What's the right World Islam policy/strategy?

[TranaGreg]

the correct answer is a combination of 3 + 6.

[B-Fly]

For what it's worth, it would appear the Libyan government is taking quite seriously its obligation to do everything in its power to work with us and catch those responsible for the killings. For all my continued skepticism about the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya and Egypt, I don't know that the current Libyan government is to blame here, although at some point I'd hope to see an assessment by both Libyan and US authorities about what could have been done differently that may have prevented this from escalating to the point it did in the first instance. We'll still have to see how things develop in Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere.

[Roto Rooter]

Like their cousins the Jews and the Christians, many Muslims have a martyr complex. That needs to be addressed because it becomes a psychological impediment to enculturation.

Problem is the Muslim martyr blows up the Jews and Christians.

[Roto Rooter]

For what it's worth, it would appear the Libyan government is taking quite seriously its obligation to do everything in its power to work with us and catch those responsible for the killings. For all my continued skepticism about the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya and Egypt, I don't know that the current Libyan government is to blame here, although at some point I'd hope to see an assessment by both Libyan and US authorities about what could have been done differently that may have prevented this from escalating to the point it did in the first instance. We'll still have to see how things develop in Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere.

Of course they are. They have a bank roll to to think about.

[Roto Rooter]

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/13/13842406-man-behind-anti-islam-film-reportedly-is-egyptian-born-ex-con?lite

So an Egyptian coptic christian made this stupid movie and the USA gets blamed and 4 more of its citizens die on 9/11.

[JudeBaldo]

Problem is the Muslim martyr blows up the Jews and Christians.

Islam does not have a monopoly on violent radicalism.

[Roto Rooter]

Islam does not have a monopoly on violent radicalism.

The past few decades it does.

[GwynnInTheHall]

The past few decades it does.

Yeah christian radicals just have spent those decade killing doctors, blowing up Govt bldgs and inciting violence in other extremists.

[Roto Rooter]

Yeah christian radicals just have spent those decade killing doctors, blowing up Govt bldgs and inciting violence in other extremists.

You're talking hunderds of events vs a handful. Radicals in any form are bad however there is one with a sustained campaign.

[GwynnInTheHall]

You're talking hunderds of events vs a handful. Radicals in any form are bad however there is one with a sustained campaign.

when did the crusades begin?

[JudeBaldo]

You're talking hunderds of events vs a handful. Radicals in any form are bad however there is one with a sustained campaign.

Here's the issue though, it APPEARS and is PERCEIVED as hundreds because Muslims actually believe themselves to be in state of constant war.

[Roto Rooter]

when did the crusades begin?

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Yeah lets compare the crusades to modern day terrorism.

[Roto Rooter]

Here's the issue though, it APPEARS and is PERCEIVED as hundreds because Muslims actually believe themselves to be in state of constant war.

So you deny that there have been HUNDREDS of suicide bombings and mass terrorists events by Muslims in the name of Islam and Allah over the past few decades compared to any other religious based violent attack?

[B-Fly]

This is the most interesting comment of the thread, to my mind, so far. I'd like to see it fleshed out a little more if Bhob has time.

I don't know that we can have much success convincing the true believers not to hate us and those who are so inclined to attempt terrorist acts against us. But I do think that the majority of the world's Muslims, even in the countries most prone to sympathy for terrorism, can be nudged away from support for violence. That in itself is no easy task, but I don't think it's a strategy that we should abandon entirely.

[Bob Kohm]

The roots of the radicalization of Islam, to me, lay in hopelessness. This hopelessness first blossomed to its potential for disaster in the Palestinian refugee camps in the 70s & 80s. Here you had a critical mass of young men who had no hope for a productive life-- they were denied almost any chance for economic opportunity, jobs, no real hope of ever owning land, no support from their brother Arabs and nothing but hostility from the Israelis who were dwelling on what they perceived was their land. Take that mix of frustration, anger and hopelessness for a better future and mix it with the stark message of Wahabbism that flowed out of Saudi Arabia and the seeming Islamic "win" (even if it was for the Shi'a) that came from embarrassing the US in Tehran in 1979 and you get the roots of where we are today. What is the average Arab's lot in life in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, even Jordan? Education levels are very low, poverty is crushing, opportunity for advancement is close to nil. When a group is made to feel powerless, they flock to anything that gives them a sense of self worth, of power to change their environment. It led to the rise of Hitler out of the morass of the Weimar, and it is leading to cadres of nihilists coming out of the slums surrounding the "Arab Street".

In those downtrodden and hopeless folks we have the gunpowder for jihad, but it is from the wealthier nations-- specifically Saudi Arabia and Iran-- that we have the sparks that light the fire. The House of Saud is absolutely screwed in terms of exercising any control of their interior lunatics-- should they ever move in a meaningful way to reign in the Wahabbi preachers they will find their nation ungovernable and their retreats in Switzerland, the Med, etc their primary residences. Perhaps worse, many members of the "nobility" of Saudi Arabia have gone over, in whole or in part, to the Wahabbis-- the bin Ladens themselves were a wealthy family sucked into Wahabbism. In 1979 & 1980, with America humiliated in Tehran and the Soviets invading Afghanistan, Wahabbism was presented with a challenge an an opportunity. First, it needed to show that it could compete and best the Shi'a as a force against the West and second, it was given that opportunity by organizing brigades of Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets. Game on.

With Afghanistan in the 1980's, the opportunity arose to take the hopeless, combine them with the wealthy sons of the Saudis and with Saudi & American money and arms, and give them a purpose-- to kill in the name of Islam. It's a story that most of us already know.

With Iran, the drive to return to regional hegemony that they have not experienced since the Macedonian conquest causes them to take advantage of the desperation and hopelessness of the Shi'a in Iraq and their kin in Syria & Lebanaon to provide foot soldiers for Hizbullah.

Fast forward 30 years to the present and look at the situation as it stands now. In Egypt we have a huge, disillusioned population oppressed by poverty and with little hope of advancement in their lifetimes, a reality made all the crueler by the orchestrated "Arab Spring" that made them believe they had become empowered. They now see themselves with the same crushing poverty, with personal security fears no less than when Mubarak's secret police were filling the prisons and torture chambers, etc. In Libya we see people with real hope but who still live in a chaotic situation-- will Libya survive as one country? Will Cyrenaica break away? Syria is a disaster with a full fledged civil war, the full dissolution of all notions of civilized society across large swaths of the nation and now full blown Iranian involvement. Lebanon had been well of its way to re-emerging from hell and becoming again the Paris of the East when Jerusalem got its collective ass kicked in the invasion of 2006, leading Israel, which had been doing some good for Lebanon while trying to quell Syrian influence there, to now actively working against Lebanese security and economic recovery. In effect, the poor Arab underclass is being returned to its 1979 status, with America recently having laid waste to Islamic nations, huge pools of hopeless young men with no economic futures... and our friends the Wahabbi & Iranians ready to take full advantage again, as witnessed by the orchestrated attack in Benghazi as just one example.

How to we break the cycle? As Fly implied, we are facing what is likely a lost generation in the Islamic world. You cannot unradicalize a religious zealot; you either kill him, allow him to kill himself, or attempt to reduce his ability to make a footprint by cutting off supplies and encouraging his nation's government to isolate him. We need to play a deeper game along something I think of, oddly enough, as a "Footloose" strategy. What we need to do is get today's and the next generation of eight to twelve year old boys to start looking at their Imams the way Kevin Bacon got the townies to look at the Southern Baptist preacher in Footloose-- as a target to rebel against who is limiting their personal liberties. To inspire that reaction, we need to help build a sense of personal liberty in the Islamic world, and that comes in the form of educational opportunities, economic opportunities, and the sharing of values via commercial culture that show how their worldview can work with their personal desires for economic opportunity. You don't tell them how much money they can make raising hogs, you show them that McDonald's is cool and uses Halal meat, so to speak.

We need to subtly empower Islamic women. As I've said many time,s we never should have been fighting the war in Afghanistan to lose the burqaa, but what we are doing in Saudi Arabia-- applying pressure over issues like women driving and shopping unescorted-- are the kinds of small steps that move cultural mountains. Helping to establish Muslim-female run micro finance groups is another huge step forward-- empower women in the marketplace and attitudes start to move. Why all of this fascination with impoprving the lot of women? No, it's not some liberal "Rah rah" equality thing; it's the fact that one of the huge reasons we do not have a draft in the United States any more is taht our women-- our Mothers-- have demanded a say in whether or not their children are to be sacrificed on a geopolitical altar. Empower women to defend their children's lives-- whether those children are 3 or, perhaps more importantly, 23-- and the culture of martyrdom dies off. Islamic women for the most part have no role in not only public but even family discourse-- change it at the family level and the well of martyrs goes down; wait a generation for the family empowerment to move to societal empowerment and it pretty much goes away.

It's a long game, and Americans suck at long games. We can't wet our pants every time a Benghazi happens and declare the whole thing a failure-- only fools do that. I loved that Joe Scarborough, a man so conservative he helped lead the coup to replace Gingrich as Speaker, said this morning on his show that "...if you're one of the vultures running around Congress this morning saying that we need to end all funding to Libya and Egypt, go into a dark room, wrap yourself in bubble wrap and get rid of all the sharp objects because YOU are a danger to the future and the national security of this country". That's the right attitude.

Now, Israel. There was a time that Israel served a purpose-- even in light of all of their heinous behavior towards us (Suez, USS Liberty, transfer of highly classified US defense technology to the Chinese, Soviets & Russians, Pollard, the current drive to get us to fight their battles for them yet again, etc, etc, etc...). That time was when we were afraid of a Soviet incursion into the Middle East and we were in need of a base of operations to stop that drive. Since then, their value has been largely hype-- nebulous intelligence help that failed to tip us off to the attack on the Tehran Embassy, the bombing of the Marines Barracks in Lebanon, 9/11, etc. The downside of treating Israel as our favorite child has been disastrous-- it has fueled the alienation of the US in the Arab world, brought us to the very brink of nuclear war at least once, been a one way money pit. It is time for that to end. I do not advocate throwing Israel under the bus-- they are a democracy in a region where that is a valuable model-- but it's time to treat them like everyone else. Israel is, as far as we should be concerned, a miniature France or South Africa. We need to make it clear that they aren't afforded NATO protections-- an attack on Israel IS NOT an attack on the US. We need to stop defending them in the Security Council for every bad act they commit, but defend them there when they are in the right. We need to stop being stupid and giving them defense technologies that they turn around and trade or sell-- anything that is seen by a professor at the Technion is the same as a technology in a lab in Beijing. Treat them on that front like Pakistan-- we'll build it for you here, but no tech transfer. By doing this, by divorcing ourselves from Israel but not running from them, we not only balance a relationship but also send a message that makes it harder for the Imams to credibly make this an "us v. the Zionists & Americans" claims.

Ithink I covered the cultural outreach part in my opening paragraphs, but just to clarify, yes, support the diffusion of American cultrue into Islamic nations. It worked in CHina, it worked in the Soviet Union, it's going to work in the Middle East.

One last thought-- the hugely dangerous Islamic nation that nobody mentions is the poorest, one of the most populous, and one that you maybe hear mentioned on the news once a year when a typhoon hits it-- Bangladesh. It has every ingredient to become Yemen increased by a couple of orders of magnitude, unbelievably poor, a training ground, never ending recruiting font, etc. It would be nice if someone in Washington paid Bangladesh 1/1000th of the attention we pay its cousin Pakistan. Just sayin'...