There are no easy solutions, no good answers. A good portion of the world will hate us no matter what we do, or don’t do.
Does the fact that there will always be people who will hate us whatever we do or don’t do give us the right to act in ways that give people reasons to hate us?
That’s where Osama and I differ. Frankly, at times I think we’d have been better off to invade Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq.
Then we would see a hundred times as many terrorists coming at us as we have now.
Communism, to be honest, is a dead issue… in
I was only bringing it up for the sake of argument, and you’re dismissing Communism as a threat in the present day is just a tactic to distract us from the issue at hand.
Now, if you are talking about an American who goes off to fight radical Islam then all the more is he likely to be motivated by Christianity.
Islam is a violent religion because of what’s written in their holy books, because of their recorded history, and because of their behavior over the last 35 years. All the rest of the argument is just noise.
Have you read the Old Testament, do you know anything about the history of Christian societies, even their history in the last 35 years?
Evidence could be assembled to prove that Christianity is a violent religion (secularists do it all the time), but, as I’ve said, to reduce a religion to a label like “religion of war” or “religion of peace” is intellectually dishonest or at best simple-minded.
You are entitled to your opinion. My own is that if there was a standoff between the West and Radical Islam on a battlefield, and the fight began to lean in favor of Radical Islam, the West might yell to Moderate, Peaceful Islam, “Lend us a hand!”-----and Moderate, Peaceful Islam would cross their legs, light up a cigarette, and sit there and watch. They would not lift a finger to help us defeat Radical Islam; but it wouldn’t bother them too terribly much if Radical Islam won the war.
Yes, they would (and are) because most Muslims do not want to live in Islamic states such as the radicals are seeking.
Nor do most Muslims want to be oppressed directly by non-Muslim powers or indirectly by Muslim states they consider to be the lackeys of non-Muslim powers. Most Muslims find themselves caught between Muslim extremists and what they see as non-Muslim aggressors and oppressors. Why should they choose the Bin Ladens over the George Bushes when they see the latter as more murderous than the former?
I am not saying that Muslims are not often self-deluding or in denial, but we can’t win them over if we don’t understand how they see things, if we continue to content ourselves with stereotypes, overgeneralizations, and caricatures.
I personally view global Islamic terrorism and imperialist motives as just a big a threat to the West as Communism was; and in many ways, just as big as Nazism and Bushido was. You are, of course, under no compulsion whatsoever to agree with me.
And how fragile, how much of a paper tiger, did Communism turn out to be?
Don’t tell me that there is any Islamic state or organization that is as powerful in today’s world as were the German and Japanese states in the world of the 1930’s. A Saudi Arabia or an Iran might be tempted to engage in economic warfare but they know they would be cutting off their own legs. They are fragile states too whose foreign policy posturings have more to do with internal political struggles than with some program of Islamic world conquest, which they are not in the position to undertake anyway.
Al-Qaida gets a lot of its influence and power from the way Westerners image it as an “existential threat” rather than as simply a criminal network. In invading and occupying Iraq, we have just played into Bin Laden’s hands - he wants a “clash of civilizations,” and we’ve given it to him. Just because he thinks in apocalyptic terms does not mean that all Muslims do or that we ourselves have to start seeing the world through the same Manichaean lenses he wears.
