Why radical Islam, why now?

[everythingsxen]

---SNIP---
In the 1930s, German-style fascism appealed to Arabs in Palestine and Egypt. Soviet-style communism had sympathetic governments in Afghanistan, Algeria and Yemen. Ba'athism took hold in Syria and Iraq. The secular Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser promised a new pan-Arabism that would do away with colonial borders that divided the "the Arab nation." Then there is the more pragmatic authoritarianism that survives in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya or in the petrol-monarchies in the Gulf.

Radical Islam may be as totalitarian and as morally bankrupt as any of these past or mostly defunct "isms," but its current appeal isn't hard to figure out. Unlike fascism or communism, radical Islam is locally grown and not plagued by charges of foreign contamination. Indeed, Islamists claim to wage jihad against the modernism and globalization of the outside, mostly Westernized world. Such a message resonates in stagnant, impoverished Muslim countries.

Of course, while the people of the region may be poor, the Islamist movement isn't. Huge oil profits filter throughout the Muslim world, allowing Islamists to act on their rhetoric. In today's world, militias can easily acquire everything from shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to rocket-propelled grenades. With such weapons on their own turf, Islamists can nullify billion-dollar Western jets and tanks.

There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers

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[jonnyblitz]

1. no offense but I can't take anything from the Reverend Moon's

newspaper seriously. :eyes:

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. I second that thought -- the Moonies's newspaper with an author

from an ultra-right wing extremist think tank warning about the dangers of totalitarianism should be taken with a grain of salt or perhaps a vodka and tonic

[Jim Sagle]

3. And besides, they're the only menace around.

Naziism is gone and communism is dying, yet the military/industrial/media/intelligence complex needs a plausible enemy. Islam isn't all that plausible as an actual threat, but they're all we have, so we'll have to make do.

[wtmusic]

4. bullshit

If this author read any of OBL's original writings, al Qaeda's attacks have nothing to do with waging jihad against "modernism and globalization" (an American fiction more popular than Mark Twain). It has everything to do with retribution for Western pillaging of the Arabian peninsula for the last 100 years (undeniable).

"With such weapons on their own turf, Islamists can nullify billion-dollar Western jets and tanks." One might think they had the right to do so, on their own turf. :crazy:

[Englander]

5. Now, there's irony-

A fascist talking about racism/fascism in a decidely racist newspaper, that also supports fascism -

Hell of a Times

These are edgy times at the Washington Times.

Still one of the most important right-wing organs in the nation, the paper has a circulation base of around 100,000. According to a source close to senior management, in the past two decades it has burned through far more than the $1.7 billion previously reported. During that time its editorial stance has consistently leaned to the hard right, as its favorite targets have ranged from liberal comsymps to President Bill Clinton to, most recently, "illegal aliens" and their allies in the "open borders lobby." Throughout, the Times has served as a major key on the conservative movement's Mighty Wurlitzer.

A nasty succession battle is now heating up at the paper, punctuated by allegations of racism, sexism and unprofessional conduct, that has implications far beyond its fractious newsroom. According to several reliable inside sources, Preston Moon, the youngest son of Korean Unification Church leader and Times financier Sun Myung Moon, has initiated a search committee to find a replacement for editor in chief Wesley Pruden--a replacement who is not Pruden's handpicked successor, managing editor Francis Coombs.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061009/washington_times

[CJCRANE]

6. Firstly

let's just point out that the original Mujahideen was financed by Reagan/Bush along with their Saudi allies.

Secondly, it's common knowledge that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the biggest boost for radical islam in recent years (and that's even been officially acknwledged in the last NIE).

[cali]

7. I try and keep an open mind, but I

find David Victor Hansen to be a hateful man, and in this OP, he hews to his hatefulness.

[no_hypocrisy]

8. To me, the gathering of the historical facts and the conclusions culled from

them are rather myopic and limited.

An examination of more history encompassing geography, anthropology, economic, and political science is required. How far back? Biblical epoch? Turn of the century? Probably both.

Consider how the inhabitants of various lands lived before colonialism of Europe, the discovery of another raw material which imperialist countries desired to take and control without compensation. When the raw materials were to be controlled, so to the inhabitants cohabiting with the materials. The suppression, the oppression, and choices forced on the general populations, the poverty, the uninvited inculturalization from western countries, etc.

Could what the Moon publication is really trying to define is nationalism but calling it fascism, or theocracy but calling it fascism?

What about an examination of the mufti who was ready to cooperate with Hitler in exchange for oil, or Nasser who closed the Suez Canal to make his point, or the fall of Shah of Iran followed by the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris as a progression of the region to forge a new identity separate and independent from the West? And how much of the antipathy against Israel is antisemitic vs. hostility against a perceived agent of the West and desire to reclaim land more or less taken as eminent domain by the U.N. (their view, not mine).

This situation is far too complicated, multilayered to be easily defined with a catchy label.

[dave_p]

9. Why not?

It's the wrong question. We should be asking: Why not modernising secular movements that offer Muslim countries meaningful social and economic progress? Where did they go? We know what happened to Iran's in 1953 - the US promoted a coup to destroy it, leaving the mullahs as the voice of opposition to the Shah. In Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil sheikhdoms such movements never got of the ground, suppressed with US and British connivance. Iraq's Gen Kasm faced early overthrow by a Baath in contact with the CIA.

And note how the piece overlooks Western powers' active role in promoting the trend when it suited them: from US dealings with Egypt's anto-Nasser Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s to arming the Saudi-backed jihad in Afghanistan and turning Pakistan into a jihadist armed camp in the 1980s to Israel's early covert prompting of Hamas as a potential rival to the PLO, those who bleat today about "Islamofascism" were only too happy to help fundamentalism's rise when it suited them.

Now they pretend it's a big surprise: "We can't imagine where this came from!" And they come out with cures like "Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic", persisting in their attempts to conflate national Islam-based movements (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas) with the pan-Islamist jihadism of bin Laden & Co. It's moronic. There's not one, but many radical Islams (Iran's hardly radical, and Hezbollah's no longer Islamist), with little to unite them. If they're so fascistic, why was the West happy to use them in the past?

It's a worthless hack piece by another retarded warmonger desperate to justify this fiasco of a policy. Anyone serious about addressing the problem of increasing violence and sectarianism in the Middle East and beyond needn't be detained by Hanson's parading of his staggering political ignorance and intellectual impotence in the face of forces he can't be bothered to understand. He should stick to toasting the political freedom of ancient Greek slave states.