Extremism In Religion and Culture Is Just BAD

Well...I've been busy reading about Islam and trying to get more information. One sided views are never the best and I've been quoting faithfreedom.org quite a bit. That site is essentially ex-Muslim's (apostates?) tearing Islam apart, piece by piece, and I have essentially been doing the same. Some might interpret this as me being prejudice against Islam. No such thing. If you look at the story I did on Judaism and Islamic sibling rivalry, I treat the biblical story regarding Abraham, Isaac and Ishmail to the same historical cynicism.

To me, understanding a religion's historical roots does not mean that someone should not follow the teachings of a particular religion or philosophy. However, I think that it behooves us to understand every aspect of a religion and it's creation so we can pinpoint where that religion stops being a "religion" and starts becoming a political movement or base for a power grab or a bludgeon for hate, prejudice, justification for slaughter or oppression in general.

Let me tell you, in my research I have found that ALL relgions have their extremists.

The Aryan Brotherhood takes passages from the bible (mostly Old Testament) and tries to pass it off as proof that white men were meant to lord it over anyone of color or not of their strict interpretation of Protestant Christianity. Frankly, the most interesting thing I've noticed is the Neo-Nazi youth marching with the anti-war crowd which is in turn full of pro-Palestinian, Communist, Anarchist, anti-Isreal pro-Islamist groups. How these groups subjugate their core beliefs to get together for the purpose of protesting a liberal republic is simply amazing. Having a common enemy seems to be a simple method of unifying disparate groups.

Then, you have the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews who insist on building settlements all over the West Bank and protect it at gun point, insisting that it is their "right" to claim the land because Abraham's 5000 year old "covenant" with God. Extremism anybody? Don't get me wrong, because I think that Isreal has a right to exist and protect itself (including building a wall), but I think when a government allows, or uses, extremist movements to hi-jack the peace process because they don't like some part of it, that government is either complicit or just too damn weak to exist. And here, I apply that liberally to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Frankly, I give more credence to the Israelis because they don't have crazy Jewish guys strapping bombs to themselves and blowing up buses full of children.

Yeah, I know the IDF regularly lobs missiles into homes, bulldozes them to the ground and allegedly rounds up Palestinian babies so they can use their pure blood in an ancient Talmud ritual (sarcasm here: I actually read that on an Islamic site), but I have never, ever, heard nor seen any population but Palestinians teaching their 10 year olds to be suicide bombers. You want sick? That's just sick.

And, no discussion would be complete without mentioning the Islamic extremists who insist that they will rule the world in the second coming of the New Caliphate and want to force Shari'a law on the entire world. And they do, too. I watched an interview the other night on CNN with two young Muslim men in Britain who were claiming that Islamic law for business, finance, etc would replace capitalism in the 21st century. Uh Huh...I think I've heard that one before. Anybody know of any "true" Communist country that exists without the benefit of the greater capitalist world today? No? Me neither. These boys were living in a dream world. Worst yet, they were living in Britain and making it good off the ugly capitalist pigs. They were dressed in Jeans and T-shirts. Very western.

These men were both going on about how freedom made people corrupt and only through the correct application of Islamic law that "protects" people from such corruption would the world be saved.

Everytime I read or hear this, I think back to the Communist propaganda about the people's proletariat and dream of utopia. These folks tend to forget that it is man's nature to have both good and bad behavior that makes these dreams impossible, not laws, political movements or strict religious morals. There will always be some ambitious folks that "corrupt" the pure movement. You want "purity"? You had best move off this planet. Even then, I bet the "pure" movement would be corrupted immediately by one ambitious man or another. Reality check, boys.

Well, the point was not to go off on a tangent about "evil Islam". Islam is no more evil than Christianity, Judaism, Budhism or athiests (just to name a few). But there are always those who would take advantage of a movement and try to turn it to their cause, which is usually a bid for power. Just look at Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. That's a religious movement that uses it's base to retain power. Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Shi'a. Bin Laden and company with their Nasserite/Qutb philosophy (I'll explain this sometime in the near future).

You name it, Islam's got it. So do the rest of them. The only difference is that the Aryan Brotherhood is not about to march out of their little compounds and try to seize the US government and inflict their sick ideology on the rest of us. They try it and they would get their asses handed to them. These Islamist movements are finding out the same thing.

My point here...there are a lot of folks that are throwing around a lot of hateful, prejudice words. Maybe some Muslim would visit this site and say the same thing about my words. Who knows? But, all religions have their nice normal people that believe in God (barring athiests), have faith, live peacefully and never think of shooting somebody for not believing and all religions have nutsos that want to rule the world (or, at least their own little piece of it). So...all those folks in glass houses, throwing your little stones at the glass house of Islam, should back up before you say something or do something to some poor folks that haven't hurt anyone and would never think about it.

President Bush said that this is not a war against religion. Let me repeat that here. It's not. It's a war of ideologies. Freedom vs. 21st centruy slavery. I know. We have heard the words "Islamist Terrorists" for so long, it's easy to start looking for Muslim's and insisting they are terrorists. That's a crying shame. We tried using the word "al-Qaida" to represent this movement, but that was so mixed up with bin Laden directly, people started believing that he was the ONLY one we needed to worry about.

So, what we are missing in our 24hour jingoistic society is a nice round title that denotes our enemy clearly while separating them from the religious base that they draw on for recruits by stopping the words "Islamist terrorist" and give it recognizable name for the general populace to associate their evil plans and ideology. Then, you go about it like an election campaign. This is what the moderate Muslim's believe and this is what the enemy believes. Show the difference and then name the enemy something other than "Islamist Terrorist". I don't like the word "terrorist" either. Terror is a tactic not a political movement. We need to name this political movement and separate it from Islam.

Maybe we should call it "Qutbism" after it's Egyptian philosopher instead of Islamists or something similar we can sink our teeth into? What do you think? Anybody got any ideas on what we could call this thing?