perfidy

TM Lutas: Islamists believe that there is one God, he sent prophets down to Earth and the last one was Muhammed. If you believe in this, you get to live a first class life. If you have some other interpretation and only believe in some of the prophets, you get to pay discriminatory taxes and live as 2nd class citizens. Everybody else converts or dies. That's their belief system. Nice pagans get killed, nice atheists get killed, nice hindus, nice buddhists, the whole nine yards. Whether or not you are a decent human being is irrelevant. Read their stuff and understand what they are saying. Combine that ideology with the simple technical fact that it's getting easier every year to build WMD and you have a ticking time bomb. One day, the people who believe in this ideology will have their own shiny red buttons and will be able to enact their dreams of mass genocide. If they die in the process, they get their 72 virgins so it's all ok in the end by their lights.

A practitioner of Islam is not an extremist. An extremist is an extremist. Every religion has them. The socio-cultural circumstances of the origin states of Islam have resulted in a surplus of extremism for that religion, unfortunately. Each of the major religions has some pretty crazy stuff in it.

Judaism has pretty much been able to characterize many of its quirks as "tradition"; for example, foods that are not eaten are not necessarily viewed as "commands from God", but rather as continuations of tradition, critical to cultural survival.

Christianity sits a little farther away from this, with some issues being stamped with "word of God" status.

Islam is, to its detriment, a more structured religion, with quite a few direct commands from God. As such they are less flexible, less able to bridge across change in society. Their culture has paid an enormous price for this inflexibility, over time.

The point is, we are not dealing with a universal whole. Do you truly believe that 99% of Arabs/Muslims in the world want people who are different to suffer? I do not. I believe in an absolute morality. I don't put very much into that category, but essential tolerance and goodwill towards your fellow man are definitely there.

My main point is this: I firmly believe that the only way to control extremism within a given target population is to bring the bulk of that population to our side. We will never be able to stamp out extremism within another culture. The members of that culture are capable of stamping it out themselves, though, which they will do if a positive cultural relationship is established. This is not a PollyAnna vision; the Nazis were decimated as a social entity, ultimately, through the changes the German people themselves enacted, over decades. They decided to be something different than they were.

We need an environment where the average citizen in a "muslim" country views extremists the way Germans view Nazis. As we move towards a future containing the "super-empowered angry man", we must rely on social means as our primary defense. We make it very difficult for an average person to come to our side when we casually discuss extreme solutions, like turning the Middle East into a glass ashtray, or "eliminating" the only religion they have ever practiced, from the world. It is the wrong starting point for the discussion.

You make in case, in the linked entry, that "spiritual warfare" should not be overlooked as a means of change in this asymmetric conflict. There are a number of problems with your approach.

• Are you really talking about forced conversion to another religion? How do you propose to accomplish this? What religions will be on the "list" of "bad" religions? Or do you propose that we simply forcibly convert everyone to Christianity?
• How do you suggest that the US project its power across the entire world to accomplish this? The Muslim population in the US is simply not a threat, and is in fact the most powerful weapon we have to counter prejudice in other countries. Our Muslim population is free to live their lives and worship their God in any way they see fit, and they choose to do so.
• What time scale do you see accomplishing this? Religions have been present, persectured, evolved, and cast aside for thousands of years. Pogroms have been remarkably ineffective at eliminating the fundamental cultural continuity of Judaism, in spite of thousands of years of trying. What factors make you believe that you can accomplish this, within your given risk time frame of a single lifetime?

I respect the fact that you are trying to solve the problem, and reaching for any solution you can. To me, what you are doing is advocating that it is better to do something, anything...than to do nothing, even if that action means that the situation will become worse.

As with virtually every complex endeavor, we need to really think about the consequences of what we do and choose, in a sober manner, those paths with the highest probability of success.

What sociological implications, world-wide, do you see for your religious suppression? How controllable are those implications? Remember that the US military cannot suppress this kind of behavior in one small country. The military can defend against almost any threat, but they cannot change hearts and minds. They're not set up to do it.

Islam in this country is not the problem. Followers here are, with virtually complete agreement, quite aware that they have far more freedom and potential in their lives than practitioners in the old world.

My solution is a combination of "Good Samaritan", principled stands, true ethics in international relations at the economic level, and decentralization within the US. I will write another time about decentralization...it is a key defense concept.