The history of Islam is not relevent to today's violence and when our politicians or well meaning ignorant ideologists say that Islam is not the problem - they are utterly wrong.
Our focus on the Middle East over the decades has been so exclusive that the majority has come to see Islam as defined by the Arab. But the Islam of the Middle East is as fixed, as unreflective, and ultimately as brittle as concrete. People don’t realize that Islam is the youngest of the world’s great religions, that it is still very much a work-in-progress on its vast frontiers, and that its forms are at least as various as the countless confessions and sects of Christendom. Islam is a vivid, dynamic, and vibrant religion of changing shape and potential. But Islam’s local identities are far from decided in its struggling borderlands, and, in times of tumult, any religion can turn toward the darkness as easily as toward the light. This struggle between religious forms and between prescriptive and repressive doctrine of faiths, is one of the two great strategic issues of our time—along with the redefinition of the socio-economic roles of women, their transition from being the property of men to being equal partners with men (which is the most profound social development in human history).
The hard-core terrorists spawned by the breakdown of the Middle East quote the Koran. They wear Muslim garments. They perform the daily rituals prescribed by the faith into which they were born. But all of us, in the West and the Middle East, have mistaken the identity of these butchers. They are not simply “rogues” of Islam. This is a civilization. We live in an age of change so profound that entire cultures cannot cope with the stress. We are dealing with a region of people who seek to blame anyone but themselves for the ruin of their societies that they themselves have created. They seek answers to why the enemies of "Allah" have prospered when they have not. The Perversion of Islam that exists in the Middle East is a symptom of decay. Saddam, Bin Ladden, Khomeini, Khudafi, etc are all symptoms of decay. Preventing as many attacks as we can, killing or capturing terrorists, destroying terrorist organizations - are essential goals, but they focus on surface tumors while ignoring the cancer beneath. It is possible to recognize that the majority of the lower-rank terrorists whose lives their overlords throw away so callously have been set up psychologically by the corruption and hopelessness of their societies.
In the decaying Arab world, Islam is the problem—because of the way bitter old men interpret and deform its more humane precepts while embracing its cruelest injunctions. The accusations leveled against us by greedy and embittered men fall upon the ears of those anxious for someone to blame for the ruin of their societies, for the local extermination of opportunities, and for the poverty guaranteed by the brute corruption of their compatriots and the selfish choices of their own leaders to remain in power. Islam certainly is not hateful in its essence—but a disproportionate number of its current adherents need to hate to avoid the agony of self-knowledge. Religious intolerance always returns in times of doubt and disorder. Fundamentalist terrorism has not arisen despite the progress the world has made, but because of it. Despite the lucrative resource the Arab elite hoards from their people, the Middle East has no competitive front with the western world. There is not one single world class university, a complete restriction of the free flow of information, rampant racism and bigotry, complete inequality, and the subjegation of women. The populations of the Middle East blew it. They've failed. In times of trouble, men and women cling to what they know. They seek simple answers to daunting complexities - And religious extremists around the world, in every major religion throughout history, have been delighted to provide those simple answers. It does not matter if those answers are true, so long as they shift blame from the believer’s shoulders and promise punishment to enemies, real or imagined. History has seen human beings react to cultural crises by fleeing into cults that sought revenge. Recently, after the bombings, a Jordanian Muslim said that, "He supported Al-Queda's fight against Americans in Iraq, because America and Israel are their enemy." He then said that, "When Al-Queda started targetting Muslims, he stopped supporting them because he could not understand it." In other words, it was OK and encouraged as long as they were merely killing American civilians. Instead of returning to a "pure" Islam, the terrorists from this civilization are building a blood cult, a deformed offshoot of their faith that revives the most primitive and grotesque of religious practices that many other religions have partaken throughout history. This crisis has never been as intense as in the Middle East, where treasured values and inherited behaviors simply do not work in the 21st century.
This is where terrorism has been bred and this is what this "War on Terror" is about. Now, how does any President "declare war" on this? Keep in mind....we and the rest of the world, still need their oil.
