Today, the Muslim world is struggling with numerous challenges: absolute monarchs, dictators, internal inequalities, confrontation with modernity and social change, the poison of oil wealth, economic stagnation, human rights abuses to name a few. But the paramount ordeal for contemporary Muslim societies is the disease of radicalism.
Radical militants terrorize, radicalize and destroy their own communities first. Only then do they attack their neighbors and the world. Even as they spread carnage and terror abroad, Muslim radicals make graveyards of their own communities. For their own sake, Muslim societies must reject radical militancy. For our sake, we need to help them.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), then the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas, and other militant groups became famous by attacking Israel, western airplanes, and western innocents. But they have done their greatest damage to the Palestinian people. The current fighting between Fatah (the PLO's political party) and Hamas is the most recent obvious expression of decades of corruption, abuse, militant attacks and internal terror perpetrated by radicals against the Palestinian people.
In Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion, a decade long fight by various Mujahideen, followed by a decade of civil war rendered this once diverse, moderate, even cosmopolitan, land a wasteland of radicalism under the rule of the Taliban. The Taliban became international radical Muslim stars, supporting Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and exporting radicalism to the world, all while destroying their own society. Their continuing war on the people of Afghanistan has wrought generational devastation.
Lebanese radicalism is embodied in Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. The Lebanese civil war destroyed a once beautiful society. Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad have also maintained a long term, low-level war with Israel. Moreover, they continue to strive to radicalize, divide and do violence to their own society. This week an anti-Syrian Muslim legislator and nine others were killed in a car bombing, threatening the stability of the Lebanese unity government.
Iranian radicalism enjoys the distinction of long-term state power. Iranian radicals have been responsible for numerous terrorist and militant attacks in recent decades. The Iranian Quds Force is currently active in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But radical clerics and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard suppress the Iranian people far more than their enemies abroad.
In the world of Muslim radicals, Al Qaeda is a relative late bloomer, born out of radicalism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Arabia. It claims to attack the West, but clearly Al Qaeda in Iraq has killed many more Muslims than non-Muslims. In fact, it would not be difficult to argue that, including the September 11th attacks, Al Qaeda has done much greater harm to Muslim societies than it has done to the West.
Finally, radical groups have gained increasingly violent potency in Iraq over the last few years. Like roaches scurrying out from under a lifted stone, Sunni insurgents, Saddam loyalists, Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Shiite death squads have proliferated in post-Saddam Iraq. Many of them claim to fight American and coalition soldiers. They have succeeded in killing and injuring thousands of foreign troops. But the murder, terror and violence they have wrought on Iraqis is far greater.
Amazingly, notwithstanding this litany of radical groups that attack and strive to destroy their own societies, the Muslim world contains hundreds of millions of people in conservative to moderate societies that want peace, stability, prosperity, and freedom. Radicalism threatens their very survival, even more than it threatens terror attacks on us.
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And to think, all those millions and hundreds of millions of moslems that want nothing more than 'peace', 'stability', 'prosperity' and 'freedom' keep their mouths closed about the jihad...
They are complicit with their silence...
But when an INFIDEL draws a cartoon of old mo', these silent moslems that want nothing more than 'peace', 'stability', 'prosperity' and 'freedom' take to the streets like rabid hordes, practically foaming at the mouth with their rage...
With placards that call for death, dismemberment, etc...etc...etc...
Ohhhh yeah, there sure are millions upon millions of moslems that want nothing more than 'peace', 'stability', 'prosperity' and 'freedom' ...
If you still believe that, I have some prime property for sale on Valles Marineris...Send me an e-mail if you are interested in buying some...
1 comment:
Valles Marineris
Ahhahaha.
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