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Islamism - The solution
Violent, radical, utopian Islamism
poses a global challenge to all free societies.
How big that challenge is remains to be seen.
But the solution to that challenge is clear.
The solution is not to appease these violent, intolerant religious bigots.
The solution is that America and the
West must assert themselves.
The Islamic world must change.
Ultimately, by a long cold war and a few hot wars,
the modern totalitarian ideology
of Islamism must be destroyed.
Islamism - or any ideology that denies religious freedom -
should have no place in our world.
- The culture of shame
-
Who is our enemy?,
by Steven Den Beste
- Their hate is not based on reason.
It is not based on things we have done, or any rational grievance.
They hate us because they are failures
and we are successful.
-
"They are forced to compare their own accomplishments to ours
...
In most of the contests it's not just that our score is higher, it's that their score is zero.
They have nothing whatever they can point to that can save face and preserve their egos. In every practical objective way we are better than they are, and they know it.
And since this is a "face" culture, one driven by pride and shame, that is intolerable. Nor is it something we can easily redress."
-
Arab psychology
by David Gutmann,
argues that Arab culture is driven by
shame and avoidance of losing face.
He argues that, paradoxically,
western weakness and tolerance
invites attacks,
while
western strength and aggressiveness
brings peace and respect.
- Nonie Darwish
(born an Egyptian Muslim):
"The Arab culture is famous for its concept of pride. Image is very important and pride and shame are great motivators. Protecting the image of Muslims in front of the non-Muslim West is vital. Thus elaborate behavior is done to saving face. Admitting to a mistake can bring terrible shame and is not regarded as a virtue; those who admit to mistakes are not rewarded for their honesty but ridiculed and shamed or even severely punished.
...
Fear of being accused of defaming one's tribe, nation or religion leads to a culture that tends to blame others rather than look within.
...
There is also a concept in Islam called "taqueya"
which allows lying to non-Muslims if it is in the best interest of Islam.
That concept is very deep in Muslim culture that we don't even think of the term
"taqueya" any more; it has simply penetrated every aspect of Muslim life.
Because of it there is very little self-criticism.
Thus, saying sorry, admitting guilt or looking within for solutions is not a strong value;
it will surely get a person in deep trouble instead.
Such a person will bear the blunt of the blame for everything
- even for what he did not do;
thus you have Muslim denials and defensiveness over matters that many in the West cannot comprehend.
...
Shaming is prominent in the Arab child. To avoid the intense pain of shaming,
denying responsibility turns into a virtue to save face and protect one's pride.
The concept of "taqueya" is one of the reasons many Muslims were silent after 9/11.
Only a few were speaking out honestly and openly by admitting there is a problem in Muslim culture that needs to be examined and corrected. The few Arab Americans who did that where not rewarded for their honesty by their Muslim community; instead they were condemned, shunned and shamed by the majority of Muslims.
...
This charade of denials and games has done nothing but keep
the Muslim world in a permanent state of stagnation,
turmoil and poverty despite of the wealth from oil."
- Augean Stables by Richard Landes
-
The Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm (HSJP)
- In contrast to the mainstream left-wing view:
"The HSJP understands the Arab-Israeli conflict through the prism of honor-shame culture
and Islamic jihad. These elements of Arab culture are the main factors that have made it impossible to reach a solution to the conflict."
- "The HSJP identifies Arab political culture as an example of "traditional" or "pre-civil society" culture.
...
According to HSJP, the Arab-Israeli conflict is fueled by wounded Arab honor
and frustrated religious imperialism.
...
Arab elites prefer losing wars to resolving the conflict by allowing Israel to exist. When they are weak they withdraw and cherish dreams of revenge. When they feel strong enough - no matter how delusional that feeling - they go to war with Israel (1948, 1967, 1973, 2000)."
- "This paradigm's conclusions seem dark, with apparently no possibility for negotiations and war as the only apparent alternative.
Although this is not necessarily true, it seems deeply depressing. Those who begin to comprehend HSJP find it difficult to communicate with people strongly committed to PCP."
[Post-Colonial Paradigm]
-
Saddam Hussein and Arab Honor
- The pathology of Arab culture that can forgive Saddam
for killing a million Muslims
because he died with "honour".
-
Why Arabs love their oppressors and hate their liberators
- article by Victor Davis Hanson,
discusses why
"Kids whose
parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein and are now fed and protected by American money and manpower
nevertheless dance upon a burned out Humvee while shouting for Saddam to return.
The same is true of those on the
West Bank who have their capital looted by the Palestinian Authority,
their relatives jailed or murdered, and their votes
and speech curtailed: They will still praise Arafat to the skies
- if he at least mutters some banality about hating the West.
Because these are irrational responses - people acting from their appetites and impulses
rather than their heads"
- because their philosophy, and their hatreds,
are built on fantasy
rather than reality.
-
"They Really Don't Think The Same Way We Do"
- A normal, tolerant westerner goes to Saudi Arabia, and his ideas change:
-
"In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances,
a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from "blowback"
from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc."
- His observations could be dismissed as "racist",
but in reality maybe they should be taken on board by Saudis (and others).
After all, culture is a human invention,
and we can all change our culture.
His observations:
- They don't think the same way we do.
- When you meet them in just the right circumstances, they are a very likable people.
- Their values are fundamentally different from ours,
their self-esteem is derived from a different source
(not work, and not relationships).
- Not only can they not build the infrastructure of a modern society, they can't maintain it either
(Saudi Arabian maintenance is like the old Soviet bloc).
- They do not think of obligations as running both ways
(hypocrisy does not bother them).
- In warfare, we think they are sneaky cowards, they think we are hypocrites.
- In rhetoric, they don't mean to be taken seriously and they don't understand when we do.
- They don't place the same value on an abstract conception of Truth as we do, they routinely believe things of breathtaking absurdity.
- They do not have the same notion of cause and effect as we do.
- We take for granted that we are a dominant civilization still on the way up. They are acutely aware that they are a civilization on the skids.
- We think that everybody has a right to their own point of view, they think that that idea is not only self-evidently absurd, but evil.
- Our civilization is destroying theirs.
We cannot share a world in peace. They understand this; we have yet to learn it.
- "I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run
we are going to have to hammer these people hard
to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization."
-
Mideast Rules to Live By, Thomas L. Friedman, December 20, 2006
(and search for copies).
Some of his rules:
- What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language.
- If you can't explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don't try to explain it at all - they won't believe it.
- Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas like liberalism vs. communism.
They are about which tribe gets to rule.
So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It's the South vs. the South.
- The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel's mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can't understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful.
-
A Northern Irish student's impression of Syria:
"In a closed society such as Assad's Syria, language is not for transmitting or exchanging information. Its main purpose is to reinforce the values held by the community and by the regime. These values are outdated and dangerous: self-pity, purity through sacrifice, a leader who will redeem us, the Jews with their wicked plots foiling us, etc.
When I first arrived this was funny in a strange Borat kind of way. Now it just scares me."
- Terrorism is not caused by poverty:
-
Department of Blithe Assertion
- The claim that
terrorism is caused by poverty.
-
Education, Poverty, Political Violence and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?
by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova
- A survey that concludes
there is no relationship between terrorism and poverty.
See summary.
- What Makes a Terrorist?
by James Q. Wilson
- Terrorism is not caused by poverty:
"Krueger and
Maleckova compared terrorist incidents in the Middle East with changes in
the GDP of the region and found that the number of
such incidents per year increased as economic conditions improved."
- Poverty Doesn't Create Terrorists,
by Alan B. Krueger.
- "More terrorists do come from poor countries than rich ones, but this
is because poor countries tend to lack civil liberties.
Once a country's degree of civil liberties is taken into account
..
income per capita bears no relation to involvement in terrorism.
Countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which have spawned
relatively many terrorists, are economically well off yet lacking
in civil liberties. Poor countries with a tradition of protecting civil
liberties are unlikely to spawn terrorists."
- "Apart from the size of a country and the extent of its civil liberties,
no factor that I could find ..
could predict whether people from that country were more or
less likely to take part in international terrorism."
-
Freedom squelches terrorist violence
- Alberto Abadie concludes that terrorism is not caused by poverty.
"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty,
but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there."
-
Marc Sageman,
University of Pennsylvania
(see here
and here
and here
and here),
found that of Al-Qa'eda members and associates:
- 18 per cent were upper class, 55 per cent were middle class.
90 percent came from caring, intact families.
- 29 per cent had some college education; 33 per cent had a college degree;
9 per cent had a postgraduate degree.
91 per cent had a secular education.
- 70 per cent joined the jihad while away from home.
They joined the jihad at the average age of 26
(mis-quoted as the average age of all of them being 26).
- In short, they are educated, alienated middle-class twenty-something
young men, who as likely as not developed their hateful fascist ideas
in the middle of tolerant, democratic western society.
Just like Hitler, Marx, Lenin and a million other angry, hateful young men
who reject the decent tolerant society that surrounds them.
- "Sageman describes them as the
"elite of their country" sent abroad to study because the schools in Germany, France, England
and the US are better.
...
Al-Qa'eda's "breeding ground", it seems, is as much in fragmented cities in the West
as in hotbeds of Islamism in the East."
- What this means is that
the western media and the western left
are partly to blame for
the conversion of young people to Islamism in the west.
The constant left-wing attacks on America and Israel one sees in the west
is not simply being watched by westerners.
Young potential jihadis are watching too,
and it encourages some of them to join Al-Qa'eda.
The media and the left
encourage the enemy
(even if they don't mean to).
Sageman notes, for example, that France is breeding lots of jihadis
while the US is not.
The different media climates in France and America
probably has a lot to do with it.
If French political culture changed to become supportive of America,
France would breed a lot less jihadi killers.
-
Arthur Chrenkoff on Al-Qa'eda not being poor:
"The problem is hardly new. Poor people rarely become revolutionaries because
they are far too busy trying to survive to engage in political pursuits. Historically,
it has always been the relatively well-off and the well educated who constituted a vanguard of any revolutionary
and/or terrorist movement, from the French Revolution and 19th century revolutionary socialism to Bolshevism,
Red Brigades-style terrorism, and Palestinian terrorism.
...
Overthrowing existing order is and has always been an elite pursuit."
- The terrorists are not poor, they are revolutionaries:
-
Under Our Very Noses: The terrorist next door
by Adrian Karatnycky.
- Poverty is not the cause of 9/11:
"It is indeed reassuring to view the terrorists who now threaten us
as an exogenous threat rooted in the Middle East's Hobbesian
environment of obscurantism, poverty, and repression
- but police and press investigations offer evidence of a far more complex, and
ominous, picture.
The key hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were well-educated children of privilege.
None of them suffered first-hand economic
privation or political oppression."
-
So who are the 9/11 attackers, if not poor third worlders?
In fact, they are very much like the middle-class
anarchist, fascist and
communist revolutionaries of the past:
"To understand the September 11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile
of the classic revolutionary: deracinated, middle class,
shaped in part by exile. In other words, the image of Lenin in Zurich or London;
or of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh in Paris."
- "many of the terrorists we are now confronting are a Western phenomenon,
existing inside the Islamic diaspora
that is an established fact of life in the U.S. and Europe.
...
Like the leaders of
America's Weather Underground, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang,
Italy's Red Brigades, and Japan's Red Army
Faction, the Islamic terrorists [are] university-educated converts
to an all-encompassing neo-totalitarian ideology.
...
youthful members of a bored middle class who have grown contemptuous
of "soft" and corrupt elites and are drawn to the
romance of revolutionary guerrilla movements."
- And like
the
1960s and 1970s
middle-class anarchist, fascist and
communist terrorists,
the
proper response
is war until their total destruction.
-
Does Affluence Cause Jihad?
by Zachary Constantino
-
The Suicide Bombers Among Us
by Theodore Dalrymple
- On the confused mind of the starry-eyed young Islamist man.
"According to Islamism
... Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve
all personal and political problems at the same time."
It is incredible that anyone would believe such a thing.
But, of course, we've seen this kind of insane utopianism before:
"This notion is fundamentally no more (and no less)
bizarre or stupid than the Marxist notion that captivated so many Western intellectuals throughout the 20th century:
that the abolition of private property would lead to final and lasting harmony among men."
-
The radical loser,
by
Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
makes the obvious point that
the idea that Islamist terror could bring about a better future for the Arab/Muslim world
is absurd.
-
He notes that so far,
Islamist terror damages the Muslim world far more than the West.
Unless terrorists get WMD (*),
if attacks continue as they are now:
"it makes no difference to the actual power relations.
Even the spectacular attack on the World Trade Center was not able to shake
the supremacy of the United States. The New York Stock Exchange
reopened the Monday after the attacks,
and the long-term impact on the international financial system and world trade was minimal.
The consequences for Arab societies, on the other hand, are fatal.
For the most devastating long-term effects will be born not by the West, but by the religion
in whose name the Islamists act. Not just refugees, asylum seekers and migrants
will suffer as a result. Beyond any sense of justice,
entire peoples will have to pay a huge price for the actions of their self-appointed representatives.
The idea that their prospects, which are bad enough as it is, could be improved through terrorism is absurd.
History offers no example of a regressive society that stifled its own productive potential
being capable of survival in the long term.
The project of the radical loser, as currently seen in Iraq and Afghanistan,
consists of organizing the suicide of an entire civilisation."
- (*) Even then, any Islamist WMD attack
will more likely lead to devastating conventional and nuclear war against the Muslim world.
Islamism has nothing to offer the Islamic world except repression, poverty, death, war,
terror, famine,
and potentially even total destruction.
It is clear that the West is under imminent nuclear threat.
It is clear that if Al-Qa'ida get a nuclear weapon,
they will use it immediately.
Optimism
- Let's change
the world
To prevent nuclear attack on the West, Islamism must be defanged and destroyed.
America's lasting reaction to Sept 11th
may not be the reaction bin Laden expected.
America's strong, lasting reaction is:
Let's change the Middle East.
Let's change the Middle East
- We have no choice
by Victor Davis Hanson.
- America is on the march
- "Two years ago nuts in caves talked about Americans
who were scared to fight; now the world is worried because we
fight too quickly and too well."
-
Bush Didn't Squander the World's Sympathy; He Spent It
by Jonathan Rauch
- In the Cold War,
the US supported Arab and Islamic tyrannies
and
not Arab and Islamic democrats.
This policy is now over.
- "This is a breathtakingly bold undertaking. The difficulties are staggering. Everything might go wrong. But the crucial point to remember is that everything had already gone wrong. No available policy could justify optimism in the Arab world, but the new policy at least offers hope. It offers a path ahead, a future where there had been only a past.
...
Spending the world's goodwill on reform in the Arab world is the most dangerous course the Bush administration could have set, except for all the others."
-
Looking on the Bright Side
(also here)
- optimism by Fareed Zakaria
- "There are always risks involved when things change. But
for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed
Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of
this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I'll take my
chances with change."
- And if it works, let us always remember that France and Germany,
and all the "anti-war" youth,
tried to stop it happening.
- Christopher Hitchens
says this is very exciting for freedom-lovers,
and terrifying for the Islamofascists:
"After Sept. 11, several conservative policy-makers
decided in effect that there were "root causes"
behind the murder-attacks. These "root causes" lay
in the political slum that the United States
has been running in the region, and in the rotten nexus
of client-states from Riyadh to Islamabad. Such causes cannot be
publicly admitted, nor can they be addressed all at once.
But a slum-clearance program is beginning to form."
- This may fail, but it's worth trying:
- Yes, this is incredibly daring and hopeful.
It may fail.
Democracy and freedom may be simply impossible for Arabs.
We may have to return to a clamped-down era
of friendly dictators and realpolitik.
But realpolitik sure doesn't look like the
safest option right now.
What a fantastic world if we could build something different.
It has to be tried, at least once.
-
A US soldier at the front in Iraq in 2004 says it best
- "Long term prospects - I have to admit that after one year here I am largely pessimistic.
Iraqi society is sick in many ways. Sometimes it's hard to tell if Saddam was the problem
or the symptom. I just don't know how a society so divided along ethnic and tribal lines,
with no democratic or liberal traditions and almost zero respect for the rule of law can
build any kind of society
[except an] autocratic one. I'm not ashamed that the US came
here with good intentions and noble sentiments about the universality of our values -
democracy, liberty, the rule of law etc., but I think all our efforts might be eventually
futile. In essence, we have given the Iraqis an enormous gift, but they don't seem to be
seizing the opportunity. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink ..."
- It's too early to tell if this will fail.
But we have to try.
And if it fails, in 10 years time we have to try again.
I believe in democracy, human rights, free speech
and freedom of religion
for all mankind,
including the Arab world.
That is why I am a neo-conservative
rather than a leftist.
Leftists only believe in these things for westerners.
Iraq (separate page)
- Afghanistan
- Al-Qa'ida, who had attacked America,
and killed thousands of Americans for no reason,
were supported by the Taliban of Afghanistan.
The US, incredibly reasonably, offered to allow the Taliban butchers
to stay in power
enslaving their own people
if they would hand over Al-Qa'ida.
The Taliban refused.
So the US took out the Al-Qa'ida bases
and destroyed the Taliban regime,
in just five weeks.
- Iraq
- The butcher Saddam Hussein enslaved his people
and threatened the world.
The US, incredibly reasonably, offered to allow him remain in power,
murdering and torturing and robbing his own people,
if he ceased to threaten the rest of the world.
Saddam refused.
So the US destroyed his entire regime,
in just three weeks.
- Libya
folds without even waiting to be invaded:
-
Message received: "America wins"
by Mark Steyn
- "You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you
don't have to invade everywhere else."
Status as at 2007:
Just 2 states are supporting fighters killing Americans: Iran and Syria (in Iraq).
Just 2 states are supporting fighters killing Israelis: Iran and Syria
(apart from the Palestinian Authority itself).
Just 1 state is trying to get nuclear weapons: Iran.
Just got them: North Korea.
Already has them: Pakistan.
|
- Iran
- Time for the mullahs to go.
The Islamic revolution was a failure
and it is time to abandon it.
- North Korea
- Now probably the most evil, unstable, dangerous
regime in the world.
- Saudi Arabia
- The source of anti-American and anti-Jewish poison.
- Sudan
- Another candidate for the most evil regime in the world.
Cartoon from Cox and Forkum
(see here).
See Cartoon Use Policy.
Also on Those Shirts t-shirt
(see here).
Next (after Iraq)
-
Iraq and Iran are the best places to pick
to start changing the Middle East,
because there the governments are most hated by their people.
- "the great
paradox of the modern Middle East: the so-called
moderate regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt
have populations irate with anti-American and
anti-Western sentiments, while among the people in
rogue regimes like Iran, Iraq and Syria, there is
sympathy for the West and support for the new
American mantra for regime change."
- Mark Goldblatt
on how it won't stop with Iraq.
- "And after Saddam? Maybe Syria. Maybe Iran. Maybe the Sudan.
...
Beyond that, the writing will be on the wall for Libya.
For Egypt. For Saudi Arabia.
Wherever radical Islam festers, we will go.
And we will go in force, and in waves ...
After a time, the people themselves won't wait for us"
-
The war is going well
- roundup country-by-country
by Charles Krauthammer after Iraq
- "[In] every [single]
country from the Khyber Pass to the Mediterranean Sea
... the forces of moderation have been strengthened.
This is a huge strategic advance"
-
Bush's State of the Union Address, Jan 2004
- "9 months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain
succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of
diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear:
For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible, and no one can
now doubt the word of America."
-
"From the beginning, America has sought international support for our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we have
gained much support. There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations, and submitting to
the
objections of a few.
America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country."
-
"We also hear doubts that democracy is a realistic goal for the greater Middle East, where freedom is rare. Yet it is
mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and
self-government. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that
desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again."
- Don't stop now
-
Orson Scott Card
- "I would not have chosen Afghanistan and Iraq to start with
... But once we chose Afghanistan and Iraq, once we began a serious campaign, we must continue the war until we achieve our objective,
which is to remove all the governments that sponsor terror, or convince the remaining sponsors of terror to absolutely, thoroughly, and
completely reverse their policy ...
Anything
less, and all our effort
- all those American lives
- were wasted."
-
These five regimes must go,
by Mark Steyn
- the five regimes of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and North Korea must go
"if you want to be able
to get to anything like a victory in this war"
- Angelo M. Codevilla says the war may have to go much further:
-
No Victory, No Peace
by Angelo M. Codevilla
- If we stop now, after Iraq, we will lose.
We need to do much more.
- "nothing less than the bloody demise of
the most egregious anti-American regimes
[will] convince the others not to foster or allow terrorism. Only this
[will] give us
peace."
-
War At Last?
by Angelo M. Codevilla
- "Where did all the Nazis go?"
- To destroy an ideology, you have to go after the regimes.
When the regimes are defeated, utterly defeated,
people, strangely enough,
abandon the ideology overnight
and pretend they never held it.
Where is Nazism now?
-
Norman Podhoretz on Angelo M. Codevilla
- "Of all the attacks on the Bush Doctrine, this set of arguments is the only one that resonates with me"
- but ultimately he finds it too extreme, too unnecessary (hopefully).
Victory may be achieved without such total war (as the Cold War showed).
-
An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror
by David Frum and Richard Perle
- what to do next
- a "manual for victory".
- See summary.
- Interview
- Frum says we can win without (too much) further war:
"Richard and I are often accused of believing that military power is the answer to everything. On the contrary, we believe that it is the answer to
some things - as opposed to those who believe it is the answer to nothing. Force is to international relations what cash is to transactions between banks: the medium of final
resort. So long as a bank is known to have abundant cash, it can do its business on credit; and so long as a nation is known to be ready to fight if necessary, it will discover that
the necessity arises very seldom."
Let's change the world
- The fight for human freedom
- WW2, the Cold War,
and now the War on Terror.
-
Our Own Hundred Years' War
by Clark S. Judge
- How we won WW2 and the Cold War.
- World War 4
- This is World War 4.
- This is World War 4
by Eliot A. Cohen
(the Cold War
was World War 3)
- This is big.
This could be the beginning of the end for Islamic fundamentalism,
and the dawn of a new era of democracy and freedom
in the Islamic world.
- R. James Woolsey
- World War IV
- speech, November 16, 2002
- "I don't believe this terror war is ever really going to go away until we change
the face of the Middle East.
..
This will take time. It will be difficult. But I think we need to say to both the terrorists
and the dictators and also to the autocrats who from time to time are friendly with us,
that we know, we understand we are going to make you nervous.
..
We want you to be nervous."
-
At war for freedom
- Norman Podhoretz
Can the Arab world become democratic?
Optimism
- Optimism from
Victor Davis Hanson:
- The Iron Veil
predicts that the Islamic fascist regimes of the Middle East
could collapse rapidly like communism.
- The World Upside Down
- "Like the
weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is ahead is fraught with uncertainty
and fear, but it is also, in some strange and macabre way, full of rare hope as well."
-
From Manhattan to Baghdad
- "Are we, then, confronted with a clash of civilizations? Not really, but rather the tottering of the last impediments to the
reform of the Arab world before it joins the world of nations, and embraces freedom and tolerance, which alone can
provide it with security and prosperity. While there are hundreds of thousands of terrorists and state fascists in almost
every Arab government, hundreds of millions of more ordinary citizens are watching this war to see who will win and
what the ultimate settlement will consist of. Many, perhaps the majority, may for the moment have their hearts with bin
Laden and Saddam Hussein, but their minds ultimately will convince them to join the victors and a promising future, rather
than the losers and a bleak past."
-
Again and again, war leads to unintended, unpredictable consequences
- and 9/11 may not have been an Islamist success,
but rather, in the long term,
the shot that destroyed the entire Islamist world.
"The suicide bombs and explosions that go off daily in Iraq are not proof that Americans
are losing the Sunni Triangle, but rather that thousands of secular and religious fascists
are desperate not to lose their entire Middle East."
- Optimism from
Bill Whittle:
- "Power"
- Islamism as the last chance, the furious last stand,
of the enemies of
human freedom.
The Islamists represent a 5,000 year
tradition of human tyranny and oppression,
that pre-dates Islam
and that now, in this 21st century, may finally be coming to an end,
to be replaced by global democracy:
- "There is loose in the world a cancer, a cult of death and destruction,
a force that loves nothing but destruction and pain and revenge for slights real and
imagined. We face people whose hatred and rage sends them into fits of ecstasy
at the thought of their own children being blown to bloody shreds so
long as they can kill as many innocents as possible."
- "It is a sickness, it is a disease - it is, in fact,
the last animal howling
of rage and impotence at a new idea of humanity
that is, at a long, bloody and
terrible price, fighting and winning a war against racism, sexism,
religious extremism, tribalism, conformity and slavery."
- "Rafts" -
"The forces of ignorance and barbarism
- bearers of ruin and despair
wherever they make camp -
are growing in confidence. But beside their will to destroy and die they have nothing.
These Death Cult barbarians think this is all they will need
...
I still hold out hope that they will crack open a second book - a history book, say
- that might at the eleventh hour give them some insight into the avocado nature of the Civilization
they seem determined now to assault: soft and pulpy on the outside, impenetrably tough and hard within.
They are going to do more than chip a tooth on us, ...
they are about to make, I think, the same mistake that others have made before them
- to see the Cindy Sheehans and Michael Moores as representative of a corrupt and dying culture,
rather than what they really are: somewhat entertaining animal acts we Westerners use
to pass the time while waiting for the next opportunity to pull the gloves off,
and kick some new inhuman, barbaric horde onto the ash heap of history"
Yeh hum naheen
("This is not us"),
a Muslim protest against Islamist terror.
Search for more copies:
This is great.
No moral equivalence.
No blaming it on western foreign policy, or "root causes".
No complaints about America, Iraq, India or Israel.
Just complaints about Islamist terror.
"This is an amazing victory,
a victory over
a monster who gassed
civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored
poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands,
and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet.
It's a victory over
those who marched in the millions to stop this
liberation,
over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America
crowd, and the armchair generals. It's a victory for the two
countries in the world that have always made freedom possible
and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made
dark by terror. It's a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and
women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage
and restraint. It's a victory for optimism over pessimism, the
righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against
postmodern excuses,
and of political leadership over appeasement.
Celebrate it. Don't let the whiners take this away from you"
-
Andrew Sullivan
on the fall of Iraq, 2003
"Let's get rid of them all"
- Tony Blair on the regimes of the unfree world.
"I will do whatever the Americans
want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was
afraid."
- An unnamed dictator,
quoted by Silvio Berlusconi after the Iraq war.
It turns out
it was Gaddafi!
"Others understand the historic importance of our work. The terrorists know.
They know that a vibrant, successful democracy at the heart of the Middle East
will discredit their radical ideology of hate.
They know that men and women with hope and purpose and dignity do not strap bombs on their bodies
and kill the innocent.
The terrorists are fighting freedom with all their cunning and cruelty because freedom is their greatest fear
- and they should be afraid, because freedom is on the march.
...
I believe that America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century.
I believe that millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty.
I believe that given the chance, they will embrace the most honorable form of government ever devised by man.
...
This young century will be liberty's century.
By promoting liberty abroad, we will build a safer world.
...
Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom."
-
President Bush's speech,
Republican National Convention, Sept 2004.
Return to
Islamism
page.
by Freedom House, 2004,
shows that the situation with Islam
is not as bad as you might think.
The majority (60 percent)
of the world's Muslims now live in "Free"
or "Partly Free" societies.
Only 40 percent live in "Not Free" societies.
It's got even better.
Indonesia,
the world's most populous Muslim state,
is now rated "Free".