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2 Comments
- clvngodess, on 03/01/2009, -2/+5"Most Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally."
"But if the secularists produce chaos and corruption, people settle for order."
Two very insightful observations the West needs to hear and comprehend.
"We won the war in Iraq chiefly because we separated the local militants from the global jihadists," says Fawaz Gerges, a scholar at Sarah Lawrence College, who has interviewed hundreds of Muslim militants. "Yet around the world we are still unwilling to make the distinction between these two groups."
WHAT? We won the war? Really? News to me. And probably to those "insurgents" in Iraq too. We didn't win a goddamn thing. Why do they keep saying this? We invaded and blew the ***** out of Iraq, yes. But we didn't win. By no means did we win. Nope.
"The veil is not the same as the suicide belt. We can better pursue our values if we recognize the local and cultural context, and appreciate that people want to find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license. In the end, time is on our side. Bin Ladenism has already lost ground in almost every Muslim country. Radical Islam will follow the same path. Wherever it is tried—in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan—people weary of its charms very quickly. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That's the most powerful weapon of all."
I would argue that if you could remove the word Islam and replace it with any "-ISM" here. I don't necessarily think that WE have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of all modern men and women, either. That's a bit arrogant. In fact, a culture that's based in blatant selfish consumerist values, imposes its form of democrazy by dropping bombs in a "it's our way or shock and awe way" isn't necessarily the world view I embrace at all. To that end, I disagree. But maybe I'm just another weirdo on the fringe who believes you don't have to drink the mainstream koolaid.... - jeffnorman, on 03/02/2009, -0/+0The veil is not the same as the suicide belt." Zakaria, a frequent writer for Newsweek, has written one of his best pieces of analysis yet in this article, in which he advocates a tight focus on global jihadists, as distinct from the local Islamic extremist who does not care for any global revolution. If only W. had understood history.
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