"The Roots of Islamic Terrorism" isn't your average simplified article on global terrorism; but at the same time I would also like to suggest that what you have just read is but the tip of the iceberg. I don't necessarily agree with every point in the article (For instance, I don't believe the Saudis have a policy of fostering anti-Americanism. However, I do believe they placate certain elements that seek to undermine the Saudi Royals with money, some of which has been used against the US and Israel). But Americans need to wake up to the fact that the War on Terror is very complex and multi-faceted. In a recent interview for Newsmax, Y. Bodansky stated (much to the chagrin of some) that the US and its allies are currently loosing the War on Terror because we failed to grasp the bigger picture:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1236480/posts

--Also Interesting--

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1234720/posts

That's not to say we've been routed by any means. We still have time to make the proper adjustments and regain the initiative. But this will never happen if both our public officials and the American people hold on to the simple-minded view that our enemies are the same as our stereotype of the "Arab street." On the contrary, we are up against some of the most sophisticated terrorists in human history. Morever, the terrorists enjoy state support from rogue regimes spanning the globe (including Marxist regimes right in our own backyard...that is, Latin America). Hopefully this article will provoke us to begin the process of getting our collective brains around the complexities of global terrorism. Our enemies are weak, but (unfortunately) our ignorance is still quite strong.

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PS I look forward to your comments, but please do the thread a favor and read the article first. Thanks.

Bump for later.

BTW, on a slightly related matter, you can read my opinion on Christianity, the Jews, and Israel at the following link. It is entitled, "Thank G-d the Jews Missed the Boat...Otherwise We Would all be Roasting in Hell":

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1235427/posts

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The most heinous and barbaric crime in this world would be to stop an individual from thinking freely. And when such a crime is "legalized" in the form of a "religion," one can easily imagine how disastrous it can be.

Islam is such a "religion" !!!

Islam imposes a threat to the whole world . . . which is far worse than deforestation, nuclear destruction or AIDS. It is an insidious, devilish disease creeping into the veins of the world. Every individual must realize the destructive and evil nature of this religion, for it eats away at the very foundation of humanity, which is:

an individual's ability to think individually and act accordingly !!!

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Thanks for the bumps. I hope you all come back and read it.

GeekDejure: I wouldn't go as far as you. But I do believe Islam to be a false religion. However, one must not forget that there was a time when the Muslims did more than just about any other civilization to preserve (get this) Western culture. And it is no coincidence that the Islamic world became very prosperous at the same time they were reintroducing (for instance) many Greek philosophers and thinkers to the West. Unfortunately, that has all changed...and the terrorists are partly to blame.

I read as much as I could but I keep coming back to the essence of Islam. Islam is the monkey see, monkey do religion. It's built around Muhammad's "examples". When you understand this you understand Islam and Islam's terrorism.

The faithful Muslim is commanded to copy Muhammad's life. This is the most important fact in Islam. They view Muhammad as the most perfect man who ever lived, whose "exemplary" life must be emulated. The nice and moderate Muslims ignore, deny, minimize the latter part of Muhammad's life in Medina where he preached Jihad and was a murderous warlord bent on Islam's expansion. Conversion by the sword. The Jihadist Muslims are intent on copying this murderous part of Muhammad's life which has inspired many Koran verses. The later Medina verses (violent) are theologically superior to any Meccan verses (peaceful) when there is a contradiction.

The nice and moderate Muslims just want to think about the Meccan verses in the Koran which preach high ideals. From when Muhammad lived in Mecca and only got 100 followers in 13 years of preaching. Muhammad turned to Medina, turned to Jihad, got more followers, engaged in bloody conquest with 20% of all booty going to him. And the rest is history and misery.

****The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom****

I agree with most of what you said. However, I would flip your basic premise on its head. That is, the terrorists are attempting to focus only on those elements of Islam that can be used to support their twisted view of Jihad. As I said, as a Christian I believe Islam is a false religion. I studied Islam and Islamic civilization for several years as an undergraduate religious studies major. However, Islam is no more false than Buddhism, Hinduism, and a host of other false religions. Imagine if a terrorist organization identified itself with Christianity or Judaism or (pick your religion). In the case of Christianity, there are plenty of verses in the Old (Hebrew Bible) and New Testaments that said hypothetical terrorist organization could focus on to justify their terror campaign. Without getting into too much detail, any practicing Christian or Jew would instantly realize that this particular terrorist group is taking Bible verses out of context to justify murder. In other words, the terrorists would not be allowing God's word to interpret itself. Now imagine these Christian or Jewish terrorists were conducting their terrorist actions against populations that only had a very limited understanding of Christianity/Judaism. What would be the reaction of that population? If we step back and study the goals and methods of terrorism, it is not usually the terrorist action itself that causes the real damage. Rather it is the public's reaction to the same. This should prompt us to ask ourselves, what kind of "reaction" are the terrorists trying to provoke in the US, Europe, and the Muslim world? After many long hours of study, I think I know what their "game" is (I, of course, recognize I could be wrong). I would it post their game right here and now, but I would like to give my fellow Freepers a chance to think about it for a while.

I think it's true that progressive socialism is one of the root sources of terror. The anarchistic bomb throwers of the late nineteenth century came from those "revolutionary" sources.

I agree, too, that the Muslim Brotherhood and similar movements, many of which started among intellectuals in Egypt, were partly to blame.

But terror as such is not a modern invention. Genghis Kahn employed it. Nero and Caligula employed it. The purges begun by the Triumvirs in Rome employed it. Many tyrants have employed it. Random violence that puts the fear of God (as the saying goes) into everyone and stuns them into keeping low profiles is an ancient political weapon.

Unlike either Christianity or Judaism, Islam seems to have a natural affinity with arbitrary power and violence. Judaism and Christianity have, at times, been corrupted and have cooperated with tyranny, but not very often and not easily. Both Judaism and Christianity have built into them a longing for justice and a sympathy for the weak, for widows and orphans, that work against using these religions for tyrannical purposes.

Not so Islam, IMHO. Jesus was a very, very different kind of religious leader from Muhammed. Muhammed was a terrorist, who didn't hesitate to murder and enslave his enemies, slaughter whole towns, and kill or enslave children. That still goes on today.

In other words, Muslims in the Arab world found it only too easy to admire the Nazis and the Communists and to import methods that were congenial to their worldview from the beginning.

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Today's terrorism is soviet inspired and probably still "former" soviet run.

Cicero, thank you for your responding.

What you say is true. But Christianity, beginning with Constantine, has been co-opted for evil purposes more times than most Christians would like to acknowledge. The difference between Islam and Christianity is that one is divine, and the other is an imitation of the divine (Islam borrows heavily from both Judaism and Christianity).

Someone else on this thread said that Islam is a "monkey see, monkey do" religion. Fair enough. But is not Christianity a "sheep see, sheep do" religion? The difference is that Christianity is true. We really do follow the "Good Shepherd." So it is little wonder that Christians naturally resist the impulse to use "arbitrary power and violence" to achieve our ends. But those acting in the name of Christianity have fallen prey to this temptation many times, and on a large scale, in the past.

Having said that, there are many verses in the Qu'ran that advocate what CS Lewis would call (for "brevity's sake") the "Tao", or Natural Law (see Lewis' book, "Abolition of Man"). That is, Islam promotes the laws of general and special beneficence; duties to Parents, elders, and ancestors; duties to children and posterity; the law of justice; the law of good faith and veracity; the law of mercy; the law of magnanimity, etc. In short, the morals contained in the Qu'ran, in the main, are very similar to our own. But like the Greeks and the Croatians, religions are sometimes willing to kill each other over differences in religious practice (for instance, Lewis tells us that the Greeks cremated their dead, whereas the Croatians ate the flesh of their dead...both found the other's practice loathsome, yet both did so to secure a better afterlife for their ancestors). However, in the current global terror offensive, I don't think the terrorists are motivated to kill because of religious differences. Indeed, it is my firm conviction that many of the terrorists (especially the ones calling the shots) could care less about Islam.

It is my contention that the Qu'ran has been perverted by unscrupulous individuals who couldn't care one farthing about what the Qu'ran really says (in context). Where Islam--true Islam--goes wrong is that they only accept Jesus as a great prophet (like Mohammad), and not the living Son of God. Of course, that is where every other religion goes wrong as well. Muslims even believe in the Second Coming of Jesus (but not as the second person of the triune God). I am tempted to press on and write more, but I am more interested in your response to what I have written so far.

JudgemAll wrote:

"Today's terrorism is soviet inspired and probably still "former" soviet run."

Judge, you are right, the Russians are involved with rogue regimes and terrorists up to their ears. If you have anything more to add to this thread, I'm all ears!!!

I borrowed this from another thread, because I think it sheds light on just how far the so-called Muslim terrorists are outside the mainstream of Islam. Look forward to your comments.

No Tip-Toeing Around the T-Word-Honest Arab journalists assess Islamic roots of terrorism.
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | September 28, 2004 | David Ouellette

Posted on 09/28/2004 5:18:35 AM PDT by SJackson

The New York Times reported last Monday that Reuters’ global managing editor, David A. Schlesinger, is worried about a Canadian media conglomerate’s (CanWest) insertion of the word “terrorist” in Reuters news stories concerning groups such as Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Reuters fears that this could lead to “confusion” and “endanger its reporters in volatile areas,” indicating intimidation, and not objectivity, is guiding Reuters’ editorial policy.

But while Reuters is only talking about its dislike of seeing the T-word in CanWest stories, there are groups in Canada, such as the Canadian branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN), the Canadian Arab Federation or the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations, who are prepared to do something. While these groups are all eager to defend democratic values when it comes to protecting Arab and Muslim interests, they seem less keen to cherish the value of an independent and free press. Their lobbies are now calling on the Canadian Senate to investigate CanWest’s editorial policy and on Parliament to examine the effects of so-called media concentration.

But while Islamic terrorists intimidate Western Press agencies into not using the T-word and Arab and Muslim lobbies in North America agitate racism accusations at those journalists and media enterprises objective enough to call a cat a cat, a growing number of Arab journalists and intellectuals, quite literally in the dragon’s den, are not only calling Islamic terrorism by its name, but are courageously assessing its “root causes.” And far from shying away from the use of the T-word in connection with Islam, they go as far as explaining that Islamist terrorism is a result of the Islamic culture’s failures in the modern age.

Here are a few telling examples of the honesty which these leading Arab journalists use in taking a long, hard look at their societies without tip-toeing around semantics:

* In the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy, Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, wrote under the headline “The Painful Truth is that All of the Terrorists are Muslims” that “Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims. We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims.” (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, September 4, 2004)

* Under the title “Butchers in the Name of Allah,” Khaled Hamad Al-Suleiman wrote in the Saudi government daily Okaz: “The propagandists of Jihad succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam, while the enemies of Islam did not succeed in doing this [even] in the course of hundreds of years. They turned today's Islam into something having to do with decapitations, the slashing of throats, abducting innocent civilians and exploding people.” (Okaz, September 5, 2004)

* Columnist Bater Wardam, wrote in the Jordanian daily Al-Dustour that “It is always easy to flee to illusions and to place responsibility for the crimes of Arabic and Muslim terrorist organizations on the Mossad, the Zionists, and on American intelligence, but we all know that this is not the case and that those who murder innocent civilians in Iraq after having kidnapped them, those who turned civilian airplanes into destructive bombs, those who exploded trains crowded with innocent civilians and those who fired on children in a school in Ossetia - they came from our midst. They are Arabs and Muslims who pray, fast, grow beards, demand the wearing of veils, and call for the defense of Islamic causes.” (Al-Dustour, September 5, 2004)

* Author and journalist Dr. Shaker Al-Nabulsi wrote in Rezqar that “If the Arabs had today a well-burnished mirror in which they can see themselves, and if they had the requisite courage to look in it, they would be stricken by fear and panic at the sight of themselves. The image [would be] that we have become the most terrorist nation and the greatest spillers of blood in the world.” (www.rezqar.com, August 14, 2002)

* More recently yet, Syrian scholar Mundir Badr Haloum wrote in the Lebanese daily Al-Safir: “Islam is in the names of all of the organizations that decapitate using knives, all the while saying the Fatiha [the first chapter of the Koran, said as a prayer] before the slaughter (...) Indeed, we as Muslims produce terrorism, succor it, and praise it. We condemn it only when forced to. Motivated by considerations of power, interests, and diplomacy, we wear a pained expression on our faces but in our hearts we rejoice at the brilliant success - a large number of casualties.”

* Journalist and former Kuwaiti communications minister Dr. Sa'ad bin Tefla said on Jordanian television: “Slaughter, destructive abuse, anarchy, and bloodshed in no way resemble Jihad according to Shari'a and resistance. These are anarchy and terrorism [and not Jihad ], and they are indications of frustration and of a culture of collective suicide reminiscent of whales (...) I maintain that we are all responsible for this culture, and that Zionism and imperialism have nothing to do with it (...) I maintain that there is, unfortunately, a culture of violence that existed before the Americans came to Iraq and the Gulf, even before the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and before the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Sociologists of Islam in the West have long argued that if liberal reform is ever to sweep over Islam and its lands, it will originate in the West where Muslims interiorize liberal democratic values. But judging by the uproar caused by the use of the T-word in Canadian dailies at Reuters and among Arab and Muslim advocacy groups, the sociologists’ prophecy is taking on the form of a pipe dream. If such reform is ever going to happen in the Muslim world, like all self-improvement, these Arab writers show it is going to come from within.

Thanks for posting. Good article, food for thought.

My pleasure. Thanks for having an open mind.