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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (11575)	11/26/2001 1:42:14 AM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

Here's an interesting take on the influence of radical post-modernism on OBL and the other Islamicists: not to be hostile, but I think it sucks, I hate it when the West gets blamed for everything but was quite relieved to discover that that Capitalism isn’t responsible for this mess.....Postmodernism, recontextualizing history, conspiracy, isn’t it great! Thanks, I did find it interesting.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (11575)	11/26/2001 3:36:17 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, Maurice:Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left Yes, he probably did learn something from the left but I doubt he was studying deconstruction or any of that rubbish. He just cut straight to the chase: power. The following comes from an article published this Summer. Make sure you read the very last quoted sentence of this post The 'oddity'. The Middle East Quarterly Summer 2001 The Islamists Have it Wrong by Abdul Hadi Palazzi mequarterly.org Perhaps most important of all is the Islamists' subordination of religion to politics, our main topic here. Khalid Durán notes the distinction between traditional Islam and its political counterfeit by underlining their different understandings of the relationship between religion and politics: Whether Islamists like the term fundamentalist or not, their understanding of religion resembles that of fundamentalists in other religions. This is not to say that Islamists are more religious or more genuinely Islamic than other Muslims . . . Islamism is a late 20th century totalitarianism. It follows in the wake of fascism and communism, picking up from those and seeking to refine their methods of domination . . . Few Muslims would deny that political commitment is part of Islamic ethics, but most disagree with the Islamist insistence that there exists a clearly defined "Islamic system," different from all other political systems.8 Islamists draw on modern European models that posit a scientific revolutionary movement, an elitist scheme of ruling society by means of secret cults that act behind the scenes, and a manufacture of consensus by means of propaganda. They reject those aspects of the Islamic tradition that do not fit with this political outlook. Theirs is, in fact, an extremist ideology; they consider their organizations and militants as custodians of the projects for Islamizing the world, and whoever criticizes them (be he a Muslim or a non-Muslim) is immediately accused of being anti-Islamic, "Islamophobic," and so forth. Unwilling to be ruled by non-Islamist Muslims, Islamists adopt an approach characterized by political supremacism. Their pious rhetoric does not hide the fact that they exploit the religious feelings of their followers to acquire mundane power and enhance their finances. They claim to be vanguard Muslims, integrating faith and politics, but their cardinal concern is holding power themselves and excluding others. Thus, the goal of these radicals is not genuinely religious but political and even totalitarian. Like other totalitarian ideologies, contemporary Islamism is blindly utopian. It implies a wholesale denial of history; the Islamists’ model of an ideal society is inspired by the idealized image of seventh-century Arabia and an ahistorical view of religion and human development. It is based on anachronistic thinking that rejects modern concepts of pluralism and tolerance. And it ignores a history of Islam that is rich in models of heterogeneous social organization and adaptation to the times. The author also has a great deal to say about the various Islamist organizations now spread around the world, Islamist history, and its dangers. And some oddities: Looking at two organizations in specific: the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a Muslim Brethren front organization24 in the United States that lobbies against journalists and scholars who dare to write anything about Islam at variance with the Brethren’s Islamist agenda, such as advocating diversity in Islam.25 Notwithstanding CAIR’s evident connection to Hamas, it is accepted by the U.S. government as a legitimate representative of the Muslim American community. Likewise, the American Muslim Council (AMC) is another branch of the Muslim Brethren. According to Khalid Durán, "The AMC's most remarkable feat was to obtain the monopoly on the training of Muslim chaplains for the U.S. Army (which is like Tehran entrusting the training of its Revolutionary Guards to the U.S. Institute of Peace)." Thus, while non-Islamist Islamic organizations like the Association for Islamic Charitable Projects26 are more or less ignored by the U.S. government, Muslim American soldiers receive spiritual assistance from Islamist chaplains. These folks have a lotta jam, don't they? I have no way of checking if this is true but it does get my attention.