I am a Christian who feels a sense of brother(/sister-)hood with Islamic people. Since the surah Baqara was quoted a couple of messages back, let me copy in a verse from it that's a good basis for good relations among the monotheistic religions, if one needs to quote scripture to have good relations: " Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. " (verse 62 Yusufali translation).
I know that historically in several islamic countries, an extra tax was placed on Christians and Jews, but this is not in or from the Quran. The quran is multiply posted online, so whenever you hear a doubtful statement attributed to it, you can always look it up. Most religions in the course of history have occasionally become more pushy than their holy books would allow -- certainly Christianity is no exception. Secularisms have done the same, cf. Stalin and Mao and their Das-Kapital-thumping fanaticism.
People in islamic countries are generally among the most friendly and hospitable you could hope to meet anywhere. I always say that islamic countries are very dangerous because every time I travel to one, a young woman among my local friends and friends-of-friends always becomes very interested in me and, to put it mildly, clearly would not rule out the possibility of marriage, following all the proper channels of course. Westerners worried about the head scarf should know that it does no harm at all to the strength of the personality wearing it! (Anyone who finds it strange to call a romantic interest "threatening" should read the humour books of PG Wodehouse about the dedicated bachelor Bertie Wooster and his perennial attempts to avoid marriage.)
I have a radical take on Al-Qaeda, one not supported by any newspaper editor or columnist. In the 20th century, starting from about 1930, many western countries, and some eastern as well, responded to some of the pressures of modernization and economic uncertainty (or depression) by going through a flirtation with with some kind of fascism. In each case, the fascist leaders tried to co-opt some something perceived as a "very good thing," and they represented their movement as better than the best when it came to this thing. In Germany, Hitler and the nazis were more German than the Germans, and anyone opposing him/them was un-German. Ditto Mussolini and the true, Italian fascisti; and likewise, the Japanese fascists as well. In Soviet Union, Stalin was more rational and scientific and internationalist than all the rational atheists; anyone opposing him was unscientific, irrational and just self-interested (and was therefore a threat best contained by a trip to a gulag or a brief look down a gun barrel.) In the US, McCarthy was more democratic than any democrat, and anyone opposing him was a communist.
Various parts of the western world had their fingers badly burned by their own fascism and that of their neighbours, and they belatedly developed some cultural self-defence against this "Our militant group is better than the best at personifying your favourite value" line of rhetoric. The islamic world, mostly emerging from colonialism (except Arabia and Iran) fortunately did not go through this particular fascist phase, except maybe in eastern Turkey. This impulse, however, is too universal for a whole section of the world to miss out on it completely. Osama bin Laden is the first modern fascist to have the wit to portray himself as more Islamic than the muslim, the purest, the noblest, the only true representative. In his view, anyone opposing him is un-islamic, and he is not afraid to say so. If Osama had begun his movement in response to the plight of the Palestinian people, his story would be quite different. Actually, he began his movement at first for a typical fascist reason, namely, to re-establish the purity of the holy land after the Sauds had let a lot of westerners and east Asians move in. Racial, ethnic, or religious purity in a particular land is always very attractive to fascism, since it means that only people in "my group" are left in the area under consideration, and "my group" is always easy to manipulate because they can be made to identify with me as their best and ultimate representative.
Later on, Osama expanded his scope and clearly saw the benefit of stoking the fire with the Palestine outrage, but in my opinion he is merely parasitizing this problem for his own advantage. His ultimate aim is to establish a very large, unified islamic state with himself, or at least someone embodying his doctrine, as its dictator. (It's not clear what he would do with the Shiite areas, since he and his spokespeople have made it clear that they don't see shiism as really islamic, but at the same time, they haven't yet proposed any solution to deal with this heresy problem.) If we can take the Taliban government as being somewhat in line with Osama's point of view, you have there a typical fascist state masquerading as traditionalist, with, for example, a suppression of women that could be said to be traditional and yet, that becomes so much more extreme than any older tradition that anyone can actually recall. What traditional society had widowed women starving in their homes because they couldn't go outside unaccompanied by a male in order to do something to make a living? When you travel around Iran and see all the women working as everything from bank managers to scientists, you rapidly lose the idea that the Taliban represented Islam. They represented the typical fascist urge to get those women into the houses making babies for the next war. Their suppression of music, though loosely linked to hadiths about the dangers of poetry, was really just the typical fascist appropriation of all culture to their own symbols. Since in this case they were parasitizing islam to build up their typical fascist, bullying "We are better than the whole world" ego trip, the symbols that were allowed had to be islamic. (I can hear readers now thinking, "the US is saying the same thing." and I acknowledge there's some truth in that).
Well, Hitler, in spite of being more German than the Germans for many years and putting his dirty hands onto every possible symbol of things German, didn't manage to destroy the German culture or people, and likewise Osama and the Taliban will ultimately not be able to stain the honour of islam. But they will certainly try. And many people in the muslim world will indeed wonder, at least for a few moments, if they are being un-islamic if they object to his ferocious points of view. But there is indeed an opposite point of view of islam as a religion of peace, tolerance, equality and enlightenment. That is often quoted in letters to editors of western newspapers, and western readers then write in saying, "oh yeah, what about those bombs?" but they don't realise that this is a true and important beacon for people who, in their hearts, are very islamic but not at all fascistic. Fascism parasitizes all religions, races, philosophies and nations. Its psychological basis is that of the bully who proclaims himself to be the persecuted underdog, representative of the common people, and then amasses a violent gang of goons and goon-philosophers to take him to power.
One of the most important things in the world right now is not to be fooled by Osama's mask of Islam. Or to put the same point another way, it's important for the rest of the world not to 'shoot itself in the foot' by blaming Islam for Osama. Osama is the guilty one, not Islam. He is only trying to hide behind Islam to conceal his guilt, like a bad kid hiding under his mom's skirt to avoid punishment.
In the context of this ultra-right-wing adventure of Osama's, it is very embarrassing to the western countries that Israel, representing the Jewish nation that most western countries, even the Allies, negligently abandoned in some way during World War II (for example, by refusing to accept Jewish German refugees in the 1930's, as was done by my native land, Canada) is causing considerable grief. Here is a people who the western nations now, after two millennia of antisemitism, want to honour, cherish and prosper, and instead of being perfectly wonderful and admirable, they are often behaving rather atrociously (though the presence of a strong peace movement needs to be noted). In fact, despite all the "he hit me first" excuses arising out of the cycle of violence in Palestine, in general post-1967 Israel is behaving with the Palestinians in much the same way as the US behaved with the American Indians when they were colonizing the west. This includes the claim that I have heard from numerous Israelis and supporters, that the Arabs weren't really using the land very well and the fact that they were just letting it go to waste caused their claim on it to fall through. The sneaky little advance settlements keep on moving out into the ever-dwindling "Palestinian reservation." "This is sacred land," the fanatics yell as they plant their house-posts on someone else's land. The world has seen this kind of story before, and it has nothing to do with the middle east in particular (in fact, it also took place not long ago in Tibet, Xinjiang and inner Mongolia). But there have been times when Israel has come very close to agreeing to share Palestine in some reasonably equitable way -- and given that most Israelis at this point are Sephards who have moved, not from Europe, but from some part of the islamic world where they have mostly given up their own land and possessions for next to nothing, this could actually be the basis of a peace perceived as having a degree of fairness. It's not as if these people have someplace else to go at this point. Though, no doubt, it is very strange to have a nation move back in to a property after 1900 years with all but a few in exile, a history capped off by a mighty genocide leading to the idea that nothing else was safe except to reestablish that 1900-year-old nation. It's a very strange situation, but one that seems to have grown out of a meeting of inexorable historical forces.
Now, every time Israel and Palestine HAVE come close to settling a deal, I have always said, "a big bomb is going to go off very soon," and so far, I have always been right. People who will settle for nothing less than the elimination of Israel will always try to make a settlement impossible, and the human-outrage bomb producing lots of flying childrens' body parts is the best tactic, because it then calls forth the equal and opposite nasty reaction, so that both sides can comfortably call each other beasts and the war can continue. IF we ever again see a peace-minded Israeli government, a non-stealing Israeli government, they will have to live down at least a few nasty explosions before the peace can take hold, and this will make the local hawks say "we Jews can't afford to be passive, we have to fight back." If, somehow, this impulse can be handled in a professional way rather than a way that promotes further mayhem (which is a difficult task to ask, but maybe not impossible), then some good can finally come out of the process.
George Bush's approval of Israel's expansions is very annoying, but if he changed his mind and disapproved, what could he do? If he turned off the money tap to Israel, the missing funds would just be raised by private hands with much shouting about betrayal of democracy. No western country could actually threaten Israel; it would be like putting themselves back into the shoes of the concentration camp guards. Besides, the country has 200 nuclear weapons. All it would need to do is threaten to blow up, say, Damascus, and all anyone could do was beg. No one is going to nuke Israel back. The stench of the concentration camps rises in my nostrils as I even write such ideas, which I certainly abhor and mention only to acknowledge the realpolitik of the situation. "Who can and possibly will nuke whom" is still an unavoidable aspect of our lovely world. In fact, I suspect that 25% of the reason George invaded Iraq, besides the unfinished business there, Saddam's threat to his daddy, the oil, the perceived need to do something more about the 9/11 problem, and so on, was that Saddam was the one middle easterner who would have been very happy to nuke Israel and who could actually have put the mechanisms together to do it. (And as a long-time liar, Saddam had the problem that when he finally did tell the truth and say that he had no weapons of mass destruction any more, no one on the US side could believe him, and how could he prove it? There could always be a hiding place -- you can't absolutely prove that you don't have such things when everyone knows you used to. Saddam was ultimately doomed by his history of saying whatever was convenient, combined with the old philosophical conundrum, "you can't prove a negative." A strikingly parallel example of that last influence was our inability to prove that disaster wouldn't happen with the computer 'millennium bug' problem in the year 2000, so that no matter how much preparation was done, many people, especially officials, were still very scared. ) The bottom line is that the US is a 'red herring' in the Israel/Palestine problem. If the US government became isolationist tomorrow and turned its back on Israel, nothing in Palestine would change. The situation there really comes down to what the local people, the Israelis and Palestinians, do. George is powerful elsewhere, but there, he is just wind.
Likewise, if Israel and Palestine made a great peace deal tomorrow, Osama's war with the US, which he declared very earnestly long before any American took him seriously, would continue without change. Like Mussolini, the man has a vision, and as, in his mind, it's the purest vision, the glory of me and people like me and of course God who always hovers appreciatively just over my flag, applauding everything I do (always in His name, never mine, since I am too busy representing God's business to have a personal ego), a little thing like a local peace deal on the eastern Mediterranean is not going to put a damper on it. Peace is temporary. I, Osama, represent eternity.
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