NYT Op-Ed: Islam needs it’s own Civil War

by Infidelesto on December 17, 2009 · Comments

Indeed, coming from The NY Times, this is quite a revelation.

Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas L. Friedman

Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.

What is really scary is that this violent, jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most “legitimacy” in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public. Secular Arab leaders wink at these groups, telling them: “We’ll arrest if you do it to us, but if you leave us alone and do it elsewhere, no problem.”

Suddenly Friedman sounds like a raging Islamophobic anti-jihadist…or maybe we were right this whole time…Yea I think we were right and he’s just now coming around.

How many fatwas — religious edicts — have been issued by the leading bodies of Islam against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Very few. Where was the outrage last week when, on the very day that Iraq’s Parliament agreed on a formula to hold free and fair multiparty elections — unprecedented in Iraq’s modern history — five explosions set off by suicide bombers hit ministries, a university and Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, killing at least 127 people and wounding more than 400, many of them kids?

Not only was there no meaningful condemnation emerging from the Muslim world — which was primarily focused on resisting Switzerland’s ban on new mosque minarets — there was barely a peep coming out of Washington. President Obama expressed no public outrage. It is time he did.

He has the right idea…generally…., except the part where he mentions a “civil war” and then only addresses the “war on ideas” which the Civil Was was not.  In fact, the Civil War was the bloodiest and most brutally violent war in America’s history.  Friedman has the right idea in calling a spade a spade, except he falls flat in how to deal with it.  IT’s going to take a lot more than a couple of Fatwa’s….

He goes on:

“What Muslims were talking about last week were the minarets of Switzerland, not the killings of people in Iraq or Pakistan,” noted Mamoun Fandy, a Middle East expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London. “People look for red herrings when they don’t want to look inward, when they don’t want to summon the moral courage to produce the counter-fatwa that would say: stabilizing Iraq is an Islamic duty and bringing peace to Afghanistan is part of the survival of the Islamic umma,” or community.

And then the 60,000 dollar question:

So please tell me, how are we supposed to help build something decent and self-sustaining in Afghanistan and Pakistan when jihadists murder other Muslims by the dozens and no one really calls them out?

A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.

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  • superllama
    gee thanks, whoever you are who wrote this article, for continuing to promote the false idea that the civil war was fought over slavery alone. sure, that was part of it, but read some history, why don't you? it was also fought over state's rights, and taxes, and who got to control the money from those taxes. at the time of the civil war, no northern states allowed blacks to live in them, they all had laws about it. almost all the slave trade was run by companies based in the north. before the civil war, most tax revenue came from the south, but congress spent almost all of it, 80% i think, in the north. there was also the fact that northern cities such as boston and new york were scared that the southern ports of savannah, charleston, and new orleans would lower taxes on imports, thus causing more trade to come to the south instead of the north, and the northern states tried to keep import taxes higher in the south to protect their trade. read some history, it's all there if you only look for it.
  • Don't be a jerk. Did you even read the post? It's from the NY Times and what you're talking about is way off topic. Your comment has nothing to do with the whole purpose of this thread. So get off it. The issue of slavery during the civil war was very important, regardless of your other points.
  • superllama
    oh i read the post. thanks for being so polite with your response, i really do appreciate it. true courtesy like that is hard to find these days. perhaps i got off-topic, yes that could be true. my bad, i'll own it. have a great day and a better tomorrow.
  • Tonto
    There is big trouble brewing between shia and sunni in Iraq. Lots of sunni (from all over) are traveling to Iraq to indulge in the jeehad they're planning on having with the shia, who are the majority there. That will begin as soon as the American kaffirs leave. Iran is getting ready by frantically trying to develop a nuclear weapon and the capability to deliver it. The skinny is that it's all to destroy Israel, but I kind of wonder. They know Israel has over 150 nuke bombs....and ain't afraid to use them. They also know that the rest of the M/E is overwhelmingly sunni....and Iran is shia.....and none of the sunni have nuke bombs. So maybe, it's about Iran keeping itself out of trouble with the wahabi sunni. That would be a big fat threat and add some sucurity to an already paranoid theocracy that is failing.
    That's the problem, and I think SirWilhelm nailed it. There will be a civil war, undoubtedly, in Iraq. Maybe Iran will be drawn into it. We had a mini preview of it back in the 80s when Saddam and the black robes were duking it out to the tune of 8 years and 8 million dead. That was basically shia vs.sunni. But who wins on either side that ain't nuts? Both of those moronic sides are crazy as bed bugs on crack. So yippie-do........they have a civil war in islam. So what?
  • Beejj
    May your words prove to be prophetic, Tonto.
  • Tonto
    I'm sending something to John to send to ya Beejj. Americans grow up with guns.
  • Beejj
    Americans grow up with guns? Thank God for that!!
  • Storm_Rider
    Liberals tend to become more conservative when confronted by the reality of the physical universe, i.e.: the human need for survival and real problem-solving; and when confronted by human evil.

    Only adults who metaphorically remain children continue to be liberals; theirs is a utopian dream world where there are no difficult problems and where there is no human evil. Liberals are ostritches, and will never admit that the lion is approaching; instead they fear and plot against the guard dog.

    Liberals are either intelligently insane or have the sanity of stupidly.

    "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth... Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane." George Orwell, 1984

    "Crimestop... includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity." George Orwell, 1984
  • SirWilhelm
    I see another problem with his analogy. Muslims are all slaves, slaves to Allah. How can slaves free fellow slaves? That's why when Muslims change governments, they don't expect, or usually see, much real change in their daily lives. They are still Muslims, and there is no real freedom in Islam.
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