Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam: "But even within the bleakest possible analysis of Mr Blair's foreign policy, it is still simply not true that the West is waging war on Islam. Just as it is not true that the CIA was really behind the 11 September attacks or any other arrant conspiratorial nonsense that enjoys widespread credence in the Middle East and beyond. It is also a logical and moral absurdity to imply, as some critics of British policy have done, that mass murder is somehow less atrocious when it is motivated by an elaborate narrative of political grievance.
If young British Muslims are alienated, that is sad and their anger should be addressed. But anyone whose alienation leads them to want to kill indiscriminately has crossed a line into psychopathic criminality. Policy cannot be dictated by the need to placate such people.
British Muslim leaders are entitled, along with everybody else, to raise questions about the conduct and consequences of Mr Blair's foreign policy. But they have a more immediate responsibility to promote the truth: that Britain is not the aggressor in a war against Islam; that no such war exists; that there is no glory in murder dressed as martyrdom and that terrorism is never excused by bogus accounts of historical victimisation."
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam
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7 comments:
Of course this is true. Killing people is not an acceptable form of political protest.
peter, it is not just Muslims. We have college professors in this country who try to blame 9/11 on Bush as well as calling the victims that day little Eichmans. It is more than religion.
Terrye,
You are right about the college professors.
Still, I very much doubt that Wardie has the courage of his convictions. While the professors love to preach the hatred, they don't have the cojones to do anything about it. The Muslims, on the other hand, do.
I wonder what the KKK would have been like if there had been an Isreal when they were strong? Scary to think about.
David, would you for God's sake look up the word "nihilist"? You're not using it right. A "nihilist" is someone who doesn't believe anything is real or meaningful, and who rejects all theories of religious or moral believe. The people you're talking about are about as far from being nihilists as it's possible to be: they not only believe very firmly in some things as being real and meaningful, and they are absolutely consumed with, and by, their acceptance of a theory of religious and moral belief.
I mean, cripes, man: this kind of recasting a word because it sounds bad, without considering what it means ... that's (cue ominous music) practically postmodern.
David, the fact that you can quote Nietzsche's non-standard definition, out of context, doesn't help much when the same article you're quoting says "Nihilism is a philosophical position which argues that the world, and especially human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value. Nihilists generally assert some or all of the following: there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or creator, a "true morality" is unknown, and secular ethics are impossible; therefore, life has no truth, and no action is known to be preferable to any other."
That's completely contradictory to what islamists believe.
What's more, I've very suspicious that you don't mean to call Christianity a nihilistic religion, so --- other than having an authority to quote --- I'm not sure what it does for your argument.
Tru, I certainly don't want to defend the islamists, but the whole history of nihilism pretty much plays out on the part about there being no higher power or judge, therefore no meaning, no standard of morality, and no possibility of saying that one action was morally or ethically preferable to any other.
The position David's ascribing to the islamists is more like that of the gnostics and albigensians, ie, that this world is meaningless, but the next one, and obedience to God, is not.
Seneca,
I don't think you're doing justice to the Cathars there. They believed that this world was hell, that it was corrupt and in opposition to the true God, but not that it was meaningless.
In a sense, the Cathars were the distant predecessors of today's Leftists, come to think of it.
I read somewhere that the many of the regions in France in which the Cathars flourished were the very same regions in many cases in which there was great support for the Revolution years later. Now, having thought about the philosophical-religious underpinnings of modern-day Leftism, it makes perfect sense.
This is why Truepeers has always been calling the Leftists Gnostics, an appelation which has never seemed quite right to me. From this point of view, it finally makes sense.
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