London calling--long reply

[EVERETT813 at aol.com]

Jon,

Just as it is for me, personally, peace is an inside job.   Until the Muslim 
societies do what Mr. Friedman talks about in the below editorial, we are 
going to be in this assymetrical warfare, tacitly supported by Muslim's the world 
over.   Remember the Palestinians dancing in the streets when 9/11 occurred?   
That attitude toward the West hasn't gone away.   Muslim societies MUST make 
this terrorism a totally unacceptable response to real or imagined grievances, 
just as North Ireland's courageous ladies are beginning to do there.   Just 
as the West did when it intervened in Kosovo, on the side of the Muslims there. 
  

Peace is an inside job.   There is no peace where expansionist Muslim 
societies rub up against others of different beliefs in many parts of the world.   
There is a bad litany of religious violence all over Africa, Asia and SE Asia 
where others believe differently than the Muslim's do.   The idea that religion 
can be spread by violence is what must also be confronted by the Muslim 
leadership itself.   The world is NOT going to become Muslim, no matter how much 
Osama and his ilk think it should be.   Or, the folks in Sudan think it should 
be.   Or, in Indonesia.   The rest of the world will fight back.   If it gets 
really grim, tens of millions will die.   Huntington's theses will have been 
proven true, to the great detriment of the world's peoples.   

So, the solution is for the Muslim folks to decide they aren't the only Way 
to God around this planet (true of the right wing Christian folk, too, but they 
aren't out blowing up themselves, initiating slaughters like in Darfur, 
Nigeria, etc.) and decide that want to live in harmony and peace with their 
neighbors, who just happen to believe differently than they do.   I'm sure the 
majority of them do want peace and harmony.   But, the truth is, many don't.   Those 
who do had better start speaking out and saying so in loud words that have 
the impact like the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie, who had to go into 
hiding to save his life.

These are un-PC comments, I realize, but they are reflections of what I see 
in the world where Muslim's dominate or are trying to dominate.   The recent 
reports by the UN, done by Muslim scholars, give strong evidence that some 
people do see that their societies are the creators of their own problems.   Only 
one example: disenfranchisement of women in nearly all those societies (but not 
all, I realize, Turkey a real exception) for education, choice of husband, 
choice of whether or not to have a family, female genital mutilation, etc.; a 
whole half of their population repressed in ways we can't even comprehend.   
They detail these kinds of repressive practices.   And the lack of societal hope 
because of their dictatorial governments, which the West has supported and 
condoned, to their detriment, too.

Peace is an inside job, everywhere.

Paul Everett

July 8, 2005
If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Yesterday's bombings in downtown London are profoundly disturbing. In part, 
that is because a bombing in our mother country and closest ally, England, is 
almost like a bombing in our own country. In part, it's because one assault may 
have involved a suicide bomber, bringing this terrible jihadist weapon into 
the heart of a major Western capital. That would be deeply troubling because 
open societies depend on trust - on trusting that the person sitting next to you 
on the bus or subway is not wearing dynamite.

The attacks are also deeply disturbing because when jihadist bombers take 
their madness into the heart of our open societies, our societies are never again 
quite as open. Indeed, we all just lost a little freedom yesterday.

But maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When 
jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is 
a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to 
the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim 
living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential 
walking bomb. And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be 
tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations.

That, too, is deeply troubling. The more Western societies - particularly the 
big European societies, which have much larger Muslim populations than 
America - look on their own Muslims with suspicion, the more internal tensions this 
creates, and the more alienated their already alienated Muslim youth become. 
This is exactly what Osama bin Laden dreamed of with 9/11: to create a great 
gulf between the Muslim world and the globalizing West.

So this is a critical moment. We must do all we can to limit the 
civilizational fallout from this bombing. But this is not going to be easy. Why? Because 
unlike after 9/11, there is no obvious, easy target to retaliate against for 
bombings like those in London. There are no obvious terrorist headquarters and 
training camps in Afghanistan that we can hit with cruise missiles. The Al 
Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, 
something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely 
distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells.

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there 
are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the 
Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - 
if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is 
going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by 
simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst 
guilty until proven innocent.

And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim 
world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If 
it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, 
it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim 
world can root out that death cult. It takes a village.

What do I mean? I mean that the greatest restraint on human behavior is never 
a policeman or a border guard. The greatest restraint on human behavior is 
what a culture and a religion deem shameful. It is what the village and its 
religious and political elders say is wrong or not allowed. Many people said 
Palestinian suicide bombing was the spontaneous reaction of frustrated Palestinian 
youth. But when Palestinians decided that it was in their interest to have a 
cease-fire with Israel, those bombings stopped cold. The village said enough 
was enough.

The Muslim village has been derelict in condemning the madness of jihadist 
attacks. When Salman Rushdie wrote a controversial novel involving the prophet 
Muhammad, he was sentenced to death by the leader of Iran. To this day - to 
this day - no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa 
condemning Osama bin Laden.

Some Muslim leaders have taken up this challenge. This past week in Jordan, 
King Abdullah II hosted an impressive conference in Amman for moderate Muslim 
thinkers and clerics who want to take back their faith from those who have 
tried to hijack it. But this has to go further and wider.

The double-decker buses of London and the subways of Paris, as well as the 
covered markets of Riyadh, Bali and Cairo, will never be secure as long as the 
Muslim village and elders do not take on, de-legitimize, condemn and isolate 
the extremists in their midst.

*
*
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