have a cease-fire with Israel, those bombings stopped cold. The village said enough was enough.

The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning Osama bin Laden.

Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider.

The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the Muslim village and elders do not take on, delegitimize, condemn and isolate the extremists in their midst.

-Rudey

[AnonAlumna]

I don't really know that much about Islam, but I did recently read an article about 'Honor Killings' among Muslims. Is that part of their religion too?

...just curious...

[RACooper]

Originally posted by AnonAlumna
I don't really know that much about Islam, but I did recently read an article about 'Honor Killings' among Muslims. Is that part of their religion too?

...just curious...

Religion no.... culturally yes...

The punishment of men and women for premaritial intimate contact is 100 lashes, the punishment for adultery for again both men and women is stoning - only to be administered by the religious/state authority (think religious police).... and for people that think this is wrong or barbaric - take a gander at the Bible/Tanakh and imagine if there was a organized religious police here in the west... or that a nations laws were based solely on the Bible/Tanakh.

Whereas the practice of honour killing, ie. the killing of a woman for "dishonour" (men can also be technically be killed as well, but very rarely) is actually contrary to the Sharia as a extra-legal punishment... and is really a hold over from tribal common law/honour system - a system that many cultures besides "Middle Eastern" possess... for example Honour Killings have a long history in the Indian subcontinent, as well as a prehistoric history in Northern Europe.

[moe.ron]

Originally posted by AnonAlumna
I don't really know that much about Islam, but I did recently read an article about 'Honor Killings' among Muslims. Is that part of their religion too?

...just curious...

No.

Link

[jubilance1922]

Originally posted by Rudey
There is no such thing as a peaceful religion. Religion has been taken as an opiate for centuries and interpreted as seen fit. Islam is one of those religions. As I have pointed out repeatedly in this thread, those that are terrorists do not believe in peace, are not outliers of Islam, and feel their interpretation is not only the right one but not open to discussion.

-Rudey

"terorists...are not outliers of Islam..."

Can you please explain?

[Rudey]

Originally posted by jubilance1922
"terorists...are not outliers of Islam..."

Can you please explain?

If you can read, you can understand.

-Rudey