[Bill Carpenter]

Ed,
As the pop classic says: "... put a little love in your heart./ And the world / will be a better place..."

I'm afraid too many people in high places take American exceptionalism to mean immunity from common sense, natural law, and karmic consequences. It's supposed to go the other way, with our government by the consent of a moral majority (a republic not an empire) enabling us to curb the appetites of the mighty.

[Andrew Frisardi]

The most nuanced article that I’ve seen on the topic of what’s particular about contemporary Islamist terrorism.

Thoughts?

[Janice D. Soderling]

Andrew, thanks for this.

I don't think there is one single reason these young people--some poor and unemployed, others highly educated and with good jobs--become terrorists. Rather I think each one has put together an individual complex of reasons.

Almost everyone, no matter their origins, religion, nation, wishes to feel personal pride for one's self and that which defines one's own group: race, religion, country, goals. I think it cannot be denied that there is something in the human psyche (perched right alongside that longing for a Great Controller) that considers it a noble cause to right the perceived wrongs and insults to one's self and one's tribe.

That is why there are feuds, vendettas, clan wars, Protestants killing Catholics, Shiites killing Sunnis, Serbs killing Bosnians, Jews killing Palestines, Rwandas killing Hutus--and vice versa. As Bush and countless others have said, "You are for us or against us." (Another example of regrettable rhetoric.)

When vengeance is enacted by OUR side it is perceived as good, anyone's "our side". When it is enacted by the "Other", our enemy (again, anyone's perceived enemy) it is terrorism and barbaric and beyond the range of understanding.

Who is not moved by the Christmas truce of 1914 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

Everyone Sang

By Siegfried Sassoon
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.


If only they would have stopped right there and not returned to senseless slaughter. How different our world might have been. Imagine if Harry Truman has just filmed an atomic explosion and sent it to the Japanese, instead of sending the bomb itself. Yes, I am speculating, but there is always more than one path of action in the beginning.

I am in NO WAY condoning terrorist actions but if you approach it psychologically, if you look at the situation through the eyes of these (mostly) men, you might understand more about the fertile ground in which radicalization can occur.

The terrorists perceive the west as having declared themselves to be enemies of Islam and their way of life. I remember how appalled I was to hear the post 9/11 Bush rhetoric when he used the word "crusade". Millions of westernized Muslims and other in their own countries who had nothing to do with bringing down the World Trade Center heard this word as Christians hear the word "jihad".

And then the choice of singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Y9NGXxdAg . That sent a bellicose message to everyone watching who was the "Other". Consider the message in the words of that song. In England, it was also sung by the archbishop of Canterbury and those gathered in the church in a (as we westerners saw it) manifestation of solidarity with the United States. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmpo0csiIMs

I know it isn't easy when the nation is in shock, but in the immediate aftermath (IMO) the opportunity to gather the support of a shocked world was wasted. What the moment called for was to establish a strong coalition between the two faiths, all faiths. Instead there was the invasion of Afghanistan, where the soviets had already been for ten years, and before them the British had fought, and the United States took on the role of vengeful aggressor with all the enemy-making potential that implies.

The drones, so these young terrorists might reason, also kill innocent "soft targets". and they see no difference between blowing up someone standing right in front of them or blowing up someone who doesn't even know they are in the crosshairs an ocean away. Dead is dead. They might even find it more honorable and braver to put their life on the line than to kill from a safe distance.

Which brings me to a thought I've been turning over in my mind. Because the suicide bomber kills himself along with his victims, there is never anyone who might repent in the agonizing throes of PTDS. The jihadist contingency sees only martyrdom, there is never any survivor who is overcome with remorse when he realizes what he has done against innocent people. It is the defectors from a cult who open doubt in the minds of the other members.

It isn't so difficult, I think, to find in any given group "idealists" who are susceptible to brainwashing and willing to offer their lives. This isn't a new weapon. The Japanese kamikaze pilots considered it a death of honor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze

Consider the early Christian martyrs depicted in countless horrific art museums throughout Europe and elsewhere. Eyeballs and severed breasts held out on a tray, flayings, drawn and quarterings. And then when that religion got the upper hand, it did the same to others: burning at the stake, the iron maiden, disembowelment. Nowhere is there any high moral ground available for the claiming.

Consider this scene in Saving Private Ryan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY61XmDJ-1w

That clip doesn't include the close-up of the soldier kissing the crucifix he wore, but even as he was reciting the twenty-first psalm and killing people he knew he was on a suicide mission.

No, it isn't difficult to understand the process of radicalization of young men, but a country's leaders and top advisors as well as the ordinary citizens should exercise forethought.

ISIS wants us to turn against the Muslims who live peacefully among us. We must love one another or die. We must.

Them's me thoughts.

PS. I have corrected some typos and clarified some foggy sentences and added some afterthought.

[Bill Carpenter]

Here, Janis: Judy Garland singing the Hymn I.m. JFK. IT must be Nov. 23 where you are. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e4Xz7WV_qJs

[Andrew Frisardi]

I cringe at the phrase at the beginning of the article (three posts back) which suggests that Islamist terrorists are uniquely evil or sadistic. This is obviously false, since the Ku Klux Klan or the Albigensian crusaders of the twelfth century, to name two, are/were easily as brutal and sadistic. But I found much of the article insightful.

The author argues, persuasively I feel, that it is not going to help either Muslims or non-Muslims to say: “The terrorists aren’t real Muslims.” On the contrary, Wahhabism/Salafism is considered by its adherents as hyper-Islam. And there is no reason that we can’t consider what it is in modern Islamic politics and culture that makes that ideology so appealing to so many, without turning on the Muslims who are our neighbors and co-citizens. Just as criticizing the corrupt power structures of the medieval Church wasn’t tantamount to trashing good and ordinary Christians.

As the Atlantic article Bill Lantry linked to at the start of this thread says, it’s an avoidance of what ISIL is about simply to say, “That’s not Islam.” Of course it’s not enlightened Islam which facilitates spiritual realization, any more than the Albigensian Crusade in the twelfth century was real Christianity. And yet the people who undertook that crusade were Christians, in their own view. A sickness within Christendom itself—ultimately the corruption of the papacy—made it possible for those crusades to happen. The fact that most Christians at that time were ordinary people with more or less devout, honest lives didn’t mean there wasn’t a systemic problem. There was: and plenty of people spoke up about it. Eventually, this would lead to the Reformation. Maybe the papacy for modern Islam is Saudi Arabia.

Right-wing Islamophobia in the U.S. lately has been sickening, but it won’t do either to gloss over the fact that the violent extremism which threatens us most these days, and Muslims most of all, is Islamic violent extremism. It doesn’t hurt anyone to question where that’s coming from. And to bring up George W. Bush’s “crusade” statement and other parallels is to revert to generalities. The Ku Klux Klan took root in a context, not only in some generalized “Us-Other” reality. Criticizing American triumphalism is a good thing to do, but the only thing we really learn by noting the universal theme of human stupidity and lust for power is that it’s universal. Then each instance of it has to be dealt with in its own specific terms.

And I think the article, despite its extravagant opening, has something worthwhile to say along these lines.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Andrew, I thought the article was nuanced and accessible. Thank you for linking to it and on a selfish level I want to especially thank you for introducing me to the author of the article, Kenan Malik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_...eaning_of_Race Any friend of the Enlightenment is a friend of mine. I did not know about his writing and am looking forward to reading more.

As a scientific author, his focus is on the philosophy of biology, and contemporary theories of multiculturalism, pluralism and race. These topics are core concerns in The Meaning of Race (1996), Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) and Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate (2008).

His work contains a forthright defence of the values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, which he sees as having been distorted and misunderstood in more recent political and scientific thought.

I fully concur with him and with you on this: that it is not going to help either Muslims or non-Muslims to say: “The terrorists aren’t real Muslims.”

Yet daily, I see and hear demands in print and in the public and social media that the individual Muslims and their collectives do exactly that. And I hear, also on a daily basis, Muslim voices explaining over and over that Islam is not Jihadism.

I agree with you also that Jihadism is a very real threat and that Wahhabism feeds it by exporting radical imams to peaceful congregations in Western (and other) countries. And Saudi Arabia leaders in turn protect and support it in the hope that they will be left alone, though any fool can see that they are a potential target and they will be toppled when the time is ripe. I also believe that the west has turned an equally blind eye to Saudi beheadings, stoning and double-dealing because of the oil.

Looking further afield, ridding the world of its dependency on oil is not only good for the climate. So the sooner we rid ourselves of dependency on fossil fuel, the better, and fracking be damned.

I don't want to go off-track into climate change for that deserves a thread of its own, but as an aside, it would help to start curbing the wasteful Western life-style. It doesn't make sense that on a hot day, the air conditioning is so high in restaurants and shops that you freeze without a sweater—and then swelter back to an air-conditioned car and home. Or that the city dumps and landfills are gorged with broken plastic items that no one ever needed anyway.

Despite the loud noises made by the Tea Partyers and their likes, it was the ideas of the Enlightenment that influenced the Constitution of the new United States, a society based upon reason rather than faith and religious doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for science based on experiments and observation. The idea of a separation of powers in a government was also a thought-child of the Enlightenment.

So thanks again for the article, well worth reading and reflecting upon.

PS. Another topic that veers off this one yet is related is that poverty and system collapse is a logical outcome of wealth concentration.

I have been hearing a lot of ballyhoo in the media lately (thanks to the World Bank and others) that fewer people are living in poverty now than in recent years. To which I say, yeah, right! The poorest ones have all died off through starvation or war.

[Andrew Frisardi]

The idea of a separation of powers in a government was also a thought-child of the Enlightenment.

It's true that this is when it came to fruition, Janice, but actually the idea was argued forcefully four centuries earlier by one Dante Alighieri. The work in which he argued it, Monarchia, was publicly burned in Bologna a couple years after his death and was banned by the Church until the nineteenth century.

I had the same reaction as you did to the discovery of that author. He's impressive.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, Erik for your post. I wrote a reply that disappeared so I'll try to briefly recap.

As in all communication, context is everything. A problem with online discussions is that it is like ad lib conversation, only we cannot see each other's face. If I were writing for "real" publication I would let my thoughts set at least overnight and read through many times, each time making major or minor adjustments.

So it well may be that I did not express my point as well as I thought I did. I wanted to simply say that one should strive in any discussion to consider the topic from the other fellow's viewpoint.

Yes, it is true that one often, nowadays, hears "crusade" coming from the jihadist faction and the bellicose Western loudmouths, but that was not the case in 2001. It was then used as a euphemism for "making a special effort", and outside the ranks of the evangelicals was understood in the dictionary sense: "any vigorous, aggressive movement for the defense or advancement of an idea, cause, etc.: a crusade against child abuse."

When introduced into the public discourse by political and religious leaders following the destruction of the twin towers, the word acquired a political and contemporary shift in meaning. I may remember incorrectly, but I believe Mr. Bush used the word a number of times in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

In the same way, or so I believe, the singing of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by large crowds that included political and religious leaders left differing impressions within various audiences.

I was in the Dominican Republic walking along the beach listening to a transistor radio when the music was interrupted by an announcement. I thought: They can't possibly be saying what I think I am hearing. (The announcement was, of course, in Spanish.) Because who could have dreamed such a nightmare scenario could happen. But when I got back to where I was staying the desk clerk asked at once, without the usual polite preliminaries, if I had heard the news.

I spend the next few days glued to the television in a little open air shack, mostly alone but not always. The interest in a news event is usually determined whether or not it has an impact on us. When someone else joined me they would look for a while, express disbelief and sympathy for the New Yorkers and then go on their way. But I was totally mesmerized, because it was about me. Probably the positions would have been reversed if it has been about a plane flying into the Vatican; I write that with no disrespect for the life of the Pope or the religion.

Another incident is etched on my mind. I was in Cambridge, in England, when another war or major war incident was started or ongoing. I don't remember which, there have been so many, shades of George Orwell. Anyway, I was staying at a hostel where, as all hostellers know, the atmosphere is international. The television room was packed for the evening news. It would not be risky to bet that a good number of people in the room were Muslim. A young American sat on the floor right in front of the television muttering, and then burst out, "Bomb them back to the stone age." He looked around but no response was forthcoming. So he said it again, in a louder voice. Perhaps he thought that, being in England, he was among like-minded. He said it a third time at the end of the newscast and still got no response so he lumbered out of the room.

I hope you will forgive me for using some personal experiences which do not, in fact, prove anything, but I hope will illustrate my point that each listener filters though his own subjective filter when he hears words, or songs, or sees symbols.

***

Apologies for the oversized typeface. It wasn't intended and I've corrected it now. I hope I didn't turn it into teeny-tiny.

[Erik Olson]

The nature of online discussions has that limitation you give it, an ad lib conversation without seeing each others faces is an apt characterization. As for the personal illustrations you relate, they are quite interesting so I thank you for sharing. I consider the personal element of our relation to symbols no less valid or worth mention than other aspects I might add.
Best,
Erik