But first a dash of ice water in the face: Islam teaches that to lie to infidels to further the faith is OK. In fact, in Islam lying to infidels is a good thing. An untruth is the truth.
It is splendid that the Sheik should publish his views at all, but why in an Australian Jewish Community publication? Why not put it on TV in Riyadh, or Teheran, or Cairo? Publish a series of articles in the Amman News. To place his choice of venues in context, I suggest you research other Aussie media. The Muslim community in Australia has been behaving very badly lately, with gang rapes, etc. Maybe that's why our Sheik (Palazzi? I'm suspicious already) is publishing in Australia!
I am bored with Muslims giving us a blinding glimpse of the obvious. Western Logic tells us what we need to know about Muslims, with whom we have dealt for 14 centuries.
Allow me Jason, to suggest a bit of Western technique: the Pareto Paradigm, or the 80/20 rule, which seems to be passably accurate in describing all human interaction.
E.G., 20% of your customers give you 80% of your business. 20% of Muslims are giving us 80% of the problem. Most humans are somewhat peaceable. Muslims ARE human. Therefore most Muslims are peaceable
How many are potential terrorists? Apply the Paradigm, dude. Out of the 20% who are potentially troublesome, 80% will never do anything, except maybe put money in the basket.
That leaves a mere 20% of the 20% who MAY have the potential to strap on the dynamite, pick up the AK, and go on active Jihad. That's 4% of all Muslims, or .04 X 1.5 Billion People.
So, all we (and apparently Sheik Palazzi) have to do is keep surveillance on those 60 Million Muslims, and their supporters, world wide. Piece of Cake.
Jason, Western Logic tells us that we should be prepared to deal with 60 Million terrorists in the available pool, with 300 Million more who are supporting the effort, some more, some less. Assume the other 80% of Islam, let's call it "Peaceable Islam," does nothing. Hey, they're human, maybe their just as terrified of terrorists as we of the Christian West. (Somehow I doubt it, religiously bigotted dog that I am.)
It makes no sense to allow any Muslim into the country, because despite what they say, we have no way of knowing what's on their minds. We have no way of knowing what side of the Paradigm they are on. Are we therefore, going to be excluding some wonderful people, who would make excellent, Allah-fearing US citizens and be worthwhile contributors to this great land? You bet, Pal. Not a Christian's job to sort good Islam from bad Islam. We could do it, but no Muslim would like the results. There wouldn't be a whole hell of a lot of them left to complain, either.
Islam is a militaristic movement without a Renaissance, without an Enlightenment, Without an Age of Reason, without a Reformation, without a Counter Reformation, with no art, no music, no literature, and no science. Oh yes, they flowered briefly on the spoils of the Byzantine, Roman and Persian Empires, but look where it took them. This is a civilization in the saddle that has been at war with the Christian West for 14 centuries.
What Sheik Palazzi really wants is a corps of "Good Muslims" living in the West. These "Good Muslims" will then presumably lead their benighted brothers toward a new, improved, reformed, sanitized Islam that draws on what he calls the "real beliefs of Islam."
Hold that thought, Sheik. I say Islam needs another 1,000 years in the desert before it is ready for life in open societies based on the Christian Civilization of the West.
On lying, the same was said by Protestants of Cardinal Newman. Somehow it has not foreclosed absolutely all dialogue, and papists are not routinely executed in England.
Riyadh is the capital of Wahhabism, and the man is of course saying they are the problem. It is like asking why Barry Goldwater didn't run for election in Moscow instead of the US. As for Iran, the students are revolting as usual. Some of them are declaring openly, in Teheran, that their so-called leaders are trying to force Stalinism upon them in the name of Islam. As for Cairo, there is greater diversity of opinion there, with some managing to say the same sort of thing as this fellow does, others wanting to kill them for it, the government throwing many of the latter in jail, but also tolerating a lot of their hateful crap on the air, etc.
Yes, most muslims are peaceable because they are human. And if those peaceable people have their hands on governments, then a lot of the unpeaceable ones can rot in jail. That is of course the whole idea. If you haven't noticed, the supposed furiously brave diehards as a general rule run away from policemen with sticks from Cairo to Karachi. That "20% of muslims give us 80% of the problem" I quite agree with; it is an accurate depiction of the scale of the problem, in terms of the number of fellow travelers or the degree of support for islamist opinion. I propose we get a little help from the other 4/5ths against them, which to me is the plainest common sense.
As for the number out of that pool of fellow travelers willing to fight, it is decidely smaller than your 4%. Perhaps under favorable conditions, openly supported by governments, equipped and organized and officered and trained, by own popular caliphate from Morroco to Timor. But they have nothing like those conditions. Indeed, we see millions in arms only where tyrannies require it of them at the barrel of a gun, and they surrender or run at the drop of a hat because their hearts are not in the quarrel.
We see committed cadres in the tens of thousands only where great rewards are offered by state organizations; they are serving not out of ideological belief but for worldly advancement. We see only a score at a time willing to die for their cause on their own initiative, and perhaps hundreds assisting them but rather more eager for self-preservation. On 9-11, they could not recruit 19 hijackers from among the 3 million domestic Muslims but had to bring them in from abroad. Since then, in over a year of hype and supposed burning eagerness for similar attacks, less than a dozen men have followed Bin Laden's orders in direct attacks in the US. Our openness to scores of terrorist tactics is extreme, as I doubt I need to relate publicly (why give them ideas?) They are not being exploited more often because there aren't men to exploit them. Only in Israel have larger numbers been involved in direct terrorist actions, a situation that predates Bin Laden's edicts and recent successes.
As for not knowing what is on someone's mind, I have no way of knowing what is in yours either, also regardless of what you say. I consider the stated maxims of many around me barely superior to those of the Ladenists; they generally defer to their state organization, which is more inclined to listen to me than to them, is the most I can say to differentiate some here from our enemies. Of course it is our job to sort good islam from bad islam, and of course if done with even a smidgen of justice many muslims will like the result. It is also our duty to sort a proper method of waging the war from improper ones.
As for islam being a militaristic movement, it is not half as militaristic as I am myself. I wonder at those who demand pacifism as a moral credential, who have only to look around them to see that pacifism is a moral failing, often a whitewash of cowardice and sometimes of treason. Quakers don't believe in war, but I do, and so does the US government, and even the catholic church come to that. As for being without a reformation or an enlightenment, they had one but turned their backs on it. Their enlightenment did not go far enough; neither did ours until quite recently, and only in portions of the west.
What reformation am I talking about? I am talking about the reform movements in islamic theology associated with the move of the caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad, and the shift from the Omayyad to the Abassid dynasty. They addressed free will, the problem of evil, government being under the law. They went to school with christian theologians of the east, learning from hellenism and the Alexandrians. They incorporated Persia and learned from it and points east as well. A score of islamic schools of thought differentiated themselves from one another. Some of the enlighteners went overboard themselves, persecuting for more reasonable doctrines where they should have tolerated, and course corrections followed.
It was later that the slide into literalism began. It is not something that has been there unchallenged from the begining. The Wahhabis date from the 18th century, and refer back to Ibn Tayymia, who was an opposition figure toward the end of their high middle ages. The whole spectrum of muslim opinion from the qadarites and mutazilites of the early Abassids, to al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun in their late middle ages, we could live with as a civilization, let alone the possible modern developments off of that relatively reasonable base. We don't need to smuggle in western thought anew, in other words, since they only rose as high as they did once by digesting large portions of earlier western thought. The needed hellenist and christian theological foundations are already there, in their own past.
As for being at war "for 14 centuries", the west has been at war with itself at least as long. War, you see, is a normal and endemic thing. To say something has been at war for 14 centuries is merely to say it has been around for 14 centuries, because you cannot find a century without war anywhere in recorded history. Islam has had periods of unity and of fragmentation, and the present is clearly one of the latter. It has had periods of military ascendency over the west, and periods of military backwardness, and the present is clearly one of the latter. The relative power of the muslim world today is vastly less than it was 300 years ago. We survived far worse, and will again.
The writer of the article, far from wanting lots of good muslims living in the west, wants good muslims ruling in the east, throughout the majority muslim lands of historical islam. And so do I. There is no reason whatever to oppose a word of what he has said, and every reason to wish him success. His enemies within islam are our enemies within islam. His doctrines about islam are the ones we will seek to empower from Baghdad to Kabul. You cannot rule people by ignoring the reform of their doctrines, you know. And we have no choice but to rule a lot of muslims, directly or indirectly, for the intermediate future.
Indeed, what I detect throughout your comments is a certain defeatist lack of ambition, as though we weren't about to reorder the governments of half the lands of islam, but instead were in some isolated castle under seige, barely able to keep out our most determined enemies. Quite the reverse is the case. They can't keep us out of downtown Kabul.
They can't even keep most of their people from preferring our presence in downtown Kabul, to that of their own hardliners - not that we leave it up to them, incidentally. I am getting on with the difficult but necessary business of running a successful imperial occupation, and figuring out its intellectual groundwork beforehand, while you seem to think we've already lost. Hatred of our own conquered subjects gets us precisely nowhere.