An Idea Lost on Fanatics

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: An idea lost on fanatics
Those behind the Mumbai attacks will never fathom religious liberty.
Tim Rutten
November 29, 2008

There are many facts remaining to be discovered about the atrocities in Mumbai this week, but we already know what we really need to know.

The physical institutions targeted and the individuals singled out for particular attention by the killers -- Americans, Britons and Jews -- are signatures of the fanatic Islamists we've come to know as jihadis. The sites of their attacks may vary -- New York, London, Madrid, Nairobi, Mumbai -- but the object of their quarrel with history remains the same: modernity.

Mumbai was selected not simply because it was a so-called soft target but because it is a symbol of modernity in the world's most populous democracy. The city the West first knew as Bombay is today the symbol of India's place in the modern world, as the center not only of banking, commerce and a burgeoning high-tech sector but one of the world's great film industries. (It's worth recalling that when the Taliban swept to power in Afghanistan, one of the first things it did was to close the cinemas and ban DVDs from Mumbai's Bollywood.)...

Like all the totalitarian movements that have come before it, hatred of liberty and Jews is the real foundation of contemporary jihadism, and not the traditions of Islam or its canonical prescriptions....

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Adherents of the jihadi ideology share a common presumption that the modern world in all its manifestations is the implacable enemy of a traditional religiosity. Modernism, in their minds, is built on concepts that pollute: reason, individual liberty, democracy, pluralism. Like all totalitarians, they demand submission to a single pure idea. Difference equals contamination; reason leads to sacrilege....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten29-2008nov29,0,1759325.column

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. Don't for a moment think these people only target Westerners

There is a war within Islam itself, where the Wahhabists and the Shia mullahs are persecuting Sufis. Their shrines and centers have been destroyed, thousands who were peacefully protesting were arrested and tortured, and even meeting is banned in some nations. You just don't hear of it because it isn't Westerners involved.