"Your leaders responded to the initiative of Sheik Osama, may God protect him, by saying they don't negotiate with terrorists and that they are winning the war on terror. I tell them: You liars, greedy war mongers, who is pulling out from Iraq and Afghanistan? Us or you? Whose soldiers are committing suicide because of despair? Us or you?"

This is a reference to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's Jan. 19 response to the truce offer al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden made in his Jan. 19 audiotape release. This means the al-Zawahiri tape was made within the last 10 days.

He also said, "Bush, do you know where I am? I am amidst the Muslim masses, what God blessed me with: their support, their care, their generosity, their protection." This no doubt will be followed by some heated discussions between Islamabad and Washington, since the Pakistani government doesn’t want to allow U.S. operations on its territory anymore.

As for my mentioning Iraq today, if you consider the following graph one cann in fact see that since late 2005, there has been a growing trend of Iraqi Sunnis (Saddam's Baatists) turning against their jihadist allies.

Thus, it may be increasingly difficult for al Qaeda to import bombers into the country, reverting this flow back to Afghanistan.

As for Palestine and al-Qeada I mentioned last month of a rise of Islamism Hamas in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Shiites in Lebanon, and the Sunnis in Syria. And that by end 2006, Judea and Samaria and Gaza most likely, will be split into separate geographic divisions. Islamic Preparations for an Iraq Nr.2 (if you discount the current trend in Afghanistan).

P.S.: Just after I completed the above, CNN started to air its own translation. Watching this, it once more became clear to me that although the al-Qaeda leaders are in hiding, they are clearly still able to continue waging an ideological battle with the West.  

The fairy tale that poverty produces terrorists doesn’t deserve any further comment (instead poverty is known to produce resignation). Yet one still finds the poverty/terrorist even in otherwise intelligent Newspapers like this one today: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article335859.ece

But if political inclusion produce ideological moderation has been doubted in the past, today, moderate Muslim groups are justifying their new pluralist practices on Islamic terms.

We also have the politically-correct mendacity, which even British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently repeated: that Islam has been “hijacked” by terrorists. In this view Bin Ladin, the ayatollahs in Iran, the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the Saudis with their Wahhabism (a particularly puritanical brand of Sunni Islam), all are twisting a “moderate” religion to suit their purpose. The “Islam = peace” brigade essentializes Islam as peaceful. UBL essentializes it as jihad. In fact Ibn Taymiyah, 700 years before George Bush said “you’re either for us or against us,” and like other scholars that time, divided the world into the domain of Islam and that of war. The only good ruler is a Muslim ruler, asserted Ibn Taymiyah. And by that he meant one that enforces shari`ah, or Islamic law. It is no use pretending that the UBLs of the world have falsely “hijacked” Islam. Indeed, their view of the faith, however intolerant and violent it may seem, has a basis in the Quran.

We refuse to get involved in the discussion of some modern Western and even some Muslim-born scholars who diagnose the process of Quranic revelation to Mohammed as a case of paranoid delusion. However, many commentators claim that Islam is where Christianity was before the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and then the Enlightenment led the West to divorce religion and state, thereby removing (mostly) the threat of religious-based warfare. And true or not, we do need to open our eyes to the reality of the harsher aspects of Islam and Islamic history. Anything else is simple—and dangerous—self-deception.

An earlier  controversy has been the  "Orientalism and Occidentalism” myth. Although it is silly to devide the world in an East and West for there is no such thing, Edward Said mentioned in Future World Jihad, was the man who touched off this contemporary controversy.

Said was raised mostly in Cairo, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. A radical activist in the cause of an independent Palestine, he served as an overseas member of the Palestinian National Council, an arm of the PLO, until breaking with Yasir Arafat over the Oslo accords (he thought Arafat had sold out).

His famous 1978 book, Orientalism, assumed, with the French structuralists of the 1960's, that every civilization defines itself by its "Other." Assuming with Michel Foucault that knowledge always generates power, he proceeded to maintain that Orientalism-and the same is with the reverse ‘Occidentalism’ far from being the objective, from the very beginnings served  political ends.

While Said's idea  came under a certain amount of return fire from within the bastions of the traditional academy, it was gleefully welcomed by a new generation of scholars, eager to be free of the shackles of the old disciplines, especially the linguistic ones.

In the decades since 1978, innumerable papers have been written, with extensions to Said's celebrated "insight." This was also the case with Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, who co-authored an article  in the New York Review, of Books in 2001 shortly after  the 9/11 debacle. It represented the ‘Said’ topic to a wider public once more when the article was re-published in the form of a booklet titled"Occidentalism" (2003) is a handy term with which to conflate now those in the East who hold a malignly simplistic view of the West.

As Buruma and Margalit suggest, much of what is anti-Western in the East today was in former generations a critique of modernity from within the West. They mention the pan-German stirrings of the 18th century, which contrasted the pastoral and spiritual qualities of pre-industrial Germany with the alien and soulless metropolitan culture of postindustrial London and Paris; or, later, the pan-Slavic stirrings in Russia against an alien 'West that now incorporated Germany. Even as Berlin and then Moscow tried desperately to catch up with the industrial age, an important constituency resented the impact of modern goods, manners, and ideas, finding literary _expression in writers as sophisticated as Herder and Dostoevsky. And very Western forms of idealism and romanticism went underground to resurface as racial theories.

From the West the wave continued to the East. By the 20th century, write Buruma and Margalit, it was the turn of many Japanese to lament the "contamination" of Tokyo and Osaka by the movies, cafes, dance halls, radios, newspapers, short skirts, and cars that bad become symbols of Western cultural hegemony. Although large cities in themselves were not a novelty in the East-Baghdad, Peking, and Edo were vast metropolitan centers long before London--the supposed atomization of the city by the importation of Western commodities and attitudes kindled a reactionary fire. Paradoxically, Buruma and Margalit point out, there was here the shadow of still another Western idea of ancient provenance: the big city as Babylon. And with it came a further paradox: the importation of such originally Western bogeymen as Jews and Freemasons, taken to be the devilish, "cosmopolitan" managers and conspirators advancing the Occidental conquest.

Capitalism, too, became a target of Eastern animosity, especially in the form of the bourgeois satisfaction with money and the comfort it can buy. To this were opposed the heroic virtues, the ideals of self-sacrifice, and the religious and aristocratic visions of grandeur that each afflicted society associated with its own past. Liberalism and democracy were no less frequently rejected as symptoms of the same disease, along with artistic freedom and sexual license. Hence, in much of the Third World, the appeal of socialism with its promise of a purely "scientific" way to obtain the advantages of modernity without the cultural and religious ramifications. But then, with the failure of socialism to deliver the goods, resentment was added to an already combustible inferiority complex to fuel still further animosity to the West.

Mao drove the urban proletariat out to work in rural communes, and the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh; both were inspired by approximately the same set of objections that provoked the Taliban to strafe Kabul.

What the Occidentalists in each place and time have shared, according to Buruma and Margalit, is a failure to grasp the indivisibility of human advancement. "You cannot import what is merely utilitarian while keeping out the potentially subversive ideas that go with it." (Alas, what you can do is try.) But this is not to say that the authors absolve the Wrest of blame. To the contrary, they are eager to concede that people who attribute all their problems to (for example) American foreign policy have some valid points. Nor are they against anti-Westernism per se; they are just against taking it to the point where it thoroughly dehumanizes the Other. Criticism of "globalization" is one thing, but by the time a whole Western society has been reduced to "a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites," things have gone too far.

What can one say about these various exercises in cross-cultural analysis? In fact, both Said on the one hand and Buruma and Margalit on the other are deeply unsatisfactory. By restricting his field to a small sampling of Anglo-Saxons and Frenchmen (plus some gratuitously introduced Israelis), Said managed to exclude the German contribution that dominated Western Orientalism through both of the centuries he surveyed, and without which the scholarly tradition as a whole is incomprehensible. Likewise he ignored significant Dutch, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, and other scholars-for the obvious reason that their countries had no horses in the race to occupy the collapsing Ottoman Empire. Seeking no enemies on the Left, he also sedulously bypassed the Soviet Russian Oriental School-which would have supplied a true rogues' gallery for comparison with the Europeans. For, in the service of Marxist ideology, the Russians peppered their studies with extremely insulting and dismissive remarks about Islamic religion and "feudal" Arab society.

Said in fact borrowed from the French scholar Raymond Schwab, that corresponded to Anglo-French adventures in India but predated the Anglo-French forays into the old Ottoman dominions of the Near East by more than a century. Indeed, his book amounted to a Procrustean transplantation of Schwab's work on sub-continental India to another region entirely.

Buruma and Margalit's Occidentalism next offered us a long catalogue of now-defunct enemies of Western civilization- all who tend to characterize us in much the same wax. We-the Westerners, Europeans/ Americans, the cosmopolitans,-are whores; our civilization is Babylon. Unfortunately, what Buruma and Margalit like Said presented is a collection less of ideas than of caricatures, and what unites them is only that they are caricatures of the same thing, really.

The final prescription by Buruma and Margalit as presented in the book version of their article however gives the game away, when they write: The story we have mentioned in this book is a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now, if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We cannot afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occidentalists, and there would be nothing left to defend.

In other words: where Said intend to address his, public, Buruma and Margalit are addressing a purely Western audience accustomed to the same parlor game that Edward Said was playing.

The claims of French structuralists notwithstanding, each civilization created itself, not by an "othering" process but by building upon its own traditions, its own legacy of faith. At one point, when the Christians discovered themselves to be completely surrounded by Muslims, the Christians became self consciously aware of Islamic civilization. At a later point-the colonial situation--the Muslims discovered themselves to be surrounded by Christians. The rivalry between this West and that East-between the West and Islam-is different in kind from the rivalries between either.

Beneath both accounts of "othering" lies the naive assumption that the West can be identified with modernity and even more specifically with the Enlightenment--prior to which, we might suppose, it was just a backward, third-world sort of culture like every other. But the West precedes the Enlightenment, and the ideals of the Enlightenment could only grow out of a much longer history.

It is also an error to conceive of the Enlightenment and all that followed it as a breach with Christian history as is detailed on this website. By the same token, however, the phrase "Islamic humanism," though a conjunction devoutly to be wished, is in fact a contradiction in terms; as a goal, it has repeatedly eluded those down through the ages.

Though the medieval Arabs took over various Greek traditions in science and philosophy they absolutely rejected Greek art and literature, with their representations of the divine-in-man. Islam could not have a reformation or an enlightenment or a genuine humanism because such things were not only missing from Islam but explicitly repudiated by it.

In the later 19th century, there were many Islamic liberals at work, merrily importing all sorts of "discoveries" from the West. What happened to them? They died right out. We may applaud those who today are trying against all odds to resurrect that noble project. But we should also acknowledge how great, if not insurmountable, the odds really are.

The 14th-century Muslim historian ibn Khaldun Ibn Khaldun considered the primary cause of civilizational decline to be forgetfulness, a collective amnesia, of how we came to be, and therefore of what we must do to continue being.

But although it is in the nature of civilizations to ‘civilize’, it is also in their nature to learn, as the Romans learned from the Greeks, the Christians from the Romans, Greeks, and Jews, the Muslims from the Christians, Jews, and Greeks. And it is in the nature of successful civilizations, to transcend their teachers, and in turn to become teachers themselves, raising up from barbarism the untutored world around them-or else falling back into barbarism.

But to argue that other cultures cannot change because their members are incapable of embodying the values we hold dear is what formerly was called racism and reemerged as ‘culturallism’.

See Also Case Study P.1: Certainly the fundamentalists invoke a militant understanding of jihad, justifying a violence that the modernists rejected. But the key difference, I think, hence the sine qua non of fundamentalism, goes beyond this specific doctrine. What makes militant Islam militant is not merely the doctrine of jihad, nor heightened intolerance, nor violence, nor traditionalism, nor fear of modernity, nor an angry response to imperialism. Its novelty is more profound than that.

Every person of Muslim background is supposed to share a common Muslim culture, whatever his or her real culture of origin (Turk, Bosnian, Pakistani or Arab), which means that religion is seen as the main component of these cultures, a component that can be isolated and erected as a culture in itself? 2. This culture is attributed to everybody with a Muslim origin, whatever his or her religious practice or level of faith (that is, without any link to religiosity). In this sense, one could speak of'non-believing Muslims'? 3. This culture differentiates a `Muslim' from an`other', who, in the West, is defined as a member never of a religious community, but of a pseudo-ethnic group. Enter P.2:

Yet if tolerance, is part of the Western heritage also this cannot be an end in itself, if we are to survive.

But as mentioned in the above case study, it is important to understand that "Islamist" - not "Islamic" - is the accurate term to refer to the ideology, which seeks the establishment of a government that implements Islamic law. Further complications for one, that Muslim militants such as the Palestinian nationalist groups al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Iraqi Sunni nationalist insurgents such as the Baathists - are ideologically more like ‘secular’ groups.

Plus, among the moderate mainstream of Islamism are two types - radical and militant. Hizb al-Tahrir, the transnational group calling for the re-establishment of the supranational caliphate, is one such example. The latter group, comprising the militants, does espouse violence - which is why it is important to use the term "militant Islamist" when defining such groups.

However – where it gets most confusing - some, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, are ideologically Islamist (meaning they seek the establishment of a government that implements Islamic law) have in addition nationalistic goals. This type of groups maintain armed wings to fight what they perceive as foreign occupation, but when it comes to achieving their goals of establishing an Islamic polity, they also engage in mainstream electoral politics. There are those who operate within a given state, such as the Taliban, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in Algeria, and Jamaat al Mujahideen in Bangladesh. Plus groups with a regional agenda - including Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia and the Chechen group led by Shamil Basayev - that want one Islamic state to encompass a region. Thus, although the Arab footprint is quite obvious in almost all Islamist militant groups, ethnicity is also, a determining factor.
The, EU Counterterrorism Coordinator Gijs de Vries acknowledged on Sept. 12 ,2005 (speaking at the Institute for Counterterrorism's annual conference in Herzliya), that Europe has become an active front in the global jihadist war - a change from its earlier status as a planning base for attacks elsewhere. According to de Vries, Europeans at home and abroad likely will be targeted by terrorist groups for years to come.

A look at the numbers shows that per end 2005, there have been double as many deaths attributed to al Qaeda since Sept. 11 (more than 800) than in the 52 months prior to it (less than 400). We should note that these statistics do not include the deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan or the former Soviet Union where active insurgencies are under way.

In his soon to be released book, Dying to Win: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It, Robert A. Pape quotes Pierre Rehov, a French documentary filmmaker who went underground to do research in Palestine ,and  explains how he is horrified by the real side of Islam, which fosters a culture of hatred by brainwashing, to such an extent that the only solution to the members’ life problems is to kill themselves and others in the name of their religion. See also: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20505 .

And we can say in conclusion here, that Islam was born as an aggressive movement, that used violence and terror to expand. Judaism, Christianity, Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and other world religions espouse their teachings but none of their doctrines propose that non-devotees be slain. Islam decrees that as a top priority if one is going to be a practicing Muslim, loyal to the faith. America's counterterrorism strategy appears predominantly weighted toward a "kill or capture" approach targeting individuals. Accordingly, the attention of the U.S. military and intelligence community is directed almost uniformly toward hunting down militant leaders or protecting U.S. forces, not toward understanding the real enemy they face. This is a monumental failing because al Qaeda's ability to continue this struggle is predicated on its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish its resources.

A look at the numbers shows that per end 2005, there have been double as many deaths attributed to al Qaeda since Sept. 11 (more than 800) than in the 52 months prior to it (less than 400). We should note that these statistics do not include the deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan or the former Soviet Union where active insurgencies are under way.

In his soon to be released book, Dying to Win: Why Suicide Terrorists Do It, Robert A. Pape quotes Pierre Rehov, a French documentary filmmaker who went underground to do research in Palestine, and explains how he is horrified by the real side of Islam, which fosters a culture of hatred by brainwashing, to such an extent that the only solution to the members’ life problems is to kill themselves and others in the name of their religion. See also: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20505 .

Islam was born as an aggressive movement, that used violence and terror to expand.
Judaism, Christianity, Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and other world religions espouse their teachings but none of their doctrines propose that non-devotees be slain. Islam decrees that as a top priority if one is going to be a practicing Muslim, loyal to the faith. Yet, except for the document mentioned in p.2 of my world Jihad series, even Washington still has no proper program yet. Hence America's counterterrorism strategy appears predominantly weighted toward a "kill or capture" approach targeting individuals. Accordingly, the attention of the U.S. military and intelligence community is directed almost uniformly toward hunting down militant leaders or protecting U.S. forces, not toward understanding the real enemy they face. This is a monumental failing because al Qaeda's ability to continue this struggle is predicated on its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish its resources.

Also more and more books start to appear written by those sympathetic towards jihadists like for example Fawaz A. Gerges' "The Far Enemy" with misleading information. He claims that the jihadist movement inclined more toward isolation and introspection about internal Muslim affairs than to supposed external threats to Islam, although history ever since the Crusades and the Mongol invasion has shown differently. Gerges thus writes apologetically that Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian radical who together with bin Laden founded al Qaeda in the late 1980s, was an exponent of "resistance, not expansion or aggression." Gerges notes that Azzam "also eschewed terrorism, targeting civilians, and taking jihad global, where in fact it already was. In "The Great Theft" Abou El Fadl, an Islamic jurist promotes the myth that as I mentioned above, Islam, would have been hijacked. Similar to the propaganda by Fawaz A. Gerges' history has proven otherwise as I will be able to proof as soon my next study about Islamic imperialism has been edited and next checked by our toe specialist peer reviewers. Although Abou El Fadl so far only echo’s the opinion of other Muslim’s, he then expresses his personal opinion with a call for a "counter-jihad" to reaffirm what he terms “Islam's moral message." I did however learn much from reading "The Great Theft" and incorporated some of its information in my own “World Jihad” series for it provides a good guide to Muslim intellectual discourse.  Sun Tzu already wrote long ago, only when we know whom (what) we are up against, can we prevail. Since the above essay in letter format, is more of a personal nature than my ‘articles’ on this website, I  should add here that although in the above I made for example mention of “Judaism, Christianity, Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and other world religions” I am an agnostic, never belonged to any political party or group, thus also never voted in my life. Rather I approach related issues from a history of ideas point of view, plus weight the evidence based on forensic research, as thought at the best universities today.

Important is also that we should not expect that most, who are born as Muslims will follow the faith. In fact we have to be careful about what I termed 'culturalism'. Hence I initially started of this study four years ago not only with an overview of leading ideologists of the Muslim Brotherhood (the most successful Islamic political party in the world today), but also as to how to avoid culturalist ideas as a whole.  

 

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