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.
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