A global conflict

[Prospero]

The news this morning from Kenya is deeply awful. At last 50 people now murdered by ultra fundamentalist members of the Somalian group Al Shabaab. Some executed at point blank range when it was clear they were not Muslim.

As those who know me at all realise i have been study in my defence of the hundreds of millions of ordinary Muslims globally who are not Jihadists or supporters of the idea of a fundamentalist Caliphate.

But my recent travels around the Middle east talking to many people and the growing numbers of terror incidents around the world convince me even more that a global struggle is underway for the soul of islam - between those who simply wish to live quietly and practice their religion (like most christians, Jews etc) and the very large number who wish to terrorise the world to impose their faith.

This should be a matter of grave concern to all of us.

It is a threat now almost everywhere - and sometimes in unexpected places. In China for instance, it is out of sight, and the Government keeps the conflict with militant Muslims in the Uighar areas. In Russian Chechen militants and jihadists flock to fight in whatever location the latest struggle is found (many in Syria for instance). Even in Indonesia, which is overwhelmingly Muslim,a radical insurgency is underway. In Mali only the presence of the French is keeping the insurgency in check. Those who could face watching the videos of militants in Syria killing Christian priests will have been the huge and multi ethnic composition of the crowds.

In Syria indeed the uprising, welcomed by so many when it began, has now been hijacked by the Islamist groups. In the northern part of the country they are murdering Christians. Any settlement is likely to see a small and fundamentalists zone created. Which will feed Jihad in such places as Jordan.

A bombing of christians today in India. Continual conflict between Jihadists in Iraq and the Shi'ite population. And so on.

Moderate islam and the wider world really do now need to focus on the eradication of this poison. it is a real threat to us all.

[trish]

Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, National Liberation Front of Tripura, The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, etc. etc. What lies at the bottom of these hate groups? Is it simply political? Is Al-Shabaab’s terrorist attack on a Nairobi shopping mall simply a tit-for-tat against Kenya having troops in Somalia? That may be part of it, but it is no more explanatory than the fact that the U.S. had an invited presence in Saudi Arabia (home of Mecca) was the reason for the 9/11 attacks. Somalia is and has been for awhile an experiment in total anarchy. It is overrun by mobs, gangsters and pirates. Al-Shabaab is in Somalia not because of any allegiance to its people, but because the lawless land serves as a safe haven for terrorists and brigands that periodically raid Kenyan villages and farms across the border.

There are not just violent Islamist groups, but Christian groups, Jewish groups as well. One might think religious groups are particularly prone to intolerance, but there is environmental terrorism, racial terrorism and political assassins.

Why is fundamentalism of all kinds dividing people everywhere? Not always violently but nevertheless persistently. In the U.S. we have fundamentalists in the form of tea-baggers and libertarians obstructing Congress. Worldwide there are anti-science swindlers obfuscating climate education. In every domain of human affaires find there are holdouts and contrarians for whom worldwide conversion to their own quirky system of wild-eyed beliefs is their self-appointed mission, the one and only mission that seems to give their life meaning and provide them with personal identity. Is this a function of world being effectively smaller than ever before? Is it a function of intrusion of modernity and the spread of practical and effective knowledge? Is it because expanded communications (via the internet) has opened up new territories (i.e. more connected minds) to be persuaded and conquered?

I visited Nairobi just a few years ago. Many Kenyans there are of both African decent, Indian and Pakistani decent. A coffee shop in the mall recently shattered by gunfire was managed by Israelis. I traveled to Lake Naivasha, spent a night in Tree Tops and a week on the Maasai Mara at Kichwa Tembo. The recent shootings truly sadden me.

But I do not wish to divert this conversation toward generalities. Is there something specific to Islam, its history, geography or beliefs that makes Islamic fundamentalism a global threat?

[broncofan]

People in general who cling to any one strain of thought usually have a sick sort of desperation about them. It does seem like such people are able to find one another better these days. Easier access to information, globalization, etc.

I'm not saying that living in a more interconnected world is bad in sum, but there is a netting effect with anything. One bad feature is that disaffected people are able to share ideas and form stronger alliances. It's group think on a very broad scale.

Islamic terrorism, eco-terrorism, conspiracy theorists, 9/11 truthers, HIV deniers. There have always been cranks but the number of positive feedback loops available has increased. Now people build self-reinforcing networks where they share the same ideas, make citations to the same pieces of evidence, and deny everything else. We see that to some degree with our right wing friends who visit and make the same hackneyed arguments, cutting and pasting, usually from the same resources.

This is not terrorism of course, but it leads to deep distortions of reality.

I want to second Trish's point. Just because someone points to the transgressions of their enemy as the cause of their actions does not mean they actually are. And even if these transgressions are a necessary condition, there may be dozens of other pre-disposing factors such as ideology that better explain the "response".

[broncofan]

But I don't mean to ignore the event that inspired the original post. It is horrible. The truth is in direct response to it I don't even know what to say.

[Prospero]

Sayed Qutb's philosophy is at root of much of contemporary Jihadism.

Sayyid Qutb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb)

A great primer (And hugely readable)to the roots of al-Queda and this philosophy is the The looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. It details the development of this thought up to - but not including- the attack on the twin towers.

Interestingly in the 1950s and 1960s, the US covertly funded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the Nasser period because they saw it as a bulwark against Communism. Just as they funded the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan to combat Soviet occupation.

[Stavros]

But my recent travels around the Middle east talking to many people and the growing numbers of terror incidents around the world convince me even more that a global struggle is underway for the soul of islam -

I disagree, because there is no 'global struggle' just as there is no such thing as 'the soul of Islam'. Like it or not there is no central authority in Islam, neither the scholars of Al-Azhar nor Qom, nor the Grand Mufti of Mecca can lay claim to such a role, however respected their opinions might be -just as the Pope is no longer an authority on Christianity -if he ever was-, and the Dalai Lama does not speak for all Buddhists.

Trish asks 'is it simply political' -yes is the answer, and to elaborate on that would mean an historical exegesis of the primary forces that have shaped the Middle East since Napoleon landed in Egypt on the 1st of July 1798 -too much for this thread, but a few thoughts follow.

For some historians -for example Malcolm Yapp- 1798 marks the arrival of 'modernity' in the region; it marks the beginning of a crisis for the Ottoman Empire from which it never recovered, and it sparks a new set of discourses in Islam which attempt to make sense of what Islam is in this new modern world, and whether or not it can fuse with it, co-exist with minimum fuss, or must reject it entirely. Mohammed Abduh, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, Mohamed ibn Abd-al-Wahab -and others, are primarily concerned with politics, and its expression in this other new thing that emerged in the wake of Napoleon and his defeat: nationalism and the state. In the event, all three strands have been submerged in the creation of a modern system of states in the region after 1918 -and also had to contend with the impact of Empire, the attraction of secular politics, and the fact that for most of the period since 1918 the ordinary man and woman in the street has not had an opportunity to shape their own agendas, for dictatorship was quick to replace messy experiments with democracy with the certainty of brutal, centralised rule and the obliteration of civil society.

That there has not been one dominant discourse in Islam is part of the complex layer of political activity that has characterised the vicissitudes of the modern state in a region where, as in Europe, people have manipulated religion for political purposes, it has suited a variety of leaders and would-be leaders to make bombastic claims about their fidelity to this or that belief in order to win converts.

Where a particular strand of Islam has dominated, the consequences have been as grim as the consequences of modernity in Europe where, until only recently (1989 if you must have a date) more than half the continent was ruled by one-party states or military dictatorships, but where, in one small corner called Northern Ireland, nobody couched the conflict in terms of a 'crisis of Christianity'.

Why not? At the same time as the 'Troubles' when Churches in northern Ireland were being attacked (mostly by extreme Protestant groups), Christians were leading the slaughter of Muslims in Lebanon as they had done so since the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Tel al-Zaatar camp in 1976, and continued right up the ghastly massacres in the Chabra and Shatila camps in 1982 -was this 'simply political' or a 'Crisis of Christianity'? What proportion of the military leaders of South American governments, and their soldiers, were rounding up and killing 'godless Communists' in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Colombia to preserve the Christian state?

And how different are these groups and their radical ideology from the guerilla movements of the 1960s who took their cue from the Russian and the Cuban Revolutions and the (erroneous) belief that even a small ragged bunch of militants can overthrow a government and create a new one -? The motto was simple enough: If you don't hit it, it won't fall. The campaign strategy of the Salafist groups in the Middle East comes straight out of the handbook of the Leninist party and the fact that for a variety of reasons the Bolsheviks manoeuvred themselves into a position in Russia in 1917 from which they could mount a bid for power, their opponents being as incoherent and divided as the Syrian opposition is today.

And so on -it is politics and the modern state; modernity and issues of gender and identity which are at the cause of the contemporary Middle East, and there but for a few yards of cloth and contentious rituals, go we all.

[Prospero]

It seems you do not understand metaphor Stavros - (my use of the word soul) and patronise me in suggesting i do no realise there is no central authority in islam.

[dderek123]

As a former teacher, I believe education and awareness should be the tools used to treat the deep wounds of fundamentalism. There's a strong correlation between fundamentalism and lack of education. Furthermore, it makes sense to think that an uneducated person would be more susceptible to indoctrination.

The Punic Wars were my favourite global conflict to learn about in history class. Hannibal was a beast.

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[Stavros]

It seems you do not understand metaphor Stavros - (my use of the word soul) and patronise me in suggesting i do no realise there is no central authority in islam.

A metaphor for what? You could try and discuss political Islam in the context in which it has become important rather than invent your own crisis and then express surprise that not everyone recognises it as such.

[Prospero]

Stavros - I have not invented this crisis. It is very real. What I wrote yesterday was a rapid and gut response to the horrific events still unfolding in Kenya.

But was not inspired by some fantasy.

I wonder how many Jihadists you have spoken to? How many British Muslim radicals you have met? How many former inmates of Guantanamo Bay? How many Imams across the Arab world? How many ordinary Muslims in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Dubai or elsewhere?

So why such a patronising and arrogant dismissal by you of something for which is a considerable evidence . A paper published this summer by the Royal African Society for instance discusses the formal affiliations between al-Shabaab and the Al-Queda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) with the "central" al-Queda leadership.

(I seriously wonder if your students found you as pompous and patronising in the classroom as you come across on here on almost any topic on which you feel someone else is wrong.)

I used the word soul loosely. I might have said heart, or mind or some other such word. Allow me, if you will, a little journalistic licence in coming up with a phrase to suggest the scope of the crisis facing the various forms of Islam globally. Yes it is to do with modernism and how to reframe Islam in the modern world. And in the aftermath of the rule of people such as Nasser and Saddam.

What I was saying is that the various forms of mainstream islam are undergoing an identity crisis and facing an aggressive challenge from a very fundamentalist vision of the faith - one that seeks to impose its own very rigorous version of Sharia law as espoused, for instance, by the Taliban when it ruled Afghanistan and which is now shared by various movements globally. It is one that in many cases also publicly espouses the notion of the creation of a global Khalifate. Or if its aims are more limited a khalifate that displaces other rules and governments in Muslim majority countries. There are many contradictions here... for instance the influence of Wahabism promoted by Saudi Arabia when in some of its forms, the radical islamist would love to overturn the rule of the Saud royal family.

And no while it is convenient for some commentators to see al-Queda as a global conspiracy (I avoided that word) it is a tendency which many younger radicalised young Muslim men (and some women) see as fitting their needs. And it does threaten the normalcy of Islam in the West (read the various accounts of those who have been radicalised in the UK via contact with still active radicalizing groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir.

As to supreme leadership in the Islamic world? There was, as you know, under the Ottoman Empire such a leadership. Today it is thoroughly splintered. (And was centuries ago when the binary divide over the succession to the prophet occurred). But the Shia tend to look to the supreme spiritual leadership in Iran and the university of Al-Azhar in Cairo is also seen as a religious authority of great repute. But no in the end I agree and know full well that there are no popes or Archbishop of Canterbury or dalai lama. I guess I had assumed most people knew this already. Did I suggest anything otherwise?

You draw a comparison with Northern Ireland as if to demolish my assertion of a crisis within Islam. No this was not seen as a crisis in Christianity – but it certainly was on one level a sectarian divide as well as a complex political one.

And the horrible massacres in refugee camps in Lebanon Now again these were not religious killings as much as Israeli inspired killings by Phalangists of opponents in the civil war –and of Palestinians. Political.

Is the public beheadings of Christian priests in Northern Syria simply political? Was the questioning of people in the shopping mall in Nairobi – and their summary execution if they were found not to be Muslim – simply political? I don’t think so.

These ignorant young people are the victims of a religious AND political ideology that IS a threat to the various forms of mainstream Islam and they also represent a wider threat.

[trish]

This morning I listened the story of one boy who was shot in the head at West Gate Mall (and is now in the hospital). Pleading their lives his mother and sister were asked by the gunman to recite a passage from the Koran. After they did they were shot and killed. A fellow gunman asked, “Why did you do that?” The reply was, “They weren’t wearing the Habeeb.”

According to the NPR radio report I was listening to Al-Shabaab is closely affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which has been trying to get a foothold in Somalia for more than a decade. But Al-Shabaab was a minor player there until the U.S. invasion cleared its political competition.

I find it difficult to believe the West Gate Mall shooting is simply or purely or merely political. Yet it’s doubtful one can understand it without the political background, the history, the geography, the balance of power (or lack of a balance in Somalia). Politics and religion. Which is the powder keg and which the fuse? Which the chicken and which the egg? Does it make any sense even to ask?

It is reported that some of the Mall shooters are young Somali men who were orphaned refugees given shelter within the U.S. and accepted into American families and schools only to years later be recruited by terrorists and sent back to Somalia. Is it religion that drew them back? Is it political rage? Nostalgia for their parents and their home soil? Whatever chords were struck, these poor young men were transformed into agents of terror.

As Prospero says, these recruiters are everywhere. I suspect most are honest in their beliefs about Islam. That believers are becoming too Westernized and their religious practices are becoming too lax, their faith too thin. But Westernization is a political process and the reaction to it is political: recruit men, send them to war, establish the Caliphate (albeit it’s based in religious legend).

I admit I’m pretty stupid when it comes Islamic issues, but it currently seems to me that in Islam politics and religion are inextricably intertwined as might be the case for any religion which has as a primary goal (early Mormonism for example) the establishment of a holy government.

[Stavros]

Stavros - I have not invented this crisis. It is very real. What I wrote yesterday was a rapid and gut response to the horrific events still unfolding in Kenya.

But was not inspired by some fantasy.

I wonder how many Jihadists you have spoken to? How many British Muslim radicals you have met? How many former inmates of Guantanamo Bay? How many Imams across the Arab world? How many ordinary Muslims in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain or Dubai or elsewhere?

So why such a patronising and arrogant dismissal by you of something for which is a considerable evidence . A paper published this summer by the Royal African Society for instance discusses the formal affiliations between al-Shabaab and the Al-Queda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) with the "central" al-Queda leadership.

(I seriously wonder if your students found you as pompous and patronising in the classroom as you come across on here on almost any topic on which you feel someone else is wrong.)

I used the word soul loosely. I might have said heart, or mind or some other such word. Allow me, if you will, a little journalistic licence in coming up with a phrase to suggest the scope of the crisis facing the various forms of Islam globally. Yes it is to do with modernism and how to reframe Islam in the modern world. And in the aftermath of the rule of people such as Nasser and Saddam.

What I was saying is that the various forms of mainstream islam are undergoing an identity crisis and facing an aggressive challenge from a very fundamentalist vision of the faith - one that seeks to impose its own very rigorous version of Sharia law as espoused, for instance, by the Taliban when it ruled Afghanistan and which is now shared by various movements globally. It is one that in many cases also publicly espouses the notion of the creation of a global Khalifate. Or if its aims are more limited a khalifate that displaces other rules and governments in Muslim majority countries. There are many contradictions here... for instance the influence of Wahabism promoted by Saudi Arabia when in some of its forms, the radical islamist would love to overturn the rule of the Saud royal family.

And no while it is convenient for some commentators to see al-Queda as a global conspiracy (I avoided that word) it is a tendency which many younger radicalised young Muslim men (and some women) see as fitting their needs. And it does threaten the normalcy of Islam in the West (read the various accounts of those who have been radicalised in the UK via contact with still active radicalizing groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir.

As to supreme leadership in the Islamic world? There was, as you know, under the Ottoman Empire such a leadership. Today it is thoroughly splintered. (And was centuries ago when the binary divide over the succession to the prophet occurred). But the Shia tend to look to the supreme spiritual leadership in Iran and the university of Al-Azhar in Cairo is also seen as a religious authority of great repute. But no in the end I agree and know full well that there are no popes or Archbishop of Canterbury or dalai lama. I guess I had assumed most people knew this already. Did I suggest anything otherwise?

You draw a comparison with Northern Ireland as if to demolish my assertion of a crisis within Islam. No this was not seen as a crisis in Christianity – but it certainly was on one level a sectarian divide as well as a complex political one.

And the horrible massacres in refugee camps in Lebanon Now again these were not religious killings as much as Israeli inspired killings by Phalangists of opponents in the civil war –and of Palestinians. Political.

Is the public beheadings of Christian priests in Northern Syria simply political? Was the questioning of people in the shopping mall in Nairobi – and their summary execution if they were found not to be Muslim – simply political? I don’t think so.

These ignorant young people are the victims of a religious AND political ideology that IS a threat to the various forms of mainstream Islam and they also represent a wider threat.

I can ignore your suppositions about what I do for a living, because it is not relevant to this thread, as well as being inaccurate. It is a pity that you substitute history for journalism, it means that while you writhe with discomfort in the moment, you cannot see the broader picture and for that reason you run with the pack without asking where they came from and where they are going.
It would be absurd to deny that armed, militant groups are not a threat to 'us' as well as to 'them', enough -too many- people have been murdered or injured for this to be in question, but you need to ask if the project that inspired the original al-Qaeda, its subsequent franchises, and say, the al-Shabab of Somalia, is any different from the project pursued by the Provisional IRA, the Red Army Fraction and the Red Brigades.

In every case there is a precise political context, but to acknowledge the aim of Islamic militants to create/re-create the Khalifate is no more interesting than a United Ireland or a socialist revolution in Germany and Italy. What is interesting is that after moving through different phases of violence and experiments with local government, none of these radical groups ever managed to extend their support beyond a hard core and all (with a few current exceptions) have called a halt to the 'armed struggle' (as was the case with Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the early 1970s) and then co-opted with the very people they sought to destroy (eg, the PLO, the Provisional IRA) or they were smashed with extreme force -but failed to rise from the ashes -Red Army Fraction, Red Brigades. Stay tuned for a deal between the Syrian opposition (some, if not all) and the Asad government.

You know as well as I do that the first experience of Taliban rule in Afghanistan alienated a substantial amount of the population and that the only reason why they have been able to return to prominence in some parts of the country is due to local and central corruption in government and law and order officials, and because the Taliban themselves have modified their original attitude (which doesn't make them any more cuddly than they were before but marks some degree of political maturity).

You also know that the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq was such a disaster that the very people it sought to lead turned against it, and in the 'Awakening' movement joined forces with the 'hated' US occupiers to destroy something they considered far worse.

And yet again, the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts that emerged in Somalia in the mid-1990s was credited with restoring law and order to a part of the country.Mogadishu and was a broad coalition of people whose priority was law and order for the purposes of 'normal life' -trade, education, and so on, and that the Courts survived by negotiating their way through the internecine forces in both Mogadishu and southern Somalia with a mixture of brutality and compromise -before it fell victim to radicals from within who thought it was too soft, and Ethiopian (and eventually, Kenyan) intervention from without who disrupted the gradual state-building process that had been going on. But what then happened is that the al-Shabab stepped into the vaccum created (partly by themselves) when the Courts collapsed, but have since taken the same road as the other would-be revolutionaries and so alienated the local population with their insane interpretation of Islam that they too have been run out of town.

Young men and women are attracted to movements which want to change the world, and they want to be part of that change, it is more exciting than stacking shelves in Tesco but it doesn't mean the world is going to change. Change mostly happens in spite of, rather than because of provocative acts. One of the Americans who left his comfortable home in Alabama to join the revolution in Somalia -he was even known as al-Amriki (his name was Omar Hammamii), got to the point where he couldn't stomach the sickening acts of violence being committed by the al-Shabab and complained about it -so they killed him too, a perfect example of the way in which these deluded grouplets implode over ludicrous debates on doctrine -'Left-Wing communism, an infantile disorder' is what Lenin called it, and that was rich coming from him!

So at its core we are dealing with a political issue, not a religious one, because the discourse of revolutionary politics manipulates Islam in order to distinguish between those who are or for or against the revolution, and it follows that if you don't want it, it is because you are not a 'proper' Muslim -that is not an identity crisis, that is political blackmail. These crises of the state we have been dealing with in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa exist because of the difficulties of creating a state where it did not exist before, with the attempt to create a government that represents the interests of the people who live in it, it really is as simple -and as complex- as that. Issues of identity, of tolerance and obligation, of taxation and representation, of work and education, are all part of the agenda of the modern state, and until someone comes up with a better alternative to it an extreme degree of violence will characterise live in places where extremists have the freedom to delude themselves they are important.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia did not begin as part of an Islamic revolution, it began because a local bureaucrat decided to impose one of a hundred stupid rules on a young man trying to make a living selling fruit from a cart and his patience snapped. It then emerged that people who had previously been afraid to express their own frustrations with incompetent government were no longer afraid and the rest follows -you can create a timeline of the American Revolution but when did those disparate events long before July 4 1776 actually become a conscious revolution against British rule? The Russian Revolution did not begin as a Communist overthrow of the Tsar, the Iranian Revolution only became Islamic after the Shah had left and power was contested within the country, but whatever the dress code, the driving forces are political, and the evidence shows that the armed militants who stormed the Mall in Kenya with the help of Kenyan officials so corrupt they would sell their own families for money, are a fringe element with no future.

[Stavros]

This morning I listened the story of one boy who was shot in the head at West Gate Mall (and is now in the hospital). Pleading their lives his mother and sister were asked by the gunman to recite a passage from the Koran. After they did they were shot and killed. A fellow gunman asked, “Why did you do that?” The reply was, “They weren’t wearing the Habeeb.”

According to the NPR radio report I was listening to Al-Shabaab is closely affiliated with Al-Qaeda, which has been trying to get a foothold in Somalia for more than a decade. But Al-Shabaab was a minor player there until the U.S. invasion cleared its political competition.

I find it difficult to believe the West Gate Mall shooting is simply or purely or merely political. Yet it’s doubtful one can understand it without the political background, the history, the geography, the balance of power (or lack of a balance in Somalia). Politics and religion. Which is the powder keg and which the fuse? Which the chicken and which the egg? Does it make any sense even to ask?

It is reported that some of the Mall shooters are young Somali men who were orphaned refugees given shelter within the U.S. and accepted into American families and schools only to years later be recruited by terrorists and sent back to Somalia. Is it religion that drew them back? Is it political rage? Nostalgia for their parents and their home soil? Whatever chords were struck, these poor young men were transformed into agents of terror.

As Prospero says, these recruiters are everywhere. I suspect most are honest in their beliefs about Islam. That believers are becoming too Westernized and their religious practices are becoming too lax, their faith too thin. But Westernization is a political process and the reaction to it is political: recruit men, send them to war, establish the Caliphate (albeit it’s based in religious legend).

I admit I’m pretty stupid when it comes Islamic issues, but it currently seems to me that in Islam politics and religion are inextricably intertwined as might be the case for any religion which has as a primary goal (early Mormonism for example) the establishment of a holy government.

Trish, if you are interested there are some useful articles on Somalia the Courts and the al-Shebab but not recent enough to monitor the latter's decline and fall. There is also a link to the NY Times you might have seen which suggests collusion between corrupt officials in Kenya and the murderers.


http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rdenever/IntlSecurity2008_docs/Menkhaus_GovernanceSomalia.pdf

http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/Africa/bpsomalia0407.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/world/africa/kenya-mall-shooting.html?hp&_r=0

[Prospero]

Correction - it was another poster who described himself as a former teacher. Apologies. But your pomposity is unique in this forum.

And again you lard your otherwise interesting posts with wholly unnecessary insults.

[dderek123]

Correction - it was another poster who described himself as a former teacher. Apologies. But your pomposity is unique in this forum.

And again you lard your otherwise interesting posts with wholly unnecessary insults.

http://imgur.com/B0ijt.jpg

[Stavros]

Correction - it was another poster who described himself as a former teacher. Apologies. But your pomposity is unique in this forum.

And again you lard your otherwise interesting posts with wholly unnecessary insults.

You just can't stand it when someone disagrees with you, Lenin. Ironic as I am about to leave for Russia where I can see the real one, even if he has been dead for 89 years.

[Prospero]

Lenin!!!!!!!.... what a complete and utter twerp you are for all your education and erudition.

[Stavros]

Lenin!!!!!!!.... what a complete and utter twerp you are for all your education and erudition.

So you lost your sense of humour too? Look, you are an intelligent and clever person, and I don't know why you have allowed yourself to become so obsessed with Islam as if there was something exceptional about the violence being perpetrated as part of some global-expansionist, revolutionary Islamic franchise. I tried to point out that these acts of sickening violence are neither unique to Islam nor other religions, but have political causes and seek political consequences, and that is where we seem to disagree. If you can prove from historical evidence that there is something exceptional about the outrages committed by violent Muslim would-be revolutionaries, that no other religion or system of belief can match them, go ahead, make my day. Given the bewildering rubbish I have read in this last week in the press from people who can't tell the difference between a Niqab and a Hijab -converts to Islam being as ignorant as their detractors- I do wonder if reason can be brought to bear on this subject.

[Prospero]

No I have not lost my humour at all nor am i obsessed with islam and nor do i see acts of political violence as unique to the faith and nor do i blame the entire faith and nor do i see a global conspiracy and nor do i see them as exceptional and not possible by other faiths (One only has to look at the violence perpetrated during the crusades or against witches or during the various inquisitions to see the hideousness that Christinaity USED to pepetrate. One can look at attacks against Muslims in Burma now. Etc). No i object to the abrasiveness in your remarks - especially when you respond to me. You debate in perfectly civil terms with anyone else in the politics strand including radical right wingers with whom we both disagree. And yet reserve you utter disdain for me - not merely here but in response to such things as my taste in music and in any other forum where you feel you want for whatever reason to respond to me. I have now come to expect your rudeness whenever you answer a posting by me. I am more than happy to discuss any subject with anyone without recourse to rudeness. But when i get the sort of remarks you made - sure my humour begins to diminish and I will answer back with rudeness.

I assure you I am not obsessed with islam but take a professional interest in it - and am indeed presently researching a film series about the political and historical roots of the present mess in the MiddleEeast. As a fellow at Cambridge university i have also made a special stdy in islam and science and I also assure you I can tell the difference between an Abaya, a Niqab, a Hijab, a Burka etc....

Being told i can brook no argument and being branded Leninist does not seem, on the face of it, full of wit. if it were a joke I missed it.

Yep. I DO see a distinction between Islamic funamentalist violence and, say, the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries of the past. In simplistic terms, one was fired by an ideological fervour to overthrow an ancient and corrupt system and replace it with something that sought to provide greater eqaulity and fairness and social and economic justice. The islamists seek to impose a version of Sharia that is backward and aqainst any notion of human rights and social justice as we understand it in the West. So when i say there is a crisis in islam it is across the Umma and particularly between the discourses that dominate most Muslims who live outside the Muslim majority countries and those who have no wish to live in harmony but insted cleave to the sort of vision inspired by Sayyed al-Qutb, the Muslim Brtherhood, the Salafist, the Wahhabi tendency and others. They are a menace. It is a global conflict and, by that I mean, fought at a low level on many different fronts. Not on a global war scale but in continual hideous bee stings (in the bigger scheme of things) like the mrderous assault this last week in Nairobi and in such attacks as 9/11, 7/7, the attack on the Madrid rail system, the bombings at moscow airport the disco bombings in Bali, the bombings in pakistan, the rise of Jihadism in the Syria civi war etc. Not part of a coherent global consiracy but surely connected - and fired by many factors including, but not exclusively, the notion of Global Jihad. Sure there is a huge political dimension here. I am not in any way trying to suggest it is all holy war. Hizbollah for instance have clear political motivations. As do Hamas. But there is also an underpinning religious vision as well.

Finally I'd like us to please be civil to one another.

[thx1138]

Blowback is a bitch: http://www.economist.com/node/21534828 Many Americans are outraged and feel threatened at what they see as a foreign invasion of an alien culture (Mexico). While the invaders are not soldiers some of them are armed and commit crimes Americans.

[Prospero]

Leaving aside the pointless and trivial squabble between me and Sataros, this report from the Independent newspaper is truly troubling - upsetting and sad.

Also the BBC reported today that the Imam who is the main recruiter for al-Shabaab in Kenya said the massacre was "the right thing to do", but that he cannot be prosecuted. Strange world.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/kenya-shopping-mall-attack-nairobi-hostages-were-tortured-before-they-were-killed-says-police-doctor-8842509.html

Kenya shopping mall attack: Nairobi hostages were tortured before they were killed, says police doctor
Rumours of rapes, disfigurement and beheadings are rife in Kenya’s capital

A police doctor scouring Nairobi’s Westgate mall for bodies after a four-day siege by Islamist gunmen that claimed dozens of lives has said victims were tortured before they died, according to a Kenyan newspaper.

“Those are not allegations. Those are f****** truths,” the doctor, a forensics expert, told The Star newspaper. “They removed balls, eyes, ears, nose. They get your hand and sharpen it like a pencil then they tell you to write your name with the blood. They drive knives inside a child’s body. Actually, if you look at all the bodies, unless those ones that were escaping, fingers are cut by pliers, the noses are ripped by pliers.”

The information could not be independently verified, but William Pike, the British editor of The Star, said the reporters working on the story had been given similar accounts from other sources. “We have [the source] on a recording,” Mr Pike said. “He was talking very graphically, and he was very angry.”

The horrifying details of what may be the last moments of some of the hostages at the hands of terrorists from Somalia’s al-Shabaab movement come amid mounting public anger over the authorities silence about the details of the siege. Many questions remain, such as what happened to the potentially dozens of hostages still unaccounted for? What happened to the attackers? And what caused parts of Westgate to collapse in the final hours of the siege?

Police have asked for patience as they begin the painstaking work of gathering evidence and searching for bodies, with Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku warning it could take up to a week to complete the search. He has said that an “insignificant” number of bodies are still trapped.

Gunmen armed with machine guns and grenades stormed the Westgate mall on Saturday lunchtime, shooting indiscriminately, and killing at least 61 people. A further six security officers died in attempts to rout the militants. During the siege, rescuers evacuated many survivors, but reports suggested hostages were being held by militants. Kenya’s Red Cross says that 71 people are still listed as missing.

Ghoulish accounts on the fate of the hostages have circulated Nairobi and there have been claims that the military was forced to blow up part of the Westgate complex not just to bring the siege to an end, but to end the appalling suffering of hostages amid reports that hostages were raped, and others beheaded and their heads thrown out of the windows.


None of these reports could be verified amid what is a febrile atmosphere in the city following the worst terrorist attack on Kenyan soil since the US embassy bombings by Al-Qa’ida in 1998 that killed more han 200.

Allegations of rape are not commonly linked with Islamist militants, although there are increasing numbers of rape cases reported in Somalia after long years of conflict.

Meanwhile, Kenyan authorities are also facing questions over whether they had any intelligence on an impending attack, which a Somali al-Shabaab chief said was a “message to Westerners” who had “backed Kenya’s invasion [of Somalia],” a reference to Kenya’s 2011 incursion aimed at crushing the militant movement.

Kenya’s National Intelligence Agency (NIS), widely accused by politicians of failing to pick up chatter about the attack, has insisted it did warn the police and officials inside the President’s office before the Westgate siege, but its warnings went unheeded, The Star reported.

According to the same report, a pregnant policewoman avoided Westgate after her brother, who works for Kenyan intelligence, warned her of a terror attack. “She has told police that her brother who is a NIS officer warned her not to visit Westgate that Saturday because she would not be able to run,” a senior officer was quoted as saying

[dderek123]

That is totally fucked up.

[Ben]

Author David Swanson: "When the World Outlawed War"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pBa361BB8hU

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=Prospero;1395456]

The islamists seek to impose a version of Sharia that is backward and aqainst any notion of human rights and social justice as we understand it in the West.
--You could have added, 'against any notion of human rights and social justice as understood in Islam' on the basis that much of the aggressive Islam which underpins the beliefs of the radical groups is actually anti-Islamic, not only does it depart from a religious understanding of Islam as the love of God, it encourages attacks on Islam from within it and from without, by acts of violence, and intimidation at the social and cultural level. As Bassam Tibi put it:
One need not be an expert on Islamic movements to know how weak and divided these movements are, in relative terms, and to infer from their weakness their inability to bring about the new world order they proclaim with such electrifying rhetoric. To be sure fundamentalists can engineer frightening levels of terrorism and otherwise throw the streets into turmoil, but it is difficult to imagine the diverse and rivalrous Islamic fundamentalist movements coming together long enough to create a new order even had they the requisite economic, political, and military wherewithal...(The Challenge of Fundamentalism, 1998)

So when i say there is a crisis in islam it is across the Umma and particularly between the discourses that dominate most Muslims who live outside the Muslim majority countries and those who have no wish to live in harmony but insted cleave to the sort of vision inspired by Sayyed al-Qutb, the Muslim Brtherhood, the Salafist, the Wahhabi tendency and others. They are a menace.
--But the problem rests with us as much as the 'Umma' you refer to. But yes, they are a menace, because they have an ability to create disorder. Isn't that the point of conjuncture with the Red Brigades and the Red Army Fraction for whom the creation of a Communist revolution first needed a repressive state apparatus that would alienate 'the masses'? In these cases, the dream of a final state is but a dream, the glory is in the struggle to create the preconditions for it, even though there is an aversion to violence among the very 'masses' in whose name atrocities are committed.

--If I object to the word 'crisis' (which is also how Tibi expressed it in 1998) it is because the word suggests a need for urgent action, whereas I see these radical movements whether or not they take their cue from Qutb as reacting against 'modernization' while practising it at the same time. And this has been part of the 'revolt of Islam' since Napleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 if not before that (cf Nikkie Keddie's article 'The Revolt of Islam, from 1700-1993' in Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol 36, no 3 (1994). The contradiction is again expressed well by Tibi:
Fundamentalism is a Weltanschaung or worldview that seeks to establish its own order, and thus to separate the peoples of Islamic civilization from the rest of humanity while claiming for their worldview a universal standing'.

But there is also an underpinning religious vision as well.
--I don't see it that way. Because I tend to see both the origin of Islam and the development of its extreme variants as reactions to a relationship to other cultures and beliefs, but where the 'crisis' is invented for political purposes. For these people there has always been a 'crisis', rather like the 'crisis in capitalism' Trostsykists have been telling us about since the 1930s.
I see these trends in the context of two thousand years. That may sound callous and impractical in the context of real events in which people are horribly killed, but it is a mistake to see these events as 'we and they' or 'them and us' because that is precisely the framework used by the radicals to try and separate Muslims from non-Muslims, and particular sects of Islam from each other, and it has nothing much to do with religion except as a branding exercise. After all, when you set aside the Protestant and Catholic criticisms of religious practice, the core problem is/was the political status of the Pope and whether or not obedience should be made to the Pope or the government, this was at the root of the religious violence which swept through England under Henry VIII and continued in a reverse fashion with Queen Mary and to a lesser extent Elizabeth 1 and led ultimately to Catholics being legally barred from holding public office (until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1822). A similar problem arises with young British Muslims who refuse to recognise the Law of England but only 'Allah's Law', absurd though the concept is in theory and practice.
The Arabs have had to work their way through a variety of political regimes most of which failed to deliver sufficient economic prosperity, social justice and stability to prevent the emergence of violent opposition; radical groups have tended to step into a vacuum vacated by the state -the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is in reality a popular social movement which has served its supporters with education and welfare precisely because the State failed to do so, much as the Cosa Nostra was built in Sicily in the vacuum of power that followed the collapse of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in 1816 and the indifference of Rome to its periphery.

The popular reaction against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the popularity of the (now defunct) Islamic Courts in Somalia as opposed to the Shebab, the Awakening movement in Iraq -what these movements show is that radical Islamic groups are a dead end; they can be destructive, they can create disorder and civil war, and carry their violence into our own streets, and they emerge in the power vacuums that open up when decades of dictatorship is replaced by chaos -but the experience of the Islamic State so far has been poor, and people know it. Right now the real fear in 'the west' is not so much Iran and Syria, but Saudi Arabia, as the Saudi Royal Family's hold on power is not tenable in the long term, but where any unified opposition is lacking precisely because a diversity of opinion and indeed, political activity is crushed throughout the kingdom. But this post is already too long on a topic that has no finality. We are stuck with this violent rage for some time to come.

[Stavros]

Leaving aside the pointless and trivial squabble between me and Sataros, this report from the Independent newspaper is truly troubling - upsetting and sad.


But is it true? There is now theory that a lot of the destruction was caused by the army when it entered the Mall, and that they set off bombs and were firing weapons as a cover while soldiers looted the shops of electrical goods, cameras, computers and the most expensive clothing....a lot of facts still to come on this incident it seems...