Fareed Zakaria interviews Barrack Hussein Obama

* Islamo agit prop and  Infil-traitor Fareed Zakaria (how did he become an editor at Newsweek?) interviews the Manchurian candidate Hussein Barrack on Caliphate News Networks:

Obama: “There has been a shift in Islam that I believe is connected to the failures of governments and the failures of the West to work with many of these countries”

Apparently Obama believes that Islamic jihad is a result of U.S. foreign policy failure. This is an assumption that he shares with virtually everyone of any influence in both parties. They all think that this is a problem that we can make go away by doing something or stopping doing something else. The possibility that it might be a problem that doesn’t stem ultimately from our actions and cannot be ended by our actions never seems to occur to anyone.

“CNN exclusive: Obama on foreign policy” — Fareed Zakaria interviews Barack Obama for CNN, July 13: via Jihad Watch

* Spin spin spin: Obama says he used “poor phrasing” on Jerusalem

In other News:

Obama has lost all of the momentum and has dropped into a virtual tie with McCain.  The latest Newsweek poll shows Obama up 44-41, within the margin of error:

 

ZAKARIA: Do you believe, when looking at the world today, that Islamic extremism is the transcendent challenge of the 21st century?

OBAMA: I think the problems of terrorism and groups that are resisting modernity, whether because of their ethnic identities or religious identities, and the fact that they can be driven into extremist ideologies, is one of the severe threats that we face.

I don’t think it’s the only threat that we face.

Who does?

ZAKARIA: But how do you view the problem within Islam? As somebody who saw it in Indonesia … the largest Muslim country in the world?
OBAMA: Well, it was interesting. When I lived in Indonesia — this would be ’67, ’68, late ’60s, early ’70s — Indonesia was never the same culture as the Arab Middle East. The brand of Islam was always different.

But around the world, there was no — there was not the sense that Islam was inherently opposed to the West, or inherently opposed to modern life, or inherently opposed to universal traditions like rule of law.

The problem today is not an opposition of “Islam” to the “rule of law.” It is the resurgence of the Islamic supremacist ideology that has led to a global attempt to replace non-Muslim legal systems with Islamic sharia law — an attempt that is making great headway in Europe and is also going on in the United States, both by violence and by stealth.

Interlude:

obama: Indonesia was never the same culture as the Arab Middle East. The brand of Islam was always different…

Different from what? Like the Kosovo muslims are different from the Pakistan muslims, who are different from the Phillipine muslims, who are different from the Janjaweed muslims, who are different from Shia muslims, who are different from the Chechen muslims, who are different from the Chinese muslims, who are different from the Sunni.
And all of them are different from the Black Muslims , who own a bakery in Oakland Ca.

This almost makes me a dizzy as Obama. Does he stagger, or need help walking?

The only difference between all those ‘different’ kinds of muslims, is a few oceans and mountains.
Ethnically they may vary, but all of them, 100% 
are Abdallahs…slaves to Allah.

I still want to know if Obama thinks Allah is God..If he does, and he religiously believes he is supposed to serve God, then he is a muslim by definition, even if not born into it, or by Shahada.
That may be the reason Bush gets to kiss them and pray in their mosque. ‘Allah is God and Mohammad is his messenger’ are the secret passwords, that allow you to kiss muslims and pray in a mosque.

And now in Indonesia, you see some of those extremist elements. And what’s interesting is, you can see some correlation between the economic crash during the Asian financial crisis, where about a third of Indonesia’s GDP was wiped out, and the acceleration of these Islamic extremist forces.
I.e., poverty causes Islamic jihad. This is an extremely widespread view, although it has been debunked many times. See, for example, here.

It isn’t to say that there is a direct correlation, but what is absolutely true is that there has been a shift in Islam that I believe is connected to the failures of governments and the failures of the West to work with many of these countries, in order to make sure that opportunities are there, that there’s bottom-up economic growth.

* 

Fitzgerald and the global jihad:

I’m going to repeat and repeat and repeat, by postinig here previous postings that go over the same ground, the ground of asking, as the second item, an article, syays, Why Is Jihad Resurgent? -and then answer my own question by going over the three developments that made Jihad, a doctrine that had temporarily fallen into desuetude – not changed, not abandoned — only because the Muslims felt themselves too weak — feasible, and a reality, for Muslims again.

If you’ve read it all before, you may at this point wish to leave the room. I won’t mind. On the other hand, I am convinced that repetition of these matters is necessary to dun them into the world’s brain, or whatever part of it I can persuade to listen:

#1.

“It is amusing that among the unintended consequences of those disgusting jizyah-payments by the E.U. and the inveigled Americans is the strengthening of Hamas, which has thereby lessened, rather than increased, the plausibility and hence the appeal(for the outside world), of the camouflage of “Palestinian nationalism” provided to the Lesser Jihad. The dominance of Hamas, the flight of even those local islamochristians who thought that if only they parrotted, and deeply believed, the Muslim Arab hostility toward Israel, that they would be safe (one more vain attempt by Christians within Dar al-Islam to protect themselves), helps to rip the pseudo-nationalist “legitimate-rights–of-the-Palestinian-people” veil right off the dead-to-the-world face of the Jihad beneath. That Jihad, the Lesser Jihad against tiny Israel, did not require much in the way of resources, and began long ago. It began, that is, before the three things happened that permitted the Arabs and Muslims to openly demonstrate their aggressive intent. Those three things were: one, the trillions in unearned, unmerited oil revenues;

2) the foolishly permitted migration of millions of Muslims behind enemy lines (to the Western world, to Infidel lands, to the Bilad al-kufr); third, technological advances made in the West and exploited by Muslims (audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite channels, the Internet) helped make a reality of the permanent dream of a Greater Jihad.

[Posted by Hugh on January 25, 2006]

#2

An Article:  

Fitzgerald: Why is the jihad resurgent?

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald comments on an intriguing statement of Dr. Nasser bin Suleiman Al-‘Omar:

“The Islamic nation now faces a great phase of Jihad, unlike anything we knew fifty years ago. Fifty years ago, Jihad was attributed only to a few individuals in Palestine, and in some other Muslims areas.” — Saudi cleric Dr. Nasser bin Suleiman Al-‘Omar, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on April 19, 2006.

Why are things different now? The doctrine of Jihad wasn’t suddenly invented. It’s been the same, more or less, for 1350 years. So what happened to make things so very different? Well, some might point to the end of “colonialism.” They might note that the French, after forty years in Morocco and Tunisia, withdrew from both by the mid-1950s, and from Algeria in 1962. They might note that the British garrisons in Aden and elsewhere along the Persian Gulf had been withdrawn, largely for financial reasons (Philip Larkin wrote a poem about it with the memorable line about “the Light Horse of LSE”). But that is not the main thing.

No, the main things which permitted the Jihad to be more than a dim and unattainable (because completely impractical) notion, save in the case of the immediate, local, small-scale Lesser Jihad against Israel, were three:

1) The OPEC oil bonanza. Inshallah-fatalism prevents Arab and Muslim countries from economic development. So they managed to acquire gigantic sums in the only way they possibly could — by accident. That accident of geology has allowed nearly a dozen Arab states to be the recipients of the largest transfer of wealth in human history; OPEC countries have received $10 trillion (in 2006 dollars) in the past one-third of a century. How have they spent it? On wage-slaves, foreigners who come to do all the work. On palaces for the corrupt ruling families and their corrupt courtiers. Play your cards right and you may share the wealth, even if you are not a prince, princeling, or princelette of the Al-Saud family, but a lowly Bin Laden from Yemen, working your way up as a contractor, or a Khashoggi and so many others like him whose “business” began by his being the middleman in arms deals. And there are so many fixers and middlemen in the Arab Gulf states and Saudi Arabia — for that is how the large fortunes are made. On armaments — hundreds of billions of dollars in arms, going to the Muslim states, which are the biggest buyer of foreign arms, year after year, in the world. And mosques, in London and Rome and Paris, and all over the Western world (and the Islamic world too). And madrasas. And campaigns of Da’wa, through generous donations. And Stinger missiles, and guns, and all sorts of things for the training camps in Afghanistan for the Taliban (also helped by generous Saudi donations). And armies of Western hirelings bought up directly or indirectly — public relations experts, former government officials (especially diplomats), journalists, academics. See the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, see the assorted King Abdul Aziz professors and Guardian of the Two Noble Sanctuaries Professors, see the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, see Durham, see Exeter, see Georgetown, see the Edward Said Professorship (Rashid Khalidi, discovered after a “nationwide” search).

2) The millions of Muslims negligently permitted to settle within various countries of Western Europe, deep behind what those Muslims are taught to regard (by Islam itself) as enemy lines: the lines that once defined Dar al-Harb, the House of War or otherwise expressed, the Bilad al-kufr, or Lands of the Infidels. These now tens of millions of Muslims aggressively pursue demands for changes in local laws and mores, in every way — in dress, in family law, in separation of men and women, in the rights which individuals can possess (freedom of speech, free exercise of conscience). They are prepared to exploit the freedoms, political and civil, created by and for the Infidels. Muslims have shown that while the Infidel political system is antipathetic to them (for it locates political power in the consent of the governed, and not in the will of Allah, expressed in the Qur’an as glossed by the stories in the Hadith), they do not hesitate to exploit it. Nor do they hesitate to exploit the very guarantees of rights that they would, if they came to dominate, do away with.

3) The exploitation of technological advances made by Infidels, but used to spread the full disturbing message of Islamic jihad. Thus the Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers used audiocassettes of his speeches, recorded by him in Neauphle-le-chateau. They disseminated throughout Iran while the Shah still ruled. Thus the videocassettes of decapitations of Infidels, and attacks on American soldiers, that have been distributed all over as recruitment tools for the Jihad — apparently, the gorier the better. Thus the use of satellite channels to disseminate hatred of the Infidels — chiefly, but by no means only, Israel and the United States; Denmark has come in for its share, and France for banning the hijab in schools. Any Infidel state or people can expect to be the subject of such a campaign at any time if they dare not to yield to Muslim demands for changes in Infidel rights and laws. And finally, the use of the Internet — a creation of Infidels, exploited by Muslims to wage a war of dominance and subjugation against those very Infidels.

Those are the three new developments.

Jihad itself is not new. It is very old. It is permanent. One cannot end it. One can work to undo the conditions — the oil wealth, the unchecked Muslim presence in the Infidel lands, and the exploitation of Western technology by Muslims — that have made the worldwide Jihad (with many local expressions and theatres of conflict) a reality.

Undoing the past thirty or forty or fifty years, so that Muslims may continue to work for Jihad but with much of the menacing wherewithal stripped from them — that should be the collective goal of all intelligent and informed Infidels.

[Posted by Hugh at May 3, 2006 4:44 PM]

#3.
“Her own view, however, is that ‘following this man [Muhammad] can lead to only one thing, fascism….’
— from the article above
Not “Islamofascism.” Islam. Islam is naturally totalitairian — a total belief-system. If, here and there, in the centuries without technological advances, and thus without the ability to spread the full doctrines of Islam throughout both Dar al-islam and Dar al-Harb, Muslims were able to live as Muslims without necessarily being fully aware of, much less always following, at every step, the doctrines of Islam, today is different. It is different because of three things:

1) the trillions in OPEC oil revenues.

2) the millions of Muslims permitted to settle behind what Islam itself teaches are to be regarded as enemy lines.

3) the technological advances of the Infidel world, including audiocassettes, videocassettes, satelllite television, and the Internet, that make the spread of Muslim propaganda, and of the full undiluted message of Islam, now constantly available to those who might once have been ignorant or unobservant Muslims, reminding them that the full teachings of Qur’an and Hadith are a mere click away, and making the same undiluted message available to Infidels suffering from various degrees of disaffection with the modern world, the West, Kapitalism, The System, Amerika, call it what you will, and who, instead of engaging in intelligent criticism of that undeniably disturbing Western world, and becoming intelligent meliorists, instead throwing it all over for the mental security of those who prefer to have a Total Regulation of Life, a Complete Explanation of the Universe, and the model of a seventh-century Arab, who may or may not have existed (that doesn’t matter, for Muslims believe he existed), as uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. For the mentally lazy, for the psychically marginal, for those yearning to suppress their own individuality in either a Nuremberg Crowd or the umma al-islamiyya, well –Islam’s the thing. It’s the perfect thing, if mental submission, and being Part of a Group, is what appeals to you. Individualists, and all those who like to think and to question rather than to have all the answers handed down from on high, where Allan Knows Best, need not apply.

It’s the perfect belief system for all those who are disaffected and whose only idea of a way out is yearning to be free by becoming part of a Collective. And the habit of submission, and of mental submission, is not the only characteristic of Fascism that Islam exhibits.

For more on this, google “Ibn Warraq” and “Fascism” and “Islam” and read of how closely Islam meets the criteria, as once offered by Umberto Eco, that define Fascism. 
[Posted by: Hugh at June 4, 2006 12:33 PM]
#4.

“the Muslim world was much more secular 100 years ago and fifty years ago than it is now.”
— from Robert’s comment on Paul Johnson above

Fifty years ago, one hundred years ago, the Muslim world was obvously weak, without resources, facing an obviously much more powerful and self-condident West. Those who recognized this and wished to do something about it, were the ones who pushed “reform” in the sense of greater constraint on Islam, and the granting of rights closer to what had been granted in the West to individuals. But the extent of that “reforming” impulse has often been exaggerated, and furthermore, it was undertaken by those who wished not to jettison Islam, but to rescue it from what they took was certain decline, and possibly fall, in relation to that West.

The most important such reformer was Ataturk, who as a result of Turkey’s loss of the Ottoman Empire and obvious weakness, put in place a series of measures designed to constrain the political and social role of Islam in Turkey. But Ataturk could do this only because Turkey was toppling, and he as a war hero, capable of great ruthlessness, could reasonably present himself as impelled — as he was — by nationalist fervor as well as by doubts about Islam. Kemalism essentially replaced the myths of Islam with a mythological cult of The Turk, who had supposedly always inhabited Anatolia and to whom the credit for everything, practically back to the Hittites, should be given. And even before Ataturk’s death in 1938, the cult of Ataturk, which became much greater after that death, was an obvious substitute for the cult of Muhammad as The Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. Primitive masses needed a replacement cult, and they were given it. Islam remained, always present, never quite yielding, and of course it has come back in Turkey with a vengeance, to the alarm of the West, and to those genuine secularists in Turkey who did not realize that the only way to keep Islam down was, from time to time, to employ the methods that only the Turkish army could, and used to, employ. “Democracy” in Muslim Turkey will not do it. 
Those like Abduh and Rida were not quite in the Ataturk mode, but rather something like those Communists who wanted not to replace Communism, but to permit it to avoid the rigidity, say, of Suslovian apparatchiki, in order not to jettison Communist rule but to preserve it.

But that spirit of mild reform was a result only of perceived Muslim weakness. 
Three things have happened to change the perception, by Muslims, of their weakness. They have been dealt with at length here many times before, but perhaps they should again be briefly summarized.

Those three developments are:

1) The oil revenues, the only revenues that could possibly have come to the Muslim states in such amounts, for they required nothing of their beneficiaries, and were simply the result of an accident of geology. Since 1973, the Arab and other Muslim-dominated oil states have received ten trillion dollars. This is the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. The Muslims did nothing to deserve this, though many took the oil bonanza as a deliberate sign of Allah’s favor. With that money, however, they were saved from their natural poverty, the poverty that, with Infidel Jizyah removed, is the natural state of Muslim countries. They bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Western arms, and with those arms, a whole network of middlemen, bribes-givers and bribes-takers, and Western hirelings not only in the arms industries, but also in the business of supplying other goods and services to the suddenly rich oil states. The money became the fabled “wealth” weapon of the Jihad, by which boycotts, and bribery, and the dangling of profitable contracts contributed to creating a vast and loyal constituency among some very influential and meretricious people in the capitals of the West.

2) Almost at the same time as the oil bonanza, the countries of Western Europe allowed millions of Muslim migrants — Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany, Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Indonesians in Holland, and then assorted mix-‘n-match Muslims from all of these places and others, to enter and to settle and to bring their wives, and to have children, children suddenly taken care of, by the free medical care of the Infidel nations, and the free schooling, and the subsidized or free housing, and the attempts, ever greater, ever more frantic, to somehow “integrate” a population that is almost entirley and incurably hostile, because its belief-system, that suffuses the societies and minds of Muslims wherever they are, had taught them to be hostile to the Infidels, no matter what those Infidels may have provided them, no matter how desperate to win their loyalty those Infidel nation-states may have been, unaware that Muslim loyalty according to the tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam, must be given only to fellow Believers, fellow members of the umma al-islamiyya. This was simply not understood, as the older generation of Western scholars of Islam died or retired, and were replaced by new people, people who were very often Muslims themselves, but even where not Muslim, were by their mental formation inclined to favor Islam and the Arabs, not least because of a diseased sympathy for all those who might be seen as members of the Third World, which one might have thought would be a difficult trick for plutocrats in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Libya, and so on to pull off, but pull it off they did. And those millions, now tens of millions, of Muslims in the West have made that West fearful, have inhibited the freedom of its governments not only in domestic but in foreign policy — as one can see from the recent behavior of the French in being so fearful of committing a few thousand troops to Lebanon, where they might be forced to behave in ways that would antagonize the ever-ready-to-riot Muslims within France.

3) Technological advances in the Western world have made it much easier to disseminate the Call to Islam to Infidels, and the full message of Islam to Believers worldwide, and furthermore, to offer propaganda — often of a kind that Infidels find appalling but that apparently work on Believers (who would have thought that decaptitation videos would be eagerly exploited as recruitment tools for those seeking others willing to actively participate in violent Jihad?). 
Without audiocassettes, with his taped sermons urging violence, Khomeini might never have been able to conquer, from Neauphle-le-Chateau in France, so many hundreds of thousands of fanatical followers in Iran. Without videocassettes, and then the Internet, and then the satellite televisiion channels, Arab and Islamic propaganda, of the kind seen on Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar, would not have been so powerful. No longer can simple pious Muslims live in villages, completely unaware of their duties save for the five canonical daily prayers — now the whole of Islam is far more readily available to them, with consequences both for Muslims, and for the Infidels, that are as yet unappreciated. 
And those who argue that the existence of such new technology also makes it possible to influence Muslim minds so that some will have their faith weakened, have not been able to show how any Western government has dared to broadcast the kind of information about the connection between the political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of Muslim societies, and Islam itself. Indeed, one discovers that deep behind enemy lines, Muslims are watching not the regular Western channels, but insisting on getting their news — in Dearborn as in the East End of London, as in the banlieues of Paris and Lyon and Marseille, from Al-Jazeera: willingly, Arab Muslims limit themselves to Arab Muslim propaganda, for only that is “telling the truth.”

These three developments make it impossible for the Arabs and other Muslims to begin to make the connection of their own failures, with Islam itself. Not a single Western government has pointed out — perhaps not a single Western government realizes — that the inshallah-fatalism with which Islam is instinct, explains the failure of these rich oil states, after 33 years (and before that there was already enough wealth derived from oil for a generation to have idled through), to create anything like modern economies, surely needs to be said, to Muslims, and to Infidels who might be inclined to believe that they are somehow to be blamed (the usual inapposite invoking of “colonialism” and that “post-colonialism” that has no sell-by date, still can convince some) for the poverty of some Muslim countries. And the continued payment of foreign aid by Infidels to every Muslim country or entity — Pakistan, Egypt, the “Palestinians” — is merely a disguised Jizyah, and of course should long ago have been abandoned, and the responsibility for helping fellow members of the umma have fallen to the fabulously rich Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other rich Arabs.

What can the Western world do? It cannot assume the kind of blithe optimisim — that incautious, and dangerous optimism, of someone such as Paul Johnson, who though he recognizes what Islam is all about, is perhaps simply too tired to want to figure out how to deal with the problem, for that would require all kinds of mental effort, and prefers to think, with a wave of his hand, that somehow Muslims — despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the fantastic hold Islam has over so many people no matter what is done by Muslims, prompted by Islamic teachings — will “collapse into secularism.”

Johnson has no evidence for this. All he has is a hope. The kind of hope that used to be called, and should still be called, a forlorn hope.

Those who wish to survive as Infidels, who wish that the most primitive adherents of primitive and fossilized belief-systems not be permitted to overwhelm other, superior peoples and civilizations, those who think they have some kind of duty to preserve their own civilizational legacy, will not be comforted by Johnson’s attitude but rather, given his reputation for political steadfastness and sense, feel a certain alarm. Et tu, Johnson — or possibly something a little less banal.

[Posted by: Hugh at August 24, 2006 11:04 PM]

Posted by: Hugh  at July 13, 2008 9:04 PM