sbszine's Journal: Islam and Terror

In the minds of my many folks, Muslims have become the new all-purpose bogeymen; this year's model of the reds under the bed that that shifted so many airport bookstore thrillers in the eighties. I am increasingly reading comments where rather than terrorists or fundamentalists, Muslims in general are nominated as the targets of the war on terror. (A war, IMO, as endless and unwinnable as the war on drugs, and boiling down to the same basic issue of supply and demand).

Recently I came across an interesting documentary about Muslim reformists (the name escapes me -- it was on Compass). The gist of it was that Islam has been heading towards its own version of the reformation for some time, but that continual conflict with the west has been strengthening the hand of fundamentalists. Put simply, so long as western governments use the spectre of fundamentalism to drum up support for dubious foreign policy, those same fundamentalists can use our foreign policy to drum up support for their own dubious causes.

In the Muslim community there are (and always have been) reformists and moderates; people mulling over issues like divorce, women's rights etc. These people are now so far out out favour that Kahlil Gibrain's house is being used as a target for Syrian artillery practice. The more our leaders try to change the middle east by force, the more they play into the fundamentalists' hands. I think that by fostering diplomacy and trade, and standing back for a few generations, things would get better for east and west alike.

(Note: Perhaps foolishly, I've left comments turned on. I have done so because I'm interested in comments as opposed to a circular argument or a flamewar).

Comment(s)

[daniil]

Seeing Muslims as the bogeymen is nothing new, and it's really hardly surprising. If you read Samuel Huntingdon's "The Clash of Civilizations" -- a book that has had a great influence on the "neocons" -- then he dedicates half of the book to proving that "the borders of Islam are bloody" and that the West has always been at war with Islam. In the light of that book, it's no wonder that many people see the Muslims as the universal bad guys: they see what they want to see. And what they want to see is a "clas

Clash of Civilisations

[sbszine]

This reaffirms for me that the neocon folks are pining for the 'good old days' of the cold war. With the USSR, they could point to a large chunk of geography as the evil empire, replete with outposts in Asia and the Americas. And the Soviet government really was trying to defeat (or at the very least compete with) the US.

Middle eastern countries, while no fans of the US, seem to hate each other just as much. There is no cohesive empire or collective civilisation to pit against the US. Just some terrorist