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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
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 Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2005 10:20 pm Post subject: The West won the world by applying organized violence |
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By Abid Mustafa
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values
or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized
violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." - Samuel
P. Huntington
During his visit to Europe, George Bush emphasized to his European
hosts that spreading freedom and democracy was the only way of defeating
terrorism in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. His remarks echo
a familiar tenet of his presidency - freedom triumphing over terrorism.
But, by coining the struggle as freedom versus terrorism, the Bush
administration has avoided answering some pertinent questions like - What
is terrorism? Who are the terrorists? Who is the enemy in the eyes of
Bush and his acolytes the neo-conservatives?
The 9/11 Commission (by no means the first) stressed that the term war
on terrorism was misleading and recommended that it should be renamed
to place greater ideological emphasis against Islam. In October 2001 US
General Wesley Clark, said that the US war against terrorism "was a war
over Islam" that would define Islam "as either a peaceful or militant"
force in society [1]. Yet others have argued that it should be
appropriately labeled war against political Islam.
Whatever differences exist amongst America's political elite over the
naming of the war there are few to be found amongst ordinary Americans.
Thanks to the Islamaphobic corporate media, most Americans irrespective
of their political orientation view the war on terror as a fight
against Islam.
The same milieu exits in Europe. The lack of boldness on part of the
Europe's political class to confront Bush on these questions together
with the Islamaphobic media has convinced ordinary Europeans that their
new enemy is Islam and Muslims who live in their midst.
Before 9/11, Muslims long held the view that American intervention in
their lands is part of the ongoing struggle between Islam and the West.
The aftermath of 9/11 only served to reinforce this view. Today an
overwhelming majority of Muslims believe unequivocally that the war
terrorism is a war against Islam and Muslims.
Hence, behind Bush's charade of fighting terrorism the clash between
Islam and the West is well and truly under way. This struggle is being
fought at several levels. The most important of all is the ideological
struggle. The winner of this battle will decide whether the future
belongs to Islam or Western secular liberalism.
So the question that now arises is who is winning the battle of ideas?
The answer is that the West long ago lost the ideological war against
Islam. This due to the following reasons:
1. The West has spent the last two hundred years combating Islamic
thoughts in the hope of dissuading Muslims from Islam. This campaign began
with the Orientalists who studied Islam and attacked its beliefs and
rules. For instance they attacked the divinity of the Quran, jihad,
polygamy, the Islamic punishment system and the Caliphate. But despite this
organized effort to alienate Muslims from Islam, the West is facing a
resurgent Islam both at home and abroad.
In the West, Islam is the fastest growing religion both amongst
immigrants and the indigenous community. Between 1989 and 1998 the Islamic
population in Europe grew by over 100 percent, to 14 million
(approximately 2 percent of the population), according to United Nations statistics
[2]. "Within the next 20 years the number of British converts will
equal or overtake the immigrant Muslim community that brought the faith
here", says Rose Kendrick the author of a textbook guide to the Koran [3].
America is not immune from this phenomenon. One expert estimates that
25,000 people a year become Muslims in the US; some clerics say they
have seen conversion rates quadruple since Sept. 11[4].
Conversion figures aside, the attitudes of Muslims living in the West
towards secular liberalism is equally damning. A recent ICM poll
surveying Muslim attitudes in Britain published the following results: 81%
view freedom of speech as a means of insulting Islam, 61% support the
Sharia, 88% want Islam in schools and 60% do not think they need to
integrate.
If this is the outlook of Muslims in one of the main citadels of
enlightenment then one can only guess the stance of Muslim world towards
secular liberal values. Suffice to say that the West has failed to convince
the Muslim masses that Western culture is better than Islam.
2. In the past, the West employed the services of modernists such as
Rifa'a At-Tahtawi (1801-1873), Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani (1838-1897),
Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), Taha Hussein (1889,1973) and Rashid Rida
(1865-1935), Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) to spear head their campaign of
introducing Western culture under the guise of Islam. The impact of these
reformists has not only been nullified but also reversed.
Today's modernists find themselves in precarious situation. They are
despised by Muslims and are seen as instruments of the cultural
imperialism undertaking the West's bidding to defame Islam.
In Western eyes they are viewed as being too Islamic and are no longer
entrusted with the responsibility of turning Muslims away from Islam.
America's decision to revoke Tariq Ramadan's visa and the media outrage
at Al-Qardawi's visit to the UK epitomizes the West's mistrust of
modernists. On the whole, they are discredited and have become irrelevant in
the battle of ideas between the West and Islam.
3. The biggest blow dealt by the West against the Islamic world came on
March 3rd, 1924, when Britain through her stooge Mustafa Kamal
destroyed the Caliphate. Lord Curzon speaking in the House of Commons said,
"The point at issue is that Turkey has been destroyed and shall never rise
again, because we have destroyed her spiritual power: the Caliphate and
Islam." Subsequently, the European powers carved up the Islamic lands
between them, establishing direct colonial rule over the Muslim people.
The Muslim masses for the first time were exposed to Western solutions,
ranging from economic solutions that plundered their wealth to an
educational syllabus that disconnected them from their history and reduced
Islam to a mere set of rituals and taught them how to think like
Westerners.
Moreover, Islam was effaced from temporal life only to be replaced by a
secular rule. Later the West granted pseudo independence to the Muslim
countries they had invented and appointed loyal servants to safeguard
Western interests and to rule over Muslim people on their behalf.
If the West had thought that eight years of subjugation to secularism
would have been enough to deter the Muslim masses from political Islam
then they were gravely mistaken. The ferocity and direction of today's
Islamic revival has seized the attention of Western leaders. Vladimir
Putin, Tony Blair and Donald Rumsfeld have joined a long chorus of
Western leaders in 2004 warning about the dangers of a resurgent Caliphate.
This was aptly summed up by Kissinger who said,".what we call terrorism
in the United States, but which is really the uprising of radical Islam
against the secular world, and against the democratic world, on behalf
of re-establishing a sort of Caliphate [5]".
4. There is an inherent flaw in the ideology of secularism, which has
led to its predictable rejection by the Muslim world. This is because
secularism insists on restricting the role of Islam in society to
personal worship only. Political decisions about running the society are left
to human beings. This directly contradicts the doctrine of Muslims,
which considers politics an indivisible part of Islam i.e. to Muslims
Islam is politics. Bernard Lewis gave a similar assessment and said, "The
absence of native secularism in Islam and the wide spread rejection of
an imported secularism inspired by Christian example, may be attributed
to certain profound differences of belief and experience in the two
religious cultures [6]".
Furthermore, secularism always leaves a spiritual void, especially when
human beings are confronted by problems, which they are unable to
solve. Separating God from temporal matters only accentuates this feeling.
It is this intellectual weakness that has contributed to the dramatic
rise of political Islam under the secular autocratic rule, which pervades
much of the Muslim world. The West should take heed from the inability
of communism to dissuade Muslims from Islam. Communism a far deeper
ideology than secularism also failed to convince the Muslim masses of
materialism and man made laws.
5. The duplicity of the West in promoting Western values across the
Muslim world has greatly undermined its credibility, especially, after
September 11, when Western double standards reached new heights. It was
the episode of Abu Ghraib that revealed the true extent of the Western
hypocrisy and hatred towards Muslims.
Western ideas such as freedom, democracy, human rights were given a
devastating blow not by Muslims, but by America, the so-called defender of
liberty. Even the agent rulers in the Muslim world were left gasping
and could not shield America from the evil crimes it had committed. In
one swoop, America by its own handiwork had permanently damaged its
standing in the Muslim world and had gravely weakened the very ideas that
represent the cornerstone of Western civilization. So much so, that many
non-Muslims are questioning the validity of these ideas and the
deceitful role played by their governments abroad. Hence for the very first
time, Western governments are faced with the challenge of convincing
their own citizens why these values have to be curbed at home, while these
values are forcibly thrust upon the Muslim world. Perhaps Westerners
should seek solace in the words of Oscar Wilde who said, "Democracy means
simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people."
These are some of the reasons, which have contributed to the Muslim
world's rejection of Western culture and its secular liberal philosophy.
The stark reality facing Western governments today is that the Muslim
Ummah (Muslim nation) has won the battle of ideas. The chapter of
ideological struggle between the Muslim Ummah and the West is more or less
closed. But the chapter of political struggle between the Ummah and the
West is still open, albeit for limited period. This is because the West
and their surrogates have no political legitimacy left in the Muslim
world. These surrogates only survive because of dogged support from
Western powers.
Therefore the West and their puppets stand alone in coercing the Ummah
to accept Western values. The Ummah stands firm rejecting Western
culture and calling for the return of a global Islamic state. The two
positions are irreconcilable and the polarization of viewpoints between the
regimes and its people cannot continue indefinitely. It is only a matter
of time before Muslims overthrow the secular order, which has been
unjustly imposed upon them. Sensing the failure of its surrogates to
contain political Islam, the West, under the pretext of fighting terrorism,
has sought to re-occupy the Muslim lands in a desperate bid to reinforce
its values and to safeguard its material interests.
The West's behavior towards the Muslim world can be likened to that of
a failed schoolteacher. A failed schoolteacher is a person who
continues to beat his pupils in the vain hope of imbuing them with the values
of the school. Instead, the teacher not only loses control of the class
but also brings down the very establishment he is trying to protect.
Indeed Westerners have got far less to fear from the Islamists and more
to fear from their own governments who, in the name of freedom and
democracy, are slowly but surely ebbing away at the very foundations of
their civilization.
Footnotes:
1. Wesley K. Clarke speaking on BBC World's Hardtalk programme, October
29 2001
2. Muslims in Europe, The Economist, October 18, 2001.
3. The Spread of a World Creed, The Times, November 9 1993
4. Islam Attracts Converts by the Thousands, The New York Times,
October 22 2001
5. Henry Kissinger, Hindustan Times, Nov 2004
6. What Went Wrong?, Bernard Lewis, 2003
Abid Mustafa is a political analyst who specializes in Muslim affairs.
Source: Junspun
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Mystic Power
admin THC-Ministry YahooGroup
Joined: 23 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2005 11:12 pm Post subject: |
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They've been working so hard to spread freedom and democracy internationally, that it's become rather thin-spread here at home.
Our rights and freedoms have been out-sourced!! 
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aeroplane
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 10 Nov 2004
Posts: 1472
Location: Valhalla
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| Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2005 10:41 am Post subject: |
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What MP said. 
I refuse to join the herds being blindly led to the slaughter by any ideology. Whether it be religious, political, or religical these ideologies serve only one purpose: to create divisions between us all. I know it's just a pipedream, but...
can't we all just get along?
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Echo
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
Posts: 1899
Location: England
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| Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2005 7:44 pm Post subject: |
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Democracy?
Like many other things it's good in principle, but it doesn't work in practice. All candidates promise democracy, all of them fail it when they are in power. |
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Stokes
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 28 Nov 2004
Posts: 1426
Location: PA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2005 1:16 am Post subject: |
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| Echo wrote: |
Democracy?
Like many other things it's good in principle, but it doesn't work in practice. All candidates promise democracy, all of them fail it when they are in power. |
The only thing they forgot to mention about democracy is that it requires a little integrity on the part of those participating ... that's where we've run into a bit of a snag.
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Mystic Power
admin THC-Ministry YahooGroup
Joined: 23 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2005 3:44 am Post subject: |
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A lynch mob is a democracy with one dissenting vote.
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"In Lak'ech"
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Stokes
Cannabis Sacrament Minister
Joined: 28 Nov 2004
Posts: 1426
Location: PA
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| Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2005 4:33 am Post subject: |
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| Mystic Power wrote: |
| A lynch mob is a democracy with one dissenting vote. |
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