http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-incontrovertible-dead-end-of-islam-revisited
At the moment, I would rather be writing about the smiley mask that is falling from President Barack Obama and his tyrannical administration regarding the fabricated Benghazi “talking points,” the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting conservative and Tea Party groups for special attention, and the government’s stealing the Associated Press’s phone records. There is also the matter of the federal government stealing millions of personal health records in order to screen who will and will not be beneficiaries of Obamacare.
On top of all that, I learned that the Obama administration and the Mainstream Media are “like that.” Imagine my index and second fingers crossed. For example, CNN vice president and deputy bureau chief Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s deputy secretary, Tom Nides. CBS president David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, master’s degree holder in fiction-writing from NYU, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, whose editing of the Benghazi “talking points” qualifies as fiction-writing. ABC president Ben Sherwood is the brother of special Obama advisor Elizabeth Sherwood. And, NBC was co-opted because its parent company is General Electric, which got $150 billion in stimulus money. What an incestuous extended family!
That leaves Fox News as the only other major news outlet that hasn’t been co-opted or corrupted by the government. But there is one place Fox won’t go, either: criticizing the Saudis. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Group, which is about 10% owned by a Saudi royal prince.
The New York Times is completely liberal/left and shows no signs of wanting a reality check, so it can be written off. The same goes for the Washington Post, whose only saving grace is Charles Krauthammer’s weekly column. Whether or not he’s a neocon or merely a straight conservative, I’ve never been able to determine.
So, we don’t need a 50-story pyramid housing Minitru in the middle of a squalid London in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to have a compliant propaganda entity. We have glitzy studio news sets and groomed talking head fashion plates and razzle-dazzle special effects to accomplish the same end: falsehoods and news reportage that is so biased it verges on fantasy.
That being said, I move on to another subject that must be raised, even though it is tangential to the foregoing vis-à-vis our foreign and domestic policies.
The following is a revised and expanded version of “The Incontrovertible Dead-End of Islam,” which first appeared on October 30th, 2010. The revision and expansion are prompted by a May 13th, 2013 article by Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, “Islam vs. Islamism,” which also appeared in the Washington Times on May 13th. His article reflects a troubling central premise of alleging a necessary distinction between Islam and “Islamists,” that is, between ordinary, non-violent Muslims and their violent, “extremist” or “radical” brethren.
Pipes opens with a reference to the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15thand the foiled attack on the Canadian rail link to the U.S.:
What motives lay behind last month’s Boston Marathon bombing and the would-be attack on a VIA Rail Canada train?
Leftists and establishmentarians variously offer imprecise and tired replies – such as “violent extremism” or anger at Western imperialism – unworthy of serious discussion. Conservatives, in contrast, engage in a lively and serious debate among themselves: some say Islam the religion provides motive, others say it’s a modern extremist variant of the religion, known as radical Islam or Islamism.
As a participant in the latter debate, here’s my argument for focusing on Islamism.
His argument proposes a false dichotomy between Islam and “Islamists,” that is, between Muslims who wage violent jihad on the West and even amongst themselves for sectarian reasons, and those who don’t.
Islam is the fourteen-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis. Muslims achieved remarkable military, economic, and cultural success between roughly 600 and 1200 C.E. Being a Muslim then meant belonging to a winning team, a fact that broadly inspired Muslims to associate their faith with mundane success. Those memories of medieval glory remain not just alive but central to believers’ confidence in Islam and in themselves as Muslims.
Major dissonance began around 1800, when Muslims unexpectedly lost wars, markets, and cultural leadership to Western Europeans. It continues today, as Muslims bunch toward the bottom of nearly ever index of achievement. This shift has caused massive confusion and anger. What went wrong, why did God seemingly abandon His faithful? The unbearable divergence between pre-modern accomplishment and modern failure brought about trauma.
Muslims have responded to this crisis in three main ways. Secularists want Muslims to ditch the Shari’a (Islamic law) and emulate the West. Apologists also emulate the West but pretend that in doing so they are following the Shari’a. Islamists reject the West in favor of a retrograde and full application of the Shari’a.
These paragraphs astounded me. The first one glosses over the conquest of the Middle East and North Africa which necessitated forced conversion, butchery, and slavery. Remarkable military successes, indeed. But for their defeat at the Battle of Tours, the “Islamists” would have carved out a huge empire in Europe. What economic accomplishments? The period he cites spans the economically stagnant Dark Ages and early Western Medieval periods. Cultural successes? Other than a certain architectural style, translating some Aristotle and other ancient thinkers – whose works Islam subsequently rejected – I can’t recall any great symphonies, artwork, or literature Islam produced in those six hundred years.
“Major dissonance” within Islam began over who was going to be Mohammad’s official successor in the 630’s. Thus the interminable conflicts between Sunnis and Shi’ites and other splintering sects of Islam. Islam never had any “cultural leadership.”
