• "Bastard child".

    From bruce2bowser@gmail.com@21:1/5 to Henry Alminas" on Sat May 2 08:52:13 2020
    Henry Alminas" <halm...@home.com> wrote:

    For educational purposes only:

    I have been bothered by the great sympathy
    that the western left has shown bin Laden and
    his thugs. It just didn't seem to add up. Here,
    after all, we are dealing with terrorists apparently
    motivated by "fundamentalism". True, not
    Christian fundamentalism - but, still.... even
    if you add the innate hate of the left for the
    western world....

    I believe that Mr. O'Sullivan has provided
    the answer. It fits. He also provides the solution
    to the problem - if the west has the stomach for
    it.

    Best - - Henry

    From: National Review
    Mosque Mission
    Dealing with radical Islamism.
    Author: John O'Sullivan
    Editor at large.
    October 9, 2001 3:35 p.m.

    In his stirring speech to the British on Sunday justifying
    the Anglo-American bombing of Kabul and Kandahar,
    Prime Minister Tony Blair warned against any
    tendency to blame all Muslims for the terrorist acts of
    Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. "This is not a war
    with Islam," he declared. "It angers me, as it angers the
    vast majority of Muslims, to hear bin Laden and his
    associates described as Islamic terrorists. They are terrorists
    pure and simple. Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion,
    and the acts of these people are contrary to the teachings
    of the Koran."

    Mr. Blair was here repeating what President Bush, other
    political leaders ,and almost all the responsible opinion-formers
    in the Western world have been saying since the 11th of
    September. Indeed, they have sometimes sounded more
    worried about the likelihood of ordinary Americans
    attacking Muslim immigrants than about Muslims supporting
    the terrorist war on Americans. Our political leaders have
    good diplomatic reasons for maintaining this position. They
    seek to avoid even the hint of a war between the once-Christian
    West and the quarter of the world that believes in Islam.
    They hope to prop up the pro-Western Muslim and Arab
    governments in the Middle East and Asia, and to use military
    bases on their territories. And, of course, they genuinely want
    to prevent any harassment of Muslims in America not only
    for humanitarian reasons but also to ensure that Muslims
    locally will offer no shelter or support to bin Laden's terrorist
    network.

    Yet, however prudent these official assertions of general Muslim
    benevolence may be, they are not strictly true. Osama bin Laden's
    brand of radical Islamism plainly has a very large following
    among Muslims, even among Muslims in the U.S. and especially
    among Arab Muslims. Although Islam has no central religious
    authority like the Vatican in Catholicism, there are many mullahs
    who endorse his jihad against the America and happily pronounce
    "fatwas" (religious decrees), sentencing them to death, on moderate
    Muslim leaders like President Musharraff of Pakistan. As Paul
    Johnson demonstrated in a recent issue of National Review, there
    are passages in the Koran that lend themselves very easily to a
    justification of holy war against the West and Israel. And, finally,
    there are undoubtedly some Islamic traditions that in the past have
    promoted aggressive hostility towards non-Muslim believers and
    that today underlie and justify the cultural resentment of many
    Muslims towards a West that has supplanted Islam as the main
    world civilization. Western governments tacitly acknowledge
    these realities when they fear that pro-Western governments in
    the Middle East and the Gulf will be overthrown by the "Arab
    street" if the war goes wrong in some way.

    At the same time, Blair's soothing words about peaceful Islam
    are not wholly false either. There are peaceful and progressive
    traditions in Islam which seek to reconcile it politically and
    economically, if not religiously, with science, liberalism, market >capitalism, and the modern world in general.

    In recent years, however, they have been on the defensive before
    the rise of radical Islamism the politico-religious philosophy
    driving bin Laden's terrorism. This doctrine combines a desire to
    impose a "purified" fundamentalist Islam on "corrupt" Muslim
    regimes with a rejection of a West seen as decadent internally
    and greedily oppressive externally. Because it strikes us in the
    West as antediluvian and absurd, we tend to assume that it must
    be the creed of ignorant and impoverished people. But it is a creed
    held by people with Western Ph.Ds, advanced technical skills and vast >financial resources as well as by unemployed youths by Muslim
    intellectuals as well as by Third World proles.

    And that should awaken a sense of familiarity within ourselves.
    For the truth is that radical Islamism does not derive solely from
    Islam. It has Western as well as Islamic roots. Indeed, it has
    been well-described by the UPI commentator, James C. Bennett,
    as the "bastard child" of Islamic fundamentalism and neo-Marxist
    Western scholarship. Its Islamic roots are in puritanical Wahabi sect
    that set out to purify Islam two centuries ago in what is now
    Saudi Arabia and that is spread today throughout the Islamic
    world by financial subsidies from wealthy Saudi believers. Its
    Western elements rest upon the theory (first conceived by the
    English Liberal economist, Hobson, popularized by Lenin in
    Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and refined in
    the 1950s and 1960s into the theories of neo-colonialism and
    "comprador capitalism") that the wealth and power of the West
    are based upon its robbery and exploitation of the Third World.

    No economic historian believes in this nonsense any more it is
    amply refuted by the fact that the Western colonial powers like
    Britain and France actually became much richer after giving up
    their colonies but it is preached by radical Islamist mullahs from
    Dearborn to Dubai. In this context it justifies overthrowing the
    corrupt client governments that help the West to rob Muslim
    believers, such as the Saudi regime, in order to usher in a new
    age of Islamic independence and prosperity. And that is plainly
    Osama bin Laden's main aim in the terrorist war he has launched.
    In short, radical Islamism is a violent, heretical, and politicized >perversion of Islam in exactly the same way that Communism
    and Nazism were violent, heretical and politicized perversions of
    enlightened Christian democratic humanism in the West. It perverts
    traditional religious ideas and sentiments into new political ideologies;
    it derives its energy from the resentments of those who feel
    economically or culturally dispossessed; it employs the most
    modern techniques in the service of essentially primitive concepts;
    and it sanctions unrestrained violence and ruthlessness in pursuit
    of totalitarian power exactly as Nazism and Communism did in
    all these respects. Because all three ideologies are what Burke
    called "armed doctrines," however, they have to be defeated not
    only intellectually and spiritually, but also on the battlefield.
    Nazism and communism were both the cause of long civil wars
    in the West. Once they were defeated on the battlefield or in
    strategic/economic competition, however, they soon faded away
    as philosophical forces though Marxism enjoys a lingering
    half-life in the corrupt literature and politics departments of
    some Western universities.

    Radical Islamism is similarly waging an unacknowledged civil
    war within Islam. But the signs are that Islamic civilization on
    its own lacks the necessary resources to overcome this perversion of
    itself. Resentment of America and the West is so strong in the
    Islamic world that many Muslims feel a sympathy for almost any
    Islamic force that challenges it. Before Islam is ready to confront
    and defeat the spiritual claims of radical Islamism, therefore, the
    West must first destroy its prestige by defeating it on the battlefield.

    And the West can and will defeat radical Islamism on the battlefield;
    it is just a matter of time. The mosque can then begin to demolish its
    spiritual claims. But not before then, alas.

    It's at least good that you bothered to address a financial aspect. Even now.

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