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

[Mark Kohut]

Walzer is brilliant about it. And brilliant about the West. Brilliant about
wars, just and unjust.

Just must say.

On Thu, Mar 31, 2016 at 3:44 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> 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
> >
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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