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Finally, a lady whose name I didn’t quite catch kept banging the drum that Muslim clerics need to vigorously denounce extremism. Aziz Poonawalla calmly and overwhelmingly reminded her that happens all the time. She also seemed to be under the impression that you were slandering Islam if you didn’t say that certain sub-sects of Islam are violence-prone and at that point I think I stopped understanding her.
None of this is Warren’s fault, as he put together a vigorous debate and challenged everyone, rather than just opening the floodgates. But, man, it is pretty grim out there.
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Not really On Point, but Asia Times Online had an interesting article about the role drug money plays in Afghanistan etc.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KL16Df01.html
Daniel Korski has an interesting post riffing off a Soros-funded study on what European Muslims think. Unusually for The Spectator, which apart from Alex Massie is mostly into the wild-eyed madness of Londonistan, Korski is remarkably positive about Muslims in Europe.
I doubt, however, that this will do much to diminish the amount of ignorant shit there is out there about European Muslims.
The UN report doesn’t support the contention that the Taliban receive only $125 million per year from the drug trade.
That number is the UN estimate of the proceeds to the Taliban from the tax they levy on cultivation of poppies.
The total revenue is, in the report, is estimated in the hundreds of millions per year in 2006-7.
We have to use a term that gets to the root cause of their ideology. Terrorist (or irhabi, which is Arabic for terrorist) does not lend any explanation as to their intentions and undercuts the fundamental understanding of the enemy. Calling the jihadis/takfiris “terrorists” would have been like calling the Nazis “blitzkriegers”. It defines them by a tactic, not by their ideology.
Kilcullen prefers “takfiri” while Phares prefers “jihadi”. I’m not sure which one I like better. I’m also not sure that “jihadi” is a “term of approval.” I think the context of when the term “jihadi” is used matters. Jihad can only be declared by the Caliph. Since there is no Caliphate, the jihad declared by bin Laden isn’t valid or religiously sanctioned. Using “jihadi” while pointing out that this isn’t actually a holy war could be a useful tactic.
“Takifi”, I think hits harder though. It gets to the root of the ideology and is negatively viewed by Muslims. Phares — however — is very authoritative on this matter, it’s important to note.
Just listened to it (didn’t even know Spencer was going to be on it). In all honesty, I think there was just a massive failure on both sides to understand what was being said by the other. It started from the very beginning, when, unless I am mistaken, Warren misconstrued Phares’ use of the term “critical mass” to be saying something about the Muslim community at large. I don’t think that is how it was meant by Phares, and I don’t think it has to be understood that way however he meant it, either. It’s obviously an interpretive term itself, but it seems to me that it’s an entirely reasonable thing to say (not that it might not nevertheless be false) that a point of critical mass has been reached in the U.S. whereby those motivated to carry out violence motivated by Salafi jihadist ideology might be expected to begin to be successful at it. Nowhere in that statement is there the assertion that the Muslim community at large is becoming increasingly radicalized, or is there a denial of the point you were right to make on the show — that that subset of Muslims (Salafi jihadists in Phares’ construction) is any more than a truly miniscule segment of the Muslim population. That simply wasn’t suggested to be the case, but nevertheless the idea of an operational critical mass having been reached isn’t precluded by it either (which is not to say that it was successfully demonstrated on the show to be the case, or in Phares’ book for that matter.)
On the combatting ideology front, obviously the attorney from the ‘Islamic ideology think tank’ was wrong to suggest that the jihadism is not being combatted by Muslim leaders all over the country, and Aziz was right to correct her on that. I can’t speak for her, but certainly it remains her right to view such efforts as insufficient and/or to promote a wider and more forceful embrace of them by Muslim leaders in the U.S. It would have been useful if somone had raised the question to her, though, of whether the problem is as much in the community as it is with a reluctance in the wider culture to hear and take note that such efforts are in fact ongoing. I do think she made a fair, if provocative, point at the end that it is not merely the renouncement of violent jihad that needs to take place, but a full-scale rejection of all the ideology and theology that buttresses violence in all Islam (at least in the U.S.) that needs to take place. That is a much, much more ambitious project that points to a fundaental struggle in Islam that is in fact underway, but that is far from resolved, and as such I think was a fair thing for her to advocate on a particular side of that discussion. Aziz responded that that too is taking place in the American Muslim community, and he is certainly right, but at the same time more radical versions of the meaning of Islam are certainly still being taught in our country, and it has to be left to individual Muslims to decide for themselves whether the resistance to those that is taking place is sufficient in quantity and effect. I’d have to list again to hear if she said that such resistance isn’t taking place at all, which would obviously be a false claim, or whether she simply said it should be happening much more, which is an entirely fair claim.
With respect to whether Phares rejected the Obama administration’s overall approach to counterterrorism, namely constructing public statements such that they defuse rather than heighten tensions that exist between Muslims and non-Muslims in the U.S., I didn’t get the impression that he did reject that. My impression was that he accepted it but regretted that in his mind this meant that use of terms like “jihad” and “Salafi” and even “terrorism” could no longer be used as analytical tools by professionals in or out of government (maybe I misunderstood his points, though). if this is what he meant, I think he is simply mistaken to think that that because the administration has a public strategy that involves downplaying such terms, that use of the concepts themselves by analysts has been jettisoned or is frowned on. But maybe I myself am mistaken in thinking that they are not.
Lastly, I’m not sure we can say it isn’t Warren’s fault that things lined up the way they did and still dismiss the significance of the fact that two out of the three Muslims appearing on the program were essentially opposed to Aziz’s and Spencer’s viewpoint (though, again, I think much of that was the product of a failure to communicate/accentuation of contrast, and less on actual substantive differences, though obviously those were still plentiful). It seems like either Warren needs to represent Muslim elite opinion more accurately on his show, or else the fact that Aziz was outnumbered among Muslims on the show in his views by two Muslims is at least a notable fact. My view is that Warren vastly overrepresented Muslims with views like those of Mr. Phares and Ms. Mirahmadi on this show. I don’t see any particular reason to let him completely off the hook for that.