Posted on 09/28/2005 4:55:08 AM PDT by OESY
The remarkable thing about the terror in Iraq is the silence with which it is greeted in other Arab lands. Grant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi his due: He has been skilled at exposing the pitilessness on the loose in that fabled Arab street and the moral emptiness of so much of official Arab life. The extremist is never just a man of the fringe: He always works at the outer edges of mainstream life, playing out the hidden yearnings and defects of the dominant culture. Zarqawi is a bigot and a killer, but he did not descend from the sky. He emerged out of the Arab world's sins of omission and commission; in the way he rails against the Shiites (and the Kurds) he expresses that fatal Arab inability to take in "the other." A terrible condition afflicts the Arabs, and Zarqawi puts it on lethal display: an addiction to failure, and a desire to see this American project in Iraq come to a bloody end.
Zarqawi's war, it has to be conceded, is not his alone; he kills and maims, he labels the Shiites rafida (rejecters of Islam), he charges them with treason as "collaborators of the occupiers and the crusaders," but he can be forgiven the sense that he is a holy warrior on behalf of a wider Arab world that has averted its gaze from his crimes, that has given him its silent approval. He and the band of killers arrayed around him must know the meaning of this great Arab silence.
There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a "shame culture."...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Deserves a bump
Amazingly Prof. Ajami was able to write this without once noting that ALL of the Islamofascists are Sunni.
Islam has a different definition of 'morality'. During the Cold War, the communists used words like 'peace' and 'freedom' to good effect, but as Orwell showed (and Hayek before him), they meanings of those words were completely different. 'Peace' in the communist lexicon meant 'the absence of opposition'. So, 'peace' equaled total communist victory forever. That's what their 'peace rallies' were about.
It's the same with Islam and one of their favorite words: Morality. To Islam, morality is following the orders set out by Mohammed as dictated to him by an Angel and set down in the eternal Koran.
So, when the Koran says to 'kill the infidels', who have refused the offer to become Muslim, that killing is not only moral, but a required religious duty. When the Muslims are weaker than the infidel, the Koran says it's OK to lie to the infidels about their true intentions. The Koran and Mohammed's examples says that it's moral to sign treaties with the infidels, until Muslims are strong enough to attack the infidels.
This is a long way around to comment on Mr Ajami's comment about the 'moral emptiness' of 'official Arab life'. From the Islamic point of view, this is absolutely true of the Islamicist or Islamo-fascist point of view, morality is the enforcement from the outside of the koranic rules of life. Women must dress in a certain way and be confined to their homes. Outside their homes, they must be escorted by husbands or male relatives. What is going on in the minds of this women is irrelevant to islamicist/islamic morality. The Taliban forbid women from working, so when a woman lost her husband, it was moral to have them absolutely penniless on the streets begging for scraps of food, rather than allow them to work and earn a living.
Of course, from my point of view, this Islamic Morality is the root of the problem in the entire Muslim world.
As Rush says, 'words mean things'. The Jabba the Tutt corollary is 'the same word can mean something completely different'. Our enemies, from the Nazis to the Commies to the Islamo-Fascists use our words to mean something entirely different.
Excellent article. Excellent writing.
The audience in this macabre play, once ululating in triumph at the sight of our innocents jumping from burning buildings, have ceased to applaud. The silence is that which occurs when the play-goers begin to look for the exits.
Gee! Sounds like Democrat politicians.
It has not been easy, this expedition to Iraq, and for America in Iraq there has been heartbreak aplenty. But we ought to remember the furies that took us there, and we ought to be consoled by the thought that the fight for Iraq is a fight to ward off Arab dangers and troubles that came our way on a clear September morning, four years ago.
Needed repeating.
Fabulous read. Good will triumph over evil!
There is a cliché that distinguishes between cultures of shame and cultures of guilt, and by that crude distinction, it has always been said that the Arab world is a "shame culture."...
The difference between the concept of "guilt" and "shame" also tells us much about the way Muslim cultures think. "Guilt" is about responsibility. It is introspective in that it results from the internal reconciliation of a person actions and thoughts to his ideal of himself. It requires an honesty with oneself and with one's God. The interaction of a person with his conscience (which is the purveyor of guilt) is what causes a person to grow in character and self-worth.
Shame on the other hand is an outward based concept. Shame and its polar opposite dignity/honor depend on how one is seen by others. Shame is appearance based. If one appears to have honor, one has honor, regardless of the truth behind the curtain. Therefore, in Islam, introspection has a substantially diminished importance. Morality is achieved by the adherence to the rules of the Prophet, however incompatible with modernity. And shame is reduced by hiding the truth from others.
Bottom-line...Islam robs its strict adherents of the tool needed for the maturity of character (the introspective wrestling with conscience) and supplants it with the belief that the goal of life is the minimalization of external shame and the maximization of the appearance of honor by whatever means possible. The truth is irrelevant and external appearances are supreme.
This appears to be the fly in Islam's ointment. This seems to be the reason Islam must expand by force and its adherents must forever push for world domination. Islam is based on a lie...it functions on a lie. The only way the lie can prevent its being exposed is if everyone accepts the lie as the truth. Hence, Islam by its very nature requires a world caliphate...and death to the infidel.
Anyway, just thinking out loud. Fascinating article.
But isn't Iran predominately Shia. And Ahmadinejad is Shia...and a fascist.
That, unfortunately, is far from the truth. Just ask the good Shiia who are living under the boot of Moqtada Sadar down in Basra. He is the cleric who killed the good and gentle Al Khoei at the beginning of the war, he is the one who killed over 200 innocents and left them in the basement of his headquaters in Najef. Sadar is a festering pustual within the Shiia and only the Shiia can lance it.
Sadr, however, is not an Islamofascist. Rather, he's a traditionalist who gets paid by the Iranian government.
Not everybody who is not a democrat is a fascist. The barbarians have their own standards and ways. The Iranian and other Shi'ites really ought to be viewed as traditionalists.
None of this really has a thing to do with religion, it has to do with a grab for power. Religion is only the tool they use to obtain that power. They use God as a weapon and a handy excuse.
There are a number of reasons for this ~ some of them are cultural, and some historic, but primarily the biggest reason is the "leadership principle" ~ Shia has a tradition of disaggregated leadership, with authority deriving from a group ~ the religious leadership in fact.
Sunni is a sitting duck for any restatement of the forms the Roman Empire adopted. That includes the exact same "leadership principle" found in fascism and its twin, Nazism, or it's first cousin, Stalinism!
So, what was it you were sayng until you brought up a new topic?
They are functioning in the same manner for the same goals and they DO work together as we have seen in Iraq. There is danger in pretending there is a difference.
Fanaticism is a description of the level of zealotry found in followers/members of any group, not just Fascism and its clones.
Actually, Hannah Arendt documented one of the truths of Fascism ~ it was not only evil, it was banal in its evil. She's the person who came up with the term "the banality of evil".
The term "fanaticism" implies something far different.
I am not sure what the point is in claiming that there is no difference between Shia and Sunni ~ that would be like claiming there is no difference between the Roman Catholic church and the Apostolic Charismatic Free Will Seventh Day Baptist church on the corner.
Over the years muawiyah, we have come to expect you not to see the point. If you can't see that there is no difference between Zaqawi and Sadar, then all the posts in the world will do nothing more than allow you to continue to nit pick until the points are entirely lost and you have hijacked yet another thread.
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