Eva Luna (N.B. Duck Cuck Goose) – I concede that you know more than I do about the background of Muslims around the world. However, I don’t claim to know their motivations. I merely claim that the number of Muslim attacks is so great that there’s more than mere coincidence.
Collounsbury, I take your point about the Kashmir conflict “not inherently linked to any of this.” However, that’s what we’re debating. My assertion is that by looking so hard at specific background, you are failing to see the forest for the trees. This would be analogous to someone 60 years ago claiming that various attacks on African Americans in Mississippi were unrelated, when they were more properly viewed as tied in to the racism that prevailed at that time.
I was surprised to hear about al Fatah’s multi-religious background. (Do they also have a Jewish auxiliary? AFAIK none of my relatives are members of the al Fatah Sisterhood. ;)) Even if al Fatah does have some Christian aspects, it would still count as a terrorist organization associated with Muslims. But, for the record, can you please provide some more details on the Christian involvement in al Fatah?
Have you ever backed down on the substance of an O.P. or post you composed, rather than a minor factual point, upon receiving conflicting evidence?
Are you basing your opinions on the Middle East/Muslim world on anything other than general knowledge gained by reading the mainstrea U.S. media? If so, please provide details.
I submit that you have it exactly reversed.
While we need to discover where specific Islamist organizations are providing support and stop them, by focusing on your notion of the “big picture” we simply repeat the errors of the Cold War, in which we destabilized or prevented the creation of viable democracies throughout the world as we played the “Great Game” with the Soviets. And you will note that while we eventually beat the Soviets (mostly by simply having a better economic model than they had), we are now having to deal with the situations that we created by our ignoring the local situations. The situations in Indonesia and the Philippines are directly related to our support for anti-democratic forces in our monomaniacal approach to “fighting communism.” The lack of stable democracies throughout Africa can also be tied to the same tunnel vision. To the extent that Islamists are succeeding in the world, they are filling in the power vacuum left by the Soviets because we were too stupid to address the local situations when we had the chance. You are simply suggesting that we continue the same mindless focus on easily caricatured “bad guys” to the neglect of policies that will allow us to separate the Islamists from their popular support–which, paradoxically actually increases their support among people who view us as the heavy-handed bullies.
Al Fatah, and the PLO in general, is a secular, nationalist, organization. Saying that it’s “a terrorist organization associated with Muslims” is misleading. Just because of the demographics of the Palestinians, any group that’s a cross-section of the Palestinian population is going to be majority Muslim, just like any group in Israel itself is going to be majority Jewish, or any group in the US is going to be majority Christian. However, there are Christians in the PLO’s, and Fatah’s leadership, the group doesn’t espouse any religious goals, and the group doesn’t care much about whether its members are Muslim or not.
You can see the difference if you contrast al Fatah with Hamas. Hamas is a Muslim organization. It’s members are Muslim, and have to be Muslim, it finds Muslim arguments for an independent Palestinian state and the defeat or destruction of Israel, and uses Islam to justify its actions, and finally, while the founder of al Fatah, Yasser Arafat, is a thoroughly secular socialist, the founder of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, is a religious leader.
“Admit that the OP was off-base?” No, he never does.
“Mainstream”? Nawww… He bases his opinions on what he reads in various conservative, Republican, and pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian news sources, columnists, and websites.
[scrolling back up to look at Eva’s registration date]
You haven’t been spending much time in Great Debates, have you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have to ask…
Well, I’ve been hanging out in GD more recently than I did in the beginning, and posting more, too. It just takes me a while to begin to associate posting styles with individual posters; generally, I just skim the opinions/ideas without bothering to match them to people (I generally like collecting a variety of opinions), unless the poster has something particularly original to offer, but sometimes a post is just too wacky to leave untouched.
The KKK–at least, the second KKK, founded in 1915, and its various offshoots–did (and still does) very explicitly call itself a Christian group. Its members did (and do) claim to follow Christian teachings–that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and accepting him as savior is necessary for salvation, that the Bible is the word of God, etc. They also claimed that the Bible teaches the separation of “races”, and that the Roman Catholic Church was at best a corrupted or inferior form of Christianity.
No one can say that the KKK’s form of Christianity is the only form of Christianity, or that the beliefs of the KKK are widely accepted by most Christians, or even that it is representative of evangelical Protestant Christianity in the 21st Century. (Although the KKK was a pretty respectable and influential group in its heyday in much of the Bible Belt in the South and Midwest.)
DDG and Eva Luna – You expect me admit that I was wrong?!!
Don’t be silly! I’m a guy!
(Seriously, I did withdraw significant portions of this OP.)
Captain Amazing – thanks for the info on al Fatah. Whether it’s misleading to call it an organization associated with Muslims would depend on what percentage of its members are Muslims. I have met Christian Arabs in Israel, so I guess there must be some in the PLO as well. Still, if al Fatah were, say, 95% Muslim, I think it would be reasonable to think that it’s approach might be influenced by Muslim culture.
tomndebb – we agree seeing the Cold War as an analogue. We disagree on how to characterize the Cold War. You see the alleged faults in strategy; I see a remarkable success. We avoided nuclear warfare and managed to eventually free the USSR and the countries it enslaved.
I have not claimed that the Cold War was a failure. I have noted that, as in any large enterprise, mistakes were made–mistakes that have a direct bearing on the problems we now face and mistakes that you seem to wish to repeat so that your grandchildren can go through this all, one more time.
Now, unless Bush and Company are absolute idiots, they are, indeed, pursuing the connections where al Qaida has provided support or inspiration for the Chechens, the bombers in Bali, Yemen, and other locations, and even the connections to the Muslim-Hindu riots. That is simply appropriate. However, if we simply treat the issue as a “Muslim” problem, or even an “Islamist” problem, then when al Qaida actually has been crushed, there will be a new group of patrons to support the rebels in Chechnya, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, Algeria, and elsewhere because those people are not going to be satisfied by some external bully telling them that they had no right to seek justice (in their view) simply because some of their supporters were “bad.”
Meanwhile, I find it very interesting that you, who have chastised members of the Civil Rights movement for wasting their resources fighting for issues that you consider peripheral, seems to want to divert energy and resources from the War on Terrorism to go after the odd loon or nutjob simply because they have some vague personal connection to Islam. In six weeks, no one has been able to provide a connection between the LAX shooter and any Islamist organization. Muhammad/Williams seems to have loose connections (as in, his ex-wife joined but there is no record he did) to the Nation of Islam, itself regarded as a heretical group of cranks by Sunnis, Shiites, Sufis, and Wahabis, alike–not much of an “Islamist” connection, there, either.
**december, ** believe it or not, some of my best friends are guys. I’m actually rather fond of guys, as a group. I’m more fond, however, of the ones who can explain to me how they arrived at their conclusions, whether those conclusions be in the realm of international politics, or otherwise. Flexibility is also a plus, whether in the realm of international politics, or otherwise.
So now, at the risk of this post starting to sound more like a personal ad (and please believe me, the rest of you, I am most assuredly not hitting on december), are you going to tell me how you have arrived at whatever conclusions you have arrived at in re: the Chechens and the nature of their current struggle, and to what extent it is religious vs. political in nature? Bonus points if you can articulate how you have arrived at analogous conclusions about the nature of the other conflicts Collounsbury mentioned previously as not being primarily Islamic in nature.
Plus, we “freed” the USSR and the countries they enslaved? I’m trying to suppress a giggle here. I’m thinking back to my last semester of college, Spring 1989, shortly before I left to spend a semester in Leningrad. I was taking a lovely class called History of Economic Thought, and when we got to Marx in the syllabus, I asked in class one day, “But wait a minute, if people are supposed to contribute according to their ability and take according to their needs, what incentive is there in a socialist system to work hard?” The professor laughed and said, “You’re going to Russia in the fall, right? Well, let me know what you think when you get back.” Within 24 hours of arrival, I couldn’t understand how the CIA thought of the Soviet Union as a serious threat; the place was clearly collapsing on itself, and we were in a major city in European Russia, where things were (and are) are much better than in the bulk of the Soviet Union.
These are excellent questions, but I’m afraid I don’t know the answer. My POV is statistical. (Not surprising for an actuary.) We are seeing so many instances of terrorism by diverse Muslims, that there are likely to be links.
I was in Leningrad a year before you in the summer of 1988. That was the summer of the heat spell, when the swamps melted and the mosquitos were the size of eagles. Anyhow, I agree with you about the economic situtation there.
However, the USSR Communist economy never worked. As you know, there was even mass starvation some decades earlier. Yet the system continued. So, economic failure alone didn’t account for the fall of Communism. Nor did economic mismanagement cause the overthrow of the totalitarian systems in Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, or Albania, The West deserves a lot of credit.
Furthermore, the USSR was expansionary. They had a powerful military machine and they were willing to use it. Without the resistance led by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, et al, the USSR would have messed even more of the world than they did.
BTW, Eva Luna, some observers think the link is anti-semitism. E.g., John Allen Muhammad is linked to a shooting last spring at a Tacoma synagogue in which no one was injured, Tacoma police said. http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20021028_2045.html
Well, I guess to do that, the first step is to show that there is a Palestinian Muslim culture. You’d have to show that Palestinian Muslims hold values and express them differently, as a group, than Palestinian Christians, and that there’s a significant difference between the beliefs and lifestyles of the two groups.
Secondly, you’d have to show how the values of the PLO reflect the Muslim values and not the Christian ones.
It could also help if you showed that the PLO had a demographic makeup religiously different than that of the Palestinians at large.
Christians make up about 10-15, I believe, of the Palestinian population, and actually, two of the most radical terrorist groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (the guys who were into airplane hijackings, and, btw, is one of the groups that was part of the PLO from the beginning), and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (who split from the PFLP) were founded by Christians.
Nope, but the U.S. Embassy is holding onto some of ours that they should rightfully be done with by now, and it’s creating a major headache for us and our client.
a) I believe when you mention mass starvation, you’re referring to the famines of the 1930’s. This actually disproves your point about the socialist system not working, as one of the major causes of the famines (in addition to the destruction and general dislocation left over from the Revolution and its aftermath) was forced collectivization and the Stalin-organized murders of many of the most productive peasants (kulaks) and other high achievers who might have improved the economic situation greatly. There’s a very apt Russian saying that “the highest blade of grass is the first to be cut down by the scythe.”
b) The Russian Empire was expansionary long before the formation of the USSR. No significant chunk of land came under Soviet control that hadn’t been at some point under Tsarist control. So sorry, you don’t get to blame communism for that.
And may I note that once again, we’re back to discussing political, not religious phenomena? Any sigificance in that, december?
Otherwise you wouldn’t have to ask…