My wealthy, rabidly Republican sister, as part of her never ending quest to convert me to the true path of rightousness has sent me an email which contains the report found in this link: http://globalspecops.com/clash.html
The email itself was all about “make a jillion copies of this and forward it to everyone in the world so that Bush will prevail and rule forever, world without end, amen.” Because, you see, Bush and his team are hep to this whereas the Democrats don’t have a clue.
My reply to her was along the lines of “stop bombarding me with this junk as I don’t and never will believe any of it.”
But then I thought, maybe someone on the SDMB can make sense of it and thereby aleviate my ignorance. So, I’d like to see a debate among those who believe, as I do, that it is total BS and those who believe it is hand delivered by God to Bush.
My guess is that Aldebaran is saying you must be joking if you are expecting any kind of a debate about this. This is sheer nutcase, pure and simple. It’s beyond BS.
Well, that is my contention. too. I would like to be able to lay some reasoned responses on my sister, however. I honestly did hope for some sort of exchange on the subject. If it is too insane for comment, then that’s okay too. (I did say that I didn’t believe a word of it. I ain’t stupid, just ignorant.)
Typical call-to-arms paranoia aside, there are a number of factual errors ( some minor, others arguably not ) in that little essay. It also, like all good conspiracy theories ( which this isn’t exactly, though it is a closely related beast ), has some kernels of fact. If you really want, if I get the time later I’ll try to at least nitpick it a bit.
The link works when I click on it. I think basically the essay (using the word loosely) sets out the premise that the Muslim world has been formulating a vast plan for years and that now the conditions are right for them to take over and kill us (Americans) all. Only Bush and the Republican party can stop them now; Kerry will surrender meekly.
What about the Illuminati? That essay completely ignores the Illuminati! I mean, really. Everyone knows that the Knights Templar learned of the planned Third Jihad during the Crusades, and they passed that knowledge to the Illuminati, who are on the verge of producing a perpetual motion machine that will simultaneously end global warming and destroy the economies of the oil-rich Arabs, foiling their nefarious scheme.
Gorsnak, I’m damn glad to hear it is all under control, although I would have thought the Masons would have at least a small role.
Tammerlane, if you feel up to it, I would love to see it shot full of holes. I have found and have started reading a couple of websites that purport to give an accurate history of the Muslim religion. I regret to say that my ignorance on the subject falls far past abyssmal. Any reliable links to good sources would be greatly appreciated.
One boner that’s laugh-out-loud ludicrous is the claim that most of the Shi‘ites are Wahhabi. In fact, the Shi‘ites and Wahhabis have always been mortal enemies of each other, and they still would like nothing better than to eradicate each other from the face of the earth. I pity the fool who wrote this, thinking because he read a few Reader’s Digest articles on Islam that he can trick people into believing he knows anything at all of what he’s talking about.
Well, if I’m not mistaken the Masons are supposed to be connected to the Knights Templar back in the mists of time too, so I expect they do have at least a small role.
It looks like the guy who wrote this has at least bought a few history books. As conspiracy theories go, it’s not badly written. Leaving aside the consipiracy crap about third Jihads (why do conspiracy theories have to have numbers?), here’s a few of the more glaring historical mistakes
From the site in question:
This statement, and the following information about the Byzantine empire, is highly misleading. It’s an arguable point, but the Byzantine / Eastern Roman empire was not particularly weak at the advent of Islam. Neither was the enormous Persian empire, not mentioned by the author. However, there was somewhat of a power vaccuum in Arabia at the time, which may have helped in the very early years.
It’s not especially relevant to the rest of the article, but it does denigrate Islam by assuming that if the Christians were at their peak, they could fight off the Muslims easily. The later discussion about the Muslims being finally halted by Charles Martel is similarly misleading.
Not true at all. Christians and Jews were second-class systems in the early caliphates, to be sure, but they didn’t face death if they didn’t convert. They were allowed to live their lives, keep worshipping as they always had, maintain churches / temples but not build new ones and so on. On the down side, they rarely held political power and they had to pay a different, often higher, tax than the Muslims.
Drawing parallels between the Taliban, Wahhabism and modern Shiite Iran is fraught with peril. The Taliban and modern Shiite Iran are not based on Wahhabism, as the article seems to imply. All are forms of Islamism - the idea that Islam should be the basis of temporal government - but they are based on very different theologies. There are gaps between the Taliban’s ideology (Deobandism?) and that of Wahhabism, but there are tremendous gaps between the first two and the current Iranian system, especially the Sunni-Shiite split. Osama and co regard Shiites as heretics.
Osama holds no official position within Wahhabism. No idea where they’re getting this “field marshal” rubbish from.
See earlier comments about the Sunni-Shiite split. While Iran sponsors some terrorist groups, notably al-Quds / Hizbullah, they don’t work together with Osama or provide bases of operations. Osama hates Iran, Iran hates Osama.
Has this guy read a newspaper in the last year or so? Maybe the bits about there being no WMDs and no proof of any nexus between Saddam and Osama?
Yes, Saddam gave money to the families of suicide bombers. No secret ‘funneling’ involved there. But this was a political move - taking a swing at Israel is like taking a swing at child molesters for WEstern politicians - it’s a political winner.
Saddam was a SECULAR dictator who feared religious loonies like Osama and co and tried to kill as many as possible. Osama is a deeply RELIGIOUS person, though his religious views are all fucked up, and wants to kill as many repressive secular dictators as possible. They had no reason to work together and every reason to work against each other.
Look, you can’t have a “Caliphate” without a Caliph – that is, some single leader whom all, or most, of the world’s Muslims can agree to acknowledge as the “Commander of the Faithful.” And what possible candidate could satisfy all, or most, of them? There has not even been any claimant to the caliphal title since the Ottoman monarchy was abolished. The Shi’ites insist the caliph, or imam, must be of the line of Ali; the Sunnis reject this.
The cited web page uses the “Clash of Civilizations” catchphrase invented by Samuel Huntington in his book of the same name. But I read that book, and one key point that Huntington made is that, up to now, the Muslims who make up the “Islamic Civilization” have never been able to pull together. They don’t even have a highly developed sense of loyalty to their respective nation-states. They are loyal to (1) their family, clan and tribe and (2) Islam as a whole. I don’t know whether this assessment is accurate, but I do know that the Muslim world is divided among many different kinds of states and regimes – theocratic states such as Iran, theocratic traditional monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, more reasonable monarchies such as Jordan, ideological partisan dictatorships such as Syria and Libya, secular republics such as Turkey, military dictatorships such as Pakistan. Afghanistan even had a Communist government within living memory – a HOMEGROWN Communist government which the Soviet Union intervened to defend, not to install. And these political and national divisions cut across the lines of religious divisions between Sunnis, Shi’ites, and so on. How could all of these nations, states and sects possibly unite behind a single leader?
This is the old canard of forced conversion. Though it did occur in isolated incidences, it was in fact the exception to the rule. Islam specifically mandates no coercion in matters of conversion and one of the few exceptions to the mandated punishment for apostasy from Islam is that of the forcibly converted, who are not considered to have legally converted in the first place ( the fact that such a ruling exists speaks both to the fact that it occasionally occurred, but also to the fact that it was considered an unsanctioned deviation ).
In fact no choice of taxes or conversion was given in the early Islamic world - the choice was taxes, period - sometimes harsher or as harsh as under the previous Christian lordship ( Egypt was, as it had been since Roman times, used as a cash cow and squeezed until it bled, whereas other areas prospered ), sometimes rather less onerous. Conversion was deliberately discouraged in early decades of the Caliphate, because a) many of the early Muslims ( not necessarily Muhammed, but his successors ) viewed Islam as essentially an ethnic religion of the Arabs and b) conversions could potentially erode the tax base that supported the Muslim ruling class ( which initially paid only a relatively small poll tax, the zakat ). Even after large numbers of non-Arabs converted ( especially in Persia ) for a number of decades they remained discriminated against in matters of taxation. The matter only started to be redressed starting with the Umayyad Caliph Umar II and finally resolved with the Abbasid revolution. After that point the normal situation ( there are many local variations and exceptions, but in a general sense ) was that everybody ( at least in the non-elites ) paid the same land, custom and other non-poll taxes, non-Muslims paid the jizya poll tax ( and were exempt from military service ) and Muslims paid their own poll tax - zakat or alms tax, as above ( always less onerous than the non-Muslim poll tax ).
The Muslim conquest was not successful because of rapid conversion ( with the possible exception of parts of Syria ). Non-Muslims continued to be the majority ( often a large majority as in Egypt ) in many parts of the Caliphate for centuries ( some areas, like Daylam along the Caspian Sea were not even fully subdued for centuries ). We really only see Muslim majorities starting to emerge in most areas in the 10th century.
I’ve never heard of this phrase “first great Jihad” and I think I might reasonably have expected too if it were common, as either a phrase or a concept. It is not impossible that such a mythology has been created and used by modern Jihadists, but if so it is almost certainly a modern invention/adoption with little grounding in classic Islamic historigraphy. For example Islamic history speaks frequently of the four fitna or Islamic civil wars, but it doesn’t mention “great Jihads”.
At any rate Charles Martel should in no way be given credit for stopping the Muslim advance in Europe. It was already grinding to a halt based on earlier setbacks and simple logistics. Charles Martel may have staved off some temporary gains in Aquitaine and he certainly helped secure the future of his dynasty by a) humiliating and forcing the submission of his greatest rival, Eudo of Aquitaine and b) winning a great propaganda victory. But he didn’t win any kind of decisive victory. Muslim rule clung to Septimania for a bit more and destructive raids, even a few further acqusitions, contuned after Tours. Even had the Muslims been vistories at Tours in 732, the result would have been meager because the whole Caliphate was already beginning to be convulsed by internal difficulties that would culminate with the Abbasid revolution in 749 and the severing of Iberia from the Caliphal body politic.
In addition the Muslim advance could be said to be continuing in the Mediterranean where the gradual conquest of the isles and for a brief time southern Italy proceeded apace ( Cyprus 807, Majorca, Sardina, and Crete 818, Sicily gradually taken over the period 827-903, Brindisi, Bari and other parts of the Boot about the same time, Rome was sacked in 846, ). Well into the late 8th century the Caliphs still hoped to take Constantinople and had some realistic chance of doing so ( Harun al-Rashid was the last to seriously attempt it ). So 732 was no watershed date and the “great Jihad” had no definite boundary - conflict was ongoing, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, but never on/off.
Which is it - the “first great Jihad” ended in 732 or 1492? In neither case is such terminology ( whether it actually exists or not ) warranted. For 732 as above and really Granada was never a serious foe - they were a weak rump state that spent much of their existence paying tribute to the Christian kingdoms. Though it did mark the end of independent Muslim rule in Iberia, 1492 was not a battlefield watershed and the Ottoman advance in the east was already well, well under way.
Again this advance started well before the fall of Granada. Trying to parse discrete epochs of Muslim conquest just doesn’t work that well. Perhaps one could speak of loosely of an expansion from the 7th -10th centuries, retrenchment and ( slight ) retraction 11th-13th centuries and re-expansion 14th-17th centuries, followed by retraction 18th-20th centuries. But that only holds up for Europe/Middle East and even then isn’t really cleanly divided. Start throwing in south and east Asia and Africa and that whole progression falls apart.
Actually, though internal disorder did gradually increase in the MENA in the 17th and 18th centuries, it is worth noting that just one large state ( the Ottomans ), one medium ( Persia ) and one smallish ( Morocco ) encompassed the entire region. And in the Ottoman and former Ottoman territories at least order increased again in the 19th century ( a de facto independent Egypt became a strong centralized state and Ottoman reforms greatly re-expanded central authority in its remaining, still substantial demesnes ).
Half-truth ;). External impacts were quite significant, really. Not that that attaches any moral blame necessarily - that is what states did back then and the Muslim states would have done the same had the shoe been on the other foot. But it is a fact that an increasing imbalance of power allowed European states to throw around their authority in a way that greatly weakened and internally undermined the Muslim states of the MENA.
You cannot have a Wahabi Shi’ite. The two terms are almost completely contradictory in an Islamic context - orthodox Wahabism loathes Shi’ism and vice versa. Wahabism is a subsect of Sunni Islam. Meanwhile the brand of fundamentalism espoused by say, Lebanese Hezbollah, has rather different roots, jurisprudence, and even tolerances. For example the fundamentalist theocrats in Iran ( a minority of the population ) may be patriarchal, but they believe in educating women and letting them hold political office - they utterly despise/d Wahabi Saudi Arabia and the Deobandi ( with Wahabi tinges - the Deobandi and Wahabi branches of Sunnism are very similar ) Taliban in Afghanistan as barbarians.
A.) Khomeini wasn’t even remotely Wahabi. His brand of fundamentalism was virtually unique to him, derived from very different theological roots ( the medieval font of modern Wahabi/Deobandi theology, Ibn Tayymiya, was no friend of the Shi’ites ) and his small cadre of followers and is largely rejected by most Shi’ites anyway.
B.) The Taliban were heavily influenced by Wahabi instructors from SA, there are some genuine Wahabis in Afghanistan and many argue that Deobandism is virtually the same as Wahabism, but in my mind they were in a slightly different category. Deobandism uses different ( more liberal ) jurisprudence than Wahabism, has more attachement to Sufism, and culturally the Taliban, while they did shelter external Jihadists like ObL, were themselves standard-issue tribal xenophobic internalists, seemingly more interested in closing Afghanistan off from the outside world than in promoting a worldwide revolution.
Now the conspiracy nonsense rears its head. There was no, repeat NO linkage between the revolution in Iran and ObL. The revolution was a genuinely popular uprising that was later successfully and skillfully high-jacked by the theocrats ( who did have a real constituency, especially among the bazaari class and the urban lumpen proletariat, but not a majority ).
The Jihadists do talk in terms of pan-Islamism and the re-establishment of a Caliphate. But Iran was ground central mostly for Shi’a groups like Hezbollah and some tangentially allied Sunni groups like branches of Islamic Jihad. Not for a “Third Jihad” that included ObL and his spiritual allies who consider Khomeini and his ilk heretics.
This is pretty much accurate. Though it must be realized that this is an ultimate, propagandistic goal. For many of these groups, local interests take precedence by far.
Inaccurate.
Accurate, but not necessarily fully integrated or centrally ordered actions.
So much for the Palestinians I guess :).
Possible, but unsupportable, far as I know.
The paragraph that follows is logical enough if one buys the assertions the author has made. Iraq is a good strategic strongpoint on paper, though not necessarily in reality.
Here we venture into “tinfoil hat” territory. I guess this presumes that the American left ( plus parts of the right and center ), much of western Europe and assorted other political opponents of the Bush administration are somehow in league with the Jihadists. Indeed this guy seems to assume an implicit connection. That is just insane and beyond nitpicking.
Err…what? As 5 time champ noted, this is also off the loony scale. In point of fact the U.S. until the 1980’s at least had a deliberate policy of supporting the Saudi spread of fundamentalist Islam as a direct ideological counter-virus to communism. It worked only too well.
Ah, yes – France, which has been bombed by Jihadist GIA terrorists from Algeria, is in on it. Apparently the Muslim population, a high percentage poor and ghettoized, have somehow seized control of the government. Incidentally the CIA pegs the Muslim population at “5-10%”.
Eh, well, that’s enough. Having only lightly skimmed it the first time, I find I was wrong – this really is conspiracy theory nonsense, rather than a distant cousin ;). The facts are off, but the more egregious problem is that the illuminati-level nuttiness is pretty high.
