I just saw this in the news. This won’t be good for stability in that region. Musharraf likely wasn’t responsible, but at the same time, he wasn’t doing anything to protect her, either.
How did humanity ever get to the point where suicide bombing became an “accepted” way of dealing with political strife?
ngongsays
Here in Thailand, Al Jazeera had the news first. The reporter was careful to mention that the Koran preaches equality between men and women, so if the assassination were related to gender, that would be a misinterpretation of scripture.
Anonsays
*sigh*
Adnansays
Here in Islamabad nothing’s happened as of yet, in terms of curfews, protests, etc. But In Karachi and Lahore, things are going crazy.
Before the obligatory “this is what happens under religious rule” comment pops up, it’s being floated around nearly everyone here in Pakistan that this was more a military-linked action than anyone else. Even if one didn’t like her – and trust me, she did quite a bit to further the influence/power of the fundamentalists – it has to be noted this is bad on so many levels.
a) the elections will most likely be cancelled or postponed, with a possible state of emergency returning.
b) an opposition leader was killed
c) She was a Bhutto, which is symbolic, especially in Sindh province.
ngong: I’m sorry, I just can’t even take that seriously. “The Koran preaches equality between men and women”? Yeah right! Just look at any fundamentalist Islamist country for refutation of that. Women who can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t walk around on their own, must be clad from head to toe in fabric … yeah, that’s equality.
Adnansays
Cyde Weys:
Aside from the “this was terrorism and should be condemned” statement from Musharraf, the timing and also the location (considered to be near the spot where her father was executed by Zia) amongst other things are placing things at his feet, by many over here.
Cyde Weys – remember your Orwell. Oppression works by distorting the language of freedom. Women in fundamentalist Islamic countries don’t have Equality; they have “equality.” The genders are equal – but some genders are more equal than others.
The reporter was careful to mention that the Koran preaches equality between men and women
Which part was he quoting? This one?
“Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful, during the husband’s absence, because God has of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness you have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them: but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them: verily, God is High, Great!”
Pakistan is a mess and it’s going to go down the toilet eventually. It’s been swirling around for a long time – and I think our “foreign policy” of supporting a military dictator is going to come back to haunt us. Personally I squirm whenever politicians on C-span are careful to avoid admitting that Musharraf is clearly setting himself up as dictator-for-life. This could be Iran all over again.
ngongsays
Clyde…I agree with your take. It’s odd that the Al Jazeera guy would feel a need to lecture viewers on “gender equality in the Koran” as scenes of mayhem in the streets flash by.
Brendan Ssays
The cynic in me says:
How much money do we give this country daily to help them kill the opposition leader and keep the military in power?
“The events of September 11, 2001, and Pakistan’s agreement to support the United States led to a waiver of the sanctions, and military assistance resumed to provide spare parts and equipment to enhance Pakistan’s capacity to police its western border with Afghanistan and address its legitimate security concerns. In 2003, President Bush announced that the United States would provide Pakistan with $3 billion in economic and military aid over 5 years. This assistance package commenced during FY 2005.”
“After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over how the money was spent, and that the strategy to improve the Pakistani military needs to be completely revamped.
In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.”
ravensays
Pakistan has looked like the next Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran for a while. The whole country seemed to be held together with bubblegum and bailing wire.
Pakistan is also a nuclear power. Could we be seeing the first civil war fought with nukes?
Nomen Nesciosays
the paranoiac in me is saying, how the heck are we supposed to pull out or disable that country’s nukes when it finally drops in the crapper? or will we just view with alarm as India bombs it to a soft green glow and quietly call that good enough?
Menasays
Thanks for the update, adnan, stay safe.
A few of Nawaz Sharif’s supporters were killed in another incident, this really puts the whole Diebold election thing in perspective for me. Sure, our elections are sometimes shams but so far, except for Bobby Kennedy, no one has died. What a world…
Scrofulumsays
It’s the effects that Pakistan’s fubarification will have on the east, and then the rest of the world that makes me worry. Not only might they have to contend with infighting and civil war (with nukes?), but how long before some western theocracy decides they’re just ripe to be classed under “muslimmy-type threat” and self-justifies another crusade . . . er, I mean war.
Am I correct in thinking that Pakistan’s main exports are textiles, rather than oil? That might protect them for a bit longer from our glorious leaders attentions, unless they suddenly need new drapes.
Scrofulumsays
Also, respect and sympathy go out to Ms Bhutto and her family. Brave.
And, I wonder if he realizes that our own intelligence cites that the little splinter of al-Qaeda active in Pakistan is the same group our soldiers had pinned down in Afghanistan before being ordered to withdraw to embark on the folly in Iraq?
Man… I have a feeling things will get weird.
Galbinus_Caelisays
/mena/
Don’t forget Paul Wellstone.
BobCsays
Every day there’s a suicide bombing and the murderers think they’re going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.
Georgesays
What an amazing positive impact the Bush foreign policy has had on democracy in the region, in just a few short years….
Here’s hoping that the USA shows Pakistan and the world the proper way to do this:
Charges of treason against public officials where there is evidence of malfeasance for the sake of a hostile power.
Public trials with solid rules of evidence.
The convicted executed by firing squad.
Suicide bombs are extra-constitutional, to say the least.
robotaholicsays
wow, how attractive islam is!- gosh this makes me seeth with animosity toward religion in general- but anyone who says christianity today is as bad as islam is just wrong- islam has GOT TO GO!
It’s hard to see this as a religious event: they’re all Islamic. Isn’t this first and foremost an incident of political strife?
Troysays
robotaholic was apparently in a coma 1969-1997. He’s apparently too stupid to understand the reference even if it was spelled out for him, so I won’t bother.
But here’s a hint, sport. Islam has about a billion adherents. It’s going nowhere.
#23It’s hard to see this as a religious event: they’re all Islamic. Isn’t this first and foremost an incident of political strife?
And the people in Northern Ireland were “all Xian”. To be sure, that was also heavily political, but the religious aspects were important to the politics of the situation.
Al Qaeda and other reactionary Islamic groups were always opposed to Bhutto, partly because a female elected leader isn’t exactly part of the dream to restore 14th cent. Islamic mores to Pakistan, and to much of the rest of the world. She was “too liberal” for many of the Islamo-fascists as well. Furthermore, if one dies fighting for Allah, one achieves paradise.
So of course it’s politics, but it’s all politics in a part of the world that has never separated mosque and state. It would be hard to find much of national politics in Pakistan that isn’t at least somewhat religious, because civil law is so much based on Islamic law. But Bhutto has been more of an affront to reactionary religionists than most leaders in the Islamic world have been of late.
Here’s some of the religious context surrounding Bhutto’s assassination:
Ms Bhutto was, in fact, a rival of President Musharraf – who has his headquarters in Rawalpindi – but recently the similarities between the two – as opponents of the growing fundamentalist movement – had seemed stronger than their differences. There had even been speculation about a possible alliance between the two leaders after the elections on 8 January 2008.
Death sentence
That possibility may have signed Ms Bhutto’s ‘death sentence’ as it were, said journalist Mariana Baabar, speaking from Rawalpindi, particularly so given the bad blood she caused with her decision, earlier this year, to support the government when it laid siege to the fundamentalist Red Mosque in Islamabad.
“That […] annoyed al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and ever since they have been hitting PPP targets.”
The fundamentalist religious students in the Red Mosque had direct links with Afghanistan and the Taliban. Meanwhile, responsibility for the killing of Ms Bhutto has been claimed from inside Afghanistan by al-Qaeda commander Mustapha Abu al-Yazid.
For President Musharraf, too, difficult times have arrived with the murder of Ms Bhutto. The ‘state of emergency’ has already been a well-tried tool under his regime, but in the past that has never managed to provide a decisive victory against the fundamentalist.
Most victims of terror by Salafist and Shiite religious extremists are Muslims – because they belong to the wrong sect or ethnic group, or espouse political values or conduct cultural activities (e.g. teaching girls) antithetical to radical Islamist tenets. (Bombings of Shiite mosques in Pakistan, mass murder of Muslims in Darfur by Janjaweed, murders of Muslim teachers in southern Thailand, slaughter of Shia by Taliban.) That doesn’t mean that there is not a religious imperative behind these attacks. Which, in that context, is also ideological. Sayyid Qutb identified supposedly apostate Muslim rulers as a hindrance to global Islam. One theological innovation of Salafist extremism, justifying terror against co-religionists, their redefinition of non-Salafis as non-Muslim.
This does not mean that all Muslim-on-Muslim conflict is primarily driven by religion; much is not. For example, Bangladesh-Pakistan in the 1970s was national. But violence by Islamists is largely religiously motivated. (To understand this, first there must be a distinction made between the larger faith of Islam and, within that, the minority religio-ideological tendency of Islamism. And some observers on both the left and the right fail to make that distinction.)
To suggest that this is not about religion is like saying the Catholic-Protestant wars of Europe were not about religion. Of course these were also about politics and nationality, and a number of other things as well.
Kagehisays
Apparently the Pope, and all those other “world leaders” that prayed for reconciliation and peace over Christmas got their god all confused again and he told some nut to do the exact opposite. Or, at least that is one explanation. lol I would go with, “Half wits that follow hate filled ideologies develop hate filled policies, and think that the only solutions to problems involve killing the people that stand in the way of those policies.”, which kind of makes praying for them to not do that shit even more pointless than if it was just the existence of something to pray to that mattered. But, that’s just me…
Troysays
But violence by Islamists is largely religiously motivated.
This is obfuscating things. Violence is a method of political struggle. In other contexts we call this “war”, “insurrection”, etc.
The greatest violent acts of the 20th century — eg. the firebombing of Tokyo — had nothing to do with religion.
Sure, religious differences, due to their dogmatic and arbitrary nature, fuel the breakdown of civility, but the Islamic world has shown no lack of civility when measured against the Western, and Asian standards.
Troy: Sure, religious differences, due to their dogmatic and arbitrary nature, fuel the breakdown of civility, but the Islamic world has shown no lack of civility when measured against the Western, and Asian standards.
The problem we see with the Islamic world is that there is an uncompromising need to make everyone live according to their rules, they are easily offended, and murder is one of the common responses. Pakistan has all kinds of problems with fundamentalists – trying to pass laws to make apostasy punishable by death, preventing uncovered women from being seen in public (with one major muslim cleric advocating the threat of acid attacks on women not properly covered), and so on. Did you learn anything from the mohammed/teddy bear, or the mohammed cartoons – where death was called for, or actually carried out? The US didn’t firebomb Tokyo because the Japanese named a teddy bear “Jesus”.
Kseniyasays
Good points, TinyFrog.
(We should have fire-bombed the scatological bastard who named a teddy bear “Pooh”.)
Dan:
> I wonder if Bush will pin this on al-Qaeda?
Well, he probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
The main suspects in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination are the Pakistani and foreign Islamist militants who regarded her as a heretic and an American stooge and had repeatedly threatened to kill her.
…
Two militant warlords based in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern areas, near the border with Afghanistan, had threatened to kill her on her return.
.
One was Baitullah Mehsud, a top commander fighting the Pakistani army in the tribal region of South Waziristan. He has close ties to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban.
.
The other was Haji Omar, the “amir” or leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought against the Soviets with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
.
After that attack Ms Bhutto revealed that she had received a letter signed by a person who claimed to be a friend of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden threatening to slaughter her like a goat. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3100052.ece
#23: In islamic societies, religion and politics are unseparable – it’s virtually two sides of the same coin. As for the religious aspect, it’s pretty much the usual fight between die-hard jihadists and almost-secular-progressives. Think of it as Westboro Baptist bombing Elaine Pagels.
Fernando Magyarsays
This is no way to run a country
I couldn’t agree more! Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were referring to Pakistan.
Gartossays
In a complicated political situation it is often useful to look at who gets more power from the action.
Case A: Fundamentalists did it
Bhutto has said and done things against them (Red Mosque) and she is a bad example for women in politics. We hate her so we kill her.
Case B: Musharaf did it
Bhutto has put herself against the Fundamentalists and was a direct adversary to Musharaf in the secular part of society. Killing her in a way that points to the Fundamentalists gets both of his two “enemies” out of the way. Bhutto’s supporters might get more radicalized in an anti-Fundamentalist belief that Musharraf makes good (US) money supporting.
—————-
I think Musharaf has more to gain from this assasination than the Fundamentalists. But I would like to know what other people think.
PS: I am a born Atheist in a region were there have been numerous wars over religion and politics (Balkans). Please don’t see things so simple (Sunnis vs Shias, Catholics vs Protestants etc) the socio-economic reasons usually weight a lot more. We are not in the Middle Ages any more (although from what I read here that is what the American media is trying to make people think there – people that will never even meet a person of another faith).
PPS: first post here I hope I didn’t mess up the english language too bad.
ravensays
Killing her in a way that points to the Fundamentalists gets both of his two “enemies” out of the way.
You are assuming that the Moslem fundies are worried that people will think they are murderous fanatics who want to send Pakistan back to the Dark Ages. (Which aren’t too far away anyway.)
The reality is that they do want to head back to the Dark Ages and violence and murder are just normal operating procedure. And if anyone doesn’t like it, tough. There are plenty more bombs and bullets where Ms. Bhutto’s came from.
These people are immune to public opinion and living in another reality reasonable people can’t understand. Or want to.
This sort of theocratic nonsense doesn’t get societies anywhere. Just look at Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, or Texas for examples. Stagnant societies going nowhere on a good day and disintegrating on a bad day.
David Marjanović, OMsays
Every day there’s a suicide bombing and the murderers think they’re going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the PKK (the Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”) had suicide bombers, too — not to mention the kamikaze.
Belief in an afterlife is not at all required for a suicide bombing. All that’s required is a belief that there is an ideology that is worth not just killing but dying for.
Here’s hoping that the USA shows Pakistan and the world the proper way to do this:
* Charges of treason against public officials where there is evidence of malfeasance for the sake of a hostile power.
* Public trials with solid rules of evidence.
* The convicted executed by firing squad.
The death penalty is “the proper way to do” anything? You have a lot left to learn, young padawan.
David Marjanović, OMsays
Every day there’s a suicide bombing and the murderers think they’re going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the PKK (the Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”) had suicide bombers, too — not to mention the kamikaze.
Belief in an afterlife is not at all required for a suicide bombing. All that’s required is a belief that there is an ideology that is worth not just killing but dying for.
Here’s hoping that the USA shows Pakistan and the world the proper way to do this:
* Charges of treason against public officials where there is evidence of malfeasance for the sake of a hostile power.
* Public trials with solid rules of evidence.
* The convicted executed by firing squad.
The death penalty is “the proper way to do” anything? You have a lot left to learn, young padawan.
Tulsesays
raven:
This sort of theocratic nonsense doesn’t get societies anywhere. Just look at Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, or Texas
Heh!
John Scanlon, FCDsays
Gartos # 36,
yes, Cui bono? is always worth asking. Who really had the strongest motive? Getting the right answer takes a lot of background knowledge though, and still falls short of being evidence. On application of Bayes’ Theorem, I would stay out of Pakistan altogether.
The death penalty is “the proper way to do” anything?
It’s a proper penalty for high treason from our elected officials. Of course, you have to prove the charges in a legal proceeding first.
You have a lot left to learn, young padawan.
The malfeasance of the current administration is ruining this country faster than I would have believed possible. If you think that we can afford NOT to investigate, prosecute where evidence is found, and carry out a sufficiently severe sentence against the guilty, you’re just going to get worse in the future. Zimbabwe, anyone?
Troysays
The US didn’t firebomb Tokyo because the Japanese named a teddy bear “Jesus”.
My larger point is that these people are assholes first, and their religion is an expression of that cocknozzlery. All cheap Gods are made in Man’s Image, essentially.
*Christians* in that part of the world recently stoned to death a young member of their community. Not to mention the recent battles in the church in Jerusalem between Greek Orthodox and Armenians . . . broken up by the Palestinian authorities.
(if I could, not that it matters, I should clarify that I think our military’s tactics in area-bombing Japan were inhumane but not necessarily inhuman, given the available and understood options at the time and place)
Desert Donkeysays
I find this truly saddening news, and I am a pretty hardened character. Then I think back to her election many years ago when it seemed that Pakistan was advancing civilization in a most unexpected way. This makes me even sadder.
We may be able to remove the 3rd rock from the sun from the list of inhabited places yet.
Redfsays
This is how terrorists solve thier problems, if they just would not be stupid anymore, they would be successful. She was trying to help them, can’t they see the world has changed, it isn’t a 1000 years ago, they can’t act like this anymore. No fundementalism, and if they going to do it fine, but can’t they do it with out killing people. Why would your God want you to kill, I am sure that contradicts many things in the Koran, which they probably don’t even read, and translate certain things from it to benefit them and thier stupid cause.
Tinyfrog:The problem we see with the Islamic world is that there is an uncompromising need to make everyone live according to their rules, they are easily offended, and murder is one of the common responses.
If you really think that the Islamic world has been worse than the West in the last hundred years then you should check out the history of Europe. I mean, how many dead from in Europe and from European Ideologies in the last hundred years? And does that even compare to the death toll in the Islamic world, from Islamic sources. Shit, the death toll from Western interventions in the last twenty years is easily two orders of magnitude larger than the actions of Islamists.
Raven:You are assuming that the Moslem fundies are worried that people will think they are murderous fanatics who want to send Pakistan back to the Dark Ages. (Which aren’t too far away anyway.)
The reality is that they do want to head back to the Dark Ages and violence and murder are just normal operating procedure. And if anyone doesn’t like it, tough. There are plenty more bombs and bullets where Ms. Bhutto’s came from.
Spoken like someone who really doesn’t understand the country, the region, or the groups involved. Yes Pakistan is hardly a real state, at least in Baluchistan and the tribal areas, but it has a fair amount of cohesion among the groups in the larger cities. Certainly when the issue is radical Islam, which is generally rejected by those in the larger cities. The problem is that past politicians, the democratically elected ones often, infused religion into the army and politics for short term goals and thereby screwed over the future generations, i.e. now. For Musharef to remain in power he needs to either crush the radical groups and ally with the U.S., pretend to crush the Rads and ally with the U.S. or outright ally with the Rads. Obviously he can’t simply ally with the rads, nor can he safely outright ally with the U.S. given the support for the Rads in the military. So, he must walk a line. Given this, pinning a attack such as this on a popular figure could work out rather well for him.
I should add that it could also be the Rads trying to pin it on Musharref, one can rarely tell for sure in these situations.
Racer Xsays
>>> ‘How did humanity ever get to the point where suicide bombing became an “accepted” way of dealing with political strife?”
Since people started apologizing and making excuses for it? Look at coathangrrr’s “Well, the West has done bad things, too! Huff! Puff!” post a couple above this one. Ignorant shitheads like him like to think they know what’s going on, but their tiny broken minds are just rationalizing. Their exposure to the realities is, at best, second or third hand.
The best sources are people who have fled islam after growing up in it. Sites like Islam Watch. They would spit on people like coathangrr as enablers, and then properly ignore him as the utter singularity of uselessness that he is.
truth machinesays
Sure, our elections are sometimes shams but so far, except for Bobby Kennedy, no one has died.
Bobby Kennedy? A minor incident of no historical importance. Ditto for the SCOTUS putting GWB into office. And killing them after they take office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) doesn’t count.
And let’s be sure not to mention Allende, Mussadegh, Lumumba, or any other foreign leaders our own government has helped assassinate or overthrow.
truth machinesays
Racer X: go back to freerepublic where you belong.
Nadiasays
Racer X: Ok then, as an atheist who was raised Muslim and is a Pakistani and a woman: coathangrrr is absolutely right as far as the political history of the country and its results are concerned. As far as who the worse offender is, is that really even a pissing contest worth getting into? No amount of killing on one ‘side’ makes killing on the other any more acceptable.
G. Tingeysays
Errr ….
#17 & #33 ….. “Pinning it on Al-Qaeda”.
Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An “unnamed leader” phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a “priceless American asset” …..
More information will probably be forthcoming later
truth machinesays
Every day there’s a suicide bombing and the murderers think they’re going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.
How about ridiculing natural stupidity? Bhutto was killed by a bullet in the neck.
truth machinesays
Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An “unnamed leader” phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a “priceless American asset” …..
Ignorant shitheads like him like to think they know what’s going on, but their tiny broken minds are just rationalizing. Their exposure to the realities is, at best, second or third hand.
Nice. First you claim I’m ignorant and only have second or third hand “exposure to reality”(what am I stuck in the Matrix?). The you go on to show that you have no first hand experience with the region. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don’t speak Arabic and that the extent of your knowledge of the Quran is mistranslations of 9:123.
I am certainly not arguing that there are no militant assholes in the middle east, what I’m arguing is that is our goal is to stop people from dying in the region we can be much more effective by restraining the U.S. government than by bombing civilians to get at a few bad apples.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don’t speak Arabic and that the extent of your knowledge of the Quran is mistranslations of 9:123.
Curious that you should say this. What evidence do you have that the various translations are all faulty? Further, how do you deal with the fact that these “mistranslations” are the ones favored by the Arabic-speaking Salafists?
negentropyeatersays
Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An “unnamed leader” phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a “priceless American asset” …..
… should I say, how “convenient” ;
keeps Bush happy, Musharaf happy, and Al Qaeda happy (even if they had nothing to do with it).
Katrinasays
Now, according to CNN, it was the shrapnel from the blast that killed her. CNN
What evidence do you have that the various translations are all faulty? Further, how do you deal with the fact that these “mistranslations” are the ones favored by the Arabic-speaking Salafists?
Mistranslation was a bad way to put it but the fact of the matter is that there are exceedingly few groups, if any, that think the Quran impels them to go and spread Islam by force to non-Islamic areas. And generally Salafist groups endorse interpretations which mave been translated, not translations, of the Quran that are in line with their political aims. But most of all, those groups are a minuscule part of the Islamic world, even in places that the western media makes out to be packed with radical militants. So I don’t “deal with” it at all, whatever that might mean. My point is that the person I responded to didn’t understand what he was talking about and didn’t know the region, the religion or the language and relied upon claims made by others, all of which he accused me of being guilty of.
I see that the “let’s use the promotion of atheism and/or nice white people’s religion as an excuse to see all Muslims as subhuman” folks have started to arrive on cue.
As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf.
Let’s say you choose to count the secular Ba’athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist — which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we’ve propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams — and thus count all the people he’s killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was “gassing his own people”, i.e. the Iraqi Kurds). Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power (and there are indications that HRW inflated this figure). Meanwhile, over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush’s invading and occupying Iraq.
Hell, and I’m being nice here: I’m not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin’s (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates.
johannessays
> If you really think that the Islamic world
> has been worse than the West in the last hundred
> years then you should check out the history of
> Europe. I mean, how many dead from in Europe and
> from European Ideologies in the last hundred years?
What later became Islamism was created as a tool of German imperialism and its Ottoman ally in WWI, so it was a product of European Ideology. To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European right-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.German nihilist thinkers were influencing French monarchist and catholic ones, and those were influencing the likes of Qutb. If anything, Islamism is the by-product and the heir of Europe’s bloody history.
> Shit, the death toll from Western interventions in the
> last twenty years is easily two orders of magnitude
> larger than the actions of Islamists.
Looking at the civil wars in Sudan, Algeria and Somalia alone, not to speak of the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents, and Afghans killed by the Taliban, I doubt this.
Johannes: The Iraqi insurgents wouldn’t be killing people if not for Bush’s invading and occupying their country. Remember root causes.
Also, as we’ve seen in the immediate and lasting 90% drop in violence at Basra once the Brits pulled out in September, the occupying forces are catalysts for much if not most of the violence in Iraq.
As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf — and he’s only one of the West’s legion of non-Muslim bad boys.
For example:
Let’s say you choose to count the secular Ba’athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist — which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we’ve propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams — and thus count all the people he’s killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was “gassing his own people”, i.e. the Iraqi Kurds). Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power (and there are indications that HRW inflated this figure). Meanwhile, over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush’s invading and occupying Iraq.
I’m actually being nice to The (Non-Islamic) West here: I’m not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin’s (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates (which to be fair are also in question).
As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf — and he’s only one of the West’s legion of non-Muslim bad boys.
For example:
Let’s say you choose to count the secular Ba’athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist — which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we’ve propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams — and thus count all the people he’s killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was “gassing his own people”, i.e. the Iraqi Kurds).
I’m actually being nice to The (Non-Islamic) West here: I’m not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin’s (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates.
johannessays
Phoenix Woman,
coathangrrr was speaking of the actions of Islamists, not of their root causes.
If the presence of foreign troops is a catalyst for violence or not is a difficult question to answer. Western Europe was occupied by US, Canadian and British troops for decades in the post-WWII era without being particulary violent during this time, Venezuela and post-Apartheid South Africa have very high levels of violence without a foreign occupation.
To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European right-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.
It is true, and really has been true for a long, long time that Islamic and European thought have been tied together. But to say that they aren’t clearly distinct is clearly wrong. Fascism is way different than totalitarian Islamic philosophies and to say different is dishonest.
Looking at the civil wars in Sudan, Algeria and Somalia alone, not to speak of the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents, and Afghans killed by the Taliban, I doubt this.
And the death toll from U.S. sanctions on Iraq was around 500k. Add that to the attacks in and on the Balkans, the U.S. attacks on Iraqis, NATO attacks on Afghans and various other “interventions” by U.S. and European powers and you have a huge death toll. To be fair, one of the reasons the Europeans and Americans have such a lead is because they have much more efficient weapons, so it is a lot easier for them, they just have to press some buttons to kill people while the Islamists have to do it in person.
Brian Mackersays
“To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European left-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.”
I corrected that part for you. You see, Hitler was a leftist. Follow the link if you wish to understand the actual intellectual history behind his National Socialism. He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time. Something conveniently forgotten by the left.
Phoenix Woman your one million dead is a fabrication. The Lancet study is a joke. I also find your whole line of argument pointless. So what, the philosophy of Islam has only resulted in around 60 million deaths in India and the Armenians and the Muslim slave trade, etc. vs. the 100 million for the Communists and the 14 million of the National Socialists, or X million of the Christians.
I’ve read the Qur’an and I find the religion to be violent, intolerant, unproportionate, and false. Even the supposedly tolerant portions are disconcerting in their ambiguity, vagueness, and scarcity.
I corrected that part for you. You see, Hitler was a leftist.
Of course he was, and Stalin was a rightist. You rock on with your rewriting history.
He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time. Something conveniently forgotten by the left.
Yes, because Marx, Engels and Hitler were around at the same time.
It seems that the right wing trolls are out in force today.
Colugosays
Brian Macker: “You see, Hitler was a leftist. Follow the link if you wish to understand the actual intellectual history behind his National Socialism. He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time.”
While Hitler and the Nazi elite certainly regarded themselves as socialists, they were not leftists. While the early party had a prominent left wing dominated by the Strasser brothers, much of the radically socialist policy positions and tendencies within the party were discarded by Hitler. (The larger interwar German fascist/radical nationalist scene was even more diverse, with “national bolsheviks” and volkish socialists.) In practice, Nazism was a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, but above all a plunder state rewarding supporters from robbed Jews and war booty. A stronger case can be made for the left wing nature of early Italian fascism with its Sorelian national syndicalist roots, but really only from 1919-22 (or 1915 if you want to trace it to the Milan fascio). Fascists generally claimed to be “neither right nor left” or “third positionists.” In any case, I don’t recommend Jon Jay Ray overly simplistic analyses of the origins and ideology of fascism; instead, I would suggest Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, and Zeev Sternhell.
If Bush and crew had tried to wrap up better in Afghanistan just before the Iraq II invasion, we could likely have beaten down Al-Qaeda more effectively and would be having less trouble from AQ and Taliban in Afghanistan and Waziristan in Pakistan. Sure, we would have to deal with Saddam eventually, but we could have waited for that and mopped up better in our first theater. Really, don’t start one job unless either you have to, or you’ve finished the first one. But Bin Ladin got away and AQ had the strength to murder Bhutto.
Tulsesays
If Bush and crew had tried to wrap up better in Afghanistan just before the Iraq II invasion, we could likely have beaten down Al-Qaeda more effectively and would be having less trouble from AQ and Taliban in Afghanistan and Waziristan in Pakistan.
Excellent point.
Sure, we would have to deal with Saddam eventually
Why? What was Saddam doing that, say, Qaddafi hadn’t done earlier? What threat was Saddam to the US?
truth machinesays
the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents
Use of the term “insurgents” is a habit of the U.S. media; in much of the rest of the world they are called “the resistance” to the U.S. invasion. And Iraqis killing Iraqis is sectarian violence — the term “insurgents” doesn’t apply. Look it up: “a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government; especially : a rebel not recognized as a belligerent”
truth machinesays
Phoenix Woman your one million dead is a fabrication.
So is global warming according to this troll.
Science Goddesssays
I find it unfortunate that, the day before Bhutto’s assasination, Mike Huckabee (our would-be Pastor in Chief) joked about killing Iowans who didn’t caucus for him. He was out murdering pheasant in an attempt to woo the NRA. And, yes, woo is the correct term here.
SG
johannessays
> Fascism is way different than totalitarian
> Islamic philosophies and to say different is dishonest.
Coathangrrr,
this is why I said right-wing, not fascist. Integrist and reactionary thought predates true fascism, and will probably survive it.
> And the death toll from U.S. sanctions on Iraq was around 500k.
This was an UN Embargo, not an U.S. one. As not all nations in the UN – or even in the security council – are ‘western’ (however you define ‘western’ – China and Russia will probably not fit) it hardly fits the definition of ‘western intervention’.
This said, a nation doesn’t need to do trade with the U.S. to keep its citizens reasonably supplied with food and medicine. Cuba, Yugoslavia and South Africa have survived years of economic sanctions and embargoes without much loss of human life.
> To be fair, one of the reasons the Europeans and
> Americans have such a lead is because they have
> much more efficient weapons, so it is a lot easier
> for them, they just have to press some buttons to
> kill people while the Islamists have to do it in person.
If you want to kill people in near genocidal numbers, Kalashnikovs, IED charges, RPGs and even the right combination of Machetes and drugs defeat high-tech weapons anytime.
> You see, Hitler was a leftist.
Brian Macker,
just see what Colugo has said, I have very little to add.
> compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West
> over the last hundred years
Phoenix woman,
you are right over the last hundred years, the last twenty years are another matter.
> as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle
> Eastern dictators we’ve propped up,
Pro-soviet tiersmondist dictatorships like baathist Iraq and Syria were hardly propped up by the west in the cold war years.
> Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known,
> those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the
> quarter-century he was in power
Hardly credible, if you remember the war with Iran, with was started by Iraq and fits the definition of muslim on muslim violence pretty well.
> Use of the term “insurgents” is a habit of the
> U.S. media; in much of the rest of the world they
> are called “the resistance” to the U.S. invasion.
truth machine,
it took the (anti)German left a long time to convince the German media to call those Iraqis who mostly kill other Iraqis “insurgents”, “militias” or “irregulars” rather than “the resistance”. I think the use of more neutral terms rather than one that glorifies mass killings is a progress.
Brian Mackersays
“Jon Jay Ray overly simplistic analysis of the origins and ideology of fascism”
Guess you didn’t read the article if you think it’s simplistic.
I find it laughable that leftists try to smear other groups with the behavior of their members in the past but totally whitewash their own history. It’s the old “no true Scotsman” fallacy writ large.
All the metrics that leftists try to use to distinguish Hitler from their own ideological roots just don’t work. Sure leftist are no longer racists but back in Hitlers day it was the left that was calling for eugenics and were total anti-Semites. Talk on finding a solution to the Jewish problem started long before Hitler. You need only read the quote from Lenin and Marx at the beginning of Rays article to see that their wasn’t much difference in their rhetoric than Hitler.
This isn’t revisionism either. There were writers on the right like Hayek who recognized the true nature of Hitlers and Stalins systems long before the left caught on. In fact the left continued it’s support of Stalin for many decades after WWII.
There really wasn’t anything really unique about Hilters regime from many other socialist movements. For instance the left tries to claim that Hitler was different because he abolished trade unions. But many other socialists and communists leaders did the same thing when they came into power. I know Stalin, Mao, Castro all abolished trade unions and were even further to the left in being communists (a branch of socialism).
Besides not all trade unions were or are pro-socialist. There is nothing about free trade unions that is anti-capitalist. In other words capitalism doesn’t require or even demand the destruction of trade unions. On the other hand communism and any form of socialism where the State takes control of business (even if ownership is nominally in the name of “businessmen”) would tend to make trade unions redundant. After all the State already claims to be representative of workers.
If you think that because Nazism left nominal ownership in the hands of businessmen he doesn’t qualify as a socialist then how the hell can you classify European Social Democrats as on the left? Shouldn’t they be considered even further on the right since not only do they allow businessmen to retain ownership in the sense of getting profits but also allow them to actually control their businesses. The Nazis like the Communists did not allow true ownership in that the State decided what was to be produced and in what quantities.
You can use racism as a metric for classifying Nazis as being on the right because in that historical period it was the left that was the most racist and was most fervent in pushing eugenics and “scientific” solutions to race problems.
You also cannot use nationalism as a metric for distinguishing Nazism from other socialist movements. Most of those were nationalist also.
There really wasn’t any “about face” by Hitler that the leftists claimed happened. He pretty much delivered what he said he would. Socialism isn’t about individual rights like Capitalism is. If it comes down to in the individuals desires for their own lives must take the back seat to any needs of the people as embodied in the state.
Only to a Communist would Hitler look like he was to the right. In fact if you draw a graph of the death toll during the twentieth century you will see that the far left, the Communists, murdered the most, with the more moderate economic leftists, the Fascists and Nazis coming in a close second. Of course there were all those minor states of Africa, the Middle East, and India that all toyed with socialism and also suffered both economically and from dictators.
Colugosays
Brian Macker: I am quite familiar with the writings of Jon Jay Ray on fascism and other topics. I am also quite unimpressed with his commentary on race and IQ.
Did you know that Jon Jay Ray maintains a site in which he posts the writings of scientific racist Chris Brand? http://gfactor.blogspot.com/
Above all, I think you are confused by the fact that the right/conservatism in the United States is very closely associated with pro-capitalism / free market / economic individualism – that is, classical liberalism. But conservatism/the right is not necessarily associated with pro-market politics in Europe, especially historically. Hayek understood that. In other words, capitalism vs socialism (and social welfarism as in the Christian Social Party) is not nearly as much of a left-right litmus test there as it is here.
I agree, in terms of economic policy the Nazis were at least as “socialist” as 20th century Social Democrats. That doesn’t make the Nazis leftists. And Chile under Pinochet was at least as capitalistic as the United States. Does that fact prove that capitalism/”the right” is evil? By your logic, yes.
“Left” and “right” is also a matter of affiliation and self-identification. There is no question that Fascists and communists saw each other as revolutionary rivals, recognized their common opposition to bourgeois democratic politics, and were capable of occasional opportunistic cooperation within the context of lethal enmity. (I could cite many examples; see Karl Radek’s Schlageter line.)
Fascism was a syncretizing and regionally heterogeneous movement, with elements of organic nationalism, revolutionary syndicalism/socialism, Nietzsche, vitalism, Theosophy, and Futurism. And it evolved very quickly, from anti-clerical and anti-capitalist to forging alliances with the churches and big business.
As for eugenics and scientific racism, those were widely accepted across the political spectrum from the late 19th c to WWII; the opponents of these likewise included a variety of political views. I didn’t argue that Nazi racism disqualified them from being leftists. (The tight association of the left with hardline environmentalist determinism didn’t crystalize until the 30s with the rise of Lysenkoism, and even then the Soviets had their own biodeterminist peculiarities, like preserving the brains of Lenin and Stalin to determine the source of their alleged genius.)
this is why I said right-wing, not fascist. Integrist and reactionary thought predates true fascism, and will probably survive it.
I am quite familiar with both and I am still sure that this is not the case. There might have been some small amount of
influence upon Islamic philosophers but it wasn’t much. A lot of the current pan-Islamism came from al-Afghani, who was likely more influenced by leftists than rightists.
This was an UN Embargo, not an U.S. one.
The U.S. was the one who pushed for it and the one who physically enforced it. The U.N. resolution was just a pretty wrapping on it. Clinton and Bush the Elder didn’t care about the Iraqis any more than Bush does, mainly because it has never been politically useful to do so, and they both have wrought destruction upon them time and time again.
If you want to kill people in near genocidal numbers, Kalashnikovs, IED charges, RPGs and even the right combination of Machetes and drugs defeat high-tech weapons anytime.
That’s debatable. It’s easy to destroy a country’s infrastructure, Effects Based Operations they call it, that is required to support modern population sizes. Then the people just kind of die on their own from disease and o medical care and lack of food distribution. Certainly not the same as genocides in places like Rwanda, but definitely able to post death tolls in the same range.
Colugosays
Modern militant Islam has been influenced by a variety of sources. Frantz Fanon was one. Sayyid Qutb cited Alexis Carrel (French fascist scientist); Haj Amin al-Husseini, of course, was close ally of Hitler.
truth machinesays
it took the (anti)German left a long time to convince the German media to call those Iraqis who mostly kill other Iraqis “insurgents”, “militias” or “irregulars” rather than “the resistance”. I think the use of more neutral terms rather than one that glorifies mass killings is a progress.
So you deny there was an invasion and resistance to it? I made a distinction: “Iraqis killing Iraqis is sectarian violence — the term ‘insurgents’ doesn’t apply”. If you would read with your thinking cap on, you would grasp that I implied “the resistance” doesn’t apply to Iraqis killing Iraqis either.
“militias” or “irregulars” is fine, but “insurgent” has a meaning, which I provided for you, that doesn’t apply.
Brian Mackersays
“Brian Macker: I am quite familiar with the writings of Jon Jay Ray on fascism and other topics. I am also quite unimpressed with his commentary on race and IQ.”
Exactly which commentary. I didn’t see any by him at that site. Seemed more like a blog news feed run by Chris Brand.
“Did you know that Jon Jay Ray maintains a site in which he posts the writings of scientific racist Chris Brand?”
No, I was not aware of that. Although I didn’t see anything at your link that was particularly racist.
I did look up some other sites comments on Brand and found some of his ideas purported ideas humorous. At least the ideas others were claiming he had. Like the idea that welfare moms should be encouraged to sleep around with more intelligent men to improve the gene pool. Like that’s going to happen. Then again, I find some of P Z Myers writings on politics humorous and that doesn’t mean that I’m going to become a creationist.
I linked the Ray because he did a good job of explaining why the Nazis were leftists. I don’t find the fact that Europe uses different labels for right and left at all confusing. I don’t use their terminology. Using standard US terminology Hitler was both a socialist and a leftist.
“I agree, in terms of economic policy the Nazis were at least as “socialist” as 20th century Social Democrats.
Now was that so hard. So basically you are saying that Ray is right on this issue.
That doesn’t make the Nazis leftists.
Well yes it does. It doesn’t make them Social Democrats but it certainly makes them leftists.
And Chile under Pinochet was at least as capitalistic as the United States.
Well certainly Pinochet was on “the right”. See that’s not hard to admit.
Does that fact prove that capitalism/”the right” is evil? By your logic, yes.”
You don’t understand my thought processes. I was merely refuting a leftist trying to tar “the right” with something that clearly came from “the left”, ie. socialism. I wasn’t trying to prove that social democrats are “evil” due to something another group did. The fact is however that the economic theories of the left have resulted in great suffering and evil.
Part of the whole left/right confusion comes from the lefts tendency to use techniques designed to confuse issues, like calling themselves “liberals” when in fact they are against classical liberal ideas.
Pinochet’s use of capitalism really has nothing to do with why he was evil, whereas, Hitlers use of socialism had everything to do with why he was evil. In fact the Social Democrats use capitalism, too. Which is good. To the extent they do use socialism that is bad. The same goes for the US. In fact they are both mixed economies.
Socialism has had a unnerving tendency to blame scapegoat groups for failed economic policies and then to resort to progroms. The whole reason the world was in such bad economic shape preceding WWII was a series of poor economic decisions that were quite illiberal in nature and most were based on socialist theory.
Well yes it does. It doesn’t make them Social Democrats but it certainly makes them leftists.
Economic issues are not, contrary to the belief of some, the sole determinant of whether someone is a leftist or a rightist.
Part of the whole left/right confusion comes from the lefts tendency to use techniques designed to confuse issues, like calling themselves “liberals” when in fact they are against classical liberal ideas.
Yeah, the right wing in the U.S. never used liberal as a derogatory term at all.
Pinochet’s use of capitalism really has nothing to do with why he was evil, whereas, Hitlers use of socialism had everything to do with why he was evil.
Yeah, it wasn’t his virulent nationalism and the fact that he wanted to wipe out Jews, Slavs, homosexuals and various other groups of undesirables, it was the socialism.
Socialism has had a unnerving tendency to blame scapegoat groups for failed economic policies and then to resort to progroms.
That’s Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist Communism, not socialism. You seem particularly uneducated in the use of your terms for someone who wants to make all these bold proclamations about the inherent evil of leftists.
Colugosays
Jon Jay Ray was on the panel of writers of ultra-racist website MajorityRights.com, a sewer of white nationalist thought, until he resigned in September 2006 due to his incompatibility with the site’s strong antisemitic element. Among the few political parties that MajorityRights chooses to link to are Vlaams Belang, the British National Party, and National Front. Go to MajorityRights and do some searches (try “Hitler,” “holocaust,” and “eugenics”), or just check out recent discussion topics. JJR willingly associated with this white nationalist group until its antisemitism became too much for him. (Incidentally, racist Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has no problem with Jews, creating tension with antisemitic American Renaissance supporters.)
Here is one of Jon Jay Ray’s postings at his blog Political Correctness Watch (9/11/05), which he also posted at MajorityRights:
“Some interesting new DNA research … traces changes in human brain evolution to quite recent times. Certain genes that regulate brain size appear to have become common at just about the same time when human social evolution made great advances — the beginning of civilization for instance. So we now in fact have a genetic explanation for when civilization began. But instead of welcoming such exciting new information, lots of people are playing down the results. Why? One reason is that the genetic pattern that seems to be associated with the rise of civilization is much less common among blacks. I leave it to readers to connect the rest of the dots.”
Incidentally, Bruce Lahn’s hypothesis on ASPM, microcephalin, races, and civilization was falsified; there is no link with variants in these genes to intelligence.
Brian Macker: “I don’t find the fact that Europe uses different labels for right and left at all confusing. I don’t use their terminology.”
In other words, you choose not to use the political terminology of 20th century Europe – that is, the historical and regional context of National Socialism. In addition, today’s neofascists are allied with either the self-professed right (see Vlaams Belang and other contemporary Eurofascist parties) or so-called third positionists.
Scapegoating of certain groups – and more specifically, antisemitism – is not a uniquely left wing problem, but a problem of ideological extremism. There are indeed antisemitic tendencies within revolutionary socialism. Several leftist intellectuals have commented on and lamented this history. Scapegoating Jews is also a common feature of populism, productivism, and conspiracy theories, whether these are associated with the left or the right.
Let me leave you with some recommended reading.
Coogan, Kevin. 2000. Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.
Griffin, Roger. 2007. Modernism and Fascism.
Lee, Martin. 1997. The Beast Reawakens.
Payne, Stanley. 1996. A History of Fascism 1914-1945.
Colugosays
Let me add specify that by the non-relationship of ASPM and microcephalin with intelligence I am referring to normal variants with differential frequencies in Asia, Europe, and Africa – not variants associated with pathological syndromes. Lahn’s theory was about the normal variants with different continental frequencies.
More wit and wisdom of Dr. John Joseph Ray (AKA Jon Jay Ray, John Ray, JJR, JR).
astuteblogger.blogspot.com
12/25/07:
“Because the lesser ability of blacks is not accepted in education circles, every failure of blacks to do well at educational tasks is always attributed to “the system” or “racism”… I could go on to multiply examples of how refusals to cope with black realities degrade life for everybody but I think I have said enough to make my point clear.”
12/5/07:
“Blacks as a group in disparate cultural environments worldwide are prone to high-violence, high-criminality, and low achieving (as group) – just as they are as a group in America; culture alone cannot explain this.”
There is an intensively linked comment which will immediately follow this one, but will not be visible unless and until it is approved (probably tomorrow). I suggest you bookmark the date link on this one and come back to it later.
Sorry about the delay in responding. I’ve been dealing with the stomach flu and a few other things, which have taken big chunks out of my effectiveness.
[9.123] O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).
The translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, as published by Call to Islaam:
123. O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him).
O ye who believe! fight the unbelievers who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you: and know that Allah is with those who fear Him.
Which one of these is the “kinder, gentler Quran” read and followed by devotees of the ReligionOfPeace™?
the fact of the matter is that there are exceedingly few groups, if any, that think the Quran impels them to go and spread Islam by force to non-Islamic areas.
That would be all well and good… if other Muslims condemned such actions and attitudes. I see lots of news of Muslims using the words “heretic” against those they consider to have pressed their interpretations too far. Who has declared Osama bin Laden apostate for his interpretation?
And generally Salafist groups endorse interpretations which mave been translated, not translations, of the Quran that are in line with their political aims. But most of all, those groups are a minuscule part of the Islamic world, even in places that the western media makes out to be packed with radical militants.
compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf.
The estimated death toll from the Moghul conquest of India is 40 million minimum, perhaps as much as 70 million. If Pakistan uses the nukes we carelessly let it build, that number could double in a week or so.
And quoth Johannes, quite ahistorically:
What later became Islamism was created as a tool of German imperialism and its Ottoman ally in WWI, so it was a product of European Ideology.
I would love to see you explain how jihad imperialism pushing from Arabia across the Magreb to the west and to Indonesia in the east is a product of a nation which did not even exist until centuries later.
Brian Mackersays
Yeah, and when all is said and done Hitler was still a socialist.
johannessays
> So you deny there was an invasion and resistance to it?
You have already given the answer: neither ‘resistance’ nor ‘insurgents’ apply for iraqi on iraqi violence. I know that you have made the difference, I was speaking of the cultural industry in general and the German media in peculiar, wich has only started making this difference during the last few months.
johannessays
> A lot of the current pan-Islamism came from
> al-Afghani, who was likely more influenced
> by leftists than rightists.
Most modern Islamists would loath a 19th-century masonic liberal like al-Afghani.
> It’s easy to destroy a country’s infrastructure,
> Effects Based Operations they call it, that is
> required to support modern population sizes.
It’s quite easy to drum together a bunch of people with spades to dig a latrine or repair a damaged road if the local authorities have the will to do so. It is, however, impossible to resurrect a person killed by a gunshot or a RPG blast.
Which one of these is the “kinder, gentler Quran” read and followed by devotees of the ReligionOfPeace™?
None of them, they read the Arabic.
That would be all well and good… if other Muslims condemned such actions and attitudes. I see lots of news of Muslims using the words “heretic” against those they consider to have pressed their interpretations too far. Who has declared Osama bin Laden apostate for his interpretation?
Heretic and apostate are two different things and if you haven’t found anyone condemning Osama you haven’t been looking.
Osama bin Laden has a 46% approval rating in Pakistan. The “radicals” appear to be the 9% who approve of Bush.
While he may have generally vile methods and ideology Osama has never said that he wants to spread Islam to the rest of the world. Moreover, in practical terms an approval rating doesn’t mean anything at all.
The estimated death toll from the Moghul conquest of India is 40 million minimum, perhaps as much as 70 million.
The Moghul invasion of India was how many years ago? Certainly more than a hundred years ago. And it took place over the course of hundreds of years as well.
Most modern Islamists would loath a 19th-century masonic liberal like al-Afghani.
I agree, but I don’t think that rules out him having influenced the resurgence of pan-Islamism.
It’s quite easy to drum together a bunch of people with spades to dig a latrine or repair a damaged road if the local authorities have the will to do so. It is, however, impossible to resurrect a person killed by a gunshot or a RPG blast.
Yeah, but it isn’t latrines or roads that are the infrastructure I’m talking about. It is water treatment plants and hospitals and power plants, none of which can be rebuilt as simply as latrines and roads.
Colugosays
coathangrrr: “Osama has never said that he wants to spread Islam to the rest of the world.”
Short-term and long-term goals should be distinguished. From short to long term the goals of al-Qaeda are: removal of US presence in the Middle East, replacement of apostate/secular Muslim rulers with pious Islamists, restoration of the historical Caliphate (which is why bin Laden whines about Spain and East Timor), the whole world under Islam.
Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s military commander currently under house arrest in Iran has outlined the seven phase strategy of al-Qaeda.
“The Sixth Phase: … (A) period of “total confrontation.” As soon as the caliphate has been declared the “Islamic army” it will instigate the “fight between the believers and the non-believers” which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.
The Seventh Phase: This final stage is described as “definitive victory.” Hussein writes that in the terrorists’ eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the “one-and-a-half billion Muslims,” the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed.”
A preposterous pipe dream? Sure. Especially since the last phase is scheduled for only 12 years from now. But it is still a mobilizing ultimate goal, no matter how grandiose. The more proximate goals of pushing out US presence and toppling apostate rulers are surely more pertinent as a recruiting tool.
The ultimate goal of global sharia is not exclusive to al-Qaeda. It is shared by militant Islamist organizations, no matter what their proximate objectives (Israel, Iraq, Kashmir, Egypt etc.) are. It can be seen in militant Islamist visual propaganda: the flag of the Caliphate rising from the White House or even the entire globe. In the history of religio-ideological movements, there is nothing unique about an ultimate goal of global hegemony.
Brian Mackersays
So what is important for my response to the person claiming hitler came from the right is precisely the fact that Hitler was truly a socialist. Racism is certainly not a central feature of left but governmental power to shape society towards collective goals is. So once one accepts both socialism and the inherent defect in some group, whether it be genetic or moral, then it becomes the business of the state to control, punish, or eliminate that group.
Finally I will add that everyone knows that socialism and communism are of the left. So the original posters claims that Hitler came from the right are ridiculous.
This is a common error made by the left. They seem to remember the skeletons in everyone elses closets but not their own. They ignore the inherent danger of the belief in collective power and guilt. Thus they come up with what are in fact discriminatory policies and politics like affirmative action, and “whiteness studies” even when they are fervently trying to be non-racist.
Whiteness studies is essentially racism against whites, in that it brands people of light skin as being morally inferior to those of a darker complexion. Strangely it also holds that race doesn’t exist. In this it is like a religious ideology, believing contradictory facts when it suits them. Again it forgets the legacy of slavery and racism throughout the entire non-European world.
Slavery wasn’t invented in Europe, and in fact during the period of slavery millions of Europeans were being enslaved and shipped to the dark skinned Muslim world, slavery was rampant through out the world long before European expansion. So this was not a European invention. Note also that the Muslim world invaded and colonized Europe long before Europe returned the favor.
Even the racist and colonial British were subjected to thousands of years of invasion by foreigners such as the Romans and slave raids by the Muslims. They didn’t just one day decide to start hostilities with a peaceful world.
Leftists forget facts like: The Democrat party was founded by Andrew Jackson, a man who massacred Indians. The Democrat president Truman dropped the atom bomb, twice. The Democrats drummed out all their anti-slavery members during the Civil War, and the Republicans were the ones who freed the slaves. This at a time when libertarians like Lysander Spooner were abolitionists.
When civil rights were on the table proportionately more Republicans than Democrats voted for the civil rights act. Eighty percent of Republicans were in favor and only sixty percent of Democrats.
They want to brand other groups they disfavor with the sins of their past but never consider the sins of their own past. They are in short hypocrites.
The left was heavily involved in eugenics (forced NOT voluntary eugenics) so Hitler was no aberration. Some of the latest examples of eugenics programs come from the darling of the socialists, Sweden, which was practicing this up until 1975. Norway, France, Denmark all had their own programs.
The world has always be dark and ugly. What one should look at carefully is the ideologies that you do support. If you are a Marxist or Socialist then you in fact support ideologies that justify unjust initiation of trespass against others. You are in fact in bed with what are unethical ideas.
A preposterous pipe dream? Sure. Especially since the last phase is scheduled for only 12 years from now. But it is still a mobilizing ultimate goal, no matter how grandiose. The more proximate goals of pushing out US presence and toppling apostate rulers are surely more pertinent as a recruiting tool.
The article linked says nothing at all about spreading beyond the current Islamic world. The goal is to unite Muslims under a caliphate and expel foreign influence in the caliphate.
The ultimate goal of global sharia is not exclusive to al-Qaeda. It is shared by militant Islamist organizations, no matter what their proximate objectives (Israel, Iraq, Kashmir, Egypt etc.) are
Bald assertion which are repeated again and again and again do not a fact make. I would imagine that many Muslims think, like people of most religions and ideologies, that the world would be better if everyone agreed with them, but this does not mean they endorse taking over the rest of the world by violence. I imagine that Osama might harbor dreams of everyone in the world converting to Islam, but his goal is a unified caliphate that he thinks will be the preeminent power in the world, it is not to take over the world. Saying otherwise is simply wrong.
Whiteness studies is essentially racism against whites, in that it brands people of light skin as being morally inferior to those of a darker complexion. Strangely it also holds that race doesn’t exist. In this it is like a religious ideology, believing contradictory facts when it suits them. Again it forgets the legacy of slavery and racism throughout the entire non-European world.
You fail it.
Steve_Csays
Yeah… Republicans are such saints. What a tool.
So are you really claiming that Democrats are linked the the German Fascist movement?
What a fucking tool.
Colugosays
coathangrrr: “I would imagine that many Muslims think, like people of most religions and ideologies, that the world would be better if everyone agreed with them, but this does not mean they endorse taking over the rest of the world by violence.”
If by “many Muslims” you mean “most Muslims,” of course that is correct. Radical Islamists, however, do ultimately seek to establish global Islamic domination through force and threat. As I said, this is not a proximate goal; those are much more specific and localized.
Lawrence Wright, ‘The Master Plan,’ New Yorker, 9/11/06:
“By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.””
“Hizb-ut-Tahir, which is widespread in Central Asia, has told Forum 18 that it aims to introduce a worldwide Caliphate and ban all faiths apart from Islam, Judaism and Christianity, all religious practice being regulated by Sharia law.”
“The Islamic Movement, which is once again leading the “defend Al-Aqsa” campaign, initiated the construction of an underground mosque in the Solomon’s Stables area about 10 years ago. Recently the movement declared the establishment of a global caliphate, based – where else? – in Jerusalem.”
I could cite many more such statements, including those by Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, two of the founders of modern radical Islamism.
Colugosays
Brian Macker: “So what is important for my response to the person claiming hitler came from the right is precisely the fact that Hitler was truly a socialist.”
I never said that Hitler was not a socialist. I said that he was not a leftist. And I think we agree that welfare capitalism, European social democracy, and German National Socialism are all mixed economies. (I trust that you are not one of those who believes that FDR – one of America’s greatest presidents – was a nationalist and socialist and therefore a “fascist.” Because such people are crackpots.)
“then it becomes the business of the state to control, punish, or eliminate that group.”
RJ Rummel estimates that European colonial democide killed 50 million people. So subjugation and eliminationism in the modern world is not just a problem of socialism and Islam.
“So the original posters claims that Hitler came from the right are ridiculous.”
As I said before, fascists tend to identify themselves as “neither right nor left.” Fascism is a highly syncretic, eclectic, and mutable ideology. In addition, fascists have long been allied with radical rightists. There is no question that many fascists, especially in the case of the French and Italian movements, came from the left. They did not remain there. Many neoconservatives came from the left. Is neoconservatism a leftist movement?
There is a large literature by legitimate scholars on similarities and differences between Leninists and fascists in both theory and practice. But your argument is more simplistically sweeping than that. As someone with a longtime interest in the study of totalitarianism and genocide, I’m a bit embarrassed for you.
“Strangely it also holds that race doesn’t exist.”
I’m curious: Do you endorse JJR’s views on race?
“The Democrat president Truman dropped the atom bomb, twice.”
And he was right to do so.
“the Republicans were the ones who freed the slaves … proportionately more Republicans than Democrats voted for the civil rights act.”
That was before the GOP was ideologically compromised by the influx of Dixiecrats.
“the latest examples of eugenics programs come from the darling of the socialists, Sweden, which was practicing this up until 1975. Norway, France, Denmark all had their own programs.”
Scandinavia and France do have something of an undeserved halo, at least for some.
“You are in fact in bed with what are unethical ideas.”
Using your defective reasoning, shall I burden you with the sins of Gilded Age robber barons, slave-trading American merchants, and the exterminators of the Yahi Indians? Why not?
johannessays
I would love to see you explain how jihad imperialism pushing from Arabia across the Magreb to the west and to Indonesia in the east is a product of a nation which did not even exist until centuries later.
#85,
I was spaking of modern Islamism, not Islam in general or the conquests of the 7th or 8th century in peculiar.
Conquest in the dark ages meant local warlords switched their allegiance from one remote empire to another, this has very little to do with modern politics.
I don’t blame modern protestantism for the deeds of the Taiping, either, and that was in the 19th century, not the 7th.
BTW, Indonesia was never conquered by Arabs or other muslim armies, it was converted by merchants.
Which one of these is the “kinder, gentler Quran” read and followed by devotees of the ReligionOfPeace™?
None of them, they read the Arabic.
Including the Pakistanis and others who neither read nor speak Arabic, but are jihadis nonetheless? Whose interpretation of scripture certainly can go through people who do read the Arabic?
If we are talking about ObL and his Saudi friends, you implied that their interpretation of (the Arabic) 9:123 was an incorrect one. I showed you 3 different translations, which differ mostly in their choice of idiom. None are at all friendly to unbelievers. Faulty translations and interpretations are, as I’ve shown above, a matter of life and death to Muslims. So how do you justify your claim that the believers who take 9:123 as a commandment to violence are being unfaithful to the scripture?
Of course, if you have no answer, you have to ask why anyone should view Muslims as even safe to be around. There’s an unsettling amount of stuff going on where e.g. owners of restaurant chains think their highest charitable calling is to finance Hamas.
if you haven’t found anyone condemning Osama you haven’t been looking.
I’m looking for Muslim authorities declaring takfir on him (contrast Salman Rushdie). Condemning him because his tactics attract too much attention is praising with faint damns. After all, if he’s wrong because this time should be a hudna rather than all-out jihad, it only means that the speaker shares his goals but not his tactics.
People like the ex-Kuwaiti information minister Dr. Sa’d Bin Tefla have indeed called the Muslim world to account for failing to condemn ObL. But has this shamed Muslims into doing anything about it?
Osama has never said that he wants to spread Islam to the rest of the world.
It’s implicit in 34:28.
The Moghul invasion of India was how many years ago? Certainly more than a hundred years ago.
And as a fraction of the population of the world, it was far bloodier than both of the 20th-century World Wars put together.
Worse, the aggressive force behind it still exists… and you’re making excuses for it.
Including the Pakistanis and others who neither read nor speak Arabic, but are jihadis nonetheless? Whose interpretation of scripture certainly can go through people who do read the Arabic?
I imagine that they do in fact read Arabic, despite the fact that they do not speak the language natively. Moreover, I don’t know Urdu or Pashtu or any of the other languages in the region well enough to make any commentary on the interpretations, and I am going to go out on a limb and say you don’t either.
If we are talking about ObL and his Saudi friends, you implied that their interpretation of (the Arabic) 9:123 was an incorrect one. I showed you 3 different translations, which differ mostly in their choice of idiom. None are at all friendly to unbelievers.
I did imply that, then retracted that claim and noted that they are interpretations, not translations. And you managed to not cite any translations that are out right contrary to your point like:”[9:123] O you who believe, you shall fight the disbelievers who attack you – let them find you stern – and know that GOD is with the righteous.” And the ones you quoted are not necessarily unfriendly to non-believers.
I’m looking for Muslim authorities declaring takfir on him (contrast Salman Rushdie).
Then you are an idiot. To declare him tafkir would mean that they say he doesn’t belief in Allah, which is obviously not the case. You want them to do some kind of excommunication ceremony that doesn’t exist in Islam.
It’s implicit in 34:28.
No, it isn’t. Not in the way that you mean it.
And as a fraction of the population of the world, it was far bloodier than both of the 20th-century World Wars put together.
Worse, the aggressive force behind it still exists… and you’re making excuses for it.
The Mongols are still around? You could have fooled me. If you are going to lay the atrocities committed by the Mongols at the feet of Islam then you are an idiot. They didn’t need Islam as an excuse to murder and destroy, they did that fine on their own.
johannessays
> The Mongols are still around? You could have fooled me.
> If you are going to lay the atrocities committed by the
> Mongols at the feet of Islam then you are an idiot.
> They didn’t need Islam as an excuse to murder and destroy,
> they did that fine on their own.
While the name ‘Moghul’ is obviously derived from ‘Mongol'(just like ‘Romanian’ is derived from ‘Roman’), and Babur claimed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan, the actual Moghul conquerors and rulers of northern India from the 16th century onward had very little in common with the Mongols of the 13th century. Babur himself was a Turcoman, as were most of his followers, although Pashtuns and what would be called Tajiks nowadays were also present in his army. The lingua franca of the Moghul elite was Persian, wich was also used in literature. The Moghuls were, of course, Muslim, the Mongols of the 13th century were shamanists, Buddhists or Nestorian Christians. Any similarity between those two very different entities simply reflects a common central Asian heritage.
Yes, the Mongols and the Moghuls were not the exact same group of people, but they were far closer to each other than either was to modern Islamist Radicals.
Colugosays
Brian Macker:
More information supporting my assertion that while the Nazis were socialists ((a) through their own declaration and self-conception, and b) through certain economic policies generally recognized as “socialist”) they were not leftists.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter VII (James Murphy translation):
“We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation,
our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings–if only in order to break them up–so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people.”
In Mein Kampf, Hitler mentions the left and leftists several times, clearly in the context that the Nazis are not among them.
Socialists? Yes, of a kind. While some rightists make a dubious case for the Nazis being left wing, some leftists deny that the Nazis were socialists of any kind. But there have been a bewildering variety of “socialisms” around the world since the 18th century.
Dagmar Herzog, New York Times, Review: Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 2/18/07:
“Citizens were sated with decent wages, generous overtime pay and innovative pension plans – that is, through the establishment of a complex, if absolutely amoral, welfare state.
Aly, in short, makes a serious and well–researched attempt to put the “socialism” back in National Socialism.”
But keep in mind that many of the Nazi elite also considered themselves Christian – a weird variant called Positive Christianity that rejected the Old Testament and Paul of Tarsus. (A minority of them were neo-pagans, but not Hitler himself.) Many of the Nazis elite were heterodox Christians, just like they were heterodox socialists. That fact in itself doesn’t prove that Christianity nor socialism are bad. Are the VW Bug and the Autobahn inherently evil?
I just saw this in the news. This won’t be good for stability in that region. Musharraf likely wasn’t responsible, but at the same time, he wasn’t doing anything to protect her, either.
How did humanity ever get to the point where suicide bombing became an “accepted” way of dealing with political strife?
Here in Thailand, Al Jazeera had the news first. The reporter was careful to mention that the Koran preaches equality between men and women, so if the assassination were related to gender, that would be a misinterpretation of scripture.
*sigh*
Here in Islamabad nothing’s happened as of yet, in terms of curfews, protests, etc. But In Karachi and Lahore, things are going crazy.
Before the obligatory “this is what happens under religious rule” comment pops up, it’s being floated around nearly everyone here in Pakistan that this was more a military-linked action than anyone else. Even if one didn’t like her – and trust me, she did quite a bit to further the influence/power of the fundamentalists – it has to be noted this is bad on so many levels.
a) the elections will most likely be cancelled or postponed, with a possible state of emergency returning.
b) an opposition leader was killed
c) She was a Bhutto, which is symbolic, especially in Sindh province.
More later.
ngong: I’m sorry, I just can’t even take that seriously. “The Koran preaches equality between men and women”? Yeah right! Just look at any fundamentalist Islamist country for refutation of that. Women who can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t walk around on their own, must be clad from head to toe in fabric … yeah, that’s equality.
Cyde Weys:
Aside from the “this was terrorism and should be condemned” statement from Musharraf, the timing and also the location (considered to be near the spot where her father was executed by Zia) amongst other things are placing things at his feet, by many over here.
Cyde Weys – remember your Orwell. Oppression works by distorting the language of freedom. Women in fundamentalist Islamic countries don’t have Equality; they have “equality.” The genders are equal – but some genders are more equal than others.
As for Bhutto’s death…shit.
The reporter was careful to mention that the Koran preaches equality between men and women
Which part was he quoting? This one?
“Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful, during the husband’s absence, because God has of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness you have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them: but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them: verily, God is High, Great!”
Pakistan is a mess and it’s going to go down the toilet eventually. It’s been swirling around for a long time – and I think our “foreign policy” of supporting a military dictator is going to come back to haunt us. Personally I squirm whenever politicians on C-span are careful to avoid admitting that Musharraf is clearly setting himself up as dictator-for-life. This could be Iran all over again.
Clyde…I agree with your take. It’s odd that the Al Jazeera guy would feel a need to lecture viewers on “gender equality in the Koran” as scenes of mayhem in the streets flash by.
The cynic in me says:
How much money do we give this country daily to help them kill the opposition leader and keep the military in power?
Brendan S, to answer your question, here’s something from http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/3453.htm (scroll down to ‘National Security’:
“The events of September 11, 2001, and Pakistan’s agreement to support the United States led to a waiver of the sanctions, and military assistance resumed to provide spare parts and equipment to enhance Pakistan’s capacity to police its western border with Afghanistan and address its legitimate security concerns. In 2003, President Bush announced that the United States would provide Pakistan with $3 billion in economic and military aid over 5 years. This assistance package commenced during FY 2005.”
And from IHT at http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/24/asia/24military.php:
“After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over how the money was spent, and that the strategy to improve the Pakistani military needs to be completely revamped.
In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.”
Pakistan has looked like the next Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran for a while. The whole country seemed to be held together with bubblegum and bailing wire.
Pakistan is also a nuclear power. Could we be seeing the first civil war fought with nukes?
the paranoiac in me is saying, how the heck are we supposed to pull out or disable that country’s nukes when it finally drops in the crapper? or will we just view with alarm as India bombs it to a soft green glow and quietly call that good enough?
Thanks for the update, adnan, stay safe.
A few of Nawaz Sharif’s supporters were killed in another incident, this really puts the whole Diebold election thing in perspective for me. Sure, our elections are sometimes shams but so far, except for Bobby Kennedy, no one has died. What a world…
It’s the effects that Pakistan’s fubarification will have on the east, and then the rest of the world that makes me worry. Not only might they have to contend with infighting and civil war (with nukes?), but how long before some western theocracy decides they’re just ripe to be classed under “muslimmy-type threat” and self-justifies another crusade . . . er, I mean war.
Am I correct in thinking that Pakistan’s main exports are textiles, rather than oil? That might protect them for a bit longer from our glorious leaders attentions, unless they suddenly need new drapes.
Also, respect and sympathy go out to Ms Bhutto and her family. Brave.
I wonder if Bush will pin this on al-Qaeda?
And, I wonder if he realizes that our own intelligence cites that the little splinter of al-Qaeda active in Pakistan is the same group our soldiers had pinned down in Afghanistan before being ordered to withdraw to embark on the folly in Iraq?
Man… I have a feeling things will get weird.
/mena/
Don’t forget Paul Wellstone.
Every day there’s a suicide bombing and the murderers think they’re going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.
What an amazing positive impact the Bush foreign policy has had on democracy in the region, in just a few short years….
Here’s hoping that the USA shows Pakistan and the world the proper way to do this:
Suicide bombs are extra-constitutional, to say the least.
wow, how attractive islam is!- gosh this makes me seeth with animosity toward religion in general- but anyone who says christianity today is as bad as islam is just wrong- islam has GOT TO GO!
It’s hard to see this as a religious event: they’re all Islamic. Isn’t this first and foremost an incident of political strife?
robotaholic was apparently in a coma 1969-1997. He’s apparently too stupid to understand the reference even if it was spelled out for him, so I won’t bother.
But here’s a hint, sport. Islam has about a billion adherents. It’s going nowhere.
And the people in Northern Ireland were “all Xian”. To be sure, that was also heavily political, but the religious aspects were important to the politics of the situation.
Al Qaeda and other reactionary Islamic groups were always opposed to Bhutto, partly because a female elected leader isn’t exactly part of the dream to restore 14th cent. Islamic mores to Pakistan, and to much of the rest of the world. She was “too liberal” for many of the Islamo-fascists as well. Furthermore, if one dies fighting for Allah, one achieves paradise.
So of course it’s politics, but it’s all politics in a part of the world that has never separated mosque and state. It would be hard to find much of national politics in Pakistan that isn’t at least somewhat religious, because civil law is so much based on Islamic law. But Bhutto has been more of an affront to reactionary religionists than most leaders in the Islamic world have been of late.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
From Spain the impression is that Al Qaeda is not the executioner this time.
Adnan #4 resumes very well the situation there.
Here’s some of the religious context surrounding Bhutto’s assassination:
http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/071227-benazir-bhutto
Regardless of who the culprits are, it’s an ugly religio-political situation.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7
Most victims of terror by Salafist and Shiite religious extremists are Muslims – because they belong to the wrong sect or ethnic group, or espouse political values or conduct cultural activities (e.g. teaching girls) antithetical to radical Islamist tenets. (Bombings of Shiite mosques in Pakistan, mass murder of Muslims in Darfur by Janjaweed, murders of Muslim teachers in southern Thailand, slaughter of Shia by Taliban.) That doesn’t mean that there is not a religious imperative behind these attacks. Which, in that context, is also ideological. Sayyid Qutb identified supposedly apostate Muslim rulers as a hindrance to global Islam. One theological innovation of Salafist extremism, justifying terror against co-religionists, their redefinition of non-Salafis as non-Muslim.
This does not mean that all Muslim-on-Muslim conflict is primarily driven by religion; much is not. For example, Bangladesh-Pakistan in the 1970s was national. But violence by Islamists is largely religiously motivated. (To understand this, first there must be a distinction made between the larger faith of Islam and, within that, the minority religio-ideological tendency of Islamism. And some observers on both the left and the right fail to make that distinction.)
To suggest that this is not about religion is like saying the Catholic-Protestant wars of Europe were not about religion. Of course these were also about politics and nationality, and a number of other things as well.
Apparently the Pope, and all those other “world leaders” that prayed for reconciliation and peace over Christmas got their god all confused again and he told some nut to do the exact opposite. Or, at least that is one explanation. lol I would go with, “Half wits that follow hate filled ideologies develop hate filled policies, and think that the only solutions to problems involve killing the people that stand in the way of those policies.”, which kind of makes praying for them to not do that shit even more pointless than if it was just the existence of something to pray to that mattered. But, that’s just me…
But violence by Islamists is largely religiously motivated.
This is obfuscating things. Violence is a method of political struggle. In other contexts we call this “war”, “insurrection”, etc.
The greatest violent acts of the 20th century — eg. the firebombing of Tokyo — had nothing to do with religion.
Sure, religious differences, due to their dogmatic and arbitrary nature, fuel the breakdown of civility, but the Islamic world has shown no lack of civility when measured against the Western, and Asian standards.
We all suck.
Troy:
Sure, religious differences, due to their dogmatic and arbitrary nature, fuel the breakdown of civility, but the Islamic world has shown no lack of civility when measured against the Western, and Asian standards.
The problem we see with the Islamic world is that there is an uncompromising need to make everyone live according to their rules, they are easily offended, and murder is one of the common responses. Pakistan has all kinds of problems with fundamentalists – trying to pass laws to make apostasy punishable by death, preventing uncovered women from being seen in public (with one major muslim cleric advocating the threat of acid attacks on women not properly covered), and so on. Did you learn anything from the mohammed/teddy bear, or the mohammed cartoons – where death was called for, or actually carried out? The US didn’t firebomb Tokyo because the Japanese named a teddy bear “Jesus”.
Good points, TinyFrog.
(We should have fire-bombed the scatological bastard who named a teddy bear “Pooh”.)
Dan:
> I wonder if Bush will pin this on al-Qaeda?
Well, he probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
The main suspects in Benazir Bhutto’s assassination are the Pakistani and foreign Islamist militants who regarded her as a heretic and an American stooge and had repeatedly threatened to kill her.
…
Two militant warlords based in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern areas, near the border with Afghanistan, had threatened to kill her on her return.
.
One was Baitullah Mehsud, a top commander fighting the Pakistani army in the tribal region of South Waziristan. He has close ties to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban.
.
The other was Haji Omar, the “amir” or leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought against the Soviets with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
.
After that attack Ms Bhutto revealed that she had received a letter signed by a person who claimed to be a friend of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden threatening to slaughter her like a goat.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3100052.ece
#23: In islamic societies, religion and politics are unseparable – it’s virtually two sides of the same coin. As for the religious aspect, it’s pretty much the usual fight between die-hard jihadists and almost-secular-progressives. Think of it as Westboro Baptist bombing Elaine Pagels.
I couldn’t agree more! Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were referring to Pakistan.
In a complicated political situation it is often useful to look at who gets more power from the action.
Case A: Fundamentalists did it
Bhutto has said and done things against them (Red Mosque) and she is a bad example for women in politics. We hate her so we kill her.
Case B: Musharaf did it
Bhutto has put herself against the Fundamentalists and was a direct adversary to Musharaf in the secular part of society. Killing her in a way that points to the Fundamentalists gets both of his two “enemies” out of the way. Bhutto’s supporters might get more radicalized in an anti-Fundamentalist belief that Musharraf makes good (US) money supporting.
—————-
I think Musharaf has more to gain from this assasination than the Fundamentalists. But I would like to know what other people think.
PS: I am a born Atheist in a region were there have been numerous wars over religion and politics (Balkans). Please don’t see things so simple (Sunnis vs Shias, Catholics vs Protestants etc) the socio-economic reasons usually weight a lot more. We are not in the Middle Ages any more (although from what I read here that is what the American media is trying to make people think there – people that will never even meet a person of another faith).
PPS: first post here I hope I didn’t mess up the english language too bad.
You are assuming that the Moslem fundies are worried that people will think they are murderous fanatics who want to send Pakistan back to the Dark Ages. (Which aren’t too far away anyway.)
The reality is that they do want to head back to the Dark Ages and violence and murder are just normal operating procedure. And if anyone doesn’t like it, tough. There are plenty more bombs and bullets where Ms. Bhutto’s came from.
These people are immune to public opinion and living in another reality reasonable people can’t understand. Or want to.
This sort of theocratic nonsense doesn’t get societies anywhere. Just look at Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, or Texas for examples. Stagnant societies going nowhere on a good day and disintegrating on a bad day.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the PKK (the Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”) had suicide bombers, too — not to mention the kamikaze.
Belief in an afterlife is not at all required for a suicide bombing. All that’s required is a belief that there is an ideology that is worth not just killing but dying for.
The death penalty is “the proper way to do” anything? You have a lot left to learn, young padawan.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the PKK (the Stalinist “Workers’ Party of Kurdistan”) had suicide bombers, too — not to mention the kamikaze.
Belief in an afterlife is not at all required for a suicide bombing. All that’s required is a belief that there is an ideology that is worth not just killing but dying for.
The death penalty is “the proper way to do” anything? You have a lot left to learn, young padawan.
raven:
Heh!
Gartos # 36,
yes, Cui bono? is always worth asking. Who really had the strongest motive? Getting the right answer takes a lot of background knowledge though, and still falls short of being evidence. On application of Bayes’ Theorem, I would stay out of Pakistan altogether.
It’s a proper penalty for high treason from our elected officials. Of course, you have to prove the charges in a legal proceeding first.
The malfeasance of the current administration is ruining this country faster than I would have believed possible. If you think that we can afford NOT to investigate, prosecute where evidence is found, and carry out a sufficiently severe sentence against the guilty, you’re just going to get worse in the future. Zimbabwe, anyone?
The US didn’t firebomb Tokyo because the Japanese named a teddy bear “Jesus”.
My larger point is that these people are assholes first, and their religion is an expression of that cocknozzlery. All cheap Gods are made in Man’s Image, essentially.
*Christians* in that part of the world recently stoned to death a young member of their community. Not to mention the recent battles in the church in Jerusalem between Greek Orthodox and Armenians . . . broken up by the Palestinian authorities.
(if I could, not that it matters, I should clarify that I think our military’s tactics in area-bombing Japan were inhumane but not necessarily inhuman, given the available and understood options at the time and place)
I find this truly saddening news, and I am a pretty hardened character. Then I think back to her election many years ago when it seemed that Pakistan was advancing civilization in a most unexpected way. This makes me even sadder.
We may be able to remove the 3rd rock from the sun from the list of inhabited places yet.
This is how terrorists solve thier problems, if they just would not be stupid anymore, they would be successful. She was trying to help them, can’t they see the world has changed, it isn’t a 1000 years ago, they can’t act like this anymore. No fundementalism, and if they going to do it fine, but can’t they do it with out killing people. Why would your God want you to kill, I am sure that contradicts many things in the Koran, which they probably don’t even read, and translate certain things from it to benefit them and thier stupid cause.
Tinyfrog:The problem we see with the Islamic world is that there is an uncompromising need to make everyone live according to their rules, they are easily offended, and murder is one of the common responses.
If you really think that the Islamic world has been worse than the West in the last hundred years then you should check out the history of Europe. I mean, how many dead from in Europe and from European Ideologies in the last hundred years? And does that even compare to the death toll in the Islamic world, from Islamic sources. Shit, the death toll from Western interventions in the last twenty years is easily two orders of magnitude larger than the actions of Islamists.
Raven:You are assuming that the Moslem fundies are worried that people will think they are murderous fanatics who want to send Pakistan back to the Dark Ages. (Which aren’t too far away anyway.)
The reality is that they do want to head back to the Dark Ages and violence and murder are just normal operating procedure. And if anyone doesn’t like it, tough. There are plenty more bombs and bullets where Ms. Bhutto’s came from.
Spoken like someone who really doesn’t understand the country, the region, or the groups involved. Yes Pakistan is hardly a real state, at least in Baluchistan and the tribal areas, but it has a fair amount of cohesion among the groups in the larger cities. Certainly when the issue is radical Islam, which is generally rejected by those in the larger cities. The problem is that past politicians, the democratically elected ones often, infused religion into the army and politics for short term goals and thereby screwed over the future generations, i.e. now. For Musharef to remain in power he needs to either crush the radical groups and ally with the U.S., pretend to crush the Rads and ally with the U.S. or outright ally with the Rads. Obviously he can’t simply ally with the rads, nor can he safely outright ally with the U.S. given the support for the Rads in the military. So, he must walk a line. Given this, pinning a attack such as this on a popular figure could work out rather well for him.
I should add that it could also be the Rads trying to pin it on Musharref, one can rarely tell for sure in these situations.
>>> ‘How did humanity ever get to the point where suicide bombing became an “accepted” way of dealing with political strife?”
Since people started apologizing and making excuses for it? Look at coathangrrr’s “Well, the West has done bad things, too! Huff! Puff!” post a couple above this one. Ignorant shitheads like him like to think they know what’s going on, but their tiny broken minds are just rationalizing. Their exposure to the realities is, at best, second or third hand.
The best sources are people who have fled islam after growing up in it. Sites like Islam Watch. They would spit on people like coathangrr as enablers, and then properly ignore him as the utter singularity of uselessness that he is.
Sure, our elections are sometimes shams but so far, except for Bobby Kennedy, no one has died.
Bobby Kennedy? A minor incident of no historical importance. Ditto for the SCOTUS putting GWB into office. And killing them after they take office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) doesn’t count.
And let’s be sure not to mention Allende, Mussadegh, Lumumba, or any other foreign leaders our own government has helped assassinate or overthrow.
Racer X: go back to freerepublic where you belong.
Racer X: Ok then, as an atheist who was raised Muslim and is a Pakistani and a woman: coathangrrr is absolutely right as far as the political history of the country and its results are concerned. As far as who the worse offender is, is that really even a pissing contest worth getting into? No amount of killing on one ‘side’ makes killing on the other any more acceptable.
Errr ….
#17 & #33 ….. “Pinning it on Al-Qaeda”.
Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An “unnamed leader” phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a “priceless American asset” …..
More information will probably be forthcoming later
Every day there’s a suicide bombing and the murderers think they’re going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.
How about ridiculing natural stupidity? Bhutto was killed by a bullet in the neck.
Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An “unnamed leader” phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a “priceless American asset” …..
See http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/12/27/bhutto.dhs.alqaeda/
Ignorant shitheads like him like to think they know what’s going on, but their tiny broken minds are just rationalizing. Their exposure to the realities is, at best, second or third hand.
Nice. First you claim I’m ignorant and only have second or third hand “exposure to reality”(what am I stuck in the Matrix?). The you go on to show that you have no first hand experience with the region. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don’t speak Arabic and that the extent of your knowledge of the Quran is mistranslations of 9:123.
I am certainly not arguing that there are no militant assholes in the middle east, what I’m arguing is that is our goal is to stop people from dying in the region we can be much more effective by restraining the U.S. government than by bombing civilians to get at a few bad apples.
Curious that you should say this. What evidence do you have that the various translations are all faulty? Further, how do you deal with the fact that these “mistranslations” are the ones favored by the Arabic-speaking Salafists?
Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An “unnamed leader” phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a “priceless American asset” …..
… should I say, how “convenient” ;
keeps Bush happy, Musharaf happy, and Al Qaeda happy (even if they had nothing to do with it).
Now, according to CNN, it was the shrapnel from the blast that killed her.
CNN
What evidence do you have that the various translations are all faulty? Further, how do you deal with the fact that these “mistranslations” are the ones favored by the Arabic-speaking Salafists?
Mistranslation was a bad way to put it but the fact of the matter is that there are exceedingly few groups, if any, that think the Quran impels them to go and spread Islam by force to non-Islamic areas. And generally Salafist groups endorse interpretations which mave been translated, not translations, of the Quran that are in line with their political aims. But most of all, those groups are a minuscule part of the Islamic world, even in places that the western media makes out to be packed with radical militants. So I don’t “deal with” it at all, whatever that might mean. My point is that the person I responded to didn’t understand what he was talking about and didn’t know the region, the religion or the language and relied upon claims made by others, all of which he accused me of being guilty of.
I see that the “let’s use the promotion of atheism and/or nice white people’s religion as an excuse to see all Muslims as subhuman” folks have started to arrive on cue.
As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf.
Let’s say you choose to count the secular Ba’athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist — which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we’ve propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams — and thus count all the people he’s killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was “gassing his own people”, i.e. the Iraqi Kurds). Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power (and there are indications that HRW inflated this figure). Meanwhile, over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush’s invading and occupying Iraq.
Hell, and I’m being nice here: I’m not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin’s (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates.
> If you really think that the Islamic world
> has been worse than the West in the last hundred
> years then you should check out the history of
> Europe. I mean, how many dead from in Europe and
> from European Ideologies in the last hundred years?
What later became Islamism was created as a tool of German imperialism and its Ottoman ally in WWI, so it was a product of European Ideology. To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European right-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.German nihilist thinkers were influencing French monarchist and catholic ones, and those were influencing the likes of Qutb. If anything, Islamism is the by-product and the heir of Europe’s bloody history.
> Shit, the death toll from Western interventions in the
> last twenty years is easily two orders of magnitude
> larger than the actions of Islamists.
Looking at the civil wars in Sudan, Algeria and Somalia alone, not to speak of the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents, and Afghans killed by the Taliban, I doubt this.
Johannes: The Iraqi insurgents wouldn’t be killing people if not for Bush’s invading and occupying their country. Remember root causes.
Also, as we’ve seen in the immediate and lasting 90% drop in violence at Basra once the Brits pulled out in September, the occupying forces are catalysts for much if not most of the violence in Iraq.
As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf — and he’s only one of the West’s legion of non-Muslim bad boys.
For example:
Let’s say you choose to count the secular Ba’athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist — which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we’ve propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams — and thus count all the people he’s killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was “gassing his own people”, i.e. the Iraqi Kurds). Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power (and there are indications that HRW inflated this figure). Meanwhile, over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush’s invading and occupying Iraq.
I’m actually being nice to The (Non-Islamic) West here: I’m not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin’s (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates (which to be fair are also in question).
As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf — and he’s only one of the West’s legion of non-Muslim bad boys.
For example:
Let’s say you choose to count the secular Ba’athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist — which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we’ve propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams — and thus count all the people he’s killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was “gassing his own people”, i.e. the Iraqi Kurds).
Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power — and there are indications that HRW inflated this figure (http://firedoglake.com/2007/03/28/one-out-of-every-forty/). Meanwhile, (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html) over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush’s invading and occupying Iraq.
I’m actually being nice to The (Non-Islamic) West here: I’m not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin’s (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates.
Phoenix Woman,
coathangrrr was speaking of the actions of Islamists, not of their root causes.
If the presence of foreign troops is a catalyst for violence or not is a difficult question to answer. Western Europe was occupied by US, Canadian and British troops for decades in the post-WWII era without being particulary violent during this time, Venezuela and post-Apartheid South Africa have very high levels of violence without a foreign occupation.
To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European right-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.
It is true, and really has been true for a long, long time that Islamic and European thought have been tied together. But to say that they aren’t clearly distinct is clearly wrong. Fascism is way different than totalitarian Islamic philosophies and to say different is dishonest.
Looking at the civil wars in Sudan, Algeria and Somalia alone, not to speak of the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents, and Afghans killed by the Taliban, I doubt this.
And the death toll from U.S. sanctions on Iraq was around 500k. Add that to the attacks in and on the Balkans, the U.S. attacks on Iraqis, NATO attacks on Afghans and various other “interventions” by U.S. and European powers and you have a huge death toll. To be fair, one of the reasons the Europeans and Americans have such a lead is because they have much more efficient weapons, so it is a lot easier for them, they just have to press some buttons to kill people while the Islamists have to do it in person.
“To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European left-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.”
I corrected that part for you. You see, Hitler was a leftist. Follow the link if you wish to understand the actual intellectual history behind his National Socialism. He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time. Something conveniently forgotten by the left.
Phoenix Woman your one million dead is a fabrication. The Lancet study is a joke. I also find your whole line of argument pointless. So what, the philosophy of Islam has only resulted in around 60 million deaths in India and the Armenians and the Muslim slave trade, etc. vs. the 100 million for the Communists and the 14 million of the National Socialists, or X million of the Christians.
I’ve read the Qur’an and I find the religion to be violent, intolerant, unproportionate, and false. Even the supposedly tolerant portions are disconcerting in their ambiguity, vagueness, and scarcity.
I corrected that part for you. You see, Hitler was a leftist.
Of course he was, and Stalin was a rightist. You rock on with your rewriting history.
He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time. Something conveniently forgotten by the left.
Yes, because Marx, Engels and Hitler were around at the same time.
It seems that the right wing trolls are out in force today.
Brian Macker: “You see, Hitler was a leftist. Follow the link if you wish to understand the actual intellectual history behind his National Socialism. He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time.”
While Hitler and the Nazi elite certainly regarded themselves as socialists, they were not leftists. While the early party had a prominent left wing dominated by the Strasser brothers, much of the radically socialist policy positions and tendencies within the party were discarded by Hitler. (The larger interwar German fascist/radical nationalist scene was even more diverse, with “national bolsheviks” and volkish socialists.) In practice, Nazism was a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, but above all a plunder state rewarding supporters from robbed Jews and war booty. A stronger case can be made for the left wing nature of early Italian fascism with its Sorelian national syndicalist roots, but really only from 1919-22 (or 1915 if you want to trace it to the Milan fascio). Fascists generally claimed to be “neither right nor left” or “third positionists.” In any case, I don’t recommend Jon Jay Ray overly simplistic analyses of the origins and ideology of fascism; instead, I would suggest Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, and Zeev Sternhell.
My take:
If Bush and crew had tried to wrap up better in Afghanistan just before the Iraq II invasion, we could likely have beaten down Al-Qaeda more effectively and would be having less trouble from AQ and Taliban in Afghanistan and Waziristan in Pakistan. Sure, we would have to deal with Saddam eventually, but we could have waited for that and mopped up better in our first theater. Really, don’t start one job unless either you have to, or you’ve finished the first one. But Bin Ladin got away and AQ had the strength to murder Bhutto.
Excellent point.
Why? What was Saddam doing that, say, Qaddafi hadn’t done earlier? What threat was Saddam to the US?
the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents
Use of the term “insurgents” is a habit of the U.S. media; in much of the rest of the world they are called “the resistance” to the U.S. invasion. And Iraqis killing Iraqis is sectarian violence — the term “insurgents” doesn’t apply. Look it up: “a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government; especially : a rebel not recognized as a belligerent”
Phoenix Woman your one million dead is a fabrication.
So is global warming according to this troll.
I find it unfortunate that, the day before Bhutto’s assasination, Mike Huckabee (our would-be Pastor in Chief) joked about killing Iowans who didn’t caucus for him. He was out murdering pheasant in an attempt to woo the NRA. And, yes, woo is the correct term here.
SG
> Fascism is way different than totalitarian
> Islamic philosophies and to say different is dishonest.
Coathangrrr,
this is why I said right-wing, not fascist. Integrist and reactionary thought predates true fascism, and will probably survive it.
> And the death toll from U.S. sanctions on Iraq was around 500k.
This was an UN Embargo, not an U.S. one. As not all nations in the UN – or even in the security council – are ‘western’ (however you define ‘western’ – China and Russia will probably not fit) it hardly fits the definition of ‘western intervention’.
This said, a nation doesn’t need to do trade with the U.S. to keep its citizens reasonably supplied with food and medicine. Cuba, Yugoslavia and South Africa have survived years of economic sanctions and embargoes without much loss of human life.
> To be fair, one of the reasons the Europeans and
> Americans have such a lead is because they have
> much more efficient weapons, so it is a lot easier
> for them, they just have to press some buttons to
> kill people while the Islamists have to do it in person.
If you want to kill people in near genocidal numbers, Kalashnikovs, IED charges, RPGs and even the right combination of Machetes and drugs defeat high-tech weapons anytime.
> You see, Hitler was a leftist.
Brian Macker,
just see what Colugo has said, I have very little to add.
> compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West
> over the last hundred years
Phoenix woman,
you are right over the last hundred years, the last twenty years are another matter.
> as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle
> Eastern dictators we’ve propped up,
Pro-soviet tiersmondist dictatorships like baathist Iraq and Syria were hardly propped up by the west in the cold war years.
> Saddam’s death toll, using the highest estimates known,
> those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the
> quarter-century he was in power
Hardly credible, if you remember the war with Iran, with was started by Iraq and fits the definition of muslim on muslim violence pretty well.
> Use of the term “insurgents” is a habit of the
> U.S. media; in much of the rest of the world they
> are called “the resistance” to the U.S. invasion.
truth machine,
it took the (anti)German left a long time to convince the German media to call those Iraqis who mostly kill other Iraqis “insurgents”, “militias” or “irregulars” rather than “the resistance”. I think the use of more neutral terms rather than one that glorifies mass killings is a progress.
“Jon Jay Ray overly simplistic analysis of the origins and ideology of fascism”
Guess you didn’t read the article if you think it’s simplistic.
I find it laughable that leftists try to smear other groups with the behavior of their members in the past but totally whitewash their own history. It’s the old “no true Scotsman” fallacy writ large.
All the metrics that leftists try to use to distinguish Hitler from their own ideological roots just don’t work. Sure leftist are no longer racists but back in Hitlers day it was the left that was calling for eugenics and were total anti-Semites. Talk on finding a solution to the Jewish problem started long before Hitler. You need only read the quote from Lenin and Marx at the beginning of Rays article to see that their wasn’t much difference in their rhetoric than Hitler.
This isn’t revisionism either. There were writers on the right like Hayek who recognized the true nature of Hitlers and Stalins systems long before the left caught on. In fact the left continued it’s support of Stalin for many decades after WWII.
There really wasn’t anything really unique about Hilters regime from many other socialist movements. For instance the left tries to claim that Hitler was different because he abolished trade unions. But many other socialists and communists leaders did the same thing when they came into power. I know Stalin, Mao, Castro all abolished trade unions and were even further to the left in being communists (a branch of socialism).
Besides not all trade unions were or are pro-socialist. There is nothing about free trade unions that is anti-capitalist. In other words capitalism doesn’t require or even demand the destruction of trade unions. On the other hand communism and any form of socialism where the State takes control of business (even if ownership is nominally in the name of “businessmen”) would tend to make trade unions redundant. After all the State already claims to be representative of workers.
If you think that because Nazism left nominal ownership in the hands of businessmen he doesn’t qualify as a socialist then how the hell can you classify European Social Democrats as on the left? Shouldn’t they be considered even further on the right since not only do they allow businessmen to retain ownership in the sense of getting profits but also allow them to actually control their businesses. The Nazis like the Communists did not allow true ownership in that the State decided what was to be produced and in what quantities.
You can use racism as a metric for classifying Nazis as being on the right because in that historical period it was the left that was the most racist and was most fervent in pushing eugenics and “scientific” solutions to race problems.
You also cannot use nationalism as a metric for distinguishing Nazism from other socialist movements. Most of those were nationalist also.
There really wasn’t any “about face” by Hitler that the leftists claimed happened. He pretty much delivered what he said he would. Socialism isn’t about individual rights like Capitalism is. If it comes down to in the individuals desires for their own lives must take the back seat to any needs of the people as embodied in the state.
Only to a Communist would Hitler look like he was to the right. In fact if you draw a graph of the death toll during the twentieth century you will see that the far left, the Communists, murdered the most, with the more moderate economic leftists, the Fascists and Nazis coming in a close second. Of course there were all those minor states of Africa, the Middle East, and India that all toyed with socialism and also suffered both economically and from dictators.
Brian Macker: I am quite familiar with the writings of Jon Jay Ray on fascism and other topics. I am also quite unimpressed with his commentary on race and IQ.
Did you know that Jon Jay Ray maintains a site in which he posts the writings of scientific racist Chris Brand?
http://gfactor.blogspot.com/
Above all, I think you are confused by the fact that the right/conservatism in the United States is very closely associated with pro-capitalism / free market / economic individualism – that is, classical liberalism. But conservatism/the right is not necessarily associated with pro-market politics in Europe, especially historically. Hayek understood that. In other words, capitalism vs socialism (and social welfarism as in the Christian Social Party) is not nearly as much of a left-right litmus test there as it is here.
I agree, in terms of economic policy the Nazis were at least as “socialist” as 20th century Social Democrats. That doesn’t make the Nazis leftists. And Chile under Pinochet was at least as capitalistic as the United States. Does that fact prove that capitalism/”the right” is evil? By your logic, yes.
“Left” and “right” is also a matter of affiliation and self-identification. There is no question that Fascists and communists saw each other as revolutionary rivals, recognized their common opposition to bourgeois democratic politics, and were capable of occasional opportunistic cooperation within the context of lethal enmity. (I could cite many examples; see Karl Radek’s Schlageter line.)
Fascism was a syncretizing and regionally heterogeneous movement, with elements of organic nationalism, revolutionary syndicalism/socialism, Nietzsche, vitalism, Theosophy, and Futurism. And it evolved very quickly, from anti-clerical and anti-capitalist to forging alliances with the churches and big business.
As for eugenics and scientific racism, those were widely accepted across the political spectrum from the late 19th c to WWII; the opponents of these likewise included a variety of political views. I didn’t argue that Nazi racism disqualified them from being leftists. (The tight association of the left with hardline environmentalist determinism didn’t crystalize until the 30s with the rise of Lysenkoism, and even then the Soviets had their own biodeterminist peculiarities, like preserving the brains of Lenin and Stalin to determine the source of their alleged genius.)
Anyway, read Griffin and Payne.
this is why I said right-wing, not fascist. Integrist and reactionary thought predates true fascism, and will probably survive it.
I am quite familiar with both and I am still sure that this is not the case. There might have been some small amount of
influence upon Islamic philosophers but it wasn’t much. A lot of the current pan-Islamism came from al-Afghani, who was likely more influenced by leftists than rightists.
This was an UN Embargo, not an U.S. one.
The U.S. was the one who pushed for it and the one who physically enforced it. The U.N. resolution was just a pretty wrapping on it. Clinton and Bush the Elder didn’t care about the Iraqis any more than Bush does, mainly because it has never been politically useful to do so, and they both have wrought destruction upon them time and time again.
If you want to kill people in near genocidal numbers, Kalashnikovs, IED charges, RPGs and even the right combination of Machetes and drugs defeat high-tech weapons anytime.
That’s debatable. It’s easy to destroy a country’s infrastructure, Effects Based Operations they call it, that is required to support modern population sizes. Then the people just kind of die on their own from disease and o medical care and lack of food distribution. Certainly not the same as genocides in places like Rwanda, but definitely able to post death tolls in the same range.
Modern militant Islam has been influenced by a variety of sources. Frantz Fanon was one. Sayyid Qutb cited Alexis Carrel (French fascist scientist); Haj Amin al-Husseini, of course, was close ally of Hitler.
it took the (anti)German left a long time to convince the German media to call those Iraqis who mostly kill other Iraqis “insurgents”, “militias” or “irregulars” rather than “the resistance”. I think the use of more neutral terms rather than one that glorifies mass killings is a progress.
So you deny there was an invasion and resistance to it? I made a distinction: “Iraqis killing Iraqis is sectarian violence — the term ‘insurgents’ doesn’t apply”. If you would read with your thinking cap on, you would grasp that I implied “the resistance” doesn’t apply to Iraqis killing Iraqis either.
“militias” or “irregulars” is fine, but “insurgent” has a meaning, which I provided for you, that doesn’t apply.
“Brian Macker: I am quite familiar with the writings of Jon Jay Ray on fascism and other topics. I am also quite unimpressed with his commentary on race and IQ.”
Exactly which commentary. I didn’t see any by him at that site. Seemed more like a blog news feed run by Chris Brand.
“Did you know that Jon Jay Ray maintains a site in which he posts the writings of scientific racist Chris Brand?”
No, I was not aware of that. Although I didn’t see anything at your link that was particularly racist.
I did look up some other sites comments on Brand and found some of his ideas purported ideas humorous. At least the ideas others were claiming he had. Like the idea that welfare moms should be encouraged to sleep around with more intelligent men to improve the gene pool. Like that’s going to happen. Then again, I find some of P Z Myers writings on politics humorous and that doesn’t mean that I’m going to become a creationist.
I linked the Ray because he did a good job of explaining why the Nazis were leftists. I don’t find the fact that Europe uses different labels for right and left at all confusing. I don’t use their terminology. Using standard US terminology Hitler was both a socialist and a leftist.
“I agree, in terms of economic policy the Nazis were at least as “socialist” as 20th century Social Democrats.
Now was that so hard. So basically you are saying that Ray is right on this issue.
That doesn’t make the Nazis leftists.
Well yes it does. It doesn’t make them Social Democrats but it certainly makes them leftists.
And Chile under Pinochet was at least as capitalistic as the United States.
Well certainly Pinochet was on “the right”. See that’s not hard to admit.
Does that fact prove that capitalism/”the right” is evil? By your logic, yes.”
You don’t understand my thought processes. I was merely refuting a leftist trying to tar “the right” with something that clearly came from “the left”, ie. socialism. I wasn’t trying to prove that social democrats are “evil” due to something another group did. The fact is however that the economic theories of the left have resulted in great suffering and evil.
Part of the whole left/right confusion comes from the lefts tendency to use techniques designed to confuse issues, like calling themselves “liberals” when in fact they are against classical liberal ideas.
Pinochet’s use of capitalism really has nothing to do with why he was evil, whereas, Hitlers use of socialism had everything to do with why he was evil. In fact the Social Democrats use capitalism, too. Which is good. To the extent they do use socialism that is bad. The same goes for the US. In fact they are both mixed economies.
Socialism has had a unnerving tendency to blame scapegoat groups for failed economic policies and then to resort to progroms. The whole reason the world was in such bad economic shape preceding WWII was a series of poor economic decisions that were quite illiberal in nature and most were based on socialist theory.
Well yes it does. It doesn’t make them Social Democrats but it certainly makes them leftists.
Economic issues are not, contrary to the belief of some, the sole determinant of whether someone is a leftist or a rightist.
Part of the whole left/right confusion comes from the lefts tendency to use techniques designed to confuse issues, like calling themselves “liberals” when in fact they are against classical liberal ideas.
Yeah, the right wing in the U.S. never used liberal as a derogatory term at all.
Pinochet’s use of capitalism really has nothing to do with why he was evil, whereas, Hitlers use of socialism had everything to do with why he was evil.
Yeah, it wasn’t his virulent nationalism and the fact that he wanted to wipe out Jews, Slavs, homosexuals and various other groups of undesirables, it was the socialism.
Socialism has had a unnerving tendency to blame scapegoat groups for failed economic policies and then to resort to progroms.
That’s Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist Communism, not socialism. You seem particularly uneducated in the use of your terms for someone who wants to make all these bold proclamations about the inherent evil of leftists.
Jon Jay Ray was on the panel of writers of ultra-racist website MajorityRights.com, a sewer of white nationalist thought, until he resigned in September 2006 due to his incompatibility with the site’s strong antisemitic element. Among the few political parties that MajorityRights chooses to link to are Vlaams Belang, the British National Party, and National Front. Go to MajorityRights and do some searches (try “Hitler,” “holocaust,” and “eugenics”), or just check out recent discussion topics. JJR willingly associated with this white nationalist group until its antisemitism became too much for him. (Incidentally, racist Jared Taylor of American Renaissance has no problem with Jews, creating tension with antisemitic American Renaissance supporters.)
Here is one of Jon Jay Ray’s postings at his blog Political Correctness Watch (9/11/05), which he also posted at MajorityRights:
“Some interesting new DNA research … traces changes in human brain evolution to quite recent times. Certain genes that regulate brain size appear to have become common at just about the same time when human social evolution made great advances — the beginning of civilization for instance. So we now in fact have a genetic explanation for when civilization began. But instead of welcoming such exciting new information, lots of people are playing down the results. Why? One reason is that the genetic pattern that seems to be associated with the rise of civilization is much less common among blacks. I leave it to readers to connect the rest of the dots.”
Incidentally, Bruce Lahn’s hypothesis on ASPM, microcephalin, races, and civilization was falsified; there is no link with variants in these genes to intelligence.
Brian Macker: “I don’t find the fact that Europe uses different labels for right and left at all confusing. I don’t use their terminology.”
In other words, you choose not to use the political terminology of 20th century Europe – that is, the historical and regional context of National Socialism. In addition, today’s neofascists are allied with either the self-professed right (see Vlaams Belang and other contemporary Eurofascist parties) or so-called third positionists.
Scapegoating of certain groups – and more specifically, antisemitism – is not a uniquely left wing problem, but a problem of ideological extremism. There are indeed antisemitic tendencies within revolutionary socialism. Several leftist intellectuals have commented on and lamented this history. Scapegoating Jews is also a common feature of populism, productivism, and conspiracy theories, whether these are associated with the left or the right.
Let me leave you with some recommended reading.
Coogan, Kevin. 2000. Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.
Griffin, Roger. 2007. Modernism and Fascism.
Lee, Martin. 1997. The Beast Reawakens.
Payne, Stanley. 1996. A History of Fascism 1914-1945.
Let me add specify that by the non-relationship of ASPM and microcephalin with intelligence I am referring to normal variants with differential frequencies in Asia, Europe, and Africa – not variants associated with pathological syndromes. Lahn’s theory was about the normal variants with different continental frequencies.
More wit and wisdom of Dr. John Joseph Ray (AKA Jon Jay Ray, John Ray, JJR, JR).
astuteblogger.blogspot.com
12/25/07:
“Because the lesser ability of blacks is not accepted in education circles, every failure of blacks to do well at educational tasks is always attributed to “the system” or “racism”… I could go on to multiply examples of how refusals to cope with black realities degrade life for everybody but I think I have said enough to make my point clear.”
12/5/07:
“Blacks as a group in disparate cultural environments worldwide are prone to high-violence, high-criminality, and low achieving (as group) – just as they are as a group in America; culture alone cannot explain this.”
Note to readers:
There is an intensively linked comment which will immediately follow this one, but will not be visible unless and until it is approved (probably tomorrow). I suggest you bookmark the date link on this one and come back to it later.
Sorry about the delay in responding. I’ve been dealing with the stomach flu and a few other things, which have taken big chunks out of my effectiveness.
Something you don’t seem to acknowledge is that inaccurate translations are a matter of life and death in the Islamic world; the author of a “fluent” translation into Dari is accused of conspiring with Zionists; as of the report, he was in jail.
But let’s look at a few translations of 9:123, shall we?
The translation by M.H. Shakir, as published by the University of Michigan:
The translation by Marmaduke Pickthall, as published by Call to Islaam:
Yusufali, from the University of Southern California:
Which one of these is the “kinder, gentler Quran” read and followed by devotees of the ReligionOfPeace™?
That would be all well and good… if other Muslims condemned such actions and attitudes. I see lots of news of Muslims using the words “heretic” against those they consider to have pressed their interpretations too far. Who has declared Osama bin Laden apostate for his interpretation?
Osama bin Laden has a 46% approval rating in Pakistan. The “radicals” appear to be the 9% who approve of Bush.
And quoth Phoenix Woman:
The estimated death toll from the Moghul conquest of India is 40 million minimum, perhaps as much as 70 million. If Pakistan uses the nukes we carelessly let it build, that number could double in a week or so.
And quoth Johannes, quite ahistorically:
I would love to see you explain how jihad imperialism pushing from Arabia across the Magreb to the west and to Indonesia in the east is a product of a nation which did not even exist until centuries later.
Yeah, and when all is said and done Hitler was still a socialist.
> So you deny there was an invasion and resistance to it?
You have already given the answer: neither ‘resistance’ nor ‘insurgents’ apply for iraqi on iraqi violence. I know that you have made the difference, I was speaking of the cultural industry in general and the German media in peculiar, wich has only started making this difference during the last few months.
> A lot of the current pan-Islamism came from
> al-Afghani, who was likely more influenced
> by leftists than rightists.
Most modern Islamists would loath a 19th-century masonic liberal like al-Afghani.
> It’s easy to destroy a country’s infrastructure,
> Effects Based Operations they call it, that is
> required to support modern population sizes.
It’s quite easy to drum together a bunch of people with spades to dig a latrine or repair a damaged road if the local authorities have the will to do so. It is, however, impossible to resurrect a person killed by a gunshot or a RPG blast.
Which one of these is the “kinder, gentler Quran” read and followed by devotees of the ReligionOfPeace™?
None of them, they read the Arabic.
That would be all well and good… if other Muslims condemned such actions and attitudes. I see lots of news of Muslims using the words “heretic” against those they consider to have pressed their interpretations too far. Who has declared Osama bin Laden apostate for his interpretation?
Heretic and apostate are two different things and if you haven’t found anyone condemning Osama you haven’t been looking.
Osama bin Laden has a 46% approval rating in Pakistan. The “radicals” appear to be the 9% who approve of Bush.
While he may have generally vile methods and ideology Osama has never said that he wants to spread Islam to the rest of the world. Moreover, in practical terms an approval rating doesn’t mean anything at all.
The estimated death toll from the Moghul conquest of India is 40 million minimum, perhaps as much as 70 million.
The Moghul invasion of India was how many years ago? Certainly more than a hundred years ago. And it took place over the course of hundreds of years as well.
Most modern Islamists would loath a 19th-century masonic liberal like al-Afghani.
I agree, but I don’t think that rules out him having influenced the resurgence of pan-Islamism.
It’s quite easy to drum together a bunch of people with spades to dig a latrine or repair a damaged road if the local authorities have the will to do so. It is, however, impossible to resurrect a person killed by a gunshot or a RPG blast.
Yeah, but it isn’t latrines or roads that are the infrastructure I’m talking about. It is water treatment plants and hospitals and power plants, none of which can be rebuilt as simply as latrines and roads.
coathangrrr: “Osama has never said that he wants to spread Islam to the rest of the world.”
Short-term and long-term goals should be distinguished. From short to long term the goals of al-Qaeda are: removal of US presence in the Middle East, replacement of apostate/secular Muslim rulers with pious Islamists, restoration of the historical Caliphate (which is why bin Laden whines about Spain and East Timor), the whole world under Islam.
Saif al-Adel, al-Qaeda’s military commander currently under house arrest in Iran has outlined the seven phase strategy of al-Qaeda.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,369448,00.html
“The Sixth Phase: … (A) period of “total confrontation.” As soon as the caliphate has been declared the “Islamic army” it will instigate the “fight between the believers and the non-believers” which has so often been predicted by Osama bin Laden.
The Seventh Phase: This final stage is described as “definitive victory.” Hussein writes that in the terrorists’ eyes, because the rest of the world will be so beaten down by the “one-and-a-half billion Muslims,” the caliphate will undoubtedly succeed.”
A preposterous pipe dream? Sure. Especially since the last phase is scheduled for only 12 years from now. But it is still a mobilizing ultimate goal, no matter how grandiose. The more proximate goals of pushing out US presence and toppling apostate rulers are surely more pertinent as a recruiting tool.
The ultimate goal of global sharia is not exclusive to al-Qaeda. It is shared by militant Islamist organizations, no matter what their proximate objectives (Israel, Iraq, Kashmir, Egypt etc.) are. It can be seen in militant Islamist visual propaganda: the flag of the Caliphate rising from the White House or even the entire globe. In the history of religio-ideological movements, there is nothing unique about an ultimate goal of global hegemony.
So what is important for my response to the person claiming hitler came from the right is precisely the fact that Hitler was truly a socialist. Racism is certainly not a central feature of left but governmental power to shape society towards collective goals is. So once one accepts both socialism and the inherent defect in some group, whether it be genetic or moral, then it becomes the business of the state to control, punish, or eliminate that group.
Finally I will add that everyone knows that socialism and communism are of the left. So the original posters claims that Hitler came from the right are ridiculous.
This is a common error made by the left. They seem to remember the skeletons in everyone elses closets but not their own. They ignore the inherent danger of the belief in collective power and guilt. Thus they come up with what are in fact discriminatory policies and politics like affirmative action, and “whiteness studies” even when they are fervently trying to be non-racist.
Whiteness studies is essentially racism against whites, in that it brands people of light skin as being morally inferior to those of a darker complexion. Strangely it also holds that race doesn’t exist. In this it is like a religious ideology, believing contradictory facts when it suits them. Again it forgets the legacy of slavery and racism throughout the entire non-European world.
Slavery wasn’t invented in Europe, and in fact during the period of slavery millions of Europeans were being enslaved and shipped to the dark skinned Muslim world, slavery was rampant through out the world long before European expansion. So this was not a European invention. Note also that the Muslim world invaded and colonized Europe long before Europe returned the favor.
Even the racist and colonial British were subjected to thousands of years of invasion by foreigners such as the Romans and slave raids by the Muslims. They didn’t just one day decide to start hostilities with a peaceful world.
Leftists forget facts like: The Democrat party was founded by Andrew Jackson, a man who massacred Indians. The Democrat president Truman dropped the atom bomb, twice. The Democrats drummed out all their anti-slavery members during the Civil War, and the Republicans were the ones who freed the slaves. This at a time when libertarians like Lysander Spooner were abolitionists.
When civil rights were on the table proportionately more Republicans than Democrats voted for the civil rights act. Eighty percent of Republicans were in favor and only sixty percent of Democrats.
They want to brand other groups they disfavor with the sins of their past but never consider the sins of their own past. They are in short hypocrites.
The left was heavily involved in eugenics (forced NOT voluntary eugenics) so Hitler was no aberration. Some of the latest examples of eugenics programs come from the darling of the socialists, Sweden, which was practicing this up until 1975. Norway, France, Denmark all had their own programs.
The world has always be dark and ugly. What one should look at carefully is the ideologies that you do support. If you are a Marxist or Socialist then you in fact support ideologies that justify unjust initiation of trespass against others. You are in fact in bed with what are unethical ideas.
A preposterous pipe dream? Sure. Especially since the last phase is scheduled for only 12 years from now. But it is still a mobilizing ultimate goal, no matter how grandiose. The more proximate goals of pushing out US presence and toppling apostate rulers are surely more pertinent as a recruiting tool.
The article linked says nothing at all about spreading beyond the current Islamic world. The goal is to unite Muslims under a caliphate and expel foreign influence in the caliphate.
The ultimate goal of global sharia is not exclusive to al-Qaeda. It is shared by militant Islamist organizations, no matter what their proximate objectives (Israel, Iraq, Kashmir, Egypt etc.) are
Bald assertion which are repeated again and again and again do not a fact make. I would imagine that many Muslims think, like people of most religions and ideologies, that the world would be better if everyone agreed with them, but this does not mean they endorse taking over the rest of the world by violence. I imagine that Osama might harbor dreams of everyone in the world converting to Islam, but his goal is a unified caliphate that he thinks will be the preeminent power in the world, it is not to take over the world. Saying otherwise is simply wrong.
Whiteness studies is essentially racism against whites, in that it brands people of light skin as being morally inferior to those of a darker complexion. Strangely it also holds that race doesn’t exist. In this it is like a religious ideology, believing contradictory facts when it suits them. Again it forgets the legacy of slavery and racism throughout the entire non-European world.
You fail it.
Yeah… Republicans are such saints. What a tool.
So are you really claiming that Democrats are linked the the German Fascist movement?
What a fucking tool.
coathangrrr: “I would imagine that many Muslims think, like people of most religions and ideologies, that the world would be better if everyone agreed with them, but this does not mean they endorse taking over the rest of the world by violence.”
If by “many Muslims” you mean “most Muslims,” of course that is correct. Radical Islamists, however, do ultimately seek to establish global Islamic domination through force and threat. As I said, this is not a proximate goal; those are much more specific and localized.
Lawrence Wright, ‘The Master Plan,’ New Yorker, 9/11/06:
“By 2020, “definitive victory” will have been achieved. Victory, according to the Al Qaeda ideologues, means that “falsehood will come to an end. . . . The Islamic state will lead the human race once again to the shore of safety and the oasis of happiness.””
Geraldine Fagan, ‘Hizb-ut-Tahrir wants worldwide Sharia law,’ F18News, 10/29/03:
“Hizb-ut-Tahir, which is widespread in Central Asia, has told Forum 18 that it aims to introduce a worldwide Caliphate and ban all faiths apart from Islam, Judaism and Christianity, all religious practice being regulated by Sharia law.”
Nadav Shragai, ”Defend al-Aqsa campaign’ strikes again,’ Haaretz, 2/8/07:
“The Islamic Movement, which is once again leading the “defend Al-Aqsa” campaign, initiated the construction of an underground mosque in the Solomon’s Stables area about 10 years ago. Recently the movement declared the establishment of a global caliphate, based – where else? – in Jerusalem.”
I could cite many more such statements, including those by Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, two of the founders of modern radical Islamism.
Brian Macker: “So what is important for my response to the person claiming hitler came from the right is precisely the fact that Hitler was truly a socialist.”
I never said that Hitler was not a socialist. I said that he was not a leftist. And I think we agree that welfare capitalism, European social democracy, and German National Socialism are all mixed economies. (I trust that you are not one of those who believes that FDR – one of America’s greatest presidents – was a nationalist and socialist and therefore a “fascist.” Because such people are crackpots.)
“then it becomes the business of the state to control, punish, or eliminate that group.”
RJ Rummel estimates that European colonial democide killed 50 million people. So subjugation and eliminationism in the modern world is not just a problem of socialism and Islam.
“So the original posters claims that Hitler came from the right are ridiculous.”
As I said before, fascists tend to identify themselves as “neither right nor left.” Fascism is a highly syncretic, eclectic, and mutable ideology. In addition, fascists have long been allied with radical rightists. There is no question that many fascists, especially in the case of the French and Italian movements, came from the left. They did not remain there. Many neoconservatives came from the left. Is neoconservatism a leftist movement?
There is a large literature by legitimate scholars on similarities and differences between Leninists and fascists in both theory and practice. But your argument is more simplistically sweeping than that. As someone with a longtime interest in the study of totalitarianism and genocide, I’m a bit embarrassed for you.
“Strangely it also holds that race doesn’t exist.”
I’m curious: Do you endorse JJR’s views on race?
“The Democrat president Truman dropped the atom bomb, twice.”
And he was right to do so.
“the Republicans were the ones who freed the slaves … proportionately more Republicans than Democrats voted for the civil rights act.”
That was before the GOP was ideologically compromised by the influx of Dixiecrats.
“the latest examples of eugenics programs come from the darling of the socialists, Sweden, which was practicing this up until 1975. Norway, France, Denmark all had their own programs.”
Scandinavia and France do have something of an undeserved halo, at least for some.
“You are in fact in bed with what are unethical ideas.”
Using your defective reasoning, shall I burden you with the sins of Gilded Age robber barons, slave-trading American merchants, and the exterminators of the Yahi Indians? Why not?
I would love to see you explain how jihad imperialism pushing from Arabia across the Magreb to the west and to Indonesia in the east is a product of a nation which did not even exist until centuries later.
#85,
I was spaking of modern Islamism, not Islam in general or the conquests of the 7th or 8th century in peculiar.
Conquest in the dark ages meant local warlords switched their allegiance from one remote empire to another, this has very little to do with modern politics.
I don’t blame modern protestantism for the deeds of the Taiping, either, and that was in the 19th century, not the 7th.
BTW, Indonesia was never conquered by Arabs or other muslim armies, it was converted by merchants.
Quoth coathangrrr:
Including the Pakistanis and others who neither read nor speak Arabic, but are jihadis nonetheless? Whose interpretation of scripture certainly can go through people who do read the Arabic?
If we are talking about ObL and his Saudi friends, you implied that their interpretation of (the Arabic) 9:123 was an incorrect one. I showed you 3 different translations, which differ mostly in their choice of idiom. None are at all friendly to unbelievers. Faulty translations and interpretations are, as I’ve shown above, a matter of life and death to Muslims. So how do you justify your claim that the believers who take 9:123 as a commandment to violence are being unfaithful to the scripture?
Of course, if you have no answer, you have to ask why anyone should view Muslims as even safe to be around. There’s an unsettling amount of stuff going on where e.g. owners of restaurant chains think their highest charitable calling is to finance Hamas.
I’m looking for Muslim authorities declaring takfir on him (contrast Salman Rushdie). Condemning him because his tactics attract too much attention is praising with faint damns. After all, if he’s wrong because this time should be a hudna rather than all-out jihad, it only means that the speaker shares his goals but not his tactics.
People like the ex-Kuwaiti information minister Dr. Sa’d Bin Tefla have indeed called the Muslim world to account for failing to condemn ObL. But has this shamed Muslims into doing anything about it?
It’s implicit in 34:28.
And as a fraction of the population of the world, it was far bloodier than both of the 20th-century World Wars put together.
Worse, the aggressive force behind it still exists… and you’re making excuses for it.
Including the Pakistanis and others who neither read nor speak Arabic, but are jihadis nonetheless? Whose interpretation of scripture certainly can go through people who do read the Arabic?
I imagine that they do in fact read Arabic, despite the fact that they do not speak the language natively. Moreover, I don’t know Urdu or Pashtu or any of the other languages in the region well enough to make any commentary on the interpretations, and I am going to go out on a limb and say you don’t either.
If we are talking about ObL and his Saudi friends, you implied that their interpretation of (the Arabic) 9:123 was an incorrect one. I showed you 3 different translations, which differ mostly in their choice of idiom. None are at all friendly to unbelievers.
I did imply that, then retracted that claim and noted that they are interpretations, not translations. And you managed to not cite any translations that are out right contrary to your point like:”[9:123] O you who believe, you shall fight the disbelievers who attack you – let them find you stern – and know that GOD is with the righteous.” And the ones you quoted are not necessarily unfriendly to non-believers.
I’m looking for Muslim authorities declaring takfir on him (contrast Salman Rushdie).
Then you are an idiot. To declare him tafkir would mean that they say he doesn’t belief in Allah, which is obviously not the case. You want them to do some kind of excommunication ceremony that doesn’t exist in Islam.
It’s implicit in 34:28.
No, it isn’t. Not in the way that you mean it.
And as a fraction of the population of the world, it was far bloodier than both of the 20th-century World Wars put together.
Worse, the aggressive force behind it still exists… and you’re making excuses for it.
The Mongols are still around? You could have fooled me. If you are going to lay the atrocities committed by the Mongols at the feet of Islam then you are an idiot. They didn’t need Islam as an excuse to murder and destroy, they did that fine on their own.
> The Mongols are still around? You could have fooled me.
> If you are going to lay the atrocities committed by the
> Mongols at the feet of Islam then you are an idiot.
> They didn’t need Islam as an excuse to murder and destroy,
> they did that fine on their own.
While the name ‘Moghul’ is obviously derived from ‘Mongol'(just like ‘Romanian’ is derived from ‘Roman’), and Babur claimed to be a descendant of Genghis Khan, the actual Moghul conquerors and rulers of northern India from the 16th century onward had very little in common with the Mongols of the 13th century. Babur himself was a Turcoman, as were most of his followers, although Pashtuns and what would be called Tajiks nowadays were also present in his army. The lingua franca of the Moghul elite was Persian, wich was also used in literature. The Moghuls were, of course, Muslim, the Mongols of the 13th century were shamanists, Buddhists or Nestorian Christians. Any similarity between those two very different entities simply reflects a common central Asian heritage.
Yes, the Mongols and the Moghuls were not the exact same group of people, but they were far closer to each other than either was to modern Islamist Radicals.
Brian Macker:
More information supporting my assertion that while the Nazis were socialists ((a) through their own declaration and self-conception, and b) through certain economic policies generally recognized as “socialist”) they were not leftists.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Chapter VII (James Murphy translation):
“We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation,
our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings–if only in order to break them up–so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people.”
In Mein Kampf, Hitler mentions the left and leftists several times, clearly in the context that the Nazis are not among them.
Socialists? Yes, of a kind. While some rightists make a dubious case for the Nazis being left wing, some leftists deny that the Nazis were socialists of any kind. But there have been a bewildering variety of “socialisms” around the world since the 18th century.
Dagmar Herzog, New York Times, Review: Hitler’s Beneficiaries, 2/18/07:
“Citizens were sated with decent wages, generous overtime pay and innovative pension plans – that is, through the establishment of a complex, if absolutely amoral, welfare state.
Aly, in short, makes a serious and well–researched attempt to put the “socialism” back in National Socialism.”
But keep in mind that many of the Nazi elite also considered themselves Christian – a weird variant called Positive Christianity that rejected the Old Testament and Paul of Tarsus. (A minority of them were neo-pagans, but not Hitler himself.) Many of the Nazis elite were heterodox Christians, just like they were heterodox socialists. That fact in itself doesn’t prove that Christianity nor socialism are bad. Are the VW Bug and the Autobahn inherently evil?