Islam

Fighting the War of Ideas Like a Real War

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No one is doing this in any serious way, so far as I can tell, almost six years after 9/11. Future historians will be scathing.

A book length publication that looks very interesting, after a skim. The authors say the main, under-utilized weapon in the US arsenal against terrorism is ridicule.

See also: Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas.

The report shows that media outlets and products created by Sunni insurgents, who are responsible for the majority of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq, and their supporters are undermining the authority of the Iraqi government, demonizing coalition forces, fomenting sectarian strife, glorifying terrorism, and perpetrating falsehoods that obscure the accounts of responsible journalists. Insurgent media seek to create an alternate reality to win hearts and minds, and they are having a considerable degree of success. … [However] insurgent media have not yet faced a serious challenge to their message on the Internet.

The insurgent media book was cited in Winning the Narrative by Bing West at the Small Wars Journal blog.

In in this article we learn many valuable Arab words. Our military, and government, and media should adopt these more accurate terms for terrorism. Perhaps in the blogosphere we can lead the way:

irhab (eer-HAB) — Arabic for terrorism, thus enabling us to call the al Qaeda-style killers irhabis, irhabists and irhabiyoun rather than the so-called “jihadis” and “jihadists” and “mujahideen” and “shahids” (martyrs) they badly want to be called. (Author’s lament: Here we are, almost six years into a life-and-death War on Terrorism, and most of us do not even know this basic Arabic for terrorism.)

I wish our soldiers well in their struggle against the irhabis in Anbar province.

“Is London’s future Islamic?”

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Via Rand Simberg comes this essay by Michael Hodges.

I can’t tell if the Hodges piece is parody. If not, he reminds me of a leftist anti-Semitic high-school history teacher I had. He too used that “people of the book” line, to knock Christendom for being more hostile to Jews than Islam is and to explain away Muslim mistreatment of Jews.

In fact the Muslim record, particularly the recent Arab-Muslim record, only looks good in isolated cases or by comparison with the worst abuses of old Christendom. The modern Christian world is astonishingly tolerant by historical standards. Christian institutions have shrunk away from national government while radical Islam seeks to perpetuate Islam’s historical political totalism.

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Speaking to One Another and Speaking Out

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A couple of days ago, I quoted Bruce Bawer on engagement. Since then, his words have rolled about in my head. This long spring, I started reconnecting with old gay friends; I’ve been struck by how many of them have become politicized, beset by BDS. In the sixties and seventies they were apolitical – as, most of the time, I was. Occasionally, I’d have a boyfriend who’d talk about politics, but then I’d retreat to my friends whose arguments were over the fictional and aesthetic.

Bush’s stance on gay marriage may irritate, but, frankly, this is the first White House in which a gay couple stood on the nominating platform with the presidential candidate, when the First Lady when asked if she would allow a gay couple in the White House answered, quite calmly, said she was sure many such couples had stayed there. But I must acknowledge my friends have a point. They feel something they know should be acknowledged: partnership, affection, duty. Besides, marriage has been tattered and torn. Some confuse weddings with marriage, rights with duties, conjugal responsibilities with conjugal visits, buying houses with raising children, keeping the core institution of society strong with being a social “couple.” But, then, so do a lot of heterosexuals.

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A Muslim Lysistrata?

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Aristophanes penned Lysistrata during the Peloponnesian War, about Greek women who manage to stop the war by withholding sex from their soldier-husbands. In a way, this is what Western women have been doing in the second half of the 20th Century. By leaving the home to work, they have made their sexual favors more dear. By earning their own wages, they have unchained themselves from supplicating reliance on the menfolk. We in the West have had a long time to get used to this transformation, and for the most part we are better off for it. I don’t have the data, but I suspect that societies where women make up more than one third of wage earners have seldom if ever gone to war against each other.

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Shariah by stealth

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Immigrant Aydarus Yusuf, who has lived in Britain for 15 years says, in effect, that he does not feel bound by British law. “Us Somalis, wherever we are in the world, we have our own law.” According to the BBC, the 29-year old youth worker wants to ensure that other members of his community remain subject to the law of their ancestors, too. To this end, he helps convene an unofficial Somali court, or “gar”, in southeast London. This group tries both civil and criminal cases, without reference to the English police or England’s 1,000 year old legal infrastructure. This news simply confirmed what many in Britain already suspected. Muslim immigrants and their offspring, who constitute around 2.5% (according to Labour government figures) of the population, are running an underground parallel legal system operated along tribal lines by “elders”.

Episcopalian canon Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, himself a convert from Islam, whose own family immigrated from Guyana and who heads the Institute for The Study of Islam and Christianity, confirms that shariah courts now operate in most larger cities and operate according to their own traditions.

Dr Sookhdeo said, “The government has not been straight about this.”

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