The trouble with the West

[Ramrod]

We will bury you
Perry de Havilland (London) Globalization/economics †¢ Middle East & Islamic

It is not often I quote Nikita Khrushchev in any context, but Al Qaeda is quite correct that western civilization poses a clear and present danger to their cherished notions of a universal social life centred on submission to God. An economically successful western civilisation underpinned by severalty and free intellectual enquiry is caustic to a civilisation based on the submission to non-rational ideas which are propagated by force. To put it bluntly, we will enervate them and eventually destroy them by gradual assimilation.

The best and brightest muslims are already hard pressed to not see the glaring practical and intellectual flaws in their societies and want better for themselves, and as a result there is already a small but fairly well integrated middle class of secularized American and Euro-Muslims who can be observed in the markets, cinemas, offices, pubs and bars of the west. But far more dangerous to the broader Islamist project is the example not of western thought but of western affluence and the ease and secular self-direction it yields.

The sheer material wealth of the more advanced west is almost guaranteed to subvert the broad masses who come in contact with it. The current difficulties in assimilating the lower parts of the socio-economic western muslim population should not blind us to the fact that western culture's corrosive effects on the Islamic world view really counts far more when they are felt in Peshawar, Ankara and Cairo than in Marseilles, London and Chicago. In that theatre of the war of civilisations our truly effective weapons are not the gunship helicopters, laser guided bombs and 5.56mm small arms being used in Iraq right now, but rather our cheap DVD players, Internet connections, music/porn/action videos and smorgasbord of good, accessible but inexpensive Tex-Mex, Thai, Italian and Lebanese foods that globalisation has brought us, etc. etc. I have made this point before but as we concentrate on the more local and violent issues being resolved in the streets of Iraq, it does not hurt to put it all in the broader context within which our enemies certainly see things.

It is the horror of this viral characteristic of western consumer culture which really lies at the heart of the antipathy of the Islamists to the west: as secular society and severalty is the true heart of our civilisation, by our very nature we cannot and will not just 'leave them alone'. It is not a matter of what western governments want to do, because western businesses and cultural influences will go wherever there are receptive markets and audiences. It is not a western 'conspiracy' to subvert Islam, merely the very nature of western civilisation at work. Short of turning the entire Islamic world into a hermit empire like North Korea writ large, the mullahs and ayatollahs cannot avoid their flocks hearing our siren songs.

but Al Qaeda is quite correct that western civilization poses a clear and present danger to their cherished notions of a universal social life centred on submission to God.

.....Still no reason to bomb our civilians though.....

Link

[peachey]

Originally Posted by Ramrod

.....Still no reason to bomb our civilians though.....

Link

one word was left out

"choice"

is what we have
here in the 'west' - we have the freedom to say stuff
and chance to criticise

[kronas]

my 2$ here........

judging from the article the portrayal of western civilisation as money hungry, alcohol fuelled is correct, western society has many wrongs in it no society is perfect, but to attack any society because of it faults because it is luring a particular section ie muslims to the western culture is indeed wrong, whichever way you see it both societys have there 'wrongs' whilst one is enciting hatred, the other is trying to eradicate it, but the means used on killing innoccent people by both sides is wrong, using explosives or shields of people strapped with explosives is not the way to live in a civilised world, sure the muslim religion teaches you to not drink, smoke,watch violent media,pornography, and more, but the one thing western society does give you is the freedom to choose, however wrong it may seem it is a choice.

i leave you with some interesting comments from a british commander:

The officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for "sub-humans".

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are."

source: theage.com.au

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...?from=storyrhs

these are biases which lead to civil tension, i believe because of 9/11 both sides are doing things they should not..............

[Ramrod]

However they started it with 9/11. Hardly a measured response to the Wests consumer culture especially when the 'siren lure' of our culture could be resisted by strong moral fiber. It seems we are being punished because the East is unable to resist the lure of western consumables/culture.

[peachey]

Originally Posted by Ramrod

However they started it with 9/11. Hardly a measured response to the Wests consumer culture especially when the 'siren lure' of our culture could be resisted by strong moral fiber. It seems we are being punished because the East is unable to resist the lure of western consumables/culture.

I reckon its a lot to do with jealosy

all the 'east' wants to do is stay in the past
they have loads of reasons not do do stuff but no actual solutions


they are all fur coat and no-nickers


and if they are so against images and so on
why are they so quick to video hostages and the like

indeed - that 9/11 business was calculated for the tv etc

[Ramrod]

More on the subject: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...074734,00.html

Islam cannot adapt, and I have seen the results
THEODORE DALRYMPLE



THERE IS enough truth in the devout Muslimââ‚Ã⠀šÃ‚¬ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â‚¬Å¾Ã‚¢s criticism of the less attractive aspects of Western secular culture to lend plausibility to his call for a return to purity as the answer to the Muslim worldââ‚ƚ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s woes. He sees in the Westââ‚ ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s freedom nothing but promiscuity and licence, which is certainly there; but he does not see freedom, especially freedom of inquiry, a spiritual virtue as well as an ultimate source of strength. The devout Muslim fears, with good reason, that to give an inch is sooner or later to concede the whole territory.
This fear must be all the more acute among the large and growing Muslim population in British cities such as mine. Except for a small, highly educated middle class, who live as if Islam were a private religious confession like any other in the West, Muslims congregate in neighbourhoods, where the life of the Punjab continues amid the architecture of the Industrial Revolution.



The Muslim immigrants to these areas were not seeking a new way of life when they arrived; they expected to continue their old lives, but more prosperously. They certainly never suspected that in the long run they could not maintain their culture and their religion intact. The older generation is only now realising that outward conformity to traditional codes of dress and behaviour by the young is no longer a guarantee of inner acceptance. Recently I stood at the taxi stand outside my hospital, beside two young women in full black costume, with only a slit for the eyes. One said to the other: †œGive us a light for a fag, love; Iâ₠¬ÃƒÆ’¢â€žÂ¢m gasping.ââ‚à ƒâ€šÃ‚¬Ãƒâ€šÃ‚ÂÂ� Release the social pressure on the girls, and they would abandon their costume in an instant.

Anyone who lives in a city such as mine and interests himself in the fate of the world cannot help wondering whether, deeper than this immediate cultural desperation, there is anything intrinsic to Islam that renders it unable to adapt itself to the modern world. Is there an essential element that condemns the Muslim world to permanent backwardness with regard to the West, a backwardness that is felt as a deep humiliation, and is exemplified, though not proved, by the fact that the whole of the Arab world, minus its oil, matters less to the rest of the world economically than the Nokia telephone company?

I think the answer is yes, and that the problem begins with Islamââ‚ƚ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s failure to make a distinction between church and state. Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no distinction possible between temporal and religious authority.

But this model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen. Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-ÃÃâ€*’ÂÂÂÂ*-vis the moderate. More- over, Islam †â€ÂÂÂ� in which the mosque is a meeting house, not an institutional church †â€ÂÂÂ� has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively.

The second problem is intellectual. In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between church and state, liberated individual men to think for themselves, and thus set in motion an unprecedented and still unstoppable material advancement. Islam, with no separate, secular sphere where inquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, was hopelessly left behind.

The indivisibility of any aspect of life from any other in Islam is a source of strength, but also of fragility. Where all conduct, all custom, has a religious sanction and justification, any change is a threat to the whole system of belief. Certainty that their way of life is the right one thus coexists with fear that the whole edifice †� intellectual and political †� will come tumbling down if it is tampered with in any way. Intransigence is a defence against doubt and makes living on terms of true equality with others who do not share the creed impossible.

And the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the 7th century and to dominate the 21st, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine. If they were content to exist in a 7th-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us. Their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain for ever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs.

One sign of the increasing weakness of Islamââ‚ƚ¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s hold over its nominal adherents in Britain is the throng of young Muslim men I see in prison. They will soon overtake the young men of Jamaican origin in their numbers and in the extent of their criminality. Confounding expectations, these prisoners display no interest in Islam whatsoever; they are entirely secularised. True, they still adhere to Muslim marriage customs, but only for the obvious personal advantage of having a domestic slave at home. Many of them also dot the city with their concubines †â€ÂÂÂ� sluttish white working-class girls or exploitable young Muslims who have fled forced marriages and do not know that their young men are married.

The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal meat. They do not read the Koran. They do not ask to see the visiting imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the cityâ₠¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s criminal subculture. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison, it is directed mainly at the Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight, while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their new-found religion is fundamentally opposed to it.

But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behaviour of my cityâ₠¬Ã¢â€žÂ¢s young Muslim men who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but also deal in it, and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade.

What I think these young Muslim prisoners demonstrate is that the rigidity of the traditional code by which their parents live, with its universalist pretensions and emphasis on outward conformity to them, is all or nothing; when it dissolves, it dissolves completely and leaves nothing in its place. The young Muslims then have little defence against the egotistical licentiousness they see about them and that they all too understandably take to be the summum bonum of Western life.

Observing this, of course, there are among Muslim youth a tiny minority who reject this absorption into the white lumpenproletariat and turn militant. It is their perhaps natural, or at least understandable, reaction to the failure of our society, kowtowing to absurd and dishonest multiculturalist pieties, to induct them into the best of Western culture: into that spirit of free inquiry and personal freedom that has so transformed the life chances of every person in the world, whether he knows it or not.

Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. Although fundamentalist Islam will be dangerous for some time, ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy withdrawing roar may well be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle.

[kronas]

i find the article quite laughable, Islam will die ? even i dont think thats going to happen its like saying christianity will die

Islam is a fast growing religion, the highest growth is in the US.

and whats this about cultural divides 'muslims' not being able to integrate, that has nothing to do with people bombing other nations, neither does it have anything to do with with terrorism.

sure, suppression of muslims by there elders happens, but i dont think anyone who is plainly religious and i mean people with deep sincerity and respect for Islam that followers hold, will 'drop it' so they can westernise.

whoever wrote that is clearly confused about the average muslim in comparison to a extremeist, i dont think he could even tell you the diffarences.

every particular race has its problems with drugs, violence, alcoholism, sure the information show black people are a majority in prison for drugs. but statistics are not 100% even our police force is biased against muslims in some cases, the old elite guard of commisioners who try and turn the screw on asians, you cannot deny this goes on.

the way i see it, it is muslim extremeists everyone needs to be on the look out for, not the average law abiding muslim who prays, goes to school and lives his life.


the only truth in the article worth mentioning was the seperation of church and state, in most muslims coutries the church and state are one.

[Ramrod]

Oh I don't know....all religions come and go (thats one of the reasons why I'm not religious)
Just because Islam is the fastest growing atm doesn't mean that it cannot decline quickly as well. Especially given the rate of growth of western style capitalism/consumerism.

[kronas]

Originally Posted by Ramrod

Oh I don't know....all religions come and go (thats one of the reasons why I'm not religious)

Originally Posted by Ramrod

Just because Islam is the fastest growing atm doesn't mean that it cannot decline quickly as well. Especially given the rate of growth of western style capitalism/consumerism.

the last two points are not relevant, i just dont see it happening because of the continuing upward trend of followers,

United States of America:
Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in the US. By the year 2010, America's Muslim population is expected to surpass the Jewish population, making Islam the country's second-largest faith after Christianity. There are currently about 6 million American Muslims. There are about 2,000 mosques in the US. Most American Muslims, 77.6%, are immigrants - 22.4% of American Muslims were born in the US.

http://www.ifapray.org/PrayerGuides/...he%20World.htm

each religion gets its voice heard in diffarent ways.

[Chris]

Originally Posted by Ramrod

Oh I don't know....all religions come and go (thats one of the reasons why I'm not religious)
Just because Islam is the fastest growing atm doesn't mean that it cannot decline quickly as well. Especially given the rate of growth of western style capitalism/consumerism.

As kronas himself put it, 'Statistics are not 100%' - Islam is fast-growing in Western countries purely because of demographics. Muslims have more babies because that is their cultural norm, and their babies are automatically considered 'Muslim' at birth. The number of western converts to Islam remains very small.

[kronas]

Originally Posted by towny

their babies are automatically considered 'Muslim' at birth.

many are, depending on there lifestyle, the people they are around........

Originally Posted by towny

The number of western converts to Islam remains very small.

i dont think its that small to even think it will simply 'disappear' , even non muslims sometimes convert.......

[Defiant]

Originally Posted by Ramrod

It seems we are being punished because the East is unable to resist the lure of western consumables/culture.

All go with that. Its ruddy stupid. I can't believe there are people in this country and Europe that follow these muppets yet wont the western lifestyle. If they had a braincell to share then I really would be worried about terrorism.

Here's something I just seen on the bbc website have your say,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3628101.stm

check out Mohammed I & Al's comments. These people are living in the UK yet dont seem to get it

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by kronas

the last two points are not relevant, i just dont see it happening because of the continuing upward trend of followers.

All things come to pass...

[kronas]

Originally Posted by Ramrod

All things come to pass...

even i believe that.......each thing has 'its time' befire it gains strength and loses it.......after it can either die........or regroup in the future........anything is possible.

[Ramrod]

Extinct religions