Free Republic

Attempts to explain anti-Western feelings among Muslims have centered on weaknesses in Islamic societies and opposition to U.S. foreign policy. Church historian Meic Pearse bucks the trend by focusing on cultural differences—and along the way makes some prickly points about Western ways. In Why the Rest Hates the West, Pearse builds on the thesis of Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Orders, Simon & Schuster, 1997) that cultural factors increasingly dominate world conflicts. Pearse more directly asserts that culture, not religion or foreign policy, causes most of the conflicts between the West and the...

The famous AP photograph of a killer in Baghdad shooting a pistol into the head of one kneeling election worker, while another lies crumpled on the street, throws a burst of illumination onto the face of our enemy. It is the face of Muslim fascists murdering Muslim liberals. The victims were public servants of the people of Iraq. They were election workers– agents of the will of the people. They sprang from the millions proud and eager to vote for the first time in their lives. To kill election workers is a great sin against the will of the people....

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail message from a man who called himself “Tim.” He explained that this was not his real name. “Tim” was using this name so that he could remain anonymous. He needs to stay in the realm of the unknown. Tim is a marked man because he has done the unthinkable--the unforgivable. Tim has left Islam and in doing so, he has become a “kaafir”--an infidel--and an apostate. According to the laws of Islam, if a Muslim leaves the faith, he becomes the worst of the worst, an infidel, and a traitor. These poor...

In the Arab Middle East, there is no memory of democracy. There is an unbroken history of despotism and domination – by Ottoman Turks, then by Western imperial powers. To understand what kind of nations liberated Middle East peoples will construct, consider the most powerful currents running in the region. What other forces has our invasion unleashed? One surely is the popular desire for freedom and democracy. But darker forces also roil the region. One is a virulent hatred of Israel and its American patron. From Morocco to Pakistan, Osama is as admired as Bush is hated. Today, both Bush...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden-- A painting depicting a couple making love while covered in Quranic verses was removed from a Swedish museum this week after hundreds of complaints, some threatening, from Muslims who found it offensive, officials said Thursday. The painting, "Scene d'Amour," by Louzla Darabi, was removed Monday from an exhibit about AIDS at the World Culture Museum in Goteborg in southern Sweden. More than 400,000 of Sweden's 9 million residents are Muslim, and the museum received some 700 complaints about the painting, including some that were threatening. Museum director Jette Sandahl said the painting was removed because it was detracting...

The “call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered,” reported The New York Times in April 2004. The Times story quoted a Muslim cleric in Britain touting the “culture of martyrdom,” an imam in Switzerland urging his followers to “impose the will of Islam on the godless society of the West,” and another radical Islamist leader in Britain predicting that “our Muslim brothers from abroad will come one day and conquer here, and then we will live under Islam in dignity.” [1] For those who believe that a clash of civilizations — particularly between...

The widespread presence in the Islamic world of organizations that legitimate the use of political violence in terms of values they draw from Islam leads to a simple, often asked question: Is there an intrinsic connection between Islam and political violence? A sociologist’s obvious answer to this question is “no.” All of the major religious traditions are able to legitimate political violence, and most sociologists would analyze the conditions leading to the use of political violence situationally as well as normatively. Even so, my perspective is different. While it would be foolish to argue that Islam alone, or any set of...

If it doesn't exist, then what? When people speak of moderate Islam as the solution to radical Islam, they mean that there is a modernizing core within the Muslim community capable of transforming it into a civilized member of the world community. They foresee that the dar al-Islam, the Realm of Islam, will cease to be at war with the dar al-Harb, the Realm of War, and particularly with that part of the Realm of War known as the West. I describe these ideas as the "ecumenist" school of Western-Islamic relations, because to believe in the existence of moderate Islam...

January 17, 2005 'I don't want you to join me, I want you to join bin Laden' By Sean O'Neill and Yaakov Lappin THE language is florid, the tone wavers between that of avuncular lecturer and excitable zealot and the message is consistently extreme. Each night around 7pm the voice of Omar Bakri Mohammed broadcasts from the home computers of dozens of his followers around the country. His live webcasts, followed by question-and-answer sessions, last up to two hours. The adherents, who give themselves usernames such as The Sunni Triangle, Jihad04 and Mujaidah, can also ask private questions to which...

WASHINGTON, January 14 (IslamOnline.net) - The largest US Muslim civil liberties called on the State Department to issue a report on Islamophobia across the world, as American Muslims have complained of more anti-Islam TV rants. The proposal was made when the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and several other Muslim and Arab-American groups met Thursday, January 13, with top State Department officials to discuss a number of issues related to American foreign policy, according to CAIR’s Web site. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad presented in the meeting -- attended by Assistant Secretary Patricia de Stacy Harrison, Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher...

Here is Part One of "Islam and NPR," a new three-part series by Jihad Watch Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald: I. Taqiyya and Tu-Quoque NPR’s All Things Considered. January 7, 2005 • "Jihad" is one of the few Arabic words used in English. It means "spiritual struggle," but many Muslims have pointed out that "jihad" is almost always used in English in the context of terrorism, even though the actual meaning is broader. Commentator Anisa Mehdi would like to propose a word that could be used instead of "jihad." -- From the NPR Website Anisa Mehdi, a guest on NPR’s All...

U.S. caught in clash of civilizations Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity By Samuel P Huntington Political scientist Samuel P Huntington made telling predictions about the current state of the world with his "Clash of Civilizations" theory almost a decade ago. Recently, he made headlines again with a new thought-provoking book, "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," which tries to redefine the meaning of the American nation. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American people reelected President George W Bush as a war leader, despite a...

For Americans on their first trip to Europe, nothing stands out quite like the churches. In towns large and small, the churches, especially cathedrals, are often the most prominent buildings — tall, old and beautiful, frequently containing priceless artworks. Europe is so thick with them that many Americans, after only a few days of touring, have been known to say, with some justice, "Not another cathedral." Yet if their numbers make them hard to take in, they say something profound about who many of our ancestors were and how important Christianity was to building Western civilization. This eloquent testimony, however,...

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings triology is about the epic struggle of "the free folk of the West" to ward off and defeat the temptations and the enemies that would destroy them. As such, the movie version has had a powerful cultural resonance for the free folk undergoing the war on terrorism. Now all three movies are available in extended DVD versions, forming a single 12-hour saga that sheds light on one of the strangest phenomena of our current war: the alliance between our left-wing intellectual establishment and radical Islam. In Tolkien's epic, all of Middle Earth is under...

Reader Drennan Lindsay referred us to an absolutely superb article--a speech, actually, delivered at a conference on Jan. 1--by Melanie Phillips. Ms. Phillips is a British writer whose name I've heard, but whom I have not followed closely. From now on I will. Phillips' article is titled: "The Reporting of Iraq and Israel: An Abuse of Media Power." Her focus is Great Britain, but what she says is also applicable to the American press. She begins: A friend went into Blackwells university bookshop in Oxford and asked the counter clerk: 'Do you have a copy of Alan Dershowitz's The Case...

December 6, 2004 issue Copyright © 2004 The American Conservative Weaker Than We Think: Al-Qaeda may have already fired its best shot. By Russell Seitz On Oct. 18, President Bush asked if today we are still living in the ’90s, “in the mirage of safety that was actually a time of gathering threats.” The Weekly Standard takes this to mean “a need to fundamentally change the political culture of the Middle East” lest, as Bush declared, “anger and resentment grow for more decades … feeding more terrorism until radicals without conscience gain the weapons to kill without limit.” This is...

Summary: Thinking of modern jihad as simply a cultural extension of Islam is a common, and unfortunate, mistake. Two new books by Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy offer better historical and sociological explanations, but they are only a start. Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. The debate over why the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred has been dominated by different versions of "culture talk," the notion that culture is the most reliable clue to people's politics. Their...

When Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the HBO hit "Sex and the City," loomed large in a scanty sequined dress on a billboard overlooking Jerusalem in behalf of Lux soap, a lot of prospective consumers complained. This was no way for a lady to look, especially to Orthodox Jews. The bare arms and back — not to speak of bare thighs — were quickly covered in a more modest couturier design. Unilever, the giant consumer goods corporation, got the message. To save face — and money — a spokesman said that it was the climate that dictated the change...

Karl Marx once infamously referred to religion as "the opium of the people", and argued that it served to dampen the revolutionary fervor of the masses. Yet if Marx were alive to witness the acts of ferocity being committed by zealots in the name of Islam, one suspects that even he would readily admit he got that one wrong. Just such a reconsideration of religion is taking place today among the remnants of the Marxist left in Europe and North America -- only their reassessment is taking them in an even more dangerous direction. Since the morning of September 11th,...

It hasn't been reviewed by the New York Times or The Post, and it's little known outside the military. But the red-hot book among the nation's admirals and generals this holiday season is a work of strategy by Thomas P.M. Barnett called "The Pentagon's New Map." Imagine a combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Karl von Clausewitz on war and you begin to get an idea of where Barnett is coming from. His book tries to rethink strategy for a post-Cold War, post-Sept. 11 world caught between order and anarchy, self-satisfaction and rage, prosperity and ruin. Barnett's central...