Failing Islamic States - 2011

[a_majoor]

And Mark Steyn on why Islam is failing (and the dangerous contortions that we are undertaking to appease Islamists):

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/full-comment/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/09/06/mark-steyn-blunt-words-about-muslim-backwardness

Mark Steyn: Blunt words about Muslim backwardness

Mark Steyn, National Post
Friday, Sept. 6, 2013

In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

It’s factually unarguable: Trinity College graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.”

Full disclosure: Five years ago, when I was battling Canada’s “human rights” commissions to restore free speech to my native land, Richard Dawkins was one of the few prominent figures in Her Majesty’s dominions to lend unequivocal support. He put it this way: “I have over the years developed a dislike for Mark Steyn, although I’ve always admired his forceful writing. On this issue, however, he is clearly 1000% in the right and should receive all the support anybody can give him.”

Let me return the compliment: I have over the years developed a dislike for Richard Dawkins’s forceful writing (the God of the Torah is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” etc.), but I am coming round rather to admire him personally. It’s creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West’s chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group. I doubt The Satanic Verses would be accepted for publication today, but, if it were, I’m certain no major author would come out swinging on Salman Rushdie’s behalf the way his fellow novelist Fay Weldon did: The Koran, she declared, “is food for no-thought … It gives weapons and strength to the thought-police.”

That was a remarkably prescient observation in the London of 1989. Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.

What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future. According to a new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, “Mohammed,” in its various spellings, is now the second most popular baby boy’s name in England and Wales, and Number One in the capital. It seems likely that an ever more Islamic London will, for a while, still have a West End theater scene for tourists, but it will have ever less need not just for Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward and eventually Shakespeare but for drama of any kind. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Dawkins is wrong, maybe the U.N. Human Development chaps are wrong. But the ferocious objections even to raising the subject suggest we’re not.

A quarter-century on, Fay Weldon’s “thought police” are everywhere. Notice the general line on Dawkins: Please be quiet. Turn him off. You can’t say that. What was once the London Left’s principal objection to the ayatollah’s Rushdie fatwa is now its reflexive response to even the mildest poke at Islam. Their reasoning seems to be that, if you can just insulate this one corner of the multicultural scene from criticism, elsewhere rude, raucous life — with free speech and all the other ancient liberties — will go on. Miss Weldon’s craven successors seem intent on making her point: In London, Islam is food for no thought.

 

[a_majoor]

A farily long piece which tries to explain why *we* are doind such a bad job in the West when trying to understand what is going on in the Middle East. Since Islamic fundamentalism is on the move in places like Indonesia and Africa, it would be well to understand the real issues before we are blind-sided in some place like Mali or South Sudan, or suckered into a mission because of a "red line" that might make some sense to the Western public, but has little or no applicability where the events take place:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/156181

Watching the Middle East Implode
by Bruce Thornton (Research Fellow; W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow, 2009–10, 2010–11; and member, military history working group)

Only when we recognize the fundamental role Islam plays in the region can we begin to craft sensible policies that put U.S. interests first.
The revolutions against dictators in the Middle East dubbed the Arab Spring have degenerated into a complex, bloody mélange of coups and counter-coups, as have happened in Egypt; vicious civil wars, like the current conflict in Syria; a resurgence of jihadists gaining footholds in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sinai; and a shifting and fracturing of alliances and enmities of the sort throwing Lebanon and Jordan into turmoil. Meanwhile, American foreign policy has been confused, incompetent, and feckless in insuring that the security and interests of the United States and its allies are protected.

A major reason for our foreign policy failures in the region is our inability to take into account the intricate diversity of ideological, political, and especially theological motives driving events. Just within the Islamist outfits, Sunni and Shia groups are at odds—and this isn’t to mention the many bitter divisions within Sunni and Shia groups. Add the other players in the Middle East––military dictators, secular democrats, leftover communists, and nationalists of various stripes––and the whole region seems embroiled in endlessly complex divisions and issues.

Yet a greater impediment to understanding accurately this bloody and complex region is our preconceived biases. Too often we rely on explanations that gratify our own ideological preferences and prejudices, but that function like mental stencils: they are a priori patterns we superimpose on events to create the picture we want to see, but only by concealing other events that do not fit the pattern. We indulge the most serious error of foreign policy: assuming that other peoples think like us and desire the same goods as we do, like political freedom and prosperity, at the expense of others, like religious obedience and honor.

One persistent narrative attributes the region’s disorder to Western colonialism and imperialism. The intrusion of European colonial powers into the region, the story goes, disrupted the native social and political institutions, imposing in their place racist norms and alien values that demeaned Muslims as the “other” and denigrated their culture to justify the exploitation of resources and markets. This process culminated after World War I in the dismantling of the caliphate, and the creation of Western-style nation-states that ignored the traditional ethnic and sectarian identities of the region. As a result, resentment and anger at colonial occupation and exploitation erupted in Islamist jihadism against the oppressor.

The Islamists themselves have found this narrative a convenient pretext for their violence, thus reinforcing this explanation for some Westerners. The most important jihadist theorist, the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote, “It is necessary to revive the Muslim community which is buried under the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations, and which is crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”

Qutb was clearly alluding to the European colonial presence in the Middle East, and specifically to the nearly half-century of British control of Egypt. Al Qaeda, Hamas, and other jihadist groups similarly lace their communiqués with references to colonial “oppression” and neo-imperialist interference, as when Osama bin Laden scolded the U.S. in 2002 for waging war in the region “so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.” The Arabs likewise routinely describe the creation of Israel as a particularly offensive act of colonial aggression against the lands of Islam.

Such pretexts, however, are clearly for Western consumption, exploiting the Marxist demonization of imperialism and colonialism that informs the ideology of many leftist intellectuals in Europe and America. When speaking to fellow Muslims, however, most Islamist groups ground their motives in the traditional doctrines of Islam, which call for war against the infidel and the enemies of Islam.

The narrative of colonial oppression may be gratifying to leftist Western intellectuals, but it cannot alone explain the disorder of the region that has persisted long after the exit of the colonial powers. And it is hard to take seriously complaints of imperialism, colonialism, and occupation coming from followers of Islam. After all, Muslims were one of history’s most successful conquerors and imperialists who, as Efraim Karsh writes, “acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.”

Something else is needed to explain Islamic violence when India, a British colony for nearly 200 years, or South Africa, another ex-colony subjected to the indignities of racial apartheid, has not spawned global terrorist networks responsible for over 20,000 violent attacks just since 9/11.

The other dominant narrative is a reprise of Wilsonian democracy promotion. In this view, the dysfunctions of the region reflect the absence of open economies, liberal democratic governments, and recognition of human rights. Subjected to autocrats and dictators, the peoples of the Middle East are denied freedom, individual rights, and economic opportunity, and as a result are mired in poverty, oppression, and political disorder that explode into violent jihad.

George W. Bush sounded these themes in January 2005 in his inaugural speech, in which he linked U.S. security and global peace to the “force of human freedom” and the expansion of democracy: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” Hence Bush’s attempts to build democratic institutions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and President Obama’s early support for the “Arab Spring” revolutions: “I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy [and] universal rights.” Both presidents agree that more democracy in the region will mean less of the violence, suffering, and disorder caused by frustration and oppression at the hands of dictators and kleptocrats.

Like the left-wing narrative of colonialism’s blowback in the form of terror and political dysfunction, democracy promotion suffers from the same limitations, particularly the imposition of Western political categories and goods onto a different culture. The fetishizing of democracy ignores the complex network of mores, values, and principles that undergird political freedom and that took over two millennia in the West to coalesce into liberal democracy. And it ignores the absence of those principles and mores in most Middle Eastern countries.

So we focus instead on the photogenic process of voting, the ink-stained fingers and lines at polling booths that we confuse for belief in the liberal foundations of genuine democracy. More important, like the left-wing narrative, democracy promotion is ultimately based on material conditions and the goods of this world––prosperity and individual freedom–– at the expense of religious beliefs. Religion is treated as a private lifestyle choice, as it has become in the West, rather than the most fundamental and important dimension of identity both personal and political, as it is in the Muslim world.

Much of the conflict in the Middle East reflects the collision of these two sets of goods, the religious and the secular, which we oversimplify by emphasizing only the latter. We assume that if a liberal democracy can be created, the tolerance for differences of religious belief, respect for individual rights, and a preference for settling political conflict with legal processes rather than violence, will automatically follow. We forget that in our own history, despite the long tradition of separation of church and state whose roots lie in Christian doctrine, Europe was torn apart by wars of religion that killed millions before that tolerance for sectarian differences triumphed.

The power of Islam is the reality our various narratives ignore or rationalize away when we attempt to understand the violence and disorder of the Middle East. But as the scholar Bernard Lewis reminds us, “in most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . in no Christian country at the present time can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in the Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority in most Muslim countries.”

This observation provides an insight into recent events in Egypt. After Mubarak fell, many believed that the secular democrats were on their way to creating a more democratic political order. But ensuing elections brought to power the Muslim Brothers, an Islamist organization that scorns democracy and Western notions of human rights as alien impositions preventing the creation of an Islamic social and political order based on sharia law.

When the deteriorating economy created frustration with the Muslim Brothers’ arrogance and ineptitude, mass protests sparked a military intervention that once again was interpreted as a rejection of the Brothers and sharia, and a yearning for liberal democracy. Our ideological stencil assumed that our secular goods of freedom and prosperity had trumped the religious goods of fidelity to Islam and its doctrines.

Yet it is not so clear that this is the case. Impatience with the Muslim Brothers’ inability to provide basic necessities and manage the economy, or anger at its heavy-handed tactics, do not necessarily entail rejection of the ultimate goal of a political-social order more consistent with Islamic law. Polling of Egyptians suggests that the general program of the Muslim Brothers is still supported even as their tactics and governing are rejected.

In a Pew survey earlier this year, 74 percent of Egyptians said they want sharia to be “the official law of the land,” and 55 percent said sharia should apply to non-Muslims, which in Egypt includes 15 million Christian Copts. An earlier survey from 2010 found more specific support for sharia law: 84 percent of Egyptians supported the death penalty for apostates, 82 percent supported stoning adulterers, 85 percent said Islam’s influence on politics is positive, 95 percent said that it is good that Islam plays a large role in politics, 59 percent identified with Islamic fundamentalists, 54 percent favored gender segregation in the workplace, 82 percent favored stoning adulterers, 77 percent favored whippings and cutting off the hands of thieves and robbers, 84 percent favored death for those leaving Islam, and 60 percent said that laws should strictly follow the teachings of the Koran.

These attitudes, consistent with the program of the Muslim Brothers, suggest that their opponents are angry not with their long-term goal of creating a more Islamized government, but with the Brothers’ abuse of power and their managerial incompetence that alienated the even more radically Islamist Nour party. As the Middle East analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht recently wrote, “Only the deluded, the naïve and the politically deceitful . . . can believe that Islamism’s ‘moment’ in Egypt has passed. More likely, it’s just having an interlude.”

These results will not surprise anyone who understands how profoundly religious beliefs determine Middle Eastern attitudes to politics and society. Rather than ignoring this widespread religiosity, or subordinating it to our own goods such as prosperity and personal freedom, or explaining away the patent illiberal and intolerant dimensions of this belief, as the dominant narratives continue to do, we should instead recognize and acknowledge the critical role of Islam in the violence and disorder rending this geopolitically strategic region. Only then can we craft a foreign policy that protects our security and interests.

Bruce S. Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. He received his BA in Latin in 1975 and his PhD in comparative literature–Greek, Latin, and English–in 1983, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. Thornton is currently a professor of classics and humanities at California State University in Fresno, California. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays and reviews on Greek culture and civilization and their influence on Western civilization. His latest book, published in March 2011, is titled The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama's America.

Letters to the editor may be sent to definingideas@stanford.edu. Editors reserve the right to reject or publish (and edit) letters.

 

[a_majoor]

Although we talk and think in terms of states, a better way to look at this is failing Islamic Culture. The things this author talks about are fare worse than almost any historical event or situation that I can think of. Past uses of unrestrained violence were to make a point and terrorize a people or place into submission (think of the Golden Horde stacking pyramids of skulls), the only even remotely analogous event might be the spread of Russian Nihilists in the late 19th century, who's campaign of bombings and assassination also had no clearly defined end state in mind (or at least not one that the average Russian of the time or even a reader today could understand):

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100238080/im-sorry-but-we-have-to-talk-about-the-barbarism-of-modern-islamist-terrorism/

I'm sorry, but we have to talk about the barbarism of modern Islamist terrorism
By Brendan O'Neill World Last updated: September 28th, 2013

In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC's yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word – terrorism – in relation to the bloody assault on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya at the weekend. Across the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognisable moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century. We owe it to the victims of these assaults, and to the principle of honest and frank political debate, to face up to the unhinged, morally unanchored nature of Islamist violence in the 21st century.

Maybe it’s because we have become so inured to Islamist terrorism in the 12 years since 9/11 that even something like the blowing-up of 85 Christians outside a church in Pakistan no longer shocks us or even makes it on to many newspaper front pages. But consider what happened: two men strapped with explosives walked into a group of men, women and children who were queuing for food and blew up themselves and the innocents gathered around them. Who does that? How far must a person have drifted from any basic system of moral values to behave in such an unrestrained and wicked fashion? Yet the Guardian tells us it is “moral masturbation” to express outrage over this attack, and it would be better to give into a “sober recognition that there are many bad things we can’t as a matter of fact do much about”. This is a demand that we further acclimatise to the peculiar and perverse bloody Islamist attacks around the world, shrug our shoulders, put away our moral compasses, and say: “Ah well, this kind of thing happens.”

Or consider the attack on Westgate in Kenya, where both the old and the young, black and white, male and female were targeted. With no clear stated aims from the people who carried the attack out, and no logic to their strange and brutal behaviour, Westgate had more in common with those mass mall and school shootings that are occasionally carried out by disturbed people in the West than it did with the political violence of yesteryear. And yet still observers avoid using the T-word or the M-word (murder) to describe what happened there, and instead attach all sorts of made-up, see-through political theories to this rampage, giving what was effectively a terror tantrum executed by morally unrestrained Islamists the respectability of being a political protest of some breed.

Time and again, one reads about Islamist attacks that seem to defy not only the most basic of humanity’s moral strictures but also political and even guerrilla logic. Consider the hundreds of suicide attacks that have taken place in Iraq in recent years, a great number of them against ordinary Iraqis, often children. Western apologists for this wave of weird violence, which they call “resistance”, claim it is about fighting against the Western forces which were occupying Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion. If so, it’s the first “resistance” in history whose prime targets have been civilians rather than security forces, and which has failed to put forward any kind of political programme that its violence is allegedly designed to achieve. Even experts in counterinsurgency have found themselves perplexed by the numerous nameless suicide assaults on massive numbers of civilians in post-war Iraq, and the fact that these violent actors, unlike the vast majority of violent political actors in history, have “developed no alternative government or political wing and displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern”. One Iraqi attack has stuck in my mind for seven years. In 2006 a female suicide bomber blew herself up among families – including many mothers and their offspring – who were queuing up for kerosene. Can you imagine what happened? A terrible glimpse was offered by this line in a Washington Post report on 24 September 2006: “Two pre-teen girls embraced each other as they burned to death.”

What motivates this perversity? What are its origins? Unwilling, or perhaps unable, to face up to the newness of this unrestrained, aim-free, civilian-targeting violence, Western observers do all sorts of moral contortions in an effort to present such violence as run-of-the-mill or even possibly a justifiable response to Western militarism. Some say, “Well, America kills women and children too, in its drone attacks”, wilfully overlooking the fact such people are not the targets of America’s military interventions – and I say that as someone who has opposed every American venture overseas of the past 20 years. If you cannot see the difference between a drone strike that goes wrong and kills an entire family and a man who crashes his car into the middle of a group of children accepting sweets from a US soldier and them blows himself and them up – as happened in Iraq in 2005 – then there is something wrong with you. Other observers say that Islamists, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the individuals who attacked London and New York, are fighting against Western imperialism in Muslim lands. But that doesn’t add up. How does blowing up Iraqi children represent a strike against American militarism? How is detonating a bomb on the London Underground a stab at the Foreign Office? It is ridiculous, and more than a little immoral, to try to dress up nihilistic assaults designed merely to kill as many ordinary people as possible as some kind of principled political violence.

We have a tendency to overlook the newness of modern Islamic terrorism, how recent is this emergence of a totally suicidal violence that revels in causing as many causalities as possible. Yes, terrorism has existed throughout the modern era, but not like this. Consider the newness of suicide attacks, of terrorists who destroy themselves as well as their surroundings and fellow citizens. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were an average of one or two suicide attacks a year. Across the whole world. Since the early and mid-2000s there have been around 300 or 400 suicide attacks a year. In 2006 there were more suicide attacks around the world than had taken place in the entire 20 years previous. Terrorists’ focus on killing civilians – the more the better – is also new. If you look at the 20 bloodiest terrorist attacks in human history, measured by the number of causalities they caused, you’ll see something remarkable: 14 of them – 14 – took place in the 1990s and 2000s. So in terms of mass death and injury, those terrorist eras of the 1970s and 80s, and also earlier outbursts of anarchist terrorism, pale into insignificance when compared with the new, Islamist-leaning terrorism that has emerged in recent years.

What we have today, uniquely in human history, is a terrorism that seems myopically focused on killing as many people as possible and which has no clear political goals and no stated territorial aims. The question is, why? It is not moral masturbation to ask this question or to point out the peculiarity and perversity of modern Islamist violence. My penny’s worth is that this terrorism speaks to a profound crisis of politics and of morality. Where earlier terrorist groups were restrained both by their desire to appear as rational political actors with a clear goal in mind and by basic moral rules of human behaviour – meaning their violence was often bloody, yes, but rarely focused narrowly on committing mass murder – today’s Islamist terrorists appear to float free of normal political rules and moral compunctions. This is what is so infuriating about the BBC’s refusal to call these groups terrorists – because if anything, and historically speaking, even the term terrorist might be too good for them.

Failure to call these people and groups out (like the BBC and our own media) is a failure of our culture and values as well

 

[GAP]

quite a painted picture.....

Young, angry, male and Muslim
by Michael Galak October 2, 2013
Article Link

One of the most painful faults dividing the Middle East is an institutionalised misogyny.  Habitual deprivation of women of their equality and freedom of choice is the way of life in Islamic societies.

Male control over female reproductive choices is achieved through the denial of effective contraception, institutionalised polygamy and paedophilia, denial of financial independence, widespread unwillingness to educate girls and, the most barbaric practice of all, clitoridectomy -- sometimes wrongly called ‘female circumcision’. Women are expected, and ofted forced, to give birth to as many children as possible, regardless of their wishes, preferences or, indeed, physical age. As a result the tragedy of the Middle East is complicated, and in many ways determined, by the existence of the so called ‘Youth Bulge’– an excess of young unemployed and angry males with rudimentary or non-existent educations, unable to create their own families.

Even what passes in the Muslim world for an education does not guarantee a young Middle-Eastern male a place in a society or an ability to build and support a family. In effect, supplying their young men with worthless, unusable degrees makes a bad situation worse. The devaluation of a male self-worth and high levels of societal anxiety result in the loss of self-respect and perpetual narcissistic rage, fuelled by unused testosterone. The level of violence, both sexual and personal, inevitably increases in such a society.

The post-WWII acceleration of the Islamic emigration to the West, despite a direct Quranic prohibition on Muslims living under “non-believers” rule, is a direct consequence of these failing societies' systemic faults. This emigration brought about the rapid increase in the number of angry and alienated young Islamic males in Western countries, replicating the same “youth bulge” within respective immigrant conclaves.

European precedents

Radical Islamism, which is the most common ideological justification of violence against “infidels”, is a convenient self-serving excuse for an expression of  habitual rage. If not Islamism, something else would have taken its place to facilitate and justify the violence.

The seemingly unrelated phenomena of the Middle Eastern oppression of women and earlier waves of European emigration have common roots, such as unrestricted population growth; resulting population pressure; inability of impoverished and ineligible males to occupy a decent place in a society. The universality of this phenomenon is illustrated by two examples from the European history. 

South American colonisation, or Conquista, was carried out by the Spanish Conquistadores or, as they were known at the time – “Secundos”, meaning impoverished younger sons of often wealthy aristocrats who were ineligible to inherit their fathers’ estates. The dormant violence of these superfluous and redundant young males was unleashed against “Indian heathens".  The cause of spreading of Christianity was a very convenient, even “holy”, excuse for letting out the bottled rage. 

The second example is to be found in the mass migration of Irish younger sons to the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. They migrated for exactly the same reason their Spanish counterparts did – inability to get their share of an inheritance, because family plots were small and, thus, indivisible. These plots were unable to support the whole family, especially in light of Ireland’s history of catastrophic crop failures. Similarly, these forced emigrants were not able to marry because they had no means nor sources of income to support future spouses and children.
More on link

 

[Retired AF Guy]

Although we talk and think in terms of states, a better way to look at this is failing Islamic Culture. The things this author talks about are fare worse than almost any historical event or situation that I can think of. Past uses of unrestrained violence were to make a point and terrorize a people or place into submission (think of the Golden Horde stacking pyramids of skulls), the only even remotely analogous event might be the spread of Russian Nihilists in the late 19th century, who's campaign of bombings and assassination also had no clearly defined end state in mind (or at least not one that the average Russian of the time or even a reader today could understand):

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100238080/im-sorry-but-we-have-to-talk-about-the-barbarism-of-modern-islamist-terrorism/

Failure to call these people and groups out (like the BBC and our own media) is a failure of our culture and values as well

Personally, I don't these killings have anything to do with politics, religion, Islam, or whatever. I think these guys are just a bunch of psychopaths ( ala Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, etc) who just get their jollies from killing people and the reason they target the innocent is that if they really had to fight someone armed they would crap their pants.

My two cents.

 

[a_majoor]

I might question how it is possible to gather large numbers of sociopaths together to do such things (given the small numbers and random distribution of sociopaths in the population, and the fact that sociopathic personality traits seem to prevent large numbers of them working together), but an alternative is to consider the leaders of such groups are indeed sociopathic, and use their ability to "model" people's emotional states to gain followers and whip them into a killing frenzy (and said leaders stay behind to watch the mayhem on TV).

If this is true, then the shooters are equally victims (although we should not have too much sympathy for them). It also raises the question about the social matrix they are raised in: what sort of filters and blocks are in place to deter people from acting out on impulses and becoming vulneerable to manipulation?

So at the bottom it still is a question of culture.

 

[tomahawk6]

I might question how it is possible to gather large numbers of sociopaths together to do such things (given the small numbers and random distribution of sociopaths in the population, and the fact that sociopathic personality traits seem to prevent large numbers of them working together), but an alternative is to consider the leaders of such groups are indeed sociopathic, and use their ability to "model" people's emotional states to gain followers and whip them into a killing frenzy (and said leaders stay behind to watch the mayhem on TV).

If this is true, then the shooters are equally victims (although we should not have too much sympathy for them). It also raises the question about the social matrix they are raised in: what sort of filters and blocks are in place to deter people from acting out on impulses and becoming vulneerable to manipulation?

So at the bottom it still is a question of culture.

How did the Nazi's accomplish the samething ? How did Saddam's thugs murder thousands of people ? Break down inhibitions and offer rewards and people can do anything.

 

[a_majoor]

How did the Nazi's accomplish the samething ? How did Saddam's thugs murder thousands of people ? Break down inhibitions and offer rewards and people can do anything.

Which is the point I was trying to make (although not as effectively). It seems to me that the social structure of many Islamic/Middle Eastern states lacks many of the cultural and institutional checks and balances that mold the sort of behaviour we recognize as "civilized". Western civilization is built and held together by various "small platoons"; formal and informal associations that provide common ground and sense of purpose that bind people together. Even the removal of large parts of the government (as we see in the United States right now with the shut down) does not create chaos and anarchy, similar mobilization of the "small platoons" is taking place in Detroit, where people are coming out and doing the things the municipal government has abandond due to its financial crisis. Contrast this to the situation in Egypt, which has very few functioning formal or informal institutions or organizations, and rapidly spiralled into chaos with the fall of government.

 

[a_majoor]

And a piece of good news. Tunisia has thrown the Islamists out of power, the people wishing for a more secularist government/State. This is going to be a difficult task, as there are many secular parties but only one Islamist party, so vote splitting will be an issue. As well, religion is one of the powerful institutions and value setters in that culture, so there will be a strong pull against secularism. A place to watch:

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/fall-tunisias-islamists

The Fall of Tunisia's Islamists

4 October 2013
Ennahda, the Tunisian Islamist party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, has been forced from power by an overwhelming secular opposition.

I didn’t know this was going to happen, but I had a pretty strong sense that it would. Tunisia is a modern, pluralistic, civilized place. It’s striking liberal compared with most Arab countries. A person couldn’t possibly show up in Tunis from Cairo and think the two are remotely alike. Egypt is at one extreme of the Arab world’s political spectrum, and Tunisia is at the other.

The Islamists won less than half the vote two years ago, and the only reason they did even that well is because Ennahda ran on an extremely moderate platform. They sold themselves to voters as Tunisia’s version of Germany’s Christian Democrats.

It was a lie, of course, and once Tunisians figured that out, support for Ennahda cratered.

The assassination of leftist politician Mohamed Brahmi this summer pushed the country over the edge. Ennahda didn’t kill the guy. A Salafist terrorist cell did the deed. But Ennahda has been playing footsie with the Salafist fringe while the rest of the country recoils in horror, so Ennahda is getting blamed too.

Unlike in Egypt, the Islamists weren’t thrown out by force. Tunisia doesn’t have an Egyptian-style military that’s big and powerful and ideological enough to occupy the country and rule it through a junta. Also unlike in Egypt, Tunisia has a critical mass of secular citizens who won’t put up with even a whiff of theocracy.

The other reason Ennahda’s partial victory was possible two years ago is because they had an organizational advantage after the dictator Ben Ali fell. They had the mosques while the secular parties had nothing. And since the Islamists were smart enough to pretend to be moderates, they managed to get moderate people to vote for them.

That’s over now. In the meantime, the liberal and leftist parties have had a lot more time to get organized and merge into larger entities so they can avoid the vote splitting that hurt them so much last time. When a single religious party squares off against dozens of secular parties, it doesn’t take a political or mathematical genius to figure out which will get the most votes.

Tunisia is the one and only Arab Spring country that I’ve been cautiously optimistic about. Libya is too much of a mess, Egypt was a lost cause begin with, and Syria is in worse shape than Bosnia in the mid-1990s. Tunisia, though, is doing as well as could be expected.

And get this: now that Ennahda is out, not a single post-Arab Spring country is ruled by Islamists. All of them are secular now.

 

[a_majoor]

An "oops" moment, when we realize that we are getting exactly what *we* asked for...

http://pjmedia.com/blog/islams-protestant-reformation/?print=1

Islam’s ‘Protestant Reformation’
Posted By Raymond Ibrahim On June 20, 2014 @ 12:12 am In Homeland Security,Middle East,Politics,Religion,US News,World News | 27 Comments

In order to prevent a clash of civilizations, or worse, Islam must reform.  This is the contention of many Western peoples. And, pointing to Christianity’s Protestant Reformation as proof that Islam can also reform, many are optimistic.

Overlooked by most, however, is that Islam has been reforming. What is today called “radical Islam” is the reformation of Islam. And it follows the same pattern of Christianity’s Protestant Reformation.

The problem is our understanding of the word “reform.”  Despite its positive connotations, “reform” simply means [1] to “make changes (in something, typically a social, political, or economic institution or practice) in order to improve it.”

Synonyms of “reform” include “make better,” “ameliorate,” and “improve” — splendid words all, yet words all subjective and loaded with Western references.

Muslim notions of “improving” society may include purging it of “infidels” and their corrupt ways; or segregating men and women, keeping the latter under wraps or quarantined at home; or executing apostates, who are seen as traitorous agitators.

Banning many forms of freedoms taken for granted in the West — from alcohol consumption to religious and gender equality — can be deemed an “improvement” and a “betterment” of society.

In short, an Islamic reformation need not lead to what we think of as an “improvement” and “betterment” of society — simply because “we” are not Muslims and do not share their reference points and first premises.  “Reform” only sounds good to most Western peoples because they, secular and religious alike, are to a great extent products of Christianity’s Protestant Reformation; and so, a priori, they naturally attribute positive connotations to the word.

Islam’s Reformation Has Produced Results Opposite to Protestant Antecedent.

At its core, the Protestant Reformation was a revolt against tradition in the name of scripture — in this case, the Bible.  With the coming of the printing press, increasing numbers of Christians became better acquainted with the Bible’s contents, parts of which they felt contradicted what the Church was teaching.  So they broke away, protesting that the only Christian authority was “scripture alone,” sola scriptura.

Islam’s reformation follows the same logic of the Protestant Reformation — specifically by prioritizing scripture over centuries of tradition and legal debate — but with antithetical results that reflect the contradictory teachings of the core texts of Christianity and Islam.

As with Christianity, throughout most of its history, Islam’s scriptures, specifically its “twin pillars,” the Koran (literal words of Allah) and the Hadith (words and deeds of Allah’s prophet, Muhammad), were inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Only a few scholars, or ulema — literally, “they who know” — were literate in Arabic and/or had possession of Islam’s scriptures. The average Muslim knew only the basics of Islam, or its “Five Pillars.”

In this context, a “medieval synthesis” flourished throughout the Islamic world.  Guided by an evolving general consensus (or ijma‘), Muslims sought to accommodate reality by, in medieval historian Daniel Pipes’ words [2]:

[Translating] Islam from a body of abstract, infeasible demands [as stipulated in the Koran and Hadith] into a workable system. In practical terms, it toned down Sharia and made the code of law operational. Sharia could now be sufficiently applied without Muslims being subjected to its more stringent demands.…  [However,] While the medieval synthesis worked over the centuries, it never overcame a fundamental weakness: It is not comprehensively rooted in or derived from the foundational, constitutional texts of Islam. Based on compromises and half measures, it always remained vulnerable to challenge by purists (emphasis added).

This vulnerability has now reached breaking point: millions of more Korans published in Arabic and other languages are in circulation today compared to just a century ago; millions of more Muslims are now literate enough to read and understand the Koran compared to their medieval forbears.  The Hadith, which contains some of the most intolerant teachings and violent deeds attributed to Islam’s prophet, is now collated and accessible, in part thanks to the efforts of Western scholars, the Orientalists.  Most recently, there is the Internet — where all these scriptures are now available in dozens of languages and to anyone with a laptop or iPhone.

In this backdrop, what has been called at different times, places, and contexts “Islamic fundamentalism,” “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” and “Salafism” flourished.  Many of today’s Muslim believers, much better acquainted with the often black and white words of their scriptures than their ancestors, are “protesting” against earlier traditions, are “protesting” against the “medieval synthesis,” in favor of scriptural literalism — just like their Christian Protestant counterparts once did.

Thus, if Martin Luther (d. 1546) rejected the extra-scriptural accretions of the Church and “reformed” Christianity by aligning it more closely with scripture, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (d. 1787), one of Islam’s first modern reformers, “called for a return to the pure, authentic Islam of the Prophet, and the rejection of the accretions that had corrupted it and distorted it,” in the words of Bernard Lewis in his 1997 book, The Middle East [3].

The unadulterated words of God — or Allah — are all that matter for the reformists.

Note: Because they are better acquainted with Islam’s scriptures, other Muslims, of course, are apostatizing — whether by converting to other religions, most notably Christianity, or whether by abandoning religion altogether, even if only in their hearts (for fear of the apostasy penalty).  This is an important point to be revisited later.  Muslims who do not become disaffected after better acquainting themselves with the literal teachings of Islam’s scriptures, and who instead become more faithful to and observant of them are the topic of this essay.

Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/islams-protestant-reformation/

URLs in this post:

[1] means: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/reform
[2] Daniel Pipes’ words: http://www.danielpipes.org/13033/can-islam-be-reformed
[3] The Middle East: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00309CNI0/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00309CNI0&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Financial Times is an interesting overview of the situation and and around Iraq:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c9c9b8d0-f89b-11e3-815f-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz35AlgcErD

Middle East: Falling to pieces
It is imperative that rivals unite in the face of an Isis threat. Failure to do so could spell the end of Iraq

By Roula Khalaf

June 20, 2014

The surge of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the group known as Isis, poses a threat to all countries in the Middle East as well as to western interests. The Sunni jihadi group, whose rapid takeover of swaths of northwestern Iraq could lead to all-out civil war, considers not only Shia Muslims as its enemy. Isis’s aim is to dismantle existing borders among Sunni states and demolish prevailing power structures. If left unchecked and with territory under its control, its agenda might well expand to include global violent jihad.

In the twisted world of Isis, no one wins – not the Shia clerical regime in Tehran nor the Sunni theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Both have an interest in ridding the region of the new wave of jihadi extremism. But, this being the Middle East, having a common enemy is not sufficient to establish unity of purpose.

It was in Iraq just over a decade ago that the balance of power in the region was radically altered. The shift unleashed a power struggle that has taken on Sunni-Shia sectarian overtones and has been played out across the Middle East, from Syria to Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen.

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq removed a Sunni-dominated regime that was, through elections, replaced with a government led by the Shia majority.

Since then, Iraq has been a battleground for regional score-settling, with Gulf monarchies supporting Sunni tribes and parties and Iran bolstering Shia groups. The power struggle has shifted to Syria over the past three years with Iran and the Gulf powers backing opposing sides of a civil war.

But while attention was focused on Syria, tensions were simmering in Iraq. Since the US troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has pursued policies that have further alienated the Sunni minority, fuelling widespread resentment of the central government and its military institutions that has facilitated the Isis offensive.

Former Ba’athists who never came to terms with the new political order in Iraq have been staging a comeback, fighting alongside Isis.

Interactive map

Ironically, perhaps, Iran and the US, estranged since the Islamic revolution in 1979, have good reason to co-operate in Iraq today. But co-operation is not without risks. The US is reluctant to hand any leverage to Iran during the critical negotiations under way over Tehran’s nuclear programme.

The US objective of a more balanced power- sharing agreement in Iraq is also at odds with the Iranian interest for Shia dominance. US-Iranian co-operation on Iraq is also certain to inflame Saudi passions and confirm to a suspicious Riyadh that Washington is on the way to abandoning its traditional Gulf allies.

In Riyadh and other Gulf capitals, concern about Isis is mitigated by the prospect of dealing a rare setback to the Shia-led government in Baghdad, and by extension Iran. Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy has become fixated on checking Iranian influence in the Arab world.

In this page, the Financial Times attempts to explain, through maps and graphics, the regional dynamics that complicate efforts to preserve Iraq as a united nation. More than at any time in the past decade, Iraq confronts the danger of dismemberment into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish entities, a prospect that would have huge ramifications across the Middle East.

● Iran, the leading Shia power, is probably the most important player in Iraq. It wants a stable Iraq with the Shia majority as the dominant political power. Iran is keen to co-operate with the US against Isis in Iraq and has the influence to secure an unstated US goal: a new government that would no longer be led by Nouri al-Maliki.

The US and Iran, however, back opposite sides in Syria. The same security forces that assist Iran’s Shia groups have been bolstering Bashar al-Assad, while the US has supported moderate rebels.

The US is also concerned Iran could use their co-operation as a bargaining chip in nuclear negotiations and that even the appearance of working with Iran will heighten tensions with Sunni Gulf Arab regimes.

● Saudi Arabia is the big Sunni power in the Middle East. But the Iraq conflict has broken out at a time when its long-established strategic alliance with the US is under strain. For Saudi Arabia, Iraq is a battleground for its cold war with Iran. In recent years, the Saudis have ignored repeated US pleas to help stabilise Iraq by launching a dialogue with Mr Maliki. They have shunned the prime minister and sought to prop up Iraq’s Sunni tribes and political parties.

The jihadi networks that fund Isis are assumed to include private Saudi donors. Riyadh has also been a big backer of Syria’s rebels, some of whom might have joined Isis. The Sunni Gulf monarchies appear to be taking some pleasure in Mr Maliki’s predicament today, even if Isis’s expansion could pose a threat to their own rule.

● Syria’s conflict is closely intertwined with the Iraq crisis. Isis has been the most ferocious of the disparate groups in the largely Sunni rebel movement that has been trying to unseat Mr Assad. It is now in control of parts of the north and east of Syria.

While Isis is designated as a terrorist organisation in the US, the more moderate anti-Assad rebels are backed by Washington. Mr Assad and the US therefore appear to be on the same side when it comes to Isis.

But not completely. Complicating the issue are the suspicious ties between Mr Assad and Isis. The jihadi group is believed by western intelligence to be infiltrated by the Assad regime, whose objective is to portray the rebels as Sunni extremists determined to oust a minority Alawite regime.

● Turkey has much at stake in Iraq, including growing commercial interests, particularly in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the north. It shares with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies the concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme. And it has co-operated with the monarchies and the US in Syria, where it has been a leading opponent of Mr Assad.

But Turkey has been accused of turning a blind eye to the flood of foreign fighters crossing into Syria to join the rebellion, including jihadi groups such as Isis.

Ankara’s paramount concern is the fate of Iraq’s Kurds, who have been trying to carve out self-government areas in Syria as well. Turkey’s worry is that separatist sentiment could spread to its own Kurdish minority.

Now, I don't even to pretend to understand what's happening in the Middle East and I seriously doubt the capabilities of most whoclaim they do (maybe Bernard Lewis does, but he's nearly 100 years old!). The article above does, it seems to me, explain who care about what ...  but: :dunno:

 

[Edward Campbell]

And, here, CNN provides three useful maps to help understand the situation in Iraq.

 

[CougarKing]

Qatar reportedly steps into line with its neighbours by stopping the funding for their favourite extremist group: the Muslim brotherhood:

Yahoo News

Qatar steps back into line on Brotherhood

Dubai (AFP) - Long seen as the "black sheep" of the Gulf monarchies for backing the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar appears to have fallen into line with its neighbours and started to curb the group's activities, experts said.

Doha's support for the Brotherhood -- banned by most Gulf monarchies, who see the group's political Islam as a threat to their stability -- harmed ties with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

After the ouster of Egypt's Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, Cairo labelled the Brotherhood a "terrorist organisation" and some of the group's leaders fled to Qatar.

(...EDITED)

 

[Edward Campbell]

I found this on Twitter:

My  :2c: : Saudi Arabia is not our friend, it is certainly not an ally, it is, basically, a gang of oil rich 13th century barbarians.

 

[Flavus101]

Slightly different circumstances though?  ???

 

[a_majoor]

Without Qatari funding, the Muslim Brotherhoods and their virulent offshoots like ISIS (ISIL/IS) will be much easier to deal with, and the Iranians, Syrians and Hezbollah no longer "need" US intelligence or airpower to deal with them. Once again, the real strategy is to let the Shia's and Sunnis do all the intramural fighting between themselves, while we step back and watch the show.

As for the humanitarian crisis this will cause, that is another excellent place for the oil rich Gulf States and the Iranians and their allies to use their wealth to "buy" influence; once again there is nothing that *we* should do, and only a small cadre of "friends" in the region we should be supporting.

 

[jollyjacktar]

I found this on Twitter:

My  :2c: : Saudi Arabia is not our friend, it is certainly not an ally, it is, basically, a gang of oil rich 13th century barbarians.

If,  they are whacking murderers etc as the US is and by decapitation as France once did albeit by sword vs guillotine,  what's the difference?  If, they were whacking folks for the same reasons ISIS are, that's a different kettle of fish.  I do agree, however,  they are not our friends and their worldview is barbaric.  All of the fundamentalists are as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here is a list of capital crimes in Saudi Arabia (I found it on Wikipedia, and there is no supporting reference, so take it for what it's worth, but there are plenty of reputable reports to suggests that many of the "crimes" on the list end up with a death sentence):

1.  Adultery (Unmarried adulterers can be sentenced to 100 lashes, married ones can be sentenced to stoning.)
2.  Apostasy (Apostates are sentenced to beheading but are usually given three days to repent and return to Islam.)
3.  Armed robbery
4.  Blasphemy
5.  Burglary
6.  Carjacking
7.  Aircraft hijacking
8.  Drug smuggling
9.  Fornication
10. Home invasion
11. Sodomy, homosexuality, or lesbianism (If a man or woman is sodomized by their own consent, then they will also be sentenced to death along with the sodomizer)
12. Idolatry
13. Murder
14. Rape
15. Sedition
16. Sexual misconduct
17. Sorcery
18. Terrorism
19. Theft (fourth conviction)
20. Treason
21. Waging war on God
22. Witchcraft

Now I don't know if all drug smugglers are beheaded, probably not, but some are.

 

[McG]

Is number 22 judged with a large balance scale and a duck?

 

[jollyjacktar]

I did see a bit about the guy who is the executioner for SA.  He was pleased and proud with his part in the system.  I will sayat least he does use a big f-off sword that takes the head in one cut, not a knife like those ISIS arseholes.