Saturday, October 11, 2014

Puzzle of Extremist Introspection

"We know this world view. The peddling of lies: that 9/11 was a Jewish plot and the 7/7 London attacks were staged. The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of western policy. The concept of an inevitable clash of civilization."
"We must be clear: To defeat the ideology of extremism we must deal with all forms of extremism -- not just violent extremism."
"We need to argue that prophecies of a global war of religion pitting Muslims against the rest of the world are nonsense."
British Prime Minister David Cameron
Extremist: Anjem Choudary wants the UK to become an Islamic state under sharia law
Extremist: Anjem Choudary wants the UK to become an Islamic state under sharia law

Perhaps he has it backward; Islam is bracing itself, on the receiving end of a global war of religion it has no wish to engage in but has little option but to fight back against the forces of Western liberalism and notions of freedom and democracy that have proven to ill fit Islam. Islam and the Muslim ummah appear to fit themselves comfortably into the vision of hapless victim, but a victim that refuses to be victimized; a victim that honours its sublime religion and takes pride in itself. They've no choice but to be the aggressor.

The innocent young Muslim men professing confusion over the world arrayed in hostility against their peerless religion asking why it is that the only countries to be bombed again and again by countries of the west are Muslim countries? Have they asked themslves how it is that the only terrorist groups that terrorize Muslims and the world at large are Islamist, suffused with an overwhelming sense of duty to jihad and martyrdom, called upon to demonstrate their faith by acts of terror?

Or considered that it is not Muslim countries that ride to the aid of their co-religionists when a dictator massacres his own civilian population, but countries of the west recognizing a dreadful obligation to aid their fellow man, mount a challenge to the drive to slaughter sectarian opponents. On the other hand, interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, and through the lens of Islam, the viewer sees the perception he is channelled toward; that Muslims are attacked by non-Muslims.

That Muslims slaughter Muslims can be accommodated, and many within the Muslim community find it useful to insist that those who are engaged in the slaughter are not really Muslim after all, though they proudly claim that birthright. But clearly western intervention can be recognized for what it is, a foreign group with adherence to an alien religion intent on oppressing Muslims. That powerful tool of togetherness and recruitment, the Internet, has proven an absolute boon to enable the quiet Muslim who seethes in rage to make contact and pledge allegiance to jihad.

"We've been where you are. We understand what you are reacting to. We're prepared to help guide you to a place where you will have reason to feel empowered, where you can act on your anger, where your anger will fuel your outrage further and it can be usefully expended in the coinage of revenge. Come, join us, and you will find the ultimate release from your state of disempowerment, you will become powerful, feared and capable of exacting a dreadful toll on those deserving death."

The world of Islam is a backward, stone-age world of conquest, power and forced conversion. Adulterers should be stoned to death, apostates suffer the ultimate punishment. In many Muslim countries these are accepted beliefs. And we are informed that it is only, after all, a small majority of Muslims who harbour these beliefs. A small -- majority? According to a Pew Research Center poll, 64% of Egyptians support the death penalty for apostates. Nice that 36% percent hold a more genial view of leaving Islam ... unless they're in the undecided fold.

Christians, Jews or Buddhists don't seem to have these problems with religion, with acting out one's biases, with conducting themselves in such wholesale violent ways that strike terror into the hearts of those targeted. Why do Muslims? Is this a religious thing, or is it that so many of the religion's adherents are tribal, sectarian and victim-oriented to a degree that much of the rest of the world weaned itself from many centuries earlier?

Where the west lives, freedom of enquiry is a given, so we're just asking.

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