Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 6:10 AM CST

Many possible names for this condition. I call it Tertiary Moral Syphilis (TMS).

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 7:49 AM CST

I am still reading this, but I was interested in the three or so paragraphs after the one you quoted, since I have referred here to Prof. Pape and his book Dying to Win based on his earlier paper,"The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism". Peters says:

"...honorable men and women have convinced themselves that Osama bin Laden's professed goals of driving the United States from the Middle East and removing corrupt regional governments are what global terror is all about. They gloss over his ambition of reestablishing the caliphate and his calls for the destruction of Israel as rhetorical effects--when they address them at all."

Peters is arguing that the religious extremists are irrational and their motives are beyond logical understanding. He does not understand religion, insofar as he has confused the non-rational with the irrational.

Secondly, the motivations of terrorists need not be exclusively religious. Their motives have a real-world basis or frame of reference. We do not have to become Islamic fundamentalists to understand their motivations and motives.

Thirdly, pragmatism does not require that we gloss over OBL's goal of a world caliphate or write off anti-Israeli rhetoric as empty (Although Israel-focussed terrorism is a separate phenomenon with separate issues and a separate agenda from "global terror," i.e., Islamist terrorism of the Al Qaeda variety which threatens us). In fact, it requires that we pay more attention to it and more than we were doing before 9/11.

At the same time we are also not required to believe naively that what OBL says to his minions is literally true as stated. Much of what we hear on his tapes is after all Al Qaeda inside baseball. The attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were not intended to bring about regime change in the United States, to make America an Islamic country under Osama Bin Laden as the centerpiece of the world caliphate. They were not an attack on our freedom or way of life. They were not the opening battle in a clash of civilizations. They were a response to specific real-world American policies and primarily to the presence of tens of thousands of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, which Osama used to recruit mujahideen veterans to fight his glorious victory in Afghanistan all over again by painting us as equivalent to the Russians. We have since then fallen right into his trap, proving ourselves to be exactly what he said we were.

It's the occupation; not the fundamentalism.

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 8:40 AM CST

More examples from Peters:

"Our struggle with Islamist terror (other religious terrors may haunt our descendants) has almost nothing to do with our actions in the Middle East. It's about a failing civilization's embrace of a furious god."

This is completely in error.

"Even if we understood every nuance of our enemy's culture, the suicide bomber's intense faith and the terror chieftain's visions have burned through native cultural restraints...But our enemies enjoy a faith as vivid as did our ancestors, for whom devils lurked in the undergrowth and paradise was an idealized representation of that which mortals knew. We are taught that we should never underestimate our enemies--yet, we underestimate the power of his faith, his most potent weapon...Faith is the great strategic factor that unbelieving faculties and bureaucracies ignore. It may be the crucial issue of this century. And we cannot even speak about it honestly. Give me a warrior drunk with faith, and I will show you a weapon beyond the dreams of any laboratory."

Peters is completely wrong. He has it exactly backwards: the facts show that religion has almost nothing to do with suicide terrorism. Pape studied 187 acts of suicide terrorism worldwide, every suicide attack that occured between 1987 and 2001. Muslim terrorists did not even account for a majority of the attacks, for one thing. Seventy-five of the attacks were committed by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist insurgency in Sri Lanka, most of its members being nominal Hindus. Pape describes them as the world-leaders in suicide terrorism. (Peters alludes to them and assumes their motives are religious). The universal goal of suicide terrorism is the removal of foreign military occupation troops from land which the terrorists hold to be sacred home soil. That's what 9/11 was about.

The image of the suicide terrorist as a crazed religious fanatic sacrificing his life in a religious frenzy to attain paradise surrounded by wide-eyed houris is simply wide of the mark and of the facts. They are primarily young men (some women) who are angry about foreign occupiers on their homeland. Some are highly educated professionals (engineers, physicians, technicians). Some are youth facing a life of zero prospects in occupied lands. The one thing they all have in common is the wish to strike back at a detested occupation. They may be religious individuals, but their aims are political, real-world.

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 8:44 AM CST

Corr: 1980-2001

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 8:57 AM CST

> The Christian and the atheist are the same thing to Mo: infidels.

Actually, this is not accurate. The atheist is an infidel. The Christian and the Jew are allowed to be mere dhimmi, if they accept the position and follow the rules.

The atheist is to be killed outright. The Christian and the Jew are allowed to become 3rd-rate members of Islamic culture.

Pardon me if I don't particularly find that appealing, but it does give me and mine options these **Useful Idiots** don't have...

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 9:30 AM CST

> They were a response to specific real-world American policies and primarily to the presence of tens of thousands of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula

Rider, I can't tell if you're a nitwit or just stating a rational observation of an Arab view you don't really concur with as accurate. It's probably the former, but I'll presume the latter.

If we were on the Arabian Peninsula prior to 911, then it was entirely at the behest of the specific state in question, generally because of alliances formed with us to protect them from threats of other *Arab* nations (to wit: Iraq, Syria).

To equate our presence in these locations as equivalent to the Russian presence in Afghanistan in the 80s is lunacy (the same sort which equates Abu Ghirab with Saddam's tortures). That may be one which certain Arabs have bought into, but no rational, well-informed individual would buy it (hence my uncertainty -- you aren't clear as to whether you are stating their lone view of things or one you concur with)

As far as your interpretation of the geographic nature of the various acts of terrorism, you are being totally disingenuous (which suggests that you are the sort of nitwit I think you are), by limiting the issue to a narrow range of acts (suicide terrorism) which has alternative sources/causes, you attempt to distract from the very real fact that most terrorism derives from the interface between Islam and "just about everyone else", and derives from fanatical Islam in particular because it is singularly well-suited towards inflexibility-induced violence.

This isn't about policies.

It's not even about Islam.

It's about the inherent inflexibility of *fanatical* Islam and its propensity for violence as a response.

One of the more unfortunate questions is whether or not we can reliably differentiate between fanatical Islam and moderate Islam, since the latter are sufficiently non-vocal as to appear almost non-existent.

We cannot allow the assymetry to continue. We cannot stand by and ignore Islam's manufactured* "outrage" at these trivial cartoons:
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004413.htm
at the same time we ignore these vile, despiccable excuses for pandering to Islamic hatred:
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/ArabCartoons.htm


'nuff said.
========================================================
* I say manufactured for two reasons:
1) Much of the outrage occurred as a result of recent showings by Imams not just of those cartoons above but others which were apparently more offensive but did NOT appear with the Dutch cartoons in question... the viewers were deliberately misled to believe that the Dutch had published them all.
2) This well-founded observation:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/02/04/do0402.xml

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 10:13 AM CST

Sorry if I didn't make that clear. The comparison to the Russians was OBL's. It was a lie of course. But it looked close enough that he could use it for recruiting purposes. He was an American-funded mujahideen recruiter. We gave him his Rolodex to fight the Russians. He then turned against us and used his old Defending-Against-The-Foreign-Infidel rhetoric to recruit fighters for his new campaign.

Our troops were in Saudi Arabia to protect the Saudi regime and particularly the oil supply (without which Saudi Arabia would be so much kitty litter in our eyes). Saudi Arabia allowed us to establish bases, but they had to be low-profiled as much as possible, out of public view. It's reasonable to assume that Bush saw Iraq as a more reasonable alternative for American bases.

This is all about policies. 95% of the Muslim terrorists in the world were created in the last three years by Bush's invasion of Iraq. The longer they are there, the greater the likelihood of another 9/11. The railing about radical fundamentalism, while it may be gratifying to you, is completely irrelevant.

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 9:52 PM CST

The name of your sacred cow appears to be Inviolable Territoriality. Is that correct? Conservative and ultra-conservative Muslims have somehow acquired, in your mind, an unquestionable immunity to the give and take of global culture and commerce. Their lands are not to be profaned by the presence of pork-eating GIs or menstruating American women, right?

You have the mentality of a dhimmi on this point, Rider. You have accepted the definitions of those who hate anything that differs from or challenges radical Islam.

In sociological terms, you have bought into the notion of their "noble savagery;" you believe in their delusions of piety as deeply as they do.

Why?

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 9:56 PM CST

Bandersnatch:

The atheist is an infidel. The Christian and the Jew are allowed to be mere dhimmi, if they accept the position and follow the rules.

Yeah, but dhimmitude depends on infidelity. Still, I accept your distinction: Jews and Christians are still the children of Abraham.

Thanks for your passionate comments here.

Sunday, 5 February 2006 - 10:05 PM CST

If these terrorists aren't motivated by their religious beliefs, then they sure have a funny way of convincing everybody in the world otherwise.