Islam notes Part 2

These are not well organized or completely coherent ideas. They are notes gathered and yet to be distilled. I share them for my own benefit—to write them down, review them, organize them and think about them may help me come to some position on the issue.

In Islamic countries in the middle East and in Islamic communities in Europe, poverty, high birth rates, no jobs, and a lot of angry, unemployed young men conspire to create conditions which favor radical Islamic involvement. This gulf between the Islamic countries and the first world countries continues to widen even as China, Korea and other Asian economies begin to flourish in the world economy.


It is easy to blame the Other—the U.S., for conditions under repressive, corrupt rulers whom we have helped to prop up. It is easy to hate foreigners, especially those who have a lot more than you have, and who at the same time live under very different social codes—codes which are portrayed at their worst on the television programs and movies which they see. They blame us for globalization, which seems to be leaving them behind We make a highly visible, focused and hatable target for the radicals.

Yet some Muslims want to join the modern world, to participate in its economies, its ways, its wealth and prosperity. Others say no, we must revert to our traditional ways—ways evolved over millennia in harsh desert lands.


the Saudis use the u.s. and hate us at the same time. They support
madrasa schools with oil money not only in their own countries but also in Europe and American countries, including the U.S. teaching their own brand of Islam suffused with hatred of the modern, hatred of American, hatred of the other.

Traditional Islam is said to be a religion of law--harsh law, but
just law. Penalties are severe for transgressions--but justice,
judgment and conviction are supposed to be part of the process.
Suicide is not only not condoned by traditional Islam, but is
explicitly forbidden by word and action of the Prophet. Dying
by the hand of another during war or assassination is noble, but
dying by your own hand is still considered suicide, including
blowing yourself up.

Islam also forbids the murder or involvement of women, children and other noncombatants in its complex and long-studied and
debated rules of war. Blowing up their own people to get media
attention does not, according to traditional Islam, qualify a
young man for martyrdom and heaven. The Prophet says it
qualifies him to blow himself up over and over again in Hell.

The Islamic world is falling farther and farther behind the rest
of the world economically, in part because of the corruption of
its own rulers. The U.S. has interfered, propped up some of
these leaders, and followed policies which have harmed the Muslim
peoples in the Middle East e.g. sanctions against Iraq which
clearly did not harm Hussein but squeezed the poor dry.

Bin Laden cloaks his messages in terms of Islam, but he has elevated himself to leadership and hero on hate. Hate instilled in young men in Madrasas, refugee camps, training camps. Hate of an America that does not really exist--a place of debauchery,
corruption, dissolution. They should look at his own family for
closer to home examples of corruption, debauchery and dissolution. But he and his kind need a focus of hate, a focus for their cause. Without that focus you can't get people to blow themselves up voluntarily. You can't fuel cells of people to rise
up in rage without inculcating hatred into their bones.

Some of the reasons they put forward for hating us may have some basis in reality. We have since the 1920s interfered in Arab politics, economies and distribution of wealth for the sake of the oil they sit on. We have not backed up our allies when it suited us to bail--the Shah, the Shiites in 1991 in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was our own man at first. Then we ousted, hunted, captured and eventually got him executed.

We have freedoms, material wealth, and customs they do not have. We flaunt them to the world in the over-dramatized visions of television and movies. And they eat them up.

They promise their young men heaven, virgins, and support for their families if they become suicide bombers. Which is more compelling to a young man without a job, no hope of carrying out his God-given duty to support his family in a world where nothing
is certain, and poverty, violence and hatred are all he has ever known? Do they drug them before they send them out? Do they whip them into a frenzy? Or brainwash them so thoroughly that they can carry out the mission?

They despise us for cowardice and weakness. We turned tail and ran in Beirut; we bailed in Somalia; we left our hostages in Iran for 444 days. We cry to the world that we want to bail again in Iraq. Bin Laden will use that too as a sign of our softness, our
weakness, our cowardice, our willingness to surrender, to flee, to bail. We have no backbone and can't finish what we started.

We are the enemy. We deserve part of that and don't deserve part of it. It doesn't matter. But the roots of the hatred are not, I think, only in Islam, or even, I think, in Wahhabiism. They are political, economic, historic, ethnic, cultural, and circumstantial.

We should never have gone into Iraq in the first place. We should have dealt with it in 1991, and since we didn't, we should have left it alone. But now that we're there, we have to find a way to pull it out. If we don't, the region will dissolve into a
morass of bloodshed, violence, and probably end up in another tyranny, because the only kind of leader who will work will have to be a strong military one.



What is our responsibility now? Having started the war, torn down the government, demolished the political structure, and unleashed the jackals, the extremists on all sides, to devastate their own lands and peoples—what do we do now?