What do you mean that you “never mentioned George W. Bush for a reason”?
He was the President of the United States for most of the GWOT. If Strauss’ theories were responsible for the GWOT, wouldn’t he be a follower of Strauss?
Who are the “etc.”?
The people you’ve mentioned so far were fairly small potatoes guys within George W. Bush’s administration and don’t contain any of the heavy hitters like Karl Rove, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Karen Hughes or Dick Cheney, all of whom had dramatically more influence on the George W. Bush administration than the men you mentioned.
Why didn’t you mention any of them.
Honestly the only thing that the three people you mentioned have in common is that they were all members of the Bush administration with vastly less influence than the people I mentioned and that all three of them were Jewish.
What made you pick out those three underlings who happened to be amongst few Jews in what was the most goyish administration in several decades?
I personally am not a fan of the “they hate us for our freedom” analysis and think it is heavily flawed and short-sighted for a number of reasons(and for the record I’m but “us” and “they”) but that doesn’t mean that militant Muslims don’t exist and aren’t quite powerful and influential, though I feel extremely silly using the term since any category that includes people as diverse as "Sayyid Qutb, Yussef Al-Qaradawi, Sheikh Yassin, Osama Bin Laden, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Muqtada Al-Sadr, is far too broad to be useful.
I unfortunately don’t get to interact with many Muslims. I worked with one at a job where we had a tradition of a monthly presentation. After 9-11 he gave one that seemed to have had the intention of absolving us of common misconceptions about Islam, bringing up notions such as it means “the religion of peace”. But it ended up coming across as slightly defensive of the extremists rather than disowning them. So I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole thing.
-Believe it or not, being a good terrorist is hard work, and though it attracts the crazy, they aren’t easily accepted. In fact they could mess up the whole thing
-Al Qaeda, with millions of dollars, and an international network, took years of training and a selet few men to perform September 11.
-There are plenty of Palestinians who’d like to throw a rock at the US. But to study language, learn a skill like bomb-making or sniping, and know you are going to die takes a great deal of dedication.
-Personally, I never consider Al-Qaeda to be stupid, or insane. I think they have utter contempt for human life, but so have the Mongols, the Nazi’s, the KGB, The US during the cold war, and plenty of other organizations and countries.
I’ll take your word for it that it’s not easy to make efficient bombs. But my point was they don’t have to.
I am talking about terrorists, not invaders. Their goal is not to take over the US, or to kill everyone in the US. Their goal is to spread terror. A bomb that goes off at all is enough to do that, even if nobody is injured.
I’m no expert, but I don’t think it’s very hard to make a simple pipe bomb. I’m sure it would be harder to get industrial grade explosive, put it in a gym bag or purse filled with nails, and connect it to a timer, or a detonator that can be activated by some kind of phone or radio transmission, but I find it very hard to believe that someone can’t be trained to do that in less than a week.
If you had several of those go off at random locations, with indications (perhaps explicit anonymous threats sent to TV stations or whatever) that they would continue to occur, IMO that would be sufficient to cause people to change their behavior enough to adversely affect the economy.
While I certainly appreciate your relatively polite comment, the stubbornness to accept an argument and unfounded accusation is just too much for me to take someone as intellectually honest.
To fight the stubbornness I will offer another cite, an article written in freakin’ 2002:
On the subject of being accused to use a fallacy of appealing to authority there is a condition imposed to this type of argument for it to be accepted:
Now, you may not be aware of who Robin Cook is but suffice to say he was British FM in 1997-2001 and Leader of the House in 2001-2003. I have a real difficulty with anyone questioning HIS authority on the subject let alone some dude born in Iran. In fact, I reject any notion that condition above is not met. To put it simply, he was right in there with full unrestricted access, perhaps among 100 people in the World.
Therefore, I did not make appeal to authority fallacious.
By the way, it’s getting quite tiring to have to deal with intellectual dishonesty in full display on this thread.
The subject is Arabic, not foreign policy. Donald Trump is an expert on commercial real estate transactions, and even owns land in the UAE. That does not mean you get to appeal to his expertise in Arabic translation and usage conventions.
An even better factual rebuttal.
Tell ya what, whenever you decide to read both the thread and the cite I provided, and you want to stop your bullshit about how I couldn’t have read my cite since, after all, you haven’t… well, when you’re done with that and actually want to discuss the issue you raised but seem to have retreated from, come look me up. Unfortunately though, as Dopers tend to be literate, it’ll be quite clear that you’re beaten and that’s the reason why you’re refusing to debate the issues and pretending that I haven’t read a cite which I’ve now quoted from and discussed at length.
“I don’t have any response, but I’m willing to rely solely on ad hominem bluster” is, perhaps, not a winning strategy. But hey, if you think that it works for you, double down and start pretending that not only have I not read my cite, I haven’t even posted to the this thread. Hell, knock yourself out and pretend that I don’t even exist.
An even better factual rebuttal! The hits just keep on coming.
Of course, you’re currently posting in a forum called “Great Debates”. So yes, the idea is to debate. Try it, you might like it. When you claim that…
…and you’re quickly provided with a citation of how the father of Jihadism hated Americans for our freedom of religion, freedom of behavior, freedom of dress, sexual freedom, (etc…) and respond not by admitting that you’d used bombastic blustering bullshit, but pretending that the person who just eviscerated your argument didn’t read their own cite? Well, that’s not how a debate works. That is, perhaps, how YouTube comments work, if that’s your thing. I will admit, you did at least engage in quasi-debate where you claimed that since the author of the piece enumerated how Qutb was violently opposed to many western freedoms and then summed it up with the gloss of “modernity”, and modernity isn’t freedom, then obviously Qutb didn’t hate America due to many of our freedoms. When you realized that gambit wouldn’t work, you quickly switched to pretending that I hadn’t read my own cite, since evidently holding that laughable position is easier for you than admitting that your absolutist twaddle about “no Muslim evarrrr!” was simply wrong.
So here, since you seem unwilling to start, I’ll give you a push:
“Finn, I see that you’ve cited the facts that Qutb was virulently opposed to sexual freedom, religious freedom, freedom of dress, freedom of behavior and so on, and was actually violently opposed to anything but the imposition of his brand strict Islamic fundamentalism. And yes, all of those things are obviously issues of freedom and control, and it was precisely those western freedoms which enraged Qutb, so I was wrong when I said that zero Muslims ever in history had hated us for the freedoms we hold. What I meant to say was…”
So are you unable or unwilling to actually support your position or retract your errors, and you’re instead reduced to repeatedly pretending I haven’t read my cite since you can’t or won’t actually debate? In fact, it seems as if despite all your bullshit about how I haven’t read my cite, you somehow managed to quote and bold something that not only supports my position, but yet again proves you’re wrong. I wonder if you even noticed? It seems that, ironically, you randomly pulled a quote, didn’t read it, and haphazardly bolded the first phrase you saw. It’d be less obvious if you hadn’t spent so many posts avoiding making an actual argument and pretending that I was guilty of your failings.
-Did you really not notice that you claimed that America was hated solely because “we have lots of money and we have an interventionist foreign policy” and then bolded something saying that Qutb didn’t hate America because of anything that we did?
-Do you not understand that “an interventionist foreign policy” is something one does?
-Did you really not notice that you just provided a quote saying that Qutb hated America because “In America, unlike in Egypt, dreams could come true. Qutb understood the danger this posed: America’s dazzle had the power to blind people to the real zenith of civilization, which for Qutb began with Muhammad in the seventh century and reached its apex in the Middle Ages, carried triumphantly by Muslim armies?”
-Do you honestly not understand that the ability to “make dreams come true” and to live one’s life other than stuck in the state of a religion as it was in the Middle Ages is indeed an issue of freedom?
-Do you truly not understand what “religious freedom” means?
-Do you expect me to believe that when Qutb was enraged by personal freedom, sexual freedom, religious freedom, freedom of behavior, freedom of dress, an so on, that those weren’t freedoms which enraged him and you honestly believe I didn’t read the citation which enumerated those facts?
Now, again, please actually read my cite(s) and read the exchange I had with Tom. It’s in this thread and not terribly long, and so there’s really no excuse for you to wilfully refrain from debating. If you still don’t understand how the imposition of religious fundamentalism by force is antithetical to freedom, and hating a people because they don’t observe your fundamentalist interpretation of religion is hating them because of some of the freedoms which they hold, I will be happy to try to explain it to you. But cut out your bullshit about how if someone proves you wrong with a 1st rate citation, then they must not have read it and it’ll go away if you jam your fingers in your ears. It just makes it clear that your argument is utterly without merit.
You can fix that, though, if you actually finally start debating.
P.S. I will also add that your argument in this thread has displayed a nasty habit of deliberately ignoring facts in favor of a brief gloss. Opposition to religious freedom is obviously opposition to freedom, but the author used the word “modernity” so you pretend that the issue wasn’t about freedom. I suspect that your gambit here is to pretend that “not anything Americans did” means that it wasn’t people enjoying western freedoms that enraged Qutb… despite explicit enumeration of exactly how those freedoms enraged Qutb. You appear to be building an argument on sound bytes and a refusal to read citations or the thread, and that’s hardly helpful or savory.
Ok, first of all, I didn’t insult you, so I would ask you not to insult me.
Second, for someone who’s setting himself up as the defender of Middle Easterners against Western and Zionist aggression, it’s really odd to see you directing an insult at me that seems to comes very, very close to being nationalist bigotry.
Somehow I’m pretty sure if Finn had dismissed another poster as “some dude from Lebanon” or something similar you’d be screaming “bigot!” and demanding the mods sanction him.
Beyond that, I’m not sure why you think my being born in Iran(I left when I was 2 FTR) disqualifies me from discussing matters related to the Middle East. If anything most people overstate or overestimate my knowledge and familiarity with it.
I also suspect that Christine Amanpour would be a bit surprised to learn that her views on world affairs should be dismissed because she grew up in Iran.
Ok, I invited you to bring forth someone who spoke Arabic which had Cooke been right you bring forth Giles Foden? He’s a British writer who wrote The Last King of Scotland.
Does he speak Arabic or have any expertise in it? Hell, has he even been to the Middle East?
I ask because I don’t see any evidence why he should be considered an expert in Arabic.
Furthermore, did you even bother to read his article?
Foden specifically says that Al Quaeda means “the base” or “the foundation”. For those not familiar “Al” is the Arab equivalent of “the” while “Quaeda” means “base”.
Foden specifically mentions that the Arab translation of Isaac Asmivov’s novel Foundation was “Al Quaeda”(he’s correct as I mentioned in a previous post) and the Foden spends several paragraphs taking seriously the argument that Osama Bin Laden chose to call his organization “Al Quaeda” because he was inspired by Asimov’s book and sees himself as some sort of modern day Hari Seldon.
I’ll merely note that Foden’s theory seems to me rather far-fetched and doesn’t inspire much confidence in me of his knowledge or understanding either Osama Bin Laden or Al Quaeda much less his knowledge of Arabic.
I’ll also note that Foden rather strongly(to put it mildly) disagrees with Cooke and says that most experts believe that Osama chose to call his organization “the base” to indicate it was the “command base” upon which his revolution would be built and commanded from.
Can you please cite some experts in Arabic who say “Al Quaeda” means “the database” referring to a computer file as opposed to “the base” or “the foundation.”
Yes, the religionofpeace.com is an extremely reliable, non-biased, non-bigoted websites which is highly trustworthy rather than a promoter of bigoted stereotypes.
I think that this whole debate on the English meaning of an Arabic word, while entertaining, is missing the point Robin Cook tried to make. I will attempt to offer my understanding of Robin’s column written a day after the London bombing in 2005.
The full paragraph is presented:
The sentence in question is * Al-Qaida, literally “the database”, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians. * where literally "the database", is just a little apposition that is trying to re-enforce what author wanted to state, that when the word Al-Qaida was used it was referring to the computer file with the names of recruited fighters; i.e. somewhere in CIA computer they did in fact maintain some list so when they wanted to refer to it they’d use word Al-Qaida rather than “the list with names of guys we are funding to fight Russians”. The apposition itself * literally “the database” * is just pointing out to this coincidence. The suggestion is that this word had original use for whatever reason, wrong translation notwithstanding. In other words, that was most suitable word at the time and it stuck.
While I appreciate academic discussions on difficulties with translating Arabic words into English, that was not intent of the little apposition used in this sentence.
Now, even if the translation is wrong in linguistic terms (even though, as per 2nd link written in 2001 that meaning may have evolved with times) it does not suddenly make everything Robin Cook is saying wrong.
And here we come to real use of “appeal to authority fallacy” only in a negative sense. The point of this translation debate is to show that since Robin Cook does not know what the word REALLY means (he’s wrong on this) by inference he is wrong in anything else he say in this column. Of course, something tells me that this assessment will again be rejected.
