Barakzai's Recommendations

[graveyardofempires]

All these shows are a bunch of BS. What they do is put a conservative view against a liberal view and people watch it and then go to work and reenact what they saw on TV. Most of these peoples views are not their own but just copies of what they saw.

thats why i watch both "conservative" and "liberal".
we cant expect people to be 100% but sometimes you can even get a bit of valueable information from people such as Oreilly and or Bill Maher,hell i will even listen to that nutjob from fox news forgot his name..........
I used to be fan of many news reporters but nowadays it seems they are almost all full of BS.

[Alchemist]

I always wondered why they didnt drop it on an uninhabitant island and invite the japanese to witness the devastating effects. Also why did they drop the second bomb only three days after the first one. Why not give the Japanese some time to surrender.

Even in school history class they tell us that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender anyway!

Remember, that the japenese are Oil importers. After the pearl harbour attack, which the US instigated (different story), the japenese only had reserves for 2 years max and that only during peace times. Their planes, ships etc were running on gas fumes towards the end.

The bombs were dropped to show to the rest of the world their capability.

[graveyardofempires]

I always wondered why they didnt drop it on an uninhabitant island and invite the japanese to witness the devastating effects. Also why did they drop the second bomb only three days after the first one. Why not give the Japanese some time to surrender.

its called : testing their new weapon.

[Alchemist]

thats why i watch both "conservative" and "liberal".
we cant expect people to be 100% but sometimes you can even get a bit of valueable information from people such as Oreilly and or Bill Maher,hell i will even listen to that nutjob from fox news forgot his name..........
I used to be fan of many news reporters but nowadays it seems they are almost all full of BS.

bill maher?

O reilly?

are you kidding me?

[graveyardofempires]

bill maher?

O reilly?

are you kidding me?

hmm i remember the other idiot Glen Back

i watch how proposterous their claims are and than i watch the left side and see their bias so than i can have a blanced view after watching both Biases.

[randolph85]

these people aren't news, they comment on the news. theres nothing to learn from the o reily's, becks, mahers, stewarts or colberts.

[graveyardofempires]

these people aren't news, they comment on the news. theres nothing to learn from the o reily's, becks, mahers, stewarts or colberts.

its not like i take them serious or am a fan of those guys,hell no.
its pure for entertainment and listening to biased views.
so what do you suggest?

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I continue to be amazed at this patriot and gentleman's astute predictions and his capabilities to step into his enemies shoes and actually understand the conflict "through his enemy's eyes."

The key thing here, is that he smashes and blasts Osho and Toraman's continued harping on the assumed direct correlation between economic prosperity and secularism.

Brothers, celebrate because this individual who has been often correct in forcasting the defeating strategies of the occupiers has also indicated that the online propaganda efforts of these folks, even the ones that seek to the turn this amazing forum into a mouthpiece for their agenda, are losing. More importantly, they are losing on all fronts and be evermore patient, their failure will span across decades because of their utter lack of patience and reality shunning embrace of disingenous tactics.

Illiberal Islam
Arab protesters demand democracy—but not secularism.

By Michael Scheuer

The Arab world’s unrest has brought forth gushing, rather adolescent analysis about what the region will look like a year or more hence. Americans have decided that these upheavals have everything to do with the advent of liberalism, secularism, and Westernization in the region and that Islamist militant groups like al-Qaeda have been sidelined by the historically inevitable triumph of democracy—a belief that sounds a bit like the old Marxist-Leninist claptrap about iron laws of history and communism’s inexorable triumph.

How has this judgment been reached? Primarily by disregarding facts, logic, and history, and instead relying on (a) the thin veneer of young, educated, pro-democracy, and English-speaking Muslims who can be found on Facebook and Twitter and (b) the employees of the BBC, CNN, and most other media networks, who have suspended genuine journalism in favor of cheerleading for secularism and democracy on the basis of a non-representative sample of English-speaking street demonstrators and users of social-networking sites. The West’s assessment of Arab unrest so far has been—to paraphrase Sam Spade’s comment about the Maltese Falcon—the stuff that dreams, not reality, are made of.

A year from now, we will find that most Arab Muslims have neither embraced nor installed what they have long regarded as an irreligious and even pagan ideology—secular democracy. They will have instead adhered even more closely to the faith that has graced, ordered, and regulated their lives for more than 1400 years, and which helped them endure the oppressive rule of Western-supported tyrants and kleptocrats.

This does not mean that fanatically religious regimes will dominate the region, but a seven-year Gallup survey of the Muslim world published in 2007 shows that a greater degree of Sharia law in governance is favored by young and old, moderates and militants, men and even women in most Muslim countries. While a façade of democracy may well appear in new regimes in places like Egypt and Tunisia, their governments will be heavily influenced by the military and by Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. If for no other reason, the Islamist groups will have a powerful pull because they have strong organizational capabilities; wide allegiance among the highly educated in the military, hard sciences, engineering, religious faculties, and medicine; and a reservoir of patience for a two-steps-forward, one-step-back strategy that is beyond Western comprehension. We in the West too often forget, for example, that the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda draw from Muslim society’s best and brightest, not its dregs; that al-Qaeda has been waging its struggle for 25 years, the Muslim Brotherhood for nearly 85 years; and that Islam has been in the process of globalizing since the 7th century.
As new Arab regimes develop, Westerners also are likely to find that their own deep sense of superiority over devout Muslims—which is especially strong among the secular left, Christian evangelicals, and neoconservatives—is unwarranted. The nearly universal assumption in the West is that Islamic governance could not possibly satisfy the aspirations of Muslims for greater freedom and increased economic opportunity—this even though Iran has a more representative political system than that of any state in the region presided over by a Western-backed dictator. No regime run by the Muslim Brotherhood would look like Canada, but it would be significantly less oppressive than those run by the al-Sauds and Mubarak. This is not to say it would be similar to or more friendly toward the West—neither will be the case—but in terms of respecting and addressing basic human concerns they will be less monstrous.

The West’s biggest surprise a year out may well lie in being forced to learn that Westernization, secularization, and modernization are not synonyms. The postwar West’s arrogance—dare I say hubris?—has long held as an article of its increasingly pagan faith that these concepts are identical, inseparable, and the proudest achievement of superior Western culture. Well, not so. Muslims make an absolute distinction among the concepts. Modernization, in the sense of the tools of technology, is something they pursue with a passion. From air-conditioning to computers to a variety of other communications gear and high-tech weaponry, there is little Luddism among Muslims. Indeed, the military forces of the United States are now losing wars to Islamist mujahideen who stay one step ahead of Western military technology in areas like improvised explosive devices and using topography to disguise their locations from satellite photography. Through their sophisticated use of the Internet and other media vehicles, moreover, they are dominating the so-called information war and making Western propaganda efforts appear for what they are: reality-defying, intellectually sterile, and designed for the non-existent I-am-ready-to-blow-myself-up-because-Americans-drink-beer Islamist enemy.

As Washington and its allies remain locked in two wars with Islamists—and itch to start another in Libya—they are cultivating a new generation of Muslim enemies by neglecting the fundamental difference, for Muslims and other non-Westerners, between modernization on one hand and Westernization and secularization on the other. In Steve Coll’s fine book The Bin Ladens, he describes the late Saudi King Faisal as a champion of technical progress without privatization of religion; indeed, Faisal was an austere and pious man who was the motive force behind an attempt to modernize the kingdom, but at the same time he was prepared to resist secularism with force. As Coll also notes, Osama bin Laden attended a “modern” school that taught math, sciences, geography, and English—as well as faith—that was established by Faisal. Bin Laden, Coll writes, received an up-to-date but fiercely anti-secular education that was “inseparable from the national ideology promoted by King Faisal in the late years of his reign.”

This is the point at which the West’s jejune expectations for secular democracy in the Muslim world will come dramatically a cropper in the years ahead. By willfully misinterpreting English-speaking, pro-democracy Egyptian, Libyan, and Tunisian Facebookers as representing the Arab world’s welcoming view of secularism, Western leaders, especially the media, have deluded one another into believing that Islam’s doors are open for women’s rights, pornography, blasphemy, man-made law, popular elections, and a host of the West’s other secular-pagan attributes.
In this judgment they will be dead wrong, and they will find that any Western help dispatched to move Muslim societies in these directions will earn the Faisal/bin Laden response: fierce and possibly violent resistance. Two examples of this phenomenon—one country specific, one international—are already on display.

In Afghanistan, the country’s post-2001 inundation by Western non-governmental organizations and private-sector construction, mercenary, and consulting firms brought with it bars, bordellos, and the proliferation of Western dress—all viewed by many pious Afghan Muslims as offenses to their faith. The creation of this pint-sized version of Hollywood’s lifestyle in Kabul had particularly unfortunate consequences for the U.S.-led coalition. This un-Islamic behavior helped prompt much of the city’s citizenry to collect and pass information about the West’s military and civil plans—and those of the Karzai regime that abetted the Westerners—to the Taliban and other mujahideen groups for violent exploitation.

Worldwide, the West’s extravagant—not to say mindless—praise for the once Muslim but now anti-Islamic feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a further example of its ignorance about the depth of anti-secularism in the Muslim world. Hirsi Ali is the perfect embodiment of the West’s unshakeable conviction—best expressed by Secretary Clinton and Madeleine Albright—that Muslim women want to be “just like us.” This Western image of Hirsi Ali as a kind of Joan of Arc bent on freeing Muslim women from their religion’s superstitious shackles is shared by some Muslim women—but very few. The bulk of reliable polling data by Gallup shows most Muslim men and women alike want a large measure of Sharia law to be employed by the regimes that govern them. There is no data showing that Muslim women long to decamp to a semi-pagan society where Lady Gaga and Lindsay Lohan are role models.

Indeed, the West’s heroic Hirsi Ali tends to be viewed in the Islamic world as an apostate to her faith. She also is seen as a new edition of the British imperialist Lord Curzon, bent on performing anew Kipling’s call for improving the lot of her little brown sisters by diktat or force.

At day’s end, the success of the United States and its allies in concluding their war with the Islamist movement depends on an adult assessment of the Muslim world. The basis of this analysis must be a realization that modernization, Westernization, and secularization are not interchangeable terms. The technological tools of the West are largely welcomed, admired, and used in the Muslim world—witness the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—but continuing attempts to impose Westernization and privatization of religion will, at this point in history, remain a vibrant casus belli for Muslims and earn a fierce and martial resistance.

We must begin to recognize that while America’s neoconservative and progressive thinkers fallaciously prattle on about the Islamists being on the verge of Islamicizing the West, it is the West’s half-century campaign to impose and then maintain secularist tyrants on Muslim states that has supplied the main motivation for the growing number of Muslims who believe themselves and their faith to be at war against the West. Continued failure to make this simple and clear semantic distinction will bring the late Professor Huntington’s concept of a clash of civilizations much closer to fruition.

Michael Scheuer is a former senior CIA officer and an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University. His new book is Osama bin Laden.

[faye]

i like most of what he says but how is changing semantics going to change the reality on the ground? it already has been a clash of civilisations, with britain, america and its allies (christians and jews)helping oppress the muslim countries for for all these years.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion and conspiracy theorizing about the riots in Afghanistan after Pastor Jones burned the copy of the Quran. What I find fascinating about the commentary here is that it is reality defying. On the one hand, secular nationalists and rabid arm chair interventionalists seek to prove that the Islamist nature of Afghans is actually nonexistant and they point to movements and the general demeanor of life before the Soviet invasion and the subsequent galvanizing effect it had on the populace. For them, this pseudo-history is a proof positive of a culture beneath a culture. Its basically cherry picking evidence.

Long ago events like the Kandahar rebellion when Soraya was unveiled in the era of Amanullah and recent earlier riots when Jones threatened to burn the masahif in September are forgotten in their convenient and propagandistic narrative. Current events are also conspiracy mongorized as having been initiated by a few Taliban infiltrators into the northern reaches of Afghanistan who somehow made it all the way across the mountains of the Suleiman ranges at the AfPak border. A few extra brain cells and a few ideas later, they might actually stumble on the fact that there are still people in the world, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc who take their religion seriously and are willing to take up arms in its defense. The reason why these folks are brushing historical fact under the rug is that it shows chinks in the armor of their theory of a pre-existant secularist Afghanistan and Khorasan without any religious mores.

Some excellent work by Michael, who, to the chagrin of some here, I shall continue to quote endlessly, because he also represents and effectively argues for a clean break from the paradigm that Lindsey Graham and detractors here offer.

It is sad that a former CIA agent, and a non Afghan non Muslim has a completely more sane and reasonable response than many on here. Instead of offering up polemic instigated drivel due to an inferiority complex, such as: why would they kill UN workers who are just there to help them ? (perhaps because the UN workers are on bases with associated military arsenal) versus conspiracy theories about infiltrators who whipped up a frenzy amongst the masses... this gentleman offers up a clear and cogent picture that any sane person with a clear view of history and a human nature would accept as axiomatic. Mind you, this article was written LAST september when Jones threatened to burn the Quran the first time around.

The Pastor, the President, and the Islamists’ motivation for war

By Dr. Michael Scheuer

The importance of Pastor Jones’s intent and then retreat from burning copies of the Koran has been ignored most by most of the media. This little-known pastor, at long last, forced Democratic, Republican, and mainstream media leaders to admit the truth: We are being attacked by Muslims for what we do and not for how we live or what we think. If used as a basis for discussion, this clear admission — which all of them surely hope American voters will miss — gives the United States its first post-9/11 chance to accurately gauge the enemy we face, understand his motivation, and begin to take steps to decisively defeat him.

The Florida pastor’s intended actions were perceived across the Muslim world as an attack on Islam and its believers; indeed, there was anti-U.S. rioting in Afghanistan on the mere announcement of the pastor’s intent. And we have seen this kind of reaction previously, as when the Danish artist drew and published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. There seems, then, to be a direct link between what Muslim’s perceive as U.S. and Western attacks on Islam and their violent response.

But even as President Obama and leading Republicans urged Pastor Jones not to burn Korans, they also used the occasion of this 9/11 to rehearse yet again some variation of that old mantra: “The Muslims who attack us having nothing to do with Islam, they are criminals who pervert their religion and hate how Americans live and think.” So let me ask:
–Can anyone recall Muslims or a Muslim government anywhere on earth protesting or rioting or attacking U.S. interests because there are early presidential primaries in Iowa every four years?

–How many Islamist suicide bombers do you recall who have have executed their missions in America or Europe because women are in the work force and attending university?

–How many Islamist insurgencies around the world do you know of that have been ignited because the U.S. Constitution contains a Bill of Rights?

–How many murderous attacks can you count that have been carried out by Islamists inflamed by shopping malls, Budweiser, and pole dancing?

The answer to all these questions is: not a one, and that answer is the result of the fact that none of the cultural/societal/political issues that U.S. leaders claim motivate Islamist attacks are remotely motivating to the attackers. The Islamists, without question, view all those things as morally repugnant and unIslamic; would not have them in a society they governed; and will fight to prevent their imposition in Muslim societies, as they are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. But nine years after 9/11 we have yet to hear any captured Islamist claim he was motivated by popular elections or R-rated movies. Neither have we found this sort of motivation in the papers or electronic media taken from such men.

As evident in Muslim reaction to both Pastor Jones’s intent to burn Korans and the earlier cartoons of the Prophet, not only Islamists but tens of millions of other Muslims are motivated to anti-U.S. and anti-Western attitudes and potentially violence when they believe those entities are attacking their God, their faith, and their brethren. And if Koran-burning and cartoons are deemed affronts justifying violence, just imagine how Muslims perceive such dead-Muslim-producing policies as unqualified U.S. support for Israel’s war-making and territorial aggrandizement; a half-century of U.S. and Western support and protection for Muslim police states; and the U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

When President Obama warned that an anti-Islamic act like burning Korans would help al-Qaeda recruit young Muslims he was absolutely correct. Indeed, if President Obama was a candid man he would have gone on to explain to Americans the burnings would have added to the already enormous recruiting help al-Qaeda receives from the U.S. government’s policies and interventionism in the Islamic world. And had Obama a yen to be honest, he would have told Americans that they are being attacked for what their government does and not for what they think and how they live.

Thus while Pastor Jones’ plans were thankfully abandoned, they did force Obama, McCain, and even the transcendentally important U.S. leader Angilena Jolie to publicly admit that U.S. actions perceived by Muslims as anti-Islamic cause a violent Muslim response. They have at long last been forced to state the truth. This does not, of course, mean that U.S. policies are evil, designed by madmen, or should be changed. If the policies Washington is now pursuing in the Islamic world are in the best interests of the United States, then we must continue pursuing them. Genuine U.S. national interests must always come first.

But having now accepted that U.S. actions cause Muslim reactions — and vice versa — Americans can begin to understand what this war is about and what factors motivate our Islamist enemies to continue it. With this knowledge, they can begin to use their votes to elect men and women who will either change the policies that motivate the enemy, or, if current policies are America’s only option, begin to build a military capable of defeating the Islamists in war that will be lengthy, enormously bloody and costly, and fought in Americans towns and cities as well as overseas.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

"As for our secular democracy, the Afghan people utterly rejected it because they identified it as a threat to Islam—man’s law would replace God’s—and as a method for destroying their two-millennia-old tribal society. They wanted nothing from the invading forces except a security regime as effective as the destroyed Taliban system."

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/exiting-afghanistan/

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Secular Democracy Goes on Trial

Pankaj Mishra, writing from Simla, India

Simla, India
WHEN in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran sentenced Salman Rushdie to death, saying he had blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses," it was seen even in the Islamic world as an act of political opportunism, intended to boost Iran over its rival Saudi Arabia as the beacon of global Islam. It garnered little support among the clergy outside Iran, or among Muslims in general; and Iran itself seemed to acknowledge public revulsion in 1998 when it stated it would no longer carry out the death sentence.

The ayatollah's fatwa however created what, in retrospect, seems an extraordinary ideological consensus among the largely secularized Western intelligentsia. Writing in Mr. Rushdie's defense, novelists, poets, newspaper editors and columnists painted themselves as defenders of the European Enlightenment battling the dark atavism of religion.

This view of an unreformed Islam prone to anti-Western extremism re-emerged, of course, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Many conservative intellectuals in the United States and Britain declared their resolve to fight to the bitter end against "Islamo-fascism"; and even the more liberal intellectuals demanded an immediate Islamic Reformation.

But these familiar generalities - Enlightenment versus Religion, Democracy versus Fascism - have always been facile, and are now being exploded by the ordeal of another prominent writer of Muslim ancestry, Orhan Pamuk, who goes on trial in Turkey today.

Mr. Pamuk is accused of a committing a crime by mentioning, in an interview with a Swiss newspaper, that "a million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds" were killed in Turkey after World War I. The Armenian massacres are a widely documented fact. But it is an officially taboo subject in Turkey; and the government, nationalist political groups and press immediately joined in attacking Mr. Pamuk.

Many Western politicians and intellectuals reacted late, or confusedly, to this assault on a celebrated writer. This may be because the West often upholds Turkey as an example of a Muslim society embracing secular democracy. Turkey's apparently ongoing enlightenment underpins its claim to be considered part of Europe.

So what explains this latest Turkish assault on free speech? It won't do to blame religious extremists. Most of Mr. Pamuk's detractors belong to the political right wing, which in Turkey means that they are determined secularists. The prosecutor who instigated the legal proceedings belongs to a longstanding secular Turkish state that has cracked down on Muslim women wearing headscarves more harshly than has France.

What does seem apparent is that, like all nation-states, Turkey has its own sacred nationalist myths and will protect them as fiercely as, if not more than, any society claming the sanction of religion. This state-sponsored nationalism attracts a wide range of Turks, including many members of the educated elite.

And Turkey's middle-class nationalism, as Mr. Pamuk has pointed out, is hardly exceptional. Other nations wearing some of the emblems of Western modernity - secularism, democracy, a free-market economy - hardly offer any guarantees of free speech. Consider, for example, China, India and Russia, three multiethnic and officially secular nation-states that are experimenting with variations on the free-market economy.

In all these countries, a growing middle class turned a blind eye to, or even actively supported, the suppression of ethnic minorities in the name of national unity. In democratic India, up to 70,000 people have died in Kashmir in a violent insurgency that the Indian news media have yet to honestly reckon with. In Russian Chechnya, civilians and journalists have been as much victims as Islamic rebels. And such is the power of Chinese nationalism that even most dissident intellectuals in the West feel that Tibet and Xinjiang are part of their motherland.

The destructive potential of modern nationalism should not surprise us. Traditional religion hardly played a role in the unprecedented violence of the 20th century, which was largely caused by secular ideologies - Nazism and Communism. Secular nationalism has been known to impose intellectual conformity and suppress dissent even in advanced democratic societies. In America, it was at least partly the fear of being perceived as unpatriotic that held back the freest news media in the world from rigorously questioning the official justification for and conduct of the war in Iraq.
As for traditional religion, outside Saudi Arabia and Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban it has rarely enjoyed the kind of overwhelming state power that modern nationalism has known. Then why reflexively blame religion for the growth of intolerance and violence? Perhaps, because it is easy - and useful. Certainly, all the talk of Enlightenment, Reformation, a clash of civilizations and the like does help build up ideological smokescreens, obscuring the more complex political and economic battles of the world.

By setting up abstract, simplistic oppositions, the Rushdie affair helped metaphysics cloud the realm of geopolitics. The Pamuk affair, on the other hand, promises to help create intellectual clarity. But this will not only require renouncing the urge to populate the world with religious fanatics, dangerous "others." It will also require a willingness, as Mr. Pamuk has so bravely expressed, to question the myths of our own complacently modern and secular societies.

Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of "
An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World."

[Admin Khan]

BarakzaiAbdali,
Do you frequently read the New York Times?

[Azmal]

In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion and conspiracy theorizing about the riots in Afghanistan after Pastor Jones burned the copy of the Quran. What I find fascinating about the commentary here is that it is reality defying. On the one hand, secular nationalists and rabid arm chair interventionalists seek to prove that the Islamist nature of Afghans is actually nonexistant and they point to movements and the general demeanor of life before the Soviet invasion and the subsequent galvanizing effect it had on the populace. For them, this pseudo-history is a proof positive of a culture beneath a culture. Its basically cherry picking evidence.

Long ago events like the Kandahar rebellion when Soraya was unveiled in the era of Amanullah and recent earlier riots when Jones threatened to burn the masahif in September are forgotten in their convenient and propagandistic narrative. Current events are also conspiracy mongorized as having been initiated by a few Taliban infiltrators into the northern reaches of Afghanistan who somehow made it all the way across the mountains of the Suleiman ranges at the AfPak border. A few extra brain cells and a few ideas later, they might actually stumble on the fact that there are still people in the world, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, etc who take their religion seriously and are willing to take up arms in its defense. The reason why these folks are brushing historical fact under the rug is that it shows chinks in the armor of their theory of a pre-existant secularist Afghanistan and Khorasan without any religious mores.

Some excellent work by Michael, who, to the chagrin of some here, I shall continue to quote endlessly, because he also represents and effectively argues for a clean break from the paradigm that Lindsey Graham and detractors here offer.

It is sad that a former CIA agent, and a non Afghan non Muslim has a completely more sane and reasonable response than many on here. Instead of offering up polemic instigated drivel due to an inferiority complex, such as: why would they kill UN workers who are just there to help them ? (perhaps because the UN workers are on bases with associated military arsenal) versus conspiracy theories about infiltrators who whipped up a frenzy amongst the masses... this gentleman offers up a clear and cogent picture that any sane person with a clear view of history and a human nature would accept as axiomatic. Mind you, this article was written LAST september when Jones threatened to burn the Quran the first time around.

The Pastor, the President, and the Islamists’ motivation for war

By Dr. Michael Scheuer
The importance of Pastor Jones’s intent and then retreat from burning copies of the Koran has been ignored most by most of the media. This little-known pastor, at long last, forced Democratic, Republican, and mainstream media leaders to admit the truth: We are being attacked by Muslims for what we do and not for how we live or what we think. If used as a basis for discussion, this clear admission — which all of them surely hope American voters will miss — gives the United States its first post-9/11 chance to accurately gauge the enemy we face, understand his motivation, and begin to take steps to decisively defeat him.

The Florida pastor’s intended actions were perceived across the Muslim world as an attack on Islam and its believers; indeed, there was anti-U.S. rioting in Afghanistan on the mere announcement of the pastor’s intent. And we have seen this kind of reaction previously, as when the Danish artist drew and published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. There seems, then, to be a direct link between what Muslim’s perceive as U.S. and Western attacks on Islam and their violent response.

But even as President Obama and leading Republicans urged Pastor Jones not to burn Korans, they also used the occasion of this 9/11 to rehearse yet again some variation of that old mantra: “The Muslims who attack us having nothing to do with Islam, they are criminals who pervert their religion and hate how Americans live and think.” So let me ask:
–Can anyone recall Muslims or a Muslim government anywhere on earth protesting or rioting or attacking U.S. interests because there are early presidential primaries in Iowa every four years?

–How many Islamist suicide bombers do you recall who have have executed their missions in America or Europe because women are in the work force and attending university?

–How many Islamist insurgencies around the world do you know of that have been ignited because the U.S. Constitution contains a Bill of Rights?

–How many murderous attacks can you count that have been carried out by Islamists inflamed by shopping malls, Budweiser, and pole dancing?

The answer to all these questions is: not a one, and that answer is the result of the fact that none of the cultural/societal/political issues that U.S. leaders claim motivate Islamist attacks are remotely motivating to the attackers. The Islamists, without question, view all those things as morally repugnant and unIslamic; would not have them in a society they governed; and will fight to prevent their imposition in Muslim societies, as they are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. But nine years after 9/11 we have yet to hear any captured Islamist claim he was motivated by popular elections or R-rated movies. Neither have we found this sort of motivation in the papers or electronic media taken from such men.

As evident in Muslim reaction to both Pastor Jones’s intent to burn Korans and the earlier cartoons of the Prophet, not only Islamists but tens of millions of other Muslims are motivated to anti-U.S. and anti-Western attitudes and potentially violence when they believe those entities are attacking their God, their faith, and their brethren. And if Koran-burning and cartoons are deemed affronts justifying violence, just imagine how Muslims perceive such dead-Muslim-producing policies as unqualified U.S. support for Israel’s war-making and territorial aggrandizement; a half-century of U.S. and Western support and protection for Muslim police states; and the U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

When President Obama warned that an anti-Islamic act like burning Korans would help al-Qaeda recruit young Muslims he was absolutely correct. Indeed, if President Obama was a candid man he would have gone on to explain to Americans the burnings would have added to the already enormous recruiting help al-Qaeda receives from the U.S. government’s policies and interventionism in the Islamic world. And had Obama a yen to be honest, he would have told Americans that they are being attacked for what their government does and not for what they think and how they live.

Thus while Pastor Jones’ plans were thankfully abandoned, they did force Obama, McCain, and even the transcendentally important U.S. leader Angilena Jolie to publicly admit that U.S. actions perceived by Muslims as anti-Islamic cause a violent Muslim response. They have at long last been forced to state the truth. This does not, of course, mean that U.S. policies are evil, designed by madmen, or should be changed. If the policies Washington is now pursuing in the Islamic world are in the best interests of the United States, then we must continue pursuing them. Genuine U.S. national interests must always come first.

But having now accepted that U.S. actions cause Muslim reactions — and vice versa — Americans can begin to understand what this war is about and what factors motivate our Islamist enemies to continue it. With this knowledge, they can begin to use their votes to elect men and women who will either change the policies that motivate the enemy, or, if current policies are America’s only option, begin to build a military capable of defeating the Islamists in war that will be lengthy, enormously bloody and costly, and fought in Americans towns and cities as well as overseas.

With due amusement to watch a self proclaim “American” who don’t give a “**** about Afghanistan” at work to further a repressive, barbaric paki creatures gang Taliban… reminds me of Mushraf 90s remark “Afghan people are like that.” Yea we afghan ought to allow Pakistan trained Mullah to police our moral behavior…instead of mullah work on propagating the faith through active debate and written persuasion. (As a Muslim raised in a liberal Democracy, I know I’ve nothing to worry about, for the case for religious belief is even stronger in a free society. I’ve chosen to be a Muslim…instead of born Muslim---est 300000 Afghans convert to Christianity during Taliban rule… lee then 2% of Iranian in Volayat E Feqi attending mosque.) Even more comically is the idea insanity we witness over Qouran burning is a reaction to west—(more then 40 Muslim Afghan and Swede, a Norwegian, a Rumanian and four Nepalese security guards killed for for the rage of burning of the Koran by American religious extremists in Florida, the USA-)…just as tens of Muslim got killed during Danish cartoons protests—no wonder Muslim critics accuse us of not knowing how to live peacefully among one another…but for sake of argument… If during one evening I were to be bold enough to venture into territory renowned for violent crime, and were subsequently found dead in a gutter the following morning, does my irresponsible behavior excuse the murderers? Would you have the judge announce… “Considering the foolish irresponsibility displayed by the deceased, I hereby sentence the defendant – Haji Gul Khan – to one month good behavior and an additional $30 worth of daffodils for Azmal’s grave…. I also sentence Azmal’s entire family (the Danish and American people) to 5 years imprisonment for having allowed such irresponsible mentality in their home.” Sound absurd? I hope so, for it’s a perfection depiction of your nonexistent argument.


Ps: “Kandahar rebellion when Soraya was unveiled” interestingly I’m reading “Afghanistan dar Hahd e Halhazrat Amanullah khan” by Fazil Ghani Mojadidi oddly descendent of Hazrat e ShorBazar Mojadidi--- first mullah giving Fetwa to rebel against Ghazi Amanullah....its mention in page 219…that British secret service fake nude photo of Malekah Soraya…speared across Kandahar… also mention of Times article… January 16 1929 which clearly state rebellion against Shah Amanullah(may god bless his soul) were architected by British.

[khushal]

Barakzai,
I am interested in your thoughts about Fareed Zakaria's take on this whole issue where he states that Islamic extremism was not fundamentally rooted in Islam, nor could it be claimed a reaction to American foreign policy. It had its roots in the stagnation and dysfunctions of the Arab world. Decades of failure under tyrannical regimes, all claiming to be Western-style secular modernizers, had produced an opposition that was anti-Western, religious, violent, and increasingly globalized.