One of the things that even the right seems to have forgotten about 9/11 is that these attacks, all of them, are the enforcement of judgments of religious courts. The US came to grips with the Taliban, ejected Saddam from power, reworked world finance to track terrorist finance but we’ve never seriously come to grips with the Islamic judges who condemn us to death and invite all Muslims to enforce those judgments by way of violent jihad.
Nine years after 9/11/2001 do we even have a list of who are these judges? How many of them have condemned us? Which ones of those have followings of sufficient size as to be a problem?
For all the good that the Bush administration did, it shrank away from doing this basic analysis and educating the public how Islamic courts are a serious problem. The Obama administration is no better and, in fact, considerably worse.
This is depressing.
You have a “BlogAds” Conservative Blog Advertising that is a liberal liars access point. Do you have this here on purpose? My computer is often assaulted by “bing” trojans which include URL with “de-motivational” in the lineup. Liberal liars have nothing of truth to attract useful idiots so they must deceive people to come near enough for them to latch on to them.
Anonymous – You’re missing the point. This is a 9/11 thread. Please focus.
I don’t have a problem with Blogads that have leftist messages because I see lots of conservative political ads on leftists sites. Both groups are probably wasting money but that’s not my problem.
We will never have true peace and Muslims will never progress beyond the Peace of Westphalia stage until Islam has a Reformation. What we are seeing right now, I think, is a civil war within Islam between a too-small group of reformers and a too-large group of radical zealots with the vast majority of Muslims passively accepting their lot as serfs in a Medieval social system. This will get worse in Pakistan as they see India start to join the Anglosphere economy and modernize their social structures.
I seriously don’t know if Pakistan and Iran will survive as nation states. And I don’t mean forces from within. If Halifax had signed an armistice with Hitler in 1940, a realistic possibility if Churchill had stumbled, would that have been a stable system ?
Islam already had a Reformation. It was a Reformation. it was born sola scriptura. It’s problem is the opposite. It needs a Magisterium, a source of generally accepted authority on religious questions. As it is, any charismatic murderer can get a hearing and claim to represent Islam, and can get some religious court somewhere to back him up. The wave of violence unleashed in Europe by the Reformation came to an end out of mutual exhaustion, and by the decision, following almost two centuries of bloody attrition, to mutually consider religious toleration to be a public good. Islam has not been fought to exhaustion, it did not have Hugo Grotius or the Declaration on Religious Liberty or any of the other developments of the last 500 years in the West that led to an end to religious persecution.
That was my point. Call it what you will. In fact, Shia and Sunni are quite different versions of Islam, as I understand it, with Sunni serving as the Protestant version, relying on the book. The Shia, on the other hand, rely on a more hierarchical system of scholars and judges to interpret. This could be called the “Catholic Church” version. I wasn’t being literal in my definitions but making the point, which I think you reenforced, that the religion has to come to a place where tolerance, at least to the absence of violence, replaces the vicious treatment of the smallest deviation from whichever version of the doctrine is being considered.
Surely, enough Muslims are going to realize the futility of this self-consuming zealotry that is destroying their lives. Hopefully, the south Asians who seem to have resisted the forces of zealotry so far will provide a model of modest success for the others to emulate.
TM: IIRC, Bin Laden issued the fatwa’s on his own hook. Islam has no central convening authority and any adult male can lead services and issue rulings. There is a tradition that only the most learned jurists issue fatwas, and in many Islamic countries there is an official body that is charged with that responsibility, but OBL was out in the woods by himself, so he just did it.
the reason the Obama Administration is so much worse at pointing out the truth about Islam is because Obama AGREES with them! He is trying to ADVANCE Islam in this country, not to neutralize them as a threat. I fear for the progress they will make against America FROM THE INSIDE during the four years Obama will be in office. Read Mark Steyn’s brilliant analysis of what is happening with the Islamization of Europe, then tell me that is NOT happening here.
Michael Kennedy – The Peace of Westphalia is the minimum level of tolerance that we need. Muslims have not institutionally achieved it as far as their theology is concerned. Other than that, we generally agree.
Lexington Green – I think you’re optimistic that a magesterium would solve Islam’s problem. I think it would be the death of Islam, the religious scholars generally know it, and they also know that admitting it would also be the death of Islam. A magesterium only works if you are right. Otherwise you end up gathering all your eggs in one basket and you can no longer repudiate your bad experiments. Calling for a magesterium is thus viewed as a hostile act, and rightly so. It is.
Robert Schwartz – The islamic world had approximately 5 years after the original issuance of OBL’s fatwa to put a bullet in OBL in Islam’s fine intramural tradition of reigning in its own adventurers who cross unacceptable boundaries. That they did not do so up to 9/11 means that either OBL is not an adventurer who has crossed the line or that normal Islam is too moribund to take care of its own dirty laundry or arguably both.
DG in GA – I think that you’ll get a lot further trafficking in objective facts than speculating in motivations. Whether it’s from intention, inadvertance, or an unintentional consequence in otherwise sound strategy, advantaging Islam over other religions should not happen. It’s a lot easier to prove the objective facts and a lot easier to fix things. You can’t fix motivation but you can fix bad executive action and bad law.
I think that the country would do a lot better by ameliorating the Obama administration’s bad instincts for now and electing someone else in 2012. An impeachment trial (which is where we’ll end up if we really go down the road you advocate) would wound the country and likely lead to another acquittal and is BHO’s surest road to a second term. I don’t want a second term for President Obama.
I am puzzled by statements like “we won’t have peace with the Muslims until Islam has its Reformation” which one hears with some frequency since 9/11. Despite the problems with the analogy well pointed out by Lexington Green, I just don’t see why this is supposed to lead to some sort of positive result for us. Where does this come from? The Reformation spawned the worst religious wars seen in the West, and Europe continued to be bloodthirsty, sometimes less so and sometimes more so, ever since. The Reformation cured nothing with regards to violence. Islam is what it is and it is beyond our power to fix. Perhaps we should stop looking at Islam as a problem to be fixed by this or that suggestion or policy, that we can shape Muslims into a different people more pleasing to us, and start seeing the Muslims as a different sort of people from us, who have been hostile to us for 1400 years, and that we need to keep them out and guard our borders from them. East is east, west is west, and never shall the twain meet.
Steve K – A globe spanning universal judiciary that can consist of all adult male muslims at their discretion and can pass sentence up to and including the death penalty is not something that is compatible with the current global system. This incompatibility will lead to violence and has done so most famously on 9/11/2001.
How does this problem get resolved? Either Islam changes its religious judiciary or the world changes how it deals with Islam, very likely in a truly unpleasant way. Those of us who can see good chunks of the upcoming decision tree and truly do hope for a non-genocide answer to the problem of this judiciary in a world of super-empowered individuals invest our hopes in the idea that Muslims will change their religious practices to avoid the genocide.