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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (6869)	10/15/2001 3:08:02 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

This is really about Andalusia BIN LADEN DOCTRINE: The Osama bin Laden speech broadcast after allied attacks on Afghanistan began (though obviously, from both the sunlight and contents, taped earlier) opened in an interesting way: "Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Andalusia would be repeated in Palestine. We cannot accept that Palestine will become Jewish." Andalusia was Muslim Spain, which in its Golden Age nurtured learning, trade, and (by the standards of the day) religious tolerance. But according to at least some Muslim interpretations of history what looks like greatness to the West was really a form of weakness. Prosperity and pluralism led to lax practice and division among Muslims. Lax practice and division led to brutal reconquest by militant Christianity. Bin Laden and his followers have a 500-year-old grudge, and what they've learned from history impels their actions today. Remember the Breshnev Doctrine—that no communist country should ever go non-communist? That doctrine motivated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up the Soviet-backed regime there. Now we have the Bin Laden doctrine, that no Muslim territory should ever become non-Muslim. To become pluralist is to take the first step toward becoming non-Muslim. And to permit such a change would be to repeat the "tragedy of Andalusia." In this context, the world must inevitably be split into "the camp of belief and the disbelief." There is no middle ground, and no room for tolerance. vpostrel.com