Is the war on terror a war against just Al-Qaeda or extremist Islam...

[_Jumper_]

...as a whole?

[Peace_Place]

1. A war on humanity

When we kill one of us we diminish the whole. After we kill all the people then we will go after Mother Earth.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

2. IMHO, it looks like they're trying to go after the entire Islamic world.

[DuctapeFatwa]

3. It is indeed a Crusade against Islam

perhaps not in the sense of the images encouraged by the western media, but a Crusade against Islam, most definitely.

What frightens the west about Islam has nothing to do with the rights of women, or human rights in general.

The "Islam" that is most demonized in the west is in fact the "Islam" that has been carefully cultivated and nurtured by the west, the totalitarian iron-fisted regimes of literal interpretation of scripture every bit as selective, as unstudied and as wacko as the American Christians who are so fond of "eye for an eye" when it suits their purposes but whom one seldom hears exhorting the part about an inch down in most Bibles, that lays out the conditions and rules regarding selling one's daughter into slavery.

While chopping hands and cloth on heads make good TV, and are very effective in persuading millions of otherwise reasonable people to cheerfully send their sons off to die in the name of stamping out this evil, and "liberating" these poor prisoners of the travesty their own politicians and generals and Armani-suited executive gunrunners have wrought and labelled "Islam," the fact is that women are treated just as poorly, human rights are shredded just as finely, in many places under completely non-Islamoid rubrics, and have been for thousands of years.

If western women, and western men, were and are so concerned about the plight of women in Pashtunistan, they have managed to suppress their distress quite impressively for more years than the US has been in business.

How many westerners know, for instance, that the Taliban were in fact wined and dined by bush regime henchmen, shortly after they came to the forefront, and were effectively made an offer they couldn't refuse, in the name of Holy Pipelinism, which they refused, and were selected as the next bombing victim?

And how many know that those colorful barbarities of the Taliban are in fact pre-Islamic tribal customs that not only have nothing to do with Islam but in many cases are in direct contradiction with the message of the Koran?

The half literate mullahs spouting rote suras in a language they cannot read while imposing the very kinds of draconian crap that Mohammed sought to END are the western imperialist oligarchy's best friend.

The western media loves to decry the lack of "democracy" in the Middle East, but prefers (and the regime also prefers) that no one peer too closely into just how much western blood and treasure has been spent in the cause of keeping it that way, back to the days of Lawrence and Gertrude.

The fact is, a democratic government chosen by an educated, well-fed and informed people with full franchisement would not be in the best interests of US business concerns, particularly the defense and energy industries.

A democratically elected, independent, accountable to his people leader could not be counted on to put US business interests before those of his own citizenry.

A dollaho, on the other hand, can and gladly will, if paid well and regularly, and throughout the region, they are.

Those interested might want to do some reading on the history of the House of Saud, for example, or enjoy typing "Mossadeq" into his google searchbox. For those with a taste for delving back farther in history, and a high tolerance for tragedy, the stomach-turning fall of the Hashemites from the honored position they once held to the contemptuous slimepit in which they now wallow, would not be the worst way you could spend an afternoon.

In short, the west could care less about people suffering from brutal regimes; on the contrary, they prefer it that way, because brutal regimes are more predictable and controllable. It is far easier to slip a few extra rolexes to a clumb of princes or sheikhs than it is to impose one's will on a noisy, fully franchised educated and opinionated electorate.

What the west fears about Islam itself has to do with the Islamic economy. They do not fear a huge Islamic bloc that enforces hijab in the streets with camel whips.

They fear a huge Islamic bloc that refuses to pay interest or accept Federal Reserve Notes, or the vaporcurrency of Greenspanfarts, in exchange for oil, and the other Islamic Monster, the spectre of peace.

Peace is the opposite of money. Few fine old families are said to have made their fortunes during this or that peace.

For those who are unaware, an Islamic economy is not socialism, nor is it the designer feudalism that westerners have been indoctrinated to worship as capitalism and a free market.

In an Islamic economy, entrepreneurship, prosperity, even wealth are encouraged, but exploitation and unbridled greed have no place.

Call back those hasty fingers, you who are about to say, why such a thing does not exist, cannot, human nature, all this balderdash about the utopia of the Caliphate - remember that we are talking now of the actual religion, not the various appeasing travesties of it that profit the sheikh and the CEO and starve the people, and also remember that the fact that Utopia is not possible is hardly an excuse for deliberately not feeding people when there is food to do so, and spending more than the cost of feeding them to slaughter them, which is the basis of US foreign policy for decades, and why it is possible to find not so many intelligent and well-read Iranians, Malaysians, Pakistanis and a host of other ians who will not mind telling you that they don't much care for Americans.

[_Jumper_]

5. Why lump all majority-white countries into one group?

I see Muslims do this all the time(that is what the nebulous "West" is in reality).

Note: my family is Muslim.

[DuctapeFatwa]

10. Should you direct your question to those countries?

They are empowered to do their own lumping and unlumping.

Which ones have sent soldiers to the Middle East to fight the bush regime gunmem?

[_Jumper_]

12. "The West" opposed the war

Only the UK sent troops. Eastern Europeans opposed the wars but a few governments supported it. However, Eastern Europe isn't always considered part of "the West".

I am just curious. I see Muslims do it all the time. Why? What exactly does Belgium or Finland have to do with the problems in Muslim nations?

[DuctapeFatwa]

13. I don't have a list of the nations that took money from the bush regime

in return for inclusion of their names on the "coalition" list, I know that Belgium bent over obediently when ordered to take the teeth out of their law that would have allowed some Crusade victims to pursue justice against war criminals in the Belgian court. I don't know if Finland is on the list or not, but what I can tell you is that there is a provision in the UN charter that would have allowed for a use of force to prevent one country from invading another, and the decision was made not to take it.

I can also tell you that the UN rubber stamped the occupation with only a burplet of token grumbling, and unless you want to argue that all these countries are in the same boat as Syria, then let's proceed on to the number of nations who have formed a coalition of the willing to disarm the US, or insisted that the US be voted out of the UN, and NATO entirely, and isolated as a rogue nation and a pariah state.

And I can provide a list of all the European countries who are giving military aid to the Resistance in Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan.

The number for all the above is holding steady at zero.

Maybe you would like to list all the European countries who have essentially said, ok we will sit here and some of us will issue strongly worded statements, but we won't lift a finger to stop you from seizing peoples' wives and daughters for "interrogation" or smashing kids with tanks, or torturing people to death when all your rental cells in those "pro-western" friendly countries where you have your dollahos are full, we will go along to get along, but you damn better give us some of that oil money.

[_Jumper_]

15. Why single out majority-white countries?

The UN is a world organization. Who truly opposed the war? It can be argued that each country offered only token opposition.

"And I can provide a list of all the European countries who are giving military aid to the Resistance in Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan.

The number for all the above is holding steady at zero."

So what? How many Latin American, Asian, and African countries are doing that? The UK created the problem so it should play a role in solving the problems in Iraq and Israel/Palestine but why should Austria or Denmark play a role?


"Maybe you would like to list all the European countries who have essentially said, ok we will sit here and some of us will issue strongly worded statements, but we won't lift a finger to stop you from seizing peoples' wives and daughters for "interrogation" or smashing kids with tanks, or torturing people to death when all your rental cells in those "pro-western" friendly countries where you have your dollahos are full, we will go along to get along, but you damn better give us some of that oil money."

Why single out majority-white countries?

What exactly is "pro-Western"? What does Egypt do for Sweden?

I don't consider you a racist and you are a poster I respect, but I do believe that much of the hatred of "the West" by other Muslims, especially Arabs and Pakistanis, is a result of subtle racism.

[DuctapeFatwa]

16. Altho the blip of European pre-eminence is fading from theradar screen

of history, the process is not yet complete, and it is a process neither graceful nor complimentary to the human species.

The sad old overplayed song of European colonization is the dominant note in the fragrance of the conflict played out in the US weapons depot in the Levant, the list of countries - not only in the Middle East, but in Asia, Latin America, and the Mother of us all, Africa, is still in the throes of it, for the "end" was only in name, as the typical strategy of Great White Father has been to install Great Beige Father even as he has one snowy foot on the departing ship that will sail him back to his beloved land of ice and fine cheese.

However, in the haunting and true words of Jeanette Jurado:

"seasons change, people change"

Remember that it was barely over a half century ago that racial apartheid was the law of the land in the US, an artificial country born of genocide and suckled on slavery, all in the name of bringing more light unto mankind than Zion, based on a moment or two of lucidity in which Thomas Jefferson expropriated the Great Law of the Iroquois, in between impregnating a woman he would not take as his wife.

Less than half a century ago, you could find African-Americans who would say, even when no white people were listening, that segregation was just and right, that they, our Mother's princely sons of Africa, were inferior to these remarkable Pink Ones who were among the last of humankind on earth to use tools or written language.

And you could find similar attitudes across the globe. But Roy Wilkins, and his homologues in Asia and Africa and elsewhere, died, and with them died the Majority World's love affair with Europe and everything European, leaving only a rather anachronistic but brisk trade in skin whiteners.

Needless to say, that is not enough for Sahib, who wants his loyal bearer back, not this brash new bearer who insists that the oil, and the diamonds, and the mahogany, and may God help us all, the toothfish, are HIS, and not Sahib's.

Pity Great Beige Father, for whom all the dollars in the world cannot buy the ability to go into a common marketplace with his people, without a battalion or two of Dyncorp indies, and return alive, doomed is he to spend all his days blushingly pissing Karzai-like, surrounded by a crowd of gaping dollabought rentacops.

So it is about transition, but not a rapid one, especially those who are accustomed to measure their country's history in centuries rather than millennia.

[BeFree]

8. Thank you, DuctapeFatwa

I hope many readers will partake of your fine missive. The lack of understanding of what our America is really up to needs remedying. Your words are a fine beginning to that end as any I have ever read. Thank you.

[mbartko]

14. Bravo!

Best. Post. Ever. (on this subject)

:yourock:

[Junkdrawer]

4. If you sit on oil, you qualify...

if it was against Al-Qaeda, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq.

[_Jumper_]

6. 2nd question

What should the war be? Do we need to dismantle just Al-Qaeda or all of extremist Islam to live in safety?

[Philosophy]

7. Since neither of those have anything to do with Iraq

It must be something else. Hmmm.....

[_Jumper_]

9. I'm not talking about Bush and PNAC

We were attacked. We are at war. Who is our true enemy and how should we prosecute a war against them? Do we dismantle Al-Qaeda and stop or do we shut down the madrassas and the spread of extremist Islam? I can see good arugments either way. That is why I posted this.

[leftofthedial]

11. it is a sham

cover for the Bush neocon GOPNAC agenda for domination of the earth's remaining oil reserves and geopolitical extension of American military force.

[damnraddem]

17. No, it's a war on Terra.

On the Earth as a whole. Part may be directed at those Dubya calls 'terrorists,' as opposed to allies and friends who do the same things but aren't called by the name. But it's directed at countries as well (after all, Iraq had been engaged in no terrorism directed at the U.S.). And it's directed at our own people -- not just internment without trial or legal representation, or even charges, but denial of services. And it's directed at the Earth, at Terra, itself: by destroying environmental protection. Yeah, it IS a War on Terra.