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

To: JohnM who wrote (45388)	9/20/2002 1:52:25 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

First, the sentence you quote from me about it being wrong to place Emerson alongside Kepel, if you finish the quote out you will see the point of that statement was your notion that to do so would lead to a refutation of Kepel. The rest of my reply is that there is an argument that can be made that the two are complementary, not oppositional. First you tell me it's wrong to cite Emerson, now you say that an argument can be made that they are complementary, not oppositional, but you completely ignore the limited reason why I cited him in the first place, namely, as evidence that a journalist/layman had available the resources to correctly predict what Kepel did not. But that's cool. Like Nadine Carroll, I'm hip to your slippery style. Kepel is not, at least at this level of the endgame, necessarily arguing about how the sentiments in Arab countries might be changing. He is rather arguing about the ability of political movements to translate those sentiments into sufficient power to take state power. John, believe me, I understand that, and for the reasons I spoke about earlier, consider it another fallacy in Kepel's views. The evidence clearly suggests that militant Islamism does best in places where it does not achieve state status. Islamism in Iran is having problems with the young, who are apparently uncomfortable with strict Islamic law. However, Islamism seems to be thriving in the many places where it is repressed by the state. It's an interesting paradox which I think can be explained by the Islamists' paranoid notion that "the world" is against them and that conspiracies against them are legion. When they become "the world", they are robbed of one of the biggest arrows in their quiver. It is at this point, when they become the repressors instead of the repressed, that their deficits are revealed best. I therefore question Kepel's argument that the failure to gain control of a significant number of states is somehow indicative of Islamism's wane.