Man, what an oxymoron!
GREAT article, BTW. When folks post stuff like this it reminds me what I joined FR for in the first place.
unfortunately, they make the choice to interfere with the lives of the "infidels" and they will pay the price. Nice article, thanks for posting it.
Yet more proof that the liberal mind has no regard for logic. Nowhere has a country ruled by fanatical muslim clerics produced a modern, much less, freethinking nation. Insanity is sometimes defined as expecting a different result to occur when an identical situation repeats itself.
It must be kind of sad to be inflicted with this obvious mental disorder where nothing is predictable, or understandable, and therefore explained by mystical charges of bias, discrimination, and racism.
Nothing went wrong between the West and islam, just a very predictable development.
BTW- agree with Illbay, great article, thanks much!
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
I second the post that said this is the kind of article which inspired me to join FreeRepublic in the first place.
Congressman Billybob
BTW, the comment:
''they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences and join their talents, energies and resources in a common creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the choice is their own.''
could easily be applied to the minorities in America who preach a culture of victimhood and perpetual grievance against America.
the reformers split into two diametrically opposed camps: the Western-oriented movements, which sought adaptation, imitation and accommodation with modernity, though within a moderately Muslim order of things; and the conservatives, who angrily claimed that the reason for the decline was traitorous forces within their own societies, those who had strayed from the true path of the prophet. These forces, the conservatives argued, were even more sinful and deserved more punishment than the infidels themselves. It is not difficult, in reading these earlier denunciations of Arab liberals, to recall bin Laden's recent ferocious speeches against the Saudi leadership and others in the Middle East for defiling the true faith.
9-11 was an attack on the First Amendment.
911 asserts that an "accomodationist" Moslem (the good neighbor you might have) is worse than an infidel, and "infidel" just another word for "target."
America will somehow explain to the reactionary islamic that America, diverse as it is, is not only unwilling but unable to reject the First Amendment. And that, powerful as it is, America will make sure that it does not have to do what it is not only unwilling but unable to do.
He could just as well be talking about Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Barbara Lee and the rest of the American Africans who hold their victimhood in high regard.
I just read Prof. Lewis' book, and enjoyed it. A key test of this thesis will probably be what happens in Afghanistan over the next five years. If that country is built properly, on free markets, openness to the outside world and non-theocratic government, it could become a model for the Islamic world. I'm not optimistic, but it could happen.
As for the rest of that Muslim world, whether the outside world is in a position to "help" or not really depends on how fanatic the jihadists become, and how much power they accumulate, before they are finally vanquished. If they are defeated within the Muslim world relatively soon, then Prof. Lewis is probably right. But I suspect several Muslim states are a mere one or two major atrocities away from being conquered and forcibly assimilated to modern civilization world from top to bottom, in the manner of postwar Germany and Japan.
I suspect a lot of us here at F.R. came to that conclusion some time ago without needing to devote decades of research to the subject.
Oh? Who annointed him?
What do you mean 'who annointed him'? His annointed status is self-evident on the face of it.
How is it self evident?
It is self-evident because he is the Annointed One.
Oh. I see. I think. But...
Now shut up and sit at the feet of the Annointed One and drink in his words of wisdom.
But where is he from? What was he doing before he suddenly sprang--like Athena from the head of Zeus--into our midst to inform us about these troubling current events?
What does it matter from where he sprang? How can the boring, dusty past possibly matter to the turbulent Now?
Oh, I don't know. It just seems odd somehow that here, in Our Great Bastion of Freedom, terrible events happen and--shazaaam--an Annointed One is right on the spot to tell us everything that happened and why and who, and especially, what we need to do about it.
Are you a conspiracy theorist?
no, no...please, I just wanted to....
Are you against a Secure Homeland?
Preposterous! Of course not! How dare you...
Then we will thank you to fold your hands and sit quietly while the Annointed One tells us All About It....
Alternative view-itis:
Bernard Lewis, Zbigniew Brzezinski , Muslim Fundamentalist And The Soviet Union
PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS
"....Bernard Lewis Plan, Take II
....Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis has, not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous locations. After all, the 85-year old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been London's point-man in the United States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G. Wells' outpost at Princeton University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure American compliance with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.
To put it bluntly: British intelligence senior operator Lewis is the guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S. neo-conservative drive for a new "Thirty Years War" in Eurasia....
Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after serving on the faculty of the University of London's Middle East and Africa faculty (the repository of the original India House files, long officially referred to as the Colonial Department), coincided with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's fomenting of the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to the present day, and served as a laboratory for the later "Islamic revolution" in Iran.
Lewis is no mere British quackademic. After obtaining his doctorate in the history of Islam from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, he joined the university faculty in 1938. From 1940-45, Lewis was, in his own understated words, "otherwise engaged," as a wartime British Military Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British Foreign Office. To this day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime "engagements."
Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis has been demonstrably responsible for every piece of strategic folly and insanity into which the United States has been suckered in Asia Minor. The Wellsian "method to his madness" has been the persistent push to eliminate the nation-state system, and launch murderous wars stretching across the Eurasian region.
* During the Carter Administration, Lewis was the architect of Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the Soviet Union. The planned fostering of radical Islamist war provocations was known, at the time, as "the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of this Lewis-Brzezinski collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic Revolution" in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the once-proud center of the Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age; and the 1979-1988 Afghanistan War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979 launching of covert support for Afghan mujahideen "Contras" inside Afghanistan - six months prior to the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve invasion.
As early as 1960, in a book-length study he prepared for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, under the title The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the modernizing, nation-building legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He argued instead for the revival of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a British geopolitical battering ram against Russia and against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf - in alliance with Israel.
* It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the "Clash of Civilizations" - in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, "The Clash Of Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his subsequent book-length treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis' more sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington acknowledged that Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of Civilizations."
* In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of "Lebanonization" - i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos. "The eclipse of pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside." The Islamists represent "a network outside the control of the state.... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists." He concluded the Foreign Affairs piece by forecasting the "Lebanonization" of the entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East ... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates - as happened in Lebanon - into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."
* In 1998, it was Lewis who catapulted Osama bin Laden into prominence with a November/December Foreign Affairs article, legitimizing the Saudi black sheep as a serious proponent of mainstream, militant Islam. Lewis' piece, "License To Kill: Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad," showered praise on bin Laden, pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus Jews and Crusaders" "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose ... which reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar."
Caught In The Act
Osama bin Laden released his 1998 jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998, six months before the truck bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The very next day, Bernard Lewis' signature appeared on a widely circulated Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, released by a previously unheard-of entity called the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, demanding that the U.S. government throw its full support behind a military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open Letter called for carpet bombing Iraq, and for the United States to aggressively give financial and military support for the Iraqi National Congress, yet another corrupt and inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created by U.S. and British intelligence elements, and based in London......"
(Verily--a "wilderness of mirrors"....)
Either within the Muslim world or Islam itself. Anybody that wants to possess this mudball, earth, to the exclusion of those who don't want to say God is Great several times a day --religion for a man on the go-- is welcome to it.
Kick the space program into high gear, and do it today. The universe is vast and it will be a very long time before man can conquer a significant part of it. You go that way or stay behind, we'll go the other, and we'll never have to think about each other again.