Looks like John Lewis just saved the day. Firewall activated. What a relief!
It’s been the viewpoint of the establishment for a long time. Certainly the Bush administration. Look at the presidential front runners. Trump wants to halt all Muslim immigration and Hillary is more hawkish than Obama, who’s bombing half the Middle East. A lot of Americans think Islam needs to be destroyed or reformed, certainly not a small group (unless it needs to be paired with atheism)
I see your point, but it’s poorly stated. I don’t think that modern S Asian Deobandi Muslims are particularly driven by *anti-British *sentiment now. And there have been Sikh-affiliated terror attacks in the last half-century, on India especially.
And if you ask a Muslim about religion and terrorism, they’ll probably start talking about Armenians in the Nagorno-Karabach War.
Salafis, Deobandi with Salafi influence, and Turkish nationalists are three groups in Asia known for both ethnic violence and at least nominal Muslim ties. There are some radical Islamist groups across the breadth of the Sahel with similar issues. But they may have more in common with Christian militants in places like Central Africa than they would want to admit. Generalizing about Islam is, well, generalizing.
That said, yes, Saudi oil money has fed the current global militancy, due to Saudi being able to fund missionaries to the rest of the world.
And of course not all Turks/Deobandi/Salafi are violent fanatics, any more than all white evangelicals. And not all atheists are sweetness and charity.
Our foreign policy seems almost designed to incite Muslims to attack us (or at least desire to), and Iraq & Afghanistan are cited by Muslim terrorists, including one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers. There’s no way it plays only the “tiniest part” in anti-Western violence.
Further, it’s something the President can control (unlike, say, writings from a thousand years ago).
ISIS was formed in Iraq, by Sunnis who’d been purged from power by the American invasion and subsequent de-Baathification. No invasion, no ISIS. In an alternate timeline, the founders of ISIS work for the Hussein regime, instead of forming AQI and then ISIS.
Again, diplomacy and steady progress are plans, they’re just not sexy ones. I don’t interpret Sanders as saying no diplomacy is being done, but rather that it’s half-hearted and easily mistrusted, considering our history. A changed American could undertake a new diplomacy.
Clinton remains hawkish to this day. If it was clear that she’d learned from her mistake, that’d be one thing, but I don’t think she has.
Or, he’s enough of a grown-up to realize that you can’t kill your way out of every problem.
Thanks for your input, but the Democrats would do best to leave things exactly as you describe them.
Oh, Sanders can beat Trump, all right.
Won’t have to, Trump will beat Trump.
Yes . . . he’ll find that what makes his base roar with approval is not so well received by anyone else.
The First Emperor is right about Harris and Douthat.
Sam Harris is only persuasive to people who’ve never read much from other perspectives. In that way, actually, his writing on religion, and Islam in particular, is a lot like Noam Chomsky’s writing on foreign policy (even though they hate each other). Both are scientists who apply a kind of stilted, context-free, cherry-picking style to the great tapestry of human experience, and they don’t really understand humans well enough to be able to write realistically about human motivations and complexities. They have a sort of autistic worldview, for lack of a better term.
Ross Douthat is not as smart as Harris. And on most issues he is not as liberal. But Douthat has enough humility and social intelligence to understand that there are different ways to think about the world. He can be counted on, for the most part, to attack charitable versions of his opponents’ arguments instead of straw men. Agree or disagree with his arguments, they don’t read like a set of context-free scientific measurements artificially strung together to reach predetermined conclusions that ignore basic social and cultural truths. They read more like an ordinary human genuinely struggling with difficult questions, even when the conclusions he reaches are ones you’d disagree with.
When they met, Putin was wearing this grandfather’s tie pin, covered in gold leaf and half-carat emeralds with alternate inlays of ivory, ruby and jade, and when Trump looked into Putin’s eyes, he recognized the soul of a man with taste.
This doesn’t seem consistent with his popularity among ex-Muslims and progressive Muslims. Many who have left Islam hold views very similar to his, as do some moderate and progressive Muslims who challenge mainstream Islam, and their experiences confirm much of what he contends. That is the biggest reason he is persuasive to me.
What other perspectives should someone persuaded by Sam Harris be aware of?
I know a lot of progressive Muslims and ex-Muslims personally. None of them thinks Sam Harris writes intelligently about Islam. That’s anecdotal, of course, but so is your observation. I think there is the rare figure like Hirsi Ali who likes Harris, but she is not representative of ex-Muslims, much less liberal Muslims generally.
It depends on the parts you find persuasive. In general, I’d read some books by people who are experts on the sociology of religion. I enjoyed large parts of Lapidus’s History of Islamic Societies. Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted is not an academic work, but it also provides the kind of historical and social context missing from Harris’s arguments. Shadi Hamid writes great stuff. Read Shadi Hamid on ISIS and compare that to the way Sam Harris or Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about these things. It is clear who is the polemicist and who is the scholar.
But that’s not what you quoted me saying. I said it played the tiniest part in the rejection of Western values. And as far as incitement by our foreign policy, I agree with you to a large degree. But I also realize that to the bulk of the Muslims susceptible to being recruited or incited, the only foreign policy that they will accept is submission to their goal: the horror show of a continuous expansion of the social and military manifestation of Islam, destroying all resistance, and erasing the cultural artifacts and memories of every other group.
Sure, but she could also be aware of the different strains of thought within Islam and how they interact with other factors to contribute to the current clusterfuck. I have far more confidence in Hillary than any other candidate to have an understanding that is nuanced, humanitarian, and pragmatic.
The same phenomenon occurred in Syria where we did not invade. Syria is in every bit as bad a state as Iraq. There is no reason to expect that post Arab-spring Iraq would be better off if we had not invaded. It may have been, but it may have been worse, especially considering the demographics, and Saddam’s demonstrated willingness to murder hoards of his own citizens.
That’s what I interpret him as saying as well, and this is why I can tell that he doesn’t have any grasp on the situation. The strategy has very severe circumstantial limitations that we have been working at the edge of for a long time. His proposed improvement is a pipe dream, and he has shown a naivety likely to cause him to make bad mistakes.
What should she have done differently as Secretary of State?
That doesn’t describe Clinton at all, but it’s does sounds like Rubio’s foreign policy rhetoric. Clinton will most likely continue Obama’s strategy, which has been to remain involved, but to heavily limit military engagement, cost, commitment, and risk.
So, I can put my war protest stuff in the attic and leave it there? Groovy!
There is no reason to expect the Arab Spring would have happened at all if we had not invaded. We destabilized the whole region, not just Iraq.
Nonsense. The US invasion of Iraq had almost no role in Tunisia’s uprising, which was the start of the Arab Spring.
How come? Haven’t you been the one urging the Democrats and the left to focus on socioeconomic bread and butter issues over cultural wedges? Why is a defender of torture and someone who repeats neocon rhetoric on Islam better then a conservative Catholic genuinely concerned with blue-collar welfare?
False premise.
Why is this supposed to matter to anyone? Maybe I’m too young, given the USSR fell when I was 14, but I don’t understand what’s so eyebrow raising about someone honeymooning in the Soviet Union way back when or how it’s supposed to be proof of his admitted socialist bent. People weren’t forbidden to travel there (like Cuba,) right? Did only communist sympathizers take trips there in the late 80s?