But it is obvious that this self-policing isn’t what floats the boat of Muslims politically. There’ll be the occasional good statement, but if, say, Israel bombs Gaza, then suddenly social media will fill up with Islamic outrage, careful commentators will become passionate, marchers will hit the streets. Why is there no Muslim Peace Movement campaigning for an end to violence in Muslim countries, where the victims are Muslims and the perpetrators are Muslims? Where it might make the most difference.
I posted this for click-through to the Aaronovitch op-ed, but thought to update with the note there is most certainly a core global new intelligentsia campaigning for peace and against Islamic Jihad, and it is doing so — and has been doing so — with active Muslim participation in every facet.
Unfortunately, a socially networked “new global intelligentsia” doth not a political movement nor party make.
However, to suggest there is “no Muslim Peace Movement” is wrong.
Perhaps between Islamic Humanist efforts on personal pages and in forums across Facebook, my main hangout, they’re just not seen in aggregate.
The more militarily defeated they feel, the more determined in defiance they may become because that defines their heroism, “resistance” (of course, it’s resistance to economic development, education, employment, etc., but they’re on a civilizational mission for Islam, and that mission sense needs to be redefined and channeled elsewhere). Lowa Kay’s thought adheres to the simple notion that “if they’re enemy, they should be treated like enemy” and indeed conquered and eliminated.
Although we (Jews, others similar in outlook) prefer to “do conquest” with language and policy, it hard missing the fighting bands and legions of what appears to be traditional Islam (in my new vocabulary, I hereby declare the compassionate, moderate, reasoning, and reforming the “radicals”). Barack Obama — I know how he’s viewed in conservative circles — has tried to integrate Brotherhood members into the Federal mixing bowl; Europe has promoted multicultural accommodation, and has reached its limit (http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/07/02/Europe-Takes-One-More-Step-Toward-Eliminating-the-Burqa); in the Middle East, Iraqis and Syrians have taken a beating between combinations of fascist and tribal military and political powers, and the pride-goeth-before-a-fall appearance of the “Islamic State” tells how even Islam in its majority cannot tolerate what Islam — by way of hundreds of _conservative_ inventions — has in mind for the humanity of humanity.
We’re waiting for _radical Muslims_ (compassionate, moderate, reasoning, reforming) to a) understand what has been or is being done to them, and b) find the courage in themselves to combat the forces that would enslave them — and, so sorry, those forces are not Jewish or Christian or anything else: those forces are of a dark portion of their own and of themselves.
Coming to their feet on that basis would be honorable, for the rest has been really shameful.
* * *
Obama’s trying to wriggle out of it while trying to get the Muslim targets and victims of “Islamist” aggression to stand up on their own! Unfortunately, deep divisions within the community have weakened it for the onslaughts brought by the Islamic State, which might be a good thing: everyone can see it for what it is, what it represents, and what it intends to do with humanity, including its own.
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The Awesome Conversation moves along swiftly as the tempo of events promotes greater engagement at a faster pace.
I don’t know what to do with my part of the commentary other than as swiftly post some part here for greater permanence (and even that’s uncertain).
The Islamic Slaughter (IS) operating in Iraq and Syria displays itself well.
Loud and hysterical shouts of “Allah akbar”, “To Jihad”, “there is none save Allah and the Shiites are his foes”, “He who fights for Jihad is loved by Allah”, “The Sunnis are Allah’s beloved”, “Allah is our god and not theirs (the Shiites’)”, “The Shiite god is Satan”, “Death is better than humiliation”, “With blood and spirit will we redeem you, Islam”, “Jihad is our way”, “Jihad state forever”, “O Shiite rulers, we are coming for you”, were heard at the demonstration and to serve as proof of its serious intentions, shots were fired in the air.
And they will be told by a central power — ayatollah, caliph, king, or president-for-life — to shut up.
In many systems — not all! — unquestioning obedience to God (which is not sealed in the Jewish ethos) has been already conflated with obedience to a human claiming to represent the Almighty.
Get the habits going in behavior and language, keep the cruelty in punishment high for dissent, and it’s all over.
I have vacillated a long time about the nature of Islam, as have many within the Ummah and many would-be dhimmi and kaifir, but what we are seeing suggests that al-Qaeda to ISIS represents an “Old Islam” — a how to scrape up the criminal and dispossessed, bring in the powerful to become more powerful, and expand the enterprise while growing more powerful and wealthy on plunder. It’s been there in the Banu Qurayza legend, which some among the revolutionary — the real radicals are the moderates — try to dispossess, and it’s at play in Iraq with the internecine warfare culminating in the want of a unified system beneath a single authority.
Ambivalence within the communities mentioned may stem from consideration of the possibility that such as ISIS works (as a tip of the spear) and that as long as one is Sunni, one is safe, and, therefore, why be upset about the gung-ho armed with Qurans, Kalashnikovs, and great glorious dreams of empire?
On both the true radical and Shiite angles, I would welcome Abbas Zaidi’s or Dean Mousavi’s comments.
Obama seems to want to leave this kind of warfare alone — consign it to the Middle East and North Africa (and the more Goons of the Dictator and Fanatics of Islam killed in Syria, the better, but, gosh, too bad about the people) — but I think most of humanity, and on this we too should be +95 percent want to see this evil and the excuses for its license with everyone else quelled and in any which way that works. The suffering is too much — and in the end, in displaced persons, in crime, in political anarchy, in disruption, the whole world pays the price for this deeply barbaric and medieval nonsense.
And the beat goes on.
So it goes.
Any old cliche will do for these days and issues that go on and on and on without substantial address nor an inch of change.
Also from the same conversation, my part preceding the above passage: “The silent may believe they will benefit ultimately from the political program in a system of expansion that strikes me as deeply bigoted, coercive, deceptive, and egregious on general terms.”
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/07/its-not-occupation-its-islam.html – 7/2/2014: “I raised my children on the knees of the (Islamic) religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said. Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that. The victory of Islam.”
And just a moment on the murder of an Arab teen in the vicinity of Jerusalem, an abhorrent act some — not only some Muslims, Jews as well — have skidded into calling an act of revenge far in advance of investigation. My response elsewhere to that:
Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.
I correspond off of Facebook as well (where do I find the time? It’s easy — I have no life), and this is what one from the anti-Jihad had to say about Islam in relation to the progress of the “Islamic State” (AKA “ISIS”, “ISIL”, “ISIS/L”) in Iraq and Syria:
I saw cars lined up. They were part of the death squads for Mosul. (Whilst perusing the jihad portal.) Now that we have rampant crucifixions and beheadings I await the public stoning of women. It is coming. M. allowed it. If it is good enough for him, it is good enough for them. I am determined to no longer reference these acts as “radical Islam”. They are the real Islam. This is real Islam, just as practised in the time of M. Radical Islam, would be an Islam that is moderate, philanthropic and kind. That is radical for Islam. What we are seeing, is the real Islam, based on texts, eyewitness accounts, primary source options from the era of the final Prophet.
With certainty, the entire Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda-type affiliates believe deeply that they are Muslims, never mind with what anomic and casual bents they kill others who believe they are Muslim too. Of course, what my correspondent suggests with perhaps Christian insight is that those among the middle, mild, and moderate of Islam who stand up to terrorism and argue for a progressive modern society be considered the true radicals.
Why not?
What is it tumbling around in the Islamic Small Wars with a 1400 year old “road map” that tolerates no other instruction or thought but its own?
ISIS would call what it believes and pursues the true Islam, the only Islam, and bar the “radicals” from it.
So one may nod to the most radical of Muslims, “moderate, philanthropic, and kind”.
These have no idea what it is that’s coming for them:
The newly elected parliament convened with 255 out of 328 elected officials attending, which was enough for a legal quorum, the speaker said. But when many failed to return after the break, there were not enough members to continue.
He talks at length about all of the Western-made equipment ISIS has captured during its various routs of the Iraqi army. “Look how much money America spends on fighting Islam, and it ends up going to us,” he crows. “Message to the people of the West: just keep giving and we will keep taking.”
Vox. ISIS mocks Obama in Michael Bay-style propaganda video – 7/1/2014. Vox has imported the video to its page, so, to my friends around the world, if you want to see an ISIS representative in a ball cap and speaking American English, click through to it.
As ISIS has picked up “assets” in American machinery and weaponry, also Iraqi military uniforms, I was curious about the suggestion that the same were on the road to Damascus.
Is there an ISIS armored column gunning for Bashar al-Assad and his government?
Will U.S. arms shipments to “moderate” Syrian forces arrive in time to kill or capture that column and retake ownership of The Revolution?
About a week ago, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi noted, “The upcoming battles will reveal the extent of ISIS’ maturity. Most probably, it will stop at the maximum extent in the south like it now with the North’s Kurds and it will rest a little benefiting from international incompetence” (Al-Aribya, June 24, 2014).
How else could resistance to the developing and expanding conflict be characterized?
The Iraqi Parliament, so it appears, can’t keep itself seated for even one day.
The call-up of tens of thousands of young men from Iraq’s south, Shiites, for the most part, appear to be getting a pep talk, a helmet, a firearm, and a ride toward wherever the action is, pretty much just enough to get themselves killed.
I would like to be more optimistic, of course, but the good spirit of going off to war, the preparations with uniforms, steel, and gun oil, play to vanity more than the necessities of what has to be just the ugliest and most heartbreaking business on earth. For certain, I would not want to be an American military adviser handed recruits with two weeks (or much less) of “boot camp” behind them for a day’s work in an active field populated by so deeply a delusional and treacherous enemy, but perhaps that kind of challenge is what combat pay is all about.
From Sunday’s Guardian, this quote tells of a theme I’ve encountered elsewhere:
“We have Da’ash on one side,” said Abu Mustafa, a Baquba resident, using the colloquial word for Isis. “And we have Asa’ib ahl al-Haq on the other. I don’t know who to be more scared of.”
Even if held together for a time by Saddam Hussein’s power to manipulate his constituence and keep it roiled in fear, Iraq has been long divided by the Sunni-Shiite schism, and on that matter, never mind American secular ideals and military intervention, it has been laid open to Iranian and Saudi influence and related jockeying and meddling. Into that rift has roared ISIS with inhuman and frankly incontinent bloodletting and cruelty, and the state is on the edge — beyond it, possibly — of reverting to the language and terms of the war with which it’s familiar, a reenactment in reality of the obsessive bidding for succession that attended the death of Muhammad, who having left advice about how to do everything else appears to have left out the matter of continuing his enterprise beyond his final breath.
In Wikipedese:
The historic background of the Sunni–Shia split lies in the schism that occurred when the Islamic prophet Muhammad died in the year 632, leading to a dispute over succession to Muhammad as a caliph of the Islamic community spread across various parts of the world, which led to the Battle of Siffin. The dispute intensified greatly after the Battle of Karbala, in which Hussein ibn Ali and his household were killed by the ruling Umayyad Caliph Yazid I, and the outcry for his revenge divided the early Islamic community.
Although the headline sensationalizes the potential for an all-out Sunni-Shiite showdown, even in the field and among fellow Islamists, opinion of ISIS may run low. From the same article:
“The gangs of al-Baghdadi are living in a fantasy world. They’re delusional. They want to establish a state but they don’t have the elements for it,” said Abdel-Rahman al-Shami, a spokesman for the Army of Islam, an Islamist rebel group. “You cannot establish a state through looting, sabotage and bombing.”
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