cnredd said:
And who are the people twisting those words into a literal sense? All of Islmam or just the Radical ones?
In a world with 1.2 billion Muslims, the problems we've been having are onlt with a small percentage of them, and they shouldn't be generalized...
That's like saying Christianity is a perverted religion because a couple of Christians shot an abortion doctor....The problem with Islamic Extremists is much bigger than that, but it's still a small population when considering the whole Ummah(Muslim community).
If you raise the issue of Arab or Muslim anti-Semitism, anti-americanism or anti-western values with the average Arab/Muslim leader, you will, with just a few exceptions, get a predictable set of responses. Some of them will shamefacedly acknowledge that the problem exists, and having done so, will then abruptly change the subject to racial profiling, American imperialism, or the evils of Israel. Others will admit the existence of the problem, but insist that it survives only on the "fringes" of Arab/Muslim society, and is therefore an issue of marginal concern. Some will simply fall silent. And others will tell you with disarming candor that the problem of anti-Semitism is no "problem" at all, because the Jews are after all a scheming and diabolical race who deserve all the abuse that can be directed at them, and the Americans want to dominate the world. Multiply such leaders by the hundreds, and do so over the course of decades, and you will get some sense of why the problem of anti-Semitism and anti-americanism has assumed the proportions it currently has in the Arab-Muslim community.
Though anchored in religious creed, fundamentalist Islam is a radical utopian movement closer in spirit to other such movements (communism, fascism) than to traditional religion. By nature anti-democratic and aggressive, anti-Semitic and anti-Western, it has great plans. Indeed, spokesmen for fundamentalist Islam see their movement standing in direct competition to Western civilization and challenging it for global supremacy.
To build a new Muslim society, fundamentalists proclaim their intent to do whatever they must; they openly flaunt an extremist sensibility. There are no such terms as compromise and surrender in the Islamic cultural lexicon.
Seeing Islam as the basis of a political system touching every aspect of life, fundamentalists are totalitarian. Whatever the problem, "Islam is the solution." In their hands, Islam is transformed from a personal faith into a ruling system that knows no constraints. They scrutinize the Koran and other texts for hints about Islamic medicine, Islamic economics, and Islamic statecraft, all with an eye to creating a total system for adherents and corresponding total power for leaders. Fundamentalists are revolutionary in outlook, extremist in behavior, totalitarian in ambition.
Fundamentalist Islam is also aggressive. Like other revolutionaries, very soon after taking power fundamentalists try to expand at the expense of neighbors. The Khomeinists almost immediately sought to overthrow moderate (meaning here, non-fundamentalist) Muslim regimes in Bahrain and Egypt. For six years (1982-88) after Saddam Husayn wanted to quit, they kept the war going against Iraq; and they occupied three small but strategic islands in the Persian Gulf near the Straits of Hormuz. The Iranian terrorist campaign reaches from the Philippines to Argentina. The mullahs are building an arsenal that includes missiles, submarines, and the infrastructure for unconventional weaponry. In like spirit. The Sudanese reignited the civil war against Christians and animists in the south and, for good measure, stirred up trouble at Halayib, a disputed territory on Sudan's border with Egypt.
Fundamentalists discuss Jews with the most violent and crude metaphors. Khalil Kuka, a founder of Hamas, once said that "God brought the Jews together in Palestine not to benefit from a homeland but to dig their grave there and save the world from their pollution.
Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States. Fundamentalists are responding to what they see as a centuries-long conspiracy by the West to destroy Islam. Inspired by a Crusader-style hatred of Islam and an imperialist greed for Muslim resources, the West has for centuries tried to neuter Islam. It has done so by luring Muslims away from Islam through both its vulgar culture (blue jeans, hamburgers, television shows, rock music) and its somewhat higher culture (fashion clothes, French cuisine, universities, classical music). In this spirit, a Pakistani fundamentalist group recently deemed Michael Jackson and Madonna "cultural terrorists" and called for the two Americans to be brought to trial in Pakistan.
Fearful of Western culture's hold over their own people, fundamentalists respond with vitriolic attacks denigrating Western civilization. It is crassly materialist says 'Adil Husayn, a leading Egyptian writer, seeing man is seen "as nothing but an animal whose major concern is to fill his belly." To dissuade Muslims from Westernizing, they portray our way of life as a form of disease. Kalim Saddiqui, the main Iranian polemicist in the West, deems Western civilization "not a civilization but a sickness." And not just any sickness but "a plague and a pestilence" Belhadj of Algeria's FIS ridicules Western civilization as "syphilization."
Hatred against the West inspires a struggle with it for cultural supremacy. Fundamentalists see the rivalry as cultural, not military. Fundamentalists do not restrict their sights to the Muslim quintile of the world's population but aspire to universal dominance.