Sunnis do have (usually government-sponsored) hierarchies in many countries today. Historically, Sunnis also have not had nearly as much religious autonomy as is implied here. Particular scholars always have limited abilities to actually get other people to do things, but “you are conclusively wrong” statements are very, very common in any time period.
Started a thread about this. Did conquerors always wipe out local religions, sacred sites and history? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
[Anecdote]
My 18-year old nephew who was raised in a very fundamentalist Christian household by his preacher father and my sister recently said that he wanted forced conversions and executions for all Muslims because they’re all the same. He even quoted a bit from the Quran to show his bonafides (one out of context line from the Quran provided by a pro-Christian, anti-Islam website).
He has never met a Muslim person but he wants them all executed if they don’t convert. And according to him, anyone who was a real Muslim had to be all about killing and terror because the Quran mandates it.
So yeah, there’s no shortage of people who feel this way.
[/Anecdote]
This attitude - and we have seen it in this very thread - is what prompted Obama to throw in the imperfectly worded but ultimately accurate and sadly needed disclaimer.
Possibly he should have said “ISIL doesn’t represent Islam,” though even that would undoubtedly have evoked much of the same furor. Maybe he could have went into something more long-winded like “ISIL’s extremist views and terror is completely removed from the religion as practiced by millions of peaceful adherents throughout the globe and even in America,” but people would still find fault with that.
But those who understand context know what he meant. Most of those with their panties in a bunch would have found reasons to complain no matter what he said.
A very small percentage of people get what he meant but generally don’t suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome, however they like to show off their intelligence by pointing out these kinds of things. More power to them. The internet wouldn’t be the same without these insufferable nits.
And, of course, those very same people hand-wave away scum like WBC, the people who killed Matthew Shepard, the fine young Americans, etc. who have committed atrocities as “they aren’t representative!” Kind of convenient stunt, isn’t it? Oh, and isn’t it interesting how all-fired expert these folks seem to be about the Qu’ran and Hadith when they’ve read neither?
[QUOTE=ñañi]
I’m too young to remember the 1980s but I am curious to know whether the Mujahideen were lambasted by anyone in the US at that time, either politicians or scholars or activists.
[/QUOTE]
You mean “the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan” to which the film *Rambo III *is dedicated ? Or was at any rate - the dedication was retconned in post 9/11 releases. Those cats ? Great guys. Oppressed by the evil Rooskies. Fighting back, greatest tradition, Founding Fathers, WW2 and that.
The attitude of those like your nephew - which idiotically, has led to Sikhs and other ‘Muslim-looking’ people getting attacked and even killed, in addition to the idiotic discrimination it engenders against Muslims - is not challenged by President Obama’s statement. On the contrary.
In the context of governments actively persecuting Muslim groups they don’t like by calling them ‘terrorists’ or non-Muslim, of an America that has been actively involved in meddling in the Islamic world since WWII, of reactionary establishment scholars who use government support to crush progressives and free-thinkers, of bigots who try to say that all Muslims are the same and should be treated the same, in light of all of this and more, President Obama’s statement is not “ultimately accurate.” It is yet another entry in the moderate/terrorist narrative that is inherently flawed, and is directly responsible for human suffering.
What he should have said is not something that wouldn’t be criticized - time has shown that for some people, he can do absolutely nothing right - but instead something that doesn’t advance a BS Bush-era narrative of ‘real religion’ and ‘not real religion.’ “ISIL is representative only of themselves”, “We stand with the great majority of Muslims who actively denounce ISIL, both directly and in how they live their lives”, “We stand against injustice everywhere, no matter how it tries to justify itself”, even a reference to the Treaty of Tripoli, all of these could have been better than what he actually said.
Haha, seriously? That’s hilarious. But also sad. Sadlarious. I took that from somewhere. Ugh. Too lazy to google.
Oh yeah
The shuttle Columbia is also a Thing which is dedicated to the people of Afghanistan and their gallant fight for freedom. By Reagan no less, who also equated them w/ the Founding Fathers.
As I said - they were against the Russians (or the Russians were against them, same thing) so the Mujahideen were A-OK with the US both as dudes to send weapons to and poster boys for the USSR = Pure Evil propaganda - “Look how they’re using hightech helicopters and heavy tanks against these poor beleaguered goatherders armed only with rocks and 19th century rifles ! How unsporting !”, that sort of thing. Absolutely regardless of what (if anything) they stood for.
So, yeah, grade A solid gold example of how one man’s freedom fighter is the same man’s terrorist give or take 20 years. Also the Cold War in a nutshell.
Again, for the most part, the mujhadeen weren’t the Taliban. The Taliban were created after the Soviets were defeated, and while some Taliban people fought as mujhadeen, the mujhadeen leadership became the Northern Alliance.
Yeah, sorta.
Among the several tribal groups who were battling the Soviets, (because Afghanistan has been a tribal society for a very long time), the Reagan and Bush administrations specifically supported the groups who were considered the most ferocious. They were told, at the time, that the efficiency of those groups was an outgrowth, in large part, on their cohesion due to their extremely fundamentalist Islamic views. Other tribal groups who were not perceived to be as dangerous were given less support, (or no support). People who asked that the U.S. be more even-handed in their distribution of weapons and training or who expressed concerns that we were arming the people most likely to turn against us once the Soviets were driven out were dismissed as lacking in Realpolitik understanding (or with the suggestion that we really didn’t care what happened to Afghanistan afterward as long as the Soviets’ noses were bloodied).
The Taliban only formed after the Soviets had withdrawn. However, it was formed by the Islamists among the Pashtun tribes whom we had armed at the expense of other tribal groups and they were able to seize power using our weapons that other groups hoping to share power did not have.
The Taliban was the creation, mainly of Pakistan. We can thank Benazir Bhutto (and the military and intelligence services) for that. Remember that Pakistan was one of only 3 countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
ETA: @Captain Amazing
Mujahideen is a blanket term for what we now call “jihadis” because apparently we forgot how to use proper Arabic loanwords :). That is to say, it applies to any and all Islamic/ist fighters engaged in jihad. You know, the scaaary words/concepts that prove Islam is inherently violent and such. Among idiots, anyway (note : I’m NOT accusing you of being an idiot here. Your posts in this thread I totally agree with).
Plus the US probably did back the various bands of Pakistani-trained muj’ that would become the Taliban. So there is that. Because, well, they more or less backed them all at the time. And that is because the Cold War was a stupid, *stupid *time. Not that the oughts are any less stupid and short-sighted, mind…
The US only turned against the Taliban specifically and started backing the Northern Alliance exclusively after the end of the war. A long time after. And in between they by and large just stopped giving a shit because, well, “Who cares about which band of fanatics inherits Afghanistan anyway ? What does it matter ? Oh. Ooooh. Well. Fuck.”
As well, the point is that most of the tactics the US grouses/groused about the Taliban using against them - IEDs, mortars then vanishing among civilians, threatening the families of anyone suspected of helping the US, suicide trucks etc. - the US was just fine with all that back when they were used by “mujahideen” against the Russians ; and harshly criticized the USSR for responding to these methods… less than subtly, shall we say.
In 1988 Afghani & foreign jihad fighters in Afghanistan did all that because they were gallant freedom fighters desperately fighting an overpowering and brutal army of evil by using cunning guerilla tactics to great effect. In 2003 they were doing it because they were cowardly backwards barbarians who wouldn’t fight fair and hid behind civilians, not to mention fair game for torture. Sic transit gloria mundi.
So maybe what ISIL *really *needs right now, PR-wise, is for Putin to try and invade Syria 
Personally I think all this “we armed what would become the Taliban and that bit us in the ass” kind of bullshit. The Taliban didn’t plan or fund 9-11. They certainly didn’t give the hijackers their flight training even if some might have gotten some combat training in the al-qaida camps they merely allowed to exist. It only “bit us in the ass” when we decided to invade and they didn’t all politely roll over.
Well, guerrillas are going to be guerrillas. If you can’t fight an army by conventional means, you go to the hills. But statements like, in that article, the New York Times’:
“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration delivered several hundred Stingers to Afghan resistance groups, including the Taliban.”
is just stupid, because the Taliban didn’t exist as such until 1994, recruited from refugee camps in Pakistan. So when you say "The US only turned against the Taliban specifically and started backing the Northern Alliance exclusively after the end of the war. ", that’s true, because the Taliban didn’t really exist as a force until after the war.
It’s true the US gave money to Hekmatyar (primarily through Pakistan), whose group was expressly Islamist, and who was often at odds with the rest of the anti-Soviet groups, and some of what he believed could be considered a precursor to the Taliban (although the Pakistanis would dump him for the Taliban and his relationship with the Taliban would turn out to be pretty bad), and Hekmatyar is currently in rebellion against the current Afghan government, but he was never Taliban himself.
I guess my general frustration here is the tendency by people to oversimplify the situation. People are constantly conflating the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other Afghan/Pakistani Islamist groups, and in Afghanistan in general, see the anti-Soviet mujaheddin as a single group, and the narrative, “We supported them when they fought the Soviets and then they turned anti-US and attacked the World Trade Center, so wee what happens”, just helps to support that. (I mean, Karzai himself was a mujaheddin fundraiser during the Soviet occupation and, near the end of the war, led a tribal uprising to take Tarinkot from government troops.)
True enough, and upon re-reading my post I expected this specific nit to be picked. In my defence, writing “the subgroup of mujahideen fighters, trained in Pakistan, that would later form the core of the Taliban” every single time would have gotten old quick :o. I expect the NYT journo used the same shortcut.
(and by that same token, your earlier “the mujahideen leadership became the Northern Alliance” is technically wrong on the same account, innit ?)
What I was trying to say there was that, back during the Russian war, the US wasn’t overly picky about “sides”, “tribal identities”, “religious doctrines”, “postwar ambitions” and so on among the heterogenous groups of gung ho folks it funded and armed. Which is why Bush, Reagan and Rambo would simply say “the mujahideen” or “the people of Afghanistan” in PR commenting the conflict, never really going into specifics - because those didn’t matter.
But it’s not like The Taliban suddenly picked up new and exciting religious views and goals overnight when they settled on a brand name in 1994, right ?
You have the order messed up there. Civilians don’t count for much in Pakistan, especially when it comes to Afghanistan/India. Never have. Bhutto may have been informed, and rubber stamped or otherwise enthusiastically endorsed the plans, but the driving force would have been the army and intelligence services.
That, to understand it in historical context, was a result of the rivalry between Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since Pakistan’s independence in 1947. In the 1950s, Afghanistan had been promoting a concept called “Pakhtunistan” that would unite Afghanistan with the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, calling for unification between the Pashtun areas in Afghanistan and the Pakhtun areas in Pakistan that had been divided by the British colonial Durand Line. For their part, Pakistan saw that as a land grab attempt by Afghanistan. During the Cold War, things aligned up with “non-aligned” India in the Soviet sphere of influence, Pakistan in the American sphere of influence, and Afghanistan an ally of India. Benazir, may Allah have mercy on her, in the mid-1990s was responding to this context of Afghanistan’s historical border issues with Pakistan, in an attempt to form an Afghanistan government that would be favorable toward Pakistan’s interests. Actually, it was not Benazir herself who willed this, it was Pakistan’s intelligence apparat ISI that cooked up the Taliban, and Benazir did not oppose it, because her hold on power was shaky enough as it was. Comparable to the CIA getting America entangled in Vietnam, forcing President John F. Kennedy’s hand there.
ISIS responds. With a lot of snark:
“To the extent that Kerry, that uncircumsized old geezer, suddenly became an Islamic jurist, issuing a verdict to the people that the Islamic State was distorting Islam, that what it was doing was against Islamic teachings, and that the Islamic State was an enemy of Islam, and to the extent that Obama, the mule of the Jews, suddenly became a sheikh, mufti, and an Islamic preacher, warning the people and preaching in defense of Islam, claiming that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.”
https://ia601400.us.archive.org/34/items/mir225/English_Translation.pdf
Hat tip to National Review
They went on to say:
“And the Grand Mufti of Egypt who said we were un-Islamic, his circumcision was performed unskillfully! And the Grand Muftis of Saudi Arabia and Turkey who each pronounced our actions to be contradicting Islam, they are tools of the Jews! Saudi Arabia loves the Jews! And the Organization of Islamic Countries, representing 57 Muslim-majority nations who said we were perverting Islam, well…those 57 countries are all tools of the American Imperialists whose foreskin is pale and cowardly. And the 120 religious scholars who wrote to us in classical Arabic refuting our position point-by-point, well, they all went to centuries old world-famous centers of scholarship and don’t know the truth we know in our guts that was taught to us at some donkey college in the middle of nowhere.”
How does one say TL;DR in Arabic?
Those IS fools sure do seem to have an unhealthy fascination with penises.