An interesting article on political Islam from the excellent New Republic. By the way, if you have time it's well worth reading the readers' comments in 'Discuss this article' section.
'The dangers of political Islam'
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
The New Republic
5 comments:
That's the transcript, here's the clip:
#1050 - Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan: There Is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century
Interesting post from SL above. Jason Burke in an article in today's Guardian draws parallels between radical Islam and the left wing &
Totalitarian movements of the Twentieth Century.
Here's a sample:
"The standard profile of leaders of Islamic radical movements - usually men between the ages of 18 and 35, often from middle-class families and often educated to graduate level - is very close to that of many leftwing radical activists. So is their interest in "propaganda by deed" - an idea originating in anarchist and nihilist circles of the end of the 19th century - and in the radicalisation of the masses through spectacular violence. The very concept of a small number of enlightened men struggling to raise the people against a tyrannical power, though very much a part of Islamic religious thinking and culture over centuries, also clearly shared much with the Leninist concept of the revolutionary "avant-garde". Marxism and its offshoots offered, like radical Islam does now, a dogmatic explanation of the evils of the world and an equally dogmatic programme that would lead to their apparent solution. Marxists saw history in terms of an inevitable dialectic and consulted and selectively cited key and immutable texts; so, of course, do men like Bin Laden, as the volumes under review make very evident. Radical leftwing groups and systems of governments had their rituals, their languages, their semi-god-like individual leaders, their mythologised histories, their hierarchies, their globally applicable identities that ignored national boundaries and, of course, their martyrs. So, plainly, do the contemporary Islamic militants. Then there are the more obvious direct links. Many of the radical Muslim groups set up in the 1970s and 80s made no secret of the fact that they had learned their tactics and organisation from the left, and a surprising number of Islamic militants have actually flirted with leftwing activism before becoming involved in religious radical movements. There is also the anti-semitism that marked much leftwing and all radical Islamic thought.
Interestingly, all this has escaped neither President Bush nor the militants themselves. Bergen quotes Noman Benotman, a Libyan-born former militant living in London, saying that "in the 1970s, 80s and even the 90s all these jihadi groups failed to overthrow the governments [of their native lands] ... because [they] could not recruit the people ... That is the rules of the war, especially guerrilla warfare. I think the godfather for all these things is Mao Zedong. That's the theory. It's ... Mao. We failed to recruit the people." And Bush: "The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century."
And here is the article in full:
Will the real al-Qaida please stand up?
Jason Burke
The Guardian
See a previous thread Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam for more by Jason Burke.
This comparison of Islamism and other totalitarian threats to the Liberal West is the heart of Paul Berman's brilliant book, Terror and Liberalism.
See previous thread.
Two more pieces on Iran:
Facing Down Iran
Mark Steyn (the Clinton remarks quoted are pretty extraordinary if true)
The Nuclear Power Besides Iraq
James Fallows
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