Tom Friedman looks for Muslims to fight war of ideas
The New York Times' Tom Friedman is bothered by the number of young Americans who are being recruited for jihad online. Last week, five men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan, where they went, they told Pakistani police, to join the jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They first made contact with two extremist organizations in Pakistan by e-mail in August. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday: “ ‘Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online,’ a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official said. ... ‘Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet,’ said Evan Kohlmann, a senior analyst with the U.S.-based NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites.”Friedman believes that the way to fight this is through a 'war of ideas' within Islam.
The Obama team is fond of citing how many “allies” we have in the Afghan coalition. Sorry, but we don’t need more NATO allies to kill more Taliban and Al Qaeda. We need more Arab and Muslim allies to kill their extremist ideas, which, thanks to the Virtual Afghanistan, are now being spread farther than ever before.There's just one problem: He can't find any Muslims willing to fight. Not with ideas and not with weapons.
Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.
Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.
What is really scary is that this violent, jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most “legitimacy” in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public. Secular Arab leaders wink at these groups, telling them: “We’ll arrest if you do it to us, but if you leave us alone and do it elsewhere, no problem.”Tom's right about one thing.
How many fatwas — religious edicts — have been issued by the leading bodies of Islam against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Very few. Where was the outrage last week when, on the very day that Iraq’s Parliament agreed on a formula to hold free and fair multiparty elections — unprecedented in Iraq’s modern history — five explosions set off by suicide bombers hit ministries, a university and Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, killing at least 127 people and wounding more than 400, many of them kids?
A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.Indeed. So what do we do?
Waiting for Arabs and Muslims to fight the jihadists among them (who, together with their sympathizers, may not be a minority) is a recipe for a centuries-long series of terror attacks in which we suffer the casualties. Instead, we must fight back. And not just with ideas - the only ideas that interest these people are those contained in the Koran and the Koran has some very violent and vile views of 'infidels.'
We also have to stop babying the Arabs and Muslims and hold them responsible for their own actions. Starting right here in Israel. When the West (including Tom Friedman) and Israel's Left wake up and stop pressuring Israel to capitulate to the fake 'people' known as 'Palestinians,' the West will be on its way to defeating the jihad.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:49 PM
1 Comments:
To defeat the jihad there has to be a policy of no surrender to terrorists and their sponsors. That means no concessions, no outreach, no understanding and no negotiation with them. That should be an iron-clad principle in Israel and the West. We won't get help from the other side to vanquish it.
Post a Comment
<< Home