Posted on 02/03/2004 5:19:18 AM PST by SJackson
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:51:00 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
It is obvious that the Moslems hate the Christians and Jews, and wish to convert them to Islam or kill them as they historically have done in the past. The West is now richer, and stronger, and their drive to convert the West is growing more frantic under the fanatical fundamentalists in power in Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The Real solution to this world problem is not "democracy", but moderation of radical Islamists control of their media. The way I see it, we in the US have fanatical Christian fundamentalists that may wish to have us beat people for not going to church, however, our media is controlled by the liberals; hence, we continue to have tolerance, and acceptance of each others. As the fanatical Christian fundamentalists would wish more rigid behaviors from us, the media (some times get too extreme) continues to moderate, and socially engineer our minds, and perceptions. The West’s experiments of tolerance through human rights advocacy for our minorities have proved successful for us, and were never introduced to the Moslem nations. Moslem leaders take pride in covering up barbaric hate against their minority citizens... Since the West has the biggest power and economic leverage on this planet, it is in a good position to "impose" tolerance, and moderation in the Moslem media.
You are going to ask: IMPOSE? Yes impose! But of course incrementally! How did the US media get to have gay propaganda shows on our TV? It did not happen overnight! The majority of our population still do not accept gay behaviors, but our media keep soft selling (through comedy) the gay issues. The art of propaganda was not invented yesterday, and is widely used throughout the world by leaders to achieve support from their population.
The first thing is for our politicians to realize that they must infiltrate the Moslem media through a covert help from their politicians. If our politicians chose to keep hands off interfering with other countries internal hate propaganda, then we will still have to contend with the results of such propaganda. Spending money bribing intellectuals to do the incremental soft selling of moderation should be our first priority. UN sponsored tactics can also help legitimize such effort. Considering freedom of religion, protection of minorities’ house of worships should be pushed by the Islamic leaders and the UN. Crimes against humanity should be further defined to include forced religion conversions or religion killings. Worldwide solidarity against nations that oppresses its minorities in the name of religion must become a cause celebre du jour.
I do not dispute the facts, merely the ingenuousness of the lack of context and the reality of shifting alliances.
WEll then, the Brits (and French) preferred to make money and let the slamic Turks win over the Christian Russians. They have a lot of Russian blood on their hands from the Crimean war and no good reason to have fought that war. If they hadn't then Constantinople would have been restored.
That is exactly my point. No statement is incorrect, simply ignores context and contemporary circumstances. The enemy of my enemy thing, driven by economics. Yes, they can be viewed as "wrong" in retrospect, but is the mother's milk of international relations to this very day.
Don't forget, in 1948, most Arab officers British and French.
What an uninformed statement.
Please document where ANY so-called "fundamentalist" has made such a statement.
Your bigotry is showing.
Kemal Attaturk, who made Turkey a secular republic after World War I by suppressing Islam.
Oh and kill off several million Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians.
Neither has said anything of the kind.
Pipes, especially, is against Wahhabiism, not Islam. Lewis would hardly be propounding the policy of democratizing the Middle East if he thought it was incompatible with Islam.
Both these scholars are not anti-Islam; they are anti-Islamicism, which is an ideology masquerading as a religion.
Thanks for posting this article.
When I was in graduate school my mentor on all things Islam was an Israeli professor, Gil Carl Alroy. He predicted the confrontation with Islam in the mid 70's and introduced me to Lewis. I took four courses with Alroy both as an undergraduate and graduate student. It scares me at how prophetic he was. I am afraid the the jihadists will hit us hard many times before the rest of us here in the West realize how deadly the danger from Islam is.
The real measure, is that it is also the fastest growing religion in the land of our other rival China. Combine those two and we have BIG problems.
It isn't democracy that we must introduce into the Islamic world, but complete and utter defeat.
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