Made who stronger? Have they done something they couldn’t previously do? Has the anger over Iraq allowed a new muslim state to emerge? how are “they” stronger exactly?
And thanks Kimstu for shining the light on a murky subject. Your posts were excellent.
You are hardly under threat of banishment; I did not even issue a Warning.
However, if it is “obvious” then it did not need to be said
and if it is personal, it is laible to derail the thread–and we have not even reached page three where I generally expect the debate to turn into personal jibes and mudslinging.
I would just like this thread (actually, all the threads) to display an actual discussion on the issues for a while before I have to come in and settle down the sandbox squabbling.
Hogwash. The last of my immigrant ancestors came over before the Civil War. How long would my family have to be here before you’d concede we’re no longer immigrants? That isn’t a valid point. That’s just vacuous, noble-sounding rhetoric.
The issue seems more to be: will muslim immigrants to the West assimilate?
I would say, in most cases yes. What we are seeing in muslim lands is the death throes of traditional Islam. As modern comminications become widspread, the reactionary component of islam is trying to assert itself. The reactionary side of islam thrives in areas with low literacy, limited eductaion, suppression of women, etc. Simply put: does anybody REALLY want to life life in the 13th century? I think not.
Actually, in context, silenus pointed out an extremely important distinction. The U.S., Canada, and Australia, (with similar, if somewhat less pronounced, examples in New Zealand, Argentina, and, perhaps, South Africa) were all built as immigrant nations and, while several of those states have resorted to xenophobic responses to specific immigrant waves, all of them have absorbed immigrants–with attendant changes to local culture–within living memory. The last Vandals shuffled out of France around 1500 years ago, the Vikings pretty well settled down around 1100 years ago and the only serious cultural “invasions” were those of the Moors in Spain (ended over 500 years ago), the Turks in the Balkans (still suffering shocks), and the various Germanic emigrations to Russia.
Europe is going through something for which they have no memory or tradition. (I find it ironic to watch much of the upheaval in Europe, today, after reading any number of contemptuous observations from Europeans during the civil rights movement and racial conflicts of the 1960s.)
Your knee-jerk reaction to his use of the phrase seems to have caused you to miss his actual point.
No, there’s some value to the observation. The US is not a nation of immigrants in the sense that any significant portion of its population has been first- or second-generation immigrants throughout history, but in the sense that it has a very good record of assimilating immigrants, both culturally and economically. Compare that to Germany, which has a very poor record on both fronts, and can’t reasonably be called a nation of immigrants.
Our actions have justified them, partially or completely in the eyes of many; discredited and weakened us, their enemies; greatly weakened moderates/reformers within Islam; and provided them with more recruits than they can likely handle.
You’re over-reacting. The Islamic world doesn’t have the industrial base or the manpower to project real power into the rest of the world. The best their nutters can do is stage occasional terrorist attacks. And as the British demonstrated with the IRA, civil society can still continue to function perfectly well even in the midst of fairly high levels of terrorism. After a while people learn to live with the threat. Life goes on.
The only reason that Islamic fundamentalism is a global issue at all is because of oil. And, as we see with Iran, even if the fundamentalists get control of an oil-producing nation they keep pumping. Because that’s where they get their money from. So there’s not even a real danger of them cutting off our energy. They need our dollars as much as we need their oil.
No, the real long-term threat to the United States and Europe is China. They’ve got a billion people, their economy is booming, and they have a massive industrial base. And they’re competing with us for the same shrinking pool of natural resources. That’s where the next big “clash of civilizations” is going to be.
Frankly, I believe multiculturalism has been a big part of the problem. The U.S. has been spared much of the trouble Europe has because the U.S. has traditionally been a melting pot - If you emigrated to the U.S., you were expected to become an American first. That meant learning English, it meant your first loyalty was to the American constitution and its principles. You could still retain your ethnicity - the Italians, Chinese, Germans, and other ethnic groups still have a strong ethnic presence in areas of the U.S. But first and foremost, you were American, and accepted all that America stood for.
Multiculturalism has turned countries into cultural mosaics. Move to Canada, and we’ll teach you in your native language, accomodate your cultural artifacts, and maybe even allow things like Sharia law. We’ve been taught that no culture is superior to another, that we must all be allowed to keep our cultural identity in all things.
The result has been Balkanization and confrontation between opposing ethnic groups. France has a problem with Muslims because France allows them to immigrate, but doesn’t require them to assimilate. And because they don’t assimilate, they wind up at a competitive disadvantage, and over time you wind up with a group of people who cannot find work, who are disaffected, who do not care about France and its customs and traditions, and essentially become a thorn in France’s side. It’s not just that they are Muslim - it’s that they are militant muslims because they are poor and disenfranchised and care very little about France itself.
The Danes face the same problem. Their liberalism has been their undoing. Welcoming vast numbers of muslim immigrants who come there not because they love the Danish way of life, but because they found the country easy to move to and easy to maintain their own little enclave of culture inside it, while enjoying all the benefits of citizenship. And now they are large in number and asserting themselves.
We aren’t making the problem go away by accomodating extremists. We’ll begin to win this clash of civilizations when we start acting like our civilization is worth defending, instead being constantly on the defensive and prone to knee-jerk apologies for being who we are.
When the Danish cartoon writers were threatened, the west should have stood up en masse and defended them. Those cartoons should have been published in every major newspaper. When a ‘moderate’ muslim cleric speaks out in favor of terrorism or speaks in defense of a man who murdered Theo Van Gogh, he should be forcefully opposed in rhetoric. Our leaders should be giving speeches saying things like, “Our values involve free speech, and that includes the freedom to publish pictures of Mohammed. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it. If you can’t stand living in a country where this happens, pack up and leave. This is one of our core values, and you will not threaten us into giving it up.”
One of the problems we have is that the militant muslims see the west as unprincipled, weak, and believing in nothing. We’re simply decadent hedonists. They have contempt for us. To the extent that we enable that belief by continually apologizing for who we are and offering to give up our core principles for the sake of accomodation, we’ll simply make them stronger.
The Israeli conflict is the wellspring of almost all the problems the west has had with the middle east. Of course at this point the agitators have too much power to just give it up even if we can somehow solve the Israeli issue but it’ll never come to war between the Middle East and the rest of the world. Extremists will have power and support as long as people think they make a good point, their good points right now are Israel and Iraq.
If we could have stopped Pakistan from getting the nuke we would have, they are not significantly more stable or democratic than Iran and yet they do not nuke India. We’ll stop Iran from getting the nuke if we can help it and even if they do get the nuke, they are not likely to use it against us. Remember, just about EVERYONE condemned massive scale terrorist actions like 9/11 and al Queda is the only organization of any sort that exhorts terrorist actions that result in such massive amounts of death. As a matter of fact, many diplomats thought that the U.S. could have used 9/11 to negotiate peace in the middle east (now THAT would have been a great tribute to the victims of 9/11, instead we have Iraq).
That’s reasonable. However, I do see a big difference between soldiers killing other soldiers in a mutually recognized military conflict between two national entities, and a terrorist (or a soldier) murdering innocent civilians in an unprovoked attack.
I don’t like war, but I recognize an ethical difference between war (even guerrilla war) and murder, and terrorism is murder.
Gotta call out this one. As we’ve discussed on these boards before, lots of first-generation immigrants to the US in previous eras didn’t learn English any faster than immigrants today. Second- and third-generation immigrants are where the real linguistic assimilation takes place, and second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants to Europe show that pattern too.
This one too, which seems to be little more than an anti-liberal straw man. Where are the liberals who are “apologizing for who we are”? Liberals are overwhelmingly the ones who support civil-liberties organizations such as the ACLU, the ones who stand up for women’s rights and gay rights and sexual freedom and governmental secularism and all the other things that radical-conservative Islamic extremists think are so horrible.
Egalitarianism, tolerance, and religious/societal freedom: brought to you mostly by liberals. What we need in the fight against violent and repressive Islamic extremism is more liberalism, not less.
This sounds as though you just haven’t been paying attention. Islamic-extremist calls for terrorism and violence are forcefully opposed in rhetoric. I really don’t think there’s any dearth of opinion media sources willing to come right out and say “terrorism is bad”.
Not everybody was equally supportive of the anti-Muhammad cartoons, but that was largely because most of the cartoons were disgustingly smelly. (Similarly, I might be in favor of a free press and the right to sexual freedom without demanding the publication of graphic porn in “every major newspaper”.) However, even the liberals who were most revolted by the anti-Muhammad cartoons, AFAICT, were unanimous that it was wrong for outraged Muslims to threaten or carry out violent acts in response to them. So, no “offering to give up our core principles” there either.
Israel is the excuse. Do you believe that if Israel was gone, the Middle East would suddenly turn into a bastion of peace and stability?
Israel is a ‘good point’?
Well, aside from Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, the Chechen terrorists, the Libyans who blew up a 747, the muslims who are terrorizing the population in Darfur… And everyone didn’t condemn 9/11. The Palestinians were partying in the streets. Saddam was laughing his head off. The Taliban helped pull it off.
Yeah. Because negotiating for peace in the face of aggression has always worked so well. That’s why we think so highly of Neville Chamberlain today. Imagine what might have happened if Churchill had risen to power.
Done right, it would not have been a Chamberlain variety appeasemant (which did have the good result of giving Britain time to begin rebuilding its military for 11 months that might not have been possible with a war that began in 1938).
Rather, had the U.S. encouraged the West to go into Afghanistan to oust the defenders of al Qaida, then (instead of Bush’s idiotic and hypocritical claim that we were not there for “nation building”), we had provided the resources to allow Afghanistan to rebuild itself free from both the Taliban and the warlords, demonstating a nation that could govern itself without the extremists, we could have used that example to negotiate with Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Oman, perhaps even Saudi Arabia, to consider adapting more democratic institutions, thus marginalizing the extremists.
Instead, we threw that away with a proxy war in Afghanistan followed by a useless and illegal invasion of Iraq (at which point Bush hypocritically claimed that we were interested in nation building), that has been the largest recruiting tool ever seen by any Wahabbist in the middle East.
Well, I don’t see any difference in killing soldiers or civilians in an unprovoked war.
Not to mention that Iraq was secular under Saddam, not Muslim.
We are already involved in a conflict between Western (defined as modern post industrial AmeroEuro) civilization and Islamic fundamentalism. This conflict will only get worse as the Arab world begins to modernize. If and when that happens you will most likely see fundamentalism pushed into African nations where the problems will be ten times worse.
I’m specifically talking about countries that are not the US, where accomodations are made such as allowing Sharia law in some form, providing government services in the immigrant’s language, changing laws to accomodate other cultures such as changing police uniform rules to allow the wearing of turbans or other religious artifacts, etc. If a Christian cannot wear a crucifix on a police uniform, a Sikh should not be allowed to wear a turban.
Which is why it’s so sad that so many of them reflexively make common cause with the very people who are totally antithetical to everything they believe in. Look at the love-fest George Galloway gets from some members of the left. The man’s a thug who supports the other side. Or the roses thrown at Hugo Chavez, despite the fact that he’s allied himself with freaking theocratic Iran against the best interests of the United States, Canada, and other western countries.
The ‘it’s all our fault’ crowd is loud and well established. There are lots of people in our society who, when attacked, immediately and reflexively look at what we might have done to warrant the attack. And there are lots of people who, when confronted with a barbaric attack by the other side, reflexively seek a moral equivalence by bringing up things we might have done in the past that were even remotely similar. There are also plenty of moral relativists who are completely unwilling to say that our culture is better than any other.
One of the reasons so many on the left get tarred as being anti-semitic is that some confuse anti-semitism for this general desire to see fault within ourselves rather than in our enemies. Israel is a western nation, and therefore has committed original sin in the eyes of many. Any every barbaric attack on Israeli citizens is met with comments along the lines of, “Well, if Israel hadn’t done X, this wouldn’t have happened. And the Palestinians don’t have tanks, so this the only weapon they’ve got. So it’s understandable. Regrettable, but understandable.” In the meantime, if an Israeli bulldozer attempting to close a tunnel used to smuggle bomb equipment accidentally kills a young woman attempting to stop it illegally, and who can’t be seen behind the giant blade, there are marches in the streets of the west against Israel, and the event is spun into a condemnation of the entire country. Claims about a massacre in Jenin are accepted at face value and even exaggerated, while claims of horrors done on the other side are ignored, downplayed, or disbelieved. When Israel tried to show that the house they bulldozed when Rachel Corrie was killed was actually a critical military target, liberals all over the place put their fingers in their ears and went, “lalalalala”.
If you haven’t been seeing that kind of behaviour, you haven’t been paying much attention. In fact, Rachel Corrie herself is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. She was supposedly a modern liberal activist, yet she was the champion of people who supported Hitler, the Soviet Union, Saddam, and who were ruled by a series of thugs. The people who cheered in the streets on 9/11. She died trying to protect one of the tunnels they used to smuggle suicide bombs into Israel to blow up kids at discos.
Here’s a picture of her in her element Rachel Corrie screaming and burning an American Flag in the Gaza Strip.
She’s not alone. She’s part of a large group of Americans and other westerners who reflexively take the side of the enemy. They did the same thing during the Cold War. God knows why.
Nice idea, but it should be clear by now that ‘the west’ IS the United States, along with a handful of much smaller players. I think everyone is still on board with the goal of help Afghanistan get on its feet - how’s NATO recruiting working out for that? Canada is there in decent numbers, but only because we elected a Conservative. The Liberals and NDP are already calling for us to pull out. Other countries who have been called on to help have ignored it, or contributed only a fraction of what they originally promised.
See, you have the advantage here of A) using hindsight, and B) not having to confront the possible ways your alternate scenario might have gone. For example, had the U.S. stood down against Saddam, it’s entirely possible that he would have been emboldened and started smuggling WMD to terrorists (WMD that he had every intention of building once the heat was off him). Or that he would have been a lightning rod and energized the militants in the middle east to stand up to the U.S. and we would have had the same terrorist problem we have today, except this time with heavy state sponsorship from Libya, Iraq, and other countries rallied around Saddam.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. For example, I remember a time after the Afghanistan war that everyone was using it as the perfect example of how to do this kind of thing: Instead of invading en-masse, you arm and support native insurgencies, have them overthrow the government, then work with them. Having an indigenous force due the heavy lifting prevents an insurgency against foreign occupiers. Most everyone, including those on the left, thought it was brilliant, and it was one thing the U.S. military and Bush administration got high marks for.
Now it’s going through a rocky period, and you get to claim that obviously the way the war was carried out was wrong, and that it should have been done differently.
ISTM that there is a clash of something brewing, but I don’t see it as a clash between Islam and the West, I see it as a clash between fundamentalism and modernity.
On the one hand you have a tradition of science, democracy and individual rights dating from the enlightenment. On the other you have a view rooted in religion that feels increasingly threatened by secular modernity. This fear and feeling of marginalization leads to increasingly strict readings of religious texts and a militant hostile view towards the secular west. Islamic radicals and Christian fundamentalists are two sides of the same coin. For that matter if you read some things the more radical Jewish west bank settlers are saying, they’re indistinguishable from Christian and Islamic fundamentalism. Ditto–from what little I’ve read–for the Hindu fundamentalists that are gaining power in India.
I don’t understand why denouncing Christian fundamentalism is regarded as a “liberal” position and denouncing Islamic fundamentalism is regarded as a conservative" position. They’re basically the same thing! In America the Christian Fundamentalists are far more dangerous than Islamic militants to any tattered remnants of the Enlightenment philosophy espoused in our Constitution, although the atttacks of Islamic terrorists are more frightening.
Frankly my money’s on the fundies. They’re more passionate, more violent, reproduce more, and they’re not afraid of dying.
Some terrorists definitely have that goal. Others have more limited (although still enormous) goals like getting the West to cease all involvement with the Middle East.
The OP assumes that Islam is separate from Western Civilization, and I disagree with that point. There are American Muslims, at the rate of Muslim immigration to America is the highest it has been in decades. (You have to be a New York Times Select member to read the article, which I’m not, but I read it when it was new.) Muslims have successfully integrated into some parts of the West, others not so much, but I think that has more to do with the countries in question and not so much to do with Islam.
The only thing that hindsight might give me is the opportunity to say “I told you so.”
The use of the Northern Alliance was the correct way to overthrow the Taliban so that they could not rally other Afghanis with a claim that the U.S. was invading as the U.S.S.R. had done. Once Omar and his boys had capitulated and fled, however, the appropriate action was to saturate the country with peacekeeping troops to help disarm the warlords so that the nation of Afghanistan could determine its own government without armed pressure groups corrupting the process. Instead, the U.S. pulled out numbers of troops (including intelligence units) to go play in Iraq while letting the Afghanis play “turn in your neighbor so you can steal his cow” whle we locked up hundreds of innocents in Guantanamo. It was not until we had ignored Afghanistan for three years (letting the conditions that had led to the rise of the Taliban begin to fester again) that we finally went to NATO and asked for sufficient troops to handle the mess. There is no surprise that NATO nations are now leery of sending troops into a hot zone at this late date when they might have prevented the zone from going hot had sufficent troops been sought in the summer of 2002. We did not blow the war, only the rest of the task.
As to Hussein supplying terrorists with weapons: by the time we lurched into Iraq with our inadequately staffed forces, the UN inspectors had spent nearly five months reporting that it appeared that Hussein actually did not have any weapons to distribute to Islamic Fundamentalists (most of whom hated Hussein nearly as much as they hated the U.S.) and it was pretty clerar that most of our (OSP generated) claims were lies. The pressures we had placed on Hussein through the UN were sufficient to keep him disarmed and contained–and everyone not led astray by the lies of the Office of Special Projects could see that before the war was begun.
If we’re going to play “what if” games, then we have to ask “what if” a bunch of the Saudi princes who continue to fund al Qaida had decided to stage a coup and cut off petroleum to the West until we met their demands to abandon Afghanistan? “What if” Musharraf had decided that he did not enjoy being leaned on by the U.S. and had decided to distribute his nuclear weapons (ones that actually exist, unlike those of Iraq) to the Islamists (who are warm, close personal friends of most of the senior officers of Pakistan’s military). “What if” Bush had not made his stupid “Axis of Evil” speech so that the theocrats in Iran had not been scared into shutting down the moderate opposition under a threat from the U.S. and their (unsilenced) opposition (who had control of much of the government before they were ousted from above) was now working to rein in the Iranian support for Hamas? There are a lot of “what if” games that we may play, but the reality is that we blew it in Afghanistan (in ways that were predicted when the decisions were made) and we blew it in Iraq (in ways that were predicted when the decisions were made).
