(np) What the Slaughter of Christians in Lahore Says About the Global Jihad

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

But has "the non Islamic West", these years and decades, ever killed 
Muslims - including Muslim children - on a high Muslim holiday, like 
Sugar Feast or Feast of Sacrifice, just because they were Muslims and 
not Christians?

I don't think so.

Perhaps we all are, if we want it or not, by now involved in a new 
world-war inspired by religion.  It's a very inconvenient perspective, 
but I cannot rule it out.


On 31.03.2016 09:44, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> To me this is completely one-sided. The non Islamic West has initiated as much violence as the Islamists. Killing, theft and torture, regime change,drones, suicide bombers -It is a cycle not in any way limited to Islamists.  Fascism takes many forms and is working powerfully within the many factions at play in these wars.
>> On Mar 29, 2016, at 6:27 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Maajid Nawaz:
>>
>>> ... A jihadist guerrilla war is being waged against world order, and the international community is woefully unprepared to address the problem.
>> Many still deny this insurgency exists, and it is true that these countries have locally specific factors that contribute to their respective insurgent conditions. Yes, the groups behind these attacks are not under one central leadership, rather they are either affiliates or offshoots of competing jihadist groups.
>>
>> But they all share one cause.
>>
>> They are all—including ISIS—derived from, or affiliated to just two jihadist groupings: al Qaeda and the Taliban. In turn, jihadists all drink from the same doctrinal well of widespread, rigid Wahhabism. And they share the ideological aims of popular non-terrorist Islamists. They are all unified behind a theocratic desire to enforce a version of Sharia as law over society. Considering that non-violent Wahhabi and Islamist Muslims exist in their millions globally, this drastically increases the potential recruitment pool for jihadists. The insurgency could not succeed were this not so. There is no use in denying it.
>>
>> For many years, liberals—and I speak as one—have refused to acknowledge the ideology of Islamism. All talk of “ideas” was seen to be nothing but a “neocon” line taken directly from the worst excesses of the George W. Bush years.
>>
>> Ironically, due to this very fear of political incorrectness we wound up repeating many of the mistakes of the neocon era. While we feared to engage in a debate on values with Muslim communities, we tried to restrict the problem to the realm of mere criminality, as something to be dealt with by law enforcement or, failing a solution there, by the military—and ultimately by war, even if that word went unspoken. Under this doctrine, President Barack Obama developed a secret kill-list, preferring simply to assassinate his enemies, even if they were American citizens, and he has dispatching more drone strikes abroad than Bush ever did.
>> Anything to avoid discussing ideas.
>>
>> And so, as this global jihadist insurgency became impossible to ignore, we liberals reluctantly, euphemistically began naming the problem “violent extremism.” We used nauseating, limp State Department-coined phrases such as “al-Qaeda-inspired extremism” to refer to what was clearly an ideology. But as the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in his Pakistani hideout proved, we cannot arrest nor shoot our way out of this problem. “Defeating” al Qaeda was only ever going to give rise to a group like ISIS, because it was not al Qaeda that had “inspired extremism”; it was extremism that had inspired al Qaeda.
>>
>> Our failure to recognize this as a civilizational struggle—one centered around values—has allowed the fundamentalist problem of Wahhabism, and the political problem of Islamism, to fester and metastasize. This struggle is an ideological one before it is a military or legal one. Vague platitudes that this has nothing to do with Islam—my own religion—are as unhelpful as saying that this is the essence of Islam. Extremism certainly has something to do with Islam. Not nothing, not everything, but something.
>>
>> The Lahore bombing underscores the very religious character of the jihadists’ fanaticism. This was not about alienation in a European ghetto, or revenge for American and European airstrikes in the Middle East— the secular-sounding explanations offered as the motivations of people like those who carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks. Lahore was about pure, vicious religious intolerance, killing Christians—including Christian children—on Easter Sunday because they were Christians and not the kind of Muslims the murderers claim to be ... <
>>
>> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/28/what-the-slaughter-of-christians-in-lahore-says-about-the-global-jihad.html?via=twitter_page
>>
>>
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