Plenty of interesting news heading into the weekend:
According to a new poll, 53% of the British public considers Islam a threat to the West. That's a big jump from after 9/11, when only 33% felt endangered by the "religion of peace". It's good to hear people are finally waking up to the problem, but a bigger question is - what the heck are the other 47% thinking? Ignoring a problem never makes it go away.
At the same time, the Israeli public has also awoken to recent events: Polls indicate that a majority believe their government failed in handling the Hezbollah war and that Olmert, Peretz, and Halutz should resign. I agree. American Thinker, meanwhile, outlines a similar argument. Ideally, of course, it's always preferable that a nation's leadership learns from mistakes and changes its positions. But failing that, replacement is often a necessary measure.
And speaking of the war, take a look at HonestReporting.com's compendium (courtesy of Front Page Magazine) of blatant media bias against Israel. By and large, the mainstream media simply supported the terrorists, and that's exactly why it can't whatsoever be trusted. Visit alternative media such as talk radio and blogs (many fine examples of which are listed on the Blogroll at left) for much more generally honest coverage.
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, National Review's Rich Lowry slams Democratic party opponents of Wal-Mart. The megaretailer's critics, Lowry states, have no reason to complain simply because Wal-Mart performs better than the competition.
A couple great columns appeared in the news as well. Thomas Sowell explains how leftist policies have caused major crime rate increases in Britain, while Victor Davis Hanson declares that President Bush has a communiction problem and offers solutions. Both editorials offer fascinating insights, and I highly recommend them.
Blog of the Day: Hugh Hewitt. Hugh often writes excellent posts, while Dean Barnett of Soxblog fame is his new guest blogger.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
Dukakis88:
"Finally waking up" to the problem of other people practicing a different religion? That's rich. The last time Europe woke up to that problem, they built Auschwitz.
I like to think things have changed since then, and we live in a more humane world, where the west can coexist with people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds.
Yes, there are certain radical clerics in Western Europe who need to be watched carefully, but European racist nationalist policies and open discrimination is pushing a generally secular immmigrant population towards radicalization. The French riots last year had nothing whatsoever to do with Wahabbism.
In America, the Muslim population are doing the same thing the Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants who came before them did; working hard and trying to build their American dreams. Unlike Britain, radical clerics are not prominent, and most Muslims are moderate or secular.
We should absolutely give closer scrutiny to people travelling on tourist and student visas, as well as those petitioning for refugee status, but there's no justification for needlessly oppressing people who have done nothing wrong.
Solid Surfer:
The problem with Islam clearly is not just people practicing a different religion. Many UK citizens are Hindu, Buddhist, Bahai, etc. and there is absolutely no problem with this.
Rather, this is all about Islam specifically because it is the only religion that produces a widespread terrorist threat.
And it's not primarily European policies that have pushed the Muslims there towards radicalization. The main factor is Islam itself. Europe has many other racial and religious minorities (Jews, Hindus, Chinese, Sub-Saharan Africans, etc.), and yet only the Muslims are failing to assimilate and are producing terrorists. The only possible explanation for this is that Islam is the key cause.
Dukakis88:
First of all, placing responsibility on all Muslims for terrorism is the same kind of twisted logic reparations advocates use when they try to pin the blame on all white Americans for slavery. It's implicitly fallacious.
Islam isn't any more responsible for terrorism than Christianity is for abortion clinic bombings. There are some crazy, fanatical people, and they have to be dealt with individually. But you can't oppress an entire religious or ethnic group on that basis. That would be just flagrantly offensive to American values.
In fact "failure to assimilate" has been a long-term historical justification for discrimination against Jews in Europe.
Right-wing, nationalist European parties have moved on to scapegoating Muslims for all the various problems of their constituencies because there aren't any Jews left there to incinerate.
And "failure to assimilate" is not the exclusive province of Muslims. Your ideological brethren have ceaselessly assailed Hispanic immigrants to the United States for not learning to speak English. But they weren't the first; Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants congregated together in neighborhoods and principally spoke their own language. There were Yiddish newspapers and radio stations in New York until fairly recently.
These days, Eastern European and Asian immigrants are doing more or less the same thing. Walk around below Canal street some time and see how assimilated it is down there.
Of course, I'd make the tertiary point that forcing people to assimilate is contradictory to very basic concepts of liberty and individual autonomy.
Solid Surfer:
I'm not blaming all Muslims for terrorism. But the teachings of the religion itself are certainly to blame. These terrorists aren't "crazy"; they are perfectly rational people who are following what their religion tells them to do.
Christianity as a religion is not responsible for Christians who bomb abortion clinics, because the bombers are acting specifically *against* what Christianity teaches. Muslim terrorists, however, are acting specifically *in line* with what Islam teaches. That's why every abortion clinic bombing is roundly condemned by virtually all Christians and all churches everywhere, while Muslim terrorism is often cheered and supported by Muslims and mosques around the world.
And comparisons to Jews in Europe are completely inaccurate as well. Jews never committed terrorist attacks, never committed honor killings, and never expressed the desire to force Europe to live under Jewish law. Muslims do all of these things, and the difference is like night and day.
Dukakis88:
If you read the Bible, you'll find all sorts of depictions of the kind of barbarity that took place in Biblical times.
You take stuff from that out of context, or even the whole book out of context, and you can come away with some bad ideas. That's why few modern Jewish or Christian sects interpret their holy texts in a fundamentalist manner. Most Muslims don't interpret the Koran in such a way either.
And Christianity was spread in the same brutal ways and responsible for atrocities at least as widespread as those of Islam. Based on your heroes and your blogroll, you get your news from sources so far to the right that they make George W. Bush look like Jimmy Carter, but the real situation is much more complicated. We are not at war with Islam and we don't want to be.
And your differentiation between nationalist measures against Jews and against Muslims is that the stuff they said about Jews wasn't true and the stuff they say about Muslims is.
Hitler had a laundry list of grievances against "the Jews" same as yours against "Muslims," and he had his motivating Sept. 11 type outrage in the Reichstag fire.
If you want to be safe from institutionalized anti-Semitism in the future, you have to be vigilant against any political movement to take action against an ethno-religious group based on generalities or group identification with crimes committed by individuals. Radical clerics are a small minority of the Muslim religious establisbment and terrorists are only a few thousand individuals out of hundreds of millions of Muslim men.
Solid Surfer:
You say: "Most Muslims don't interpret the Koran in such a way either."
Perhaps not most. But a significant enough number do where we should be concerned.
You say: "We are not at war with Islam and we don't want to be."
No, we don't want to be. But Islam is at war with us and so we have no choice.
And your comparison of Jews and Muslims as minorities is completely inaccurate.
Look at what happens when Jews are in power in a country. Israel is a modern democracy with freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of press, rights for women, and other aspects of a free, prosperous country.
Virtually all Muslim countries are dictatorships and theocracies with no freedoms, no one can criticize the government, no choice in religion allowed other than Islam, women are essentially property of men, etc.
That's the type of country most Muslims want America to be, because that's what their religion dictates. This threat is entirely real. The threat of Jews in Germany was non-existent.
Dukakis88:
Actually, most Muslim countries are ruled by secular autocrats. The Saudi royalty studies at Oxford, parties with American rockstars, and owns a lot of racehorses and real-estate.
Islam is used as a tool of social control, and hatred of the West is convenient so that the populace will place blame there, instead of on their own leaders.
Muslims don't necessarily want to live in autocratic countries, they're just conditioned to being ruled, and don't necessarily understand self-rule. And the autocrats themselves emerged to some extent from without, and to some extent from internal tribal politics which adds an additional layer of complexity to Arab politics. Generally, most autocrats came to rule with the backing of one side or the other during the Cold War.
Many of the terrorist groups target the west for supporting the Arab autocrats, which they view as decadent and godless. Al Quaeda, in fact, has as a central mission, the deposing of the Saudi royalty.
History didn't begin on Sept. 11, 2001, and making broad pronouncements about countries or races or major religions is a really good way to show your ignorance. Experts like Noah Feldman and commentators like Thomas Friedman and politicians like George Bush all believe that constitutional democracy can be brought to the Muslim world, and that norms of religious tolerance aren't inconsistent with Islam. Christianity also contains doctrines regarding spreading the faith, and it has come to terms with modernity.
Solid Surfer:
The Saudi royalty may be secular, but the country is still a total theocracy. All religions other than Islam are banned, women are like property, etc.
And yes, the citizens of those countries may not like their rulers, but for the most part the people still want Muslim rule and Sharia law.
Look at Afghanistan, for example - it is now a democracy, but the Muslim people there still by and large wanted to kill a man for converting to Christianity: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,189440,00.html
Also in other countries, the populist opposition to the secular rulership are Islamic Fundamentalist groups (all of which, of course, commit and support terrorism) - such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the fundamentalist Muslim party in Algeria, Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, and the Taliban remnants in Pakistan.
I do think that secular democracy can eventually emerge in Muslim countries, but in order for the West to make it happen, we need to militarily crush them so strongly that they give up on jihad. This is the only thing that worked in Germany and Japan after World War II, and it can work for Muslims as well, if we can summon the will to overcome the political correctness that holds us back from doing it.
Post a Comment