OK, is anyone else getting "Worldwide Islamist Conspiracy" crap?

[Plaid Adder]

I just would like a reality check on this, people:

Last night I talked to my mother. My mother and I have had our differences--mostly about gender & sexuality--but most of the big ones have been worked out and now we mainly get along. She has her limitations, and nobody knows them better than I do, but one thing she has never been is a bigot. She still remembers the civil rights era fondly, and in her own way has been very active in her community to try to work on poverty and race and things like this. One thing you can say about her is that she has never stopped learning; she's constantly taking classes and things like that and has taken several courses about Islam, the Arab world, and whatnot, because my sister has become a Middle East expert and my mother always wants to be into what we're doing.

Well, anyhow, she starts telling me about how she thinks the Muslims who came to the US 3 generations ago are OK, but these new ones, the Muslims who are coming over now and going to their own mosques and their own schools where everyone's always preaching hate, you just have to wonder why they come over here if they hate it so much, and what this new wave of immigration is really about...

After she had gone on this way for a while, I finally broke in and said, "Mom, you don't REALLY believe that this is all part of a worldwide Islamist conspiracy to take over the planet, do you?"

And she says, basically, yeah.

:wtf:

I start arguing with her about this and she keeps saying "But why are they always preaching hatred against us?" Eventually I just started listing all the Sources Of Hatred:

1. U.S. unconditionally supporting Israel no matter what it does to the Palestinians
2. U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia
3. Hanging the Shi'a opposition that we had encouraged to rise up against Saddam out to dry after the 1991 Gulf War
4. Removed Taliban, killed thousands of Afghanis, installed puppet government
5. Invaded Iraq for no good reason, killed 100,000+ civilians, allowed looting to go on unchecked, still can't restore order after more than a year, currently winding up a horrific atrocity excuse me decisive battle against the insurgency in Fallujah
6. Persecuting Muslim- and Arab-Americans who were completely uninvolved in 9/11 just because they were Muslim- and Arab-Americans...

and the list goes on. Mom acknowledges many of these items, still says she thinks these new immigrants are different from the other ones because they stick to themselves and are trying to replicate their own culture here. I say, "You just told me that this is what always happens with a new immigrant population: they stick together for the first generation and then after that they start mingling more with other groups. You can't expect first-generation immigrants to behave like third-generation immigrants. That doesn't make any sense."

Sure, she says, but all the same, we need to stop letting so many of these people in, and it looks like we are, so that's good.

Pissed off, finally, I say that if I ever die in a terrorist attack it'll probably have been carried out by the Christian right.

I say I hope someday this will all be over and we can have a normal country again. She says it looks like that won't be happening for a while.

No shit.

Liza came home and I ranted to her abotu this. Liza has even more reasons to think badly of my mother than I do, but she was still shocked and appalled. "She's disgracing her heritage," she said. "That's what they said abotu the Irish: that we were all going to be helping the Pope take over the country." And as I recall there was some kind of worlwide conspiracy theory about the Jews, way back when...And for God's sake, if you want to get hyped up about a possible fundamentalist takeover of the U.S., look no fucking further than right-wing evangelical Christianity.

ARGH!

So, is my mother special, or are you all starting to get vibes like this from your near and dear too? Because if this is starting to take root here, we're all in big fucking trouble.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[billyoc]

1. I'm blissfully insulated from attitudes like this,

I work in a very progressive union shop, all my relatives(Irish too) and neighbors here in Hell's Kitchen are dems or leftists of some sort. You might remind Mom Adder that there are like a billion muslims in this world, if they wanted to kill somebody, well... :shrug:

[fertilizeonarbusto]

2. She might be in a small minority

My mother says that Fundamentalism in all three Religions of the Book (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) is the problem-which it is. A lot of people I run into agree.

[fertilizeonarbusto]

4. BTW

Have I told you I love you? LOL
Let's get married for the benefits and you go home with your girl and I'll go look for male company for the night.
:loveya:

[ck4829]

3. I once had a girlfriend who was a 1st generation Muslim immigrant and

she had nothing but love for America.

[Cooley Hurd]

5. It used to be "worldwide COMMUNIST conspiracy..."

Same lie, different bugaboo, different day...

[htuttle]

15. And before that, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Same pogram, only the victims change.

[Lone Pawn]

22. We Irish we going to hand America to "Rum, Romanism, and Ruin" before that

[jdj]

6. the can believe in this yet deny election fraud.

fundieslams are no different than fundixtians.

they think they are the true religion and they are sposed to either convert you or kill you "in the name of the Lord".

same shit, different language.

[SmokingJacket]

7. As the offspring of formerly liberal, now freeper parents --

I would have to say yes, definitely.

Hatred for whole other groups of people -- flat out bigotry -- is becoming more and more acceptable in this country, particularly in just the past year. What's going on on hate radio?? I don't listen to that stuff, but I know my parents do. Recently my father told me he was a homophobe -- no shame about it, just a fact. Racist comments fly fast and furious too. And I emphasize this is a NEW thing.

I'm getting freaked out. I don't know why people are eager to hate whole groups of people (I'm fine with hating individuals ;-)) and I think some people feel they now have social permission to do just that. A kind of righteousness they got from 9-11, maybe.

Wish I had some idea about how to fight this...

[sui generis]

10. it's easy to hate gays

We're supposed to be professional victims and weak and immoral and relatively helpless to fight back.

Why anyone would be a "homophobe" is so beyond me. I want to ask them, have you ever been disadvantaged by a gay person? Have you ever lost something in your life as a result of a gay person living their lives? Have you ever considered that a gay person might have an equally deep and abiding hatred of bigots, and be able to do something about it? Please define what you think a "gay" person and how it affects you in your daily life.

What would you do if you met one? Have you ever met one? Are you sure? How did it affect you personally? Did you ever think the reverse might have been true, or EVEN WORSE, that they didn't care one way or another about what you do to get your rocks off? Horrors.

I'm truly sorry about your parents. I suspect that the water supply was infiltrated.

[Doctor_J]

17. that is because of your deplorable lifestyle

and the fact that you recruit pre-pubescent boys in your jobs as elementary school teachers and scout leaders. If you could just break yourselves of those habits, we would leave you alone ;-) ;-)

[DemBones DemBones]

8. I was going to say "Don't let her read

'Imperial Hubris' because the author talks at length about jihad as the so-called 'Fifth Pillar' of Islam." In that sense, there is a worldwide Islamic conspiracy; every Muslim is supposed to fight for Islam, if necessary.

But actually she might find it as comforting as it is frightening since he says that a take-over-new-territory-and-convert-others type jihad is impossible without a caliphate to order it. Today's jihads are defensive, aimed at us for what we DO, not what we ARE. And any Muslim can issue a jihad, despite claims that Osama has no authority to do so. (Then again, I read somewhere long ago that Osama yearns to establish a new caliphate. Just remembered that. Bummer! Not mentioned in this book, though, as far as I've read.)

Muslims, according to Anonymous, the author of "Imperial Hubris," may be offended by a lot of things in Western culture but they don't feel compelled to fight unless they see Islam, Muslims, or Muslim countries being attacked in some way. He is really annoyed that people in high places are so willfully ignorant of the attitudes and beliefs of other peoples, and that they do not listen to what Osama bin Laden says. He says that reading unclassified material only is enough to show that Osama warned us for years, going through all the steps that a faithful Muslim should take before attacking, but we failed to listen to his warnings and take them seriously because we don't understand the Muslim culture.

According to him, Muslims around the world tend to think that the anti-Muslim comments of the supposedly influential American clergy like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are believed by most Americans, so Muslims misunderstand us, too, but our intelligence communities must do better at understanding the people who have come to hate us. We have tried to secularize Muslims and convince them to have democracies where religion is separate from government, not understanding what a non-Muslim idea that is. They take their religion much more seriously than Westerners do, though there are secularized Muslims, like the Saudi princes, Karzai in Afghanistan, etc.

Anonymous may not be entirely reliable -- who knows? -- but I find the notion that we are misunderstanding other cultures completely credible as we have done it so often before. What he says about Muslim cultures fits pretty well with what I've heard from friends who've lived in Muslim countries, too.

Good luck with your mom, perhaps she's just scared and confused, not becoming a bigot. The world has been damn scary and confusing the last few years, after all.

[Plaid Adder]

13. It's not 'Imperial Hubris' doing this to her, it's @#$! Bernard Lewis

This guy came out with a book a few years ago called "What Went Wrong?" in which he basically argues that Arab civilization is stagnant, dead, not open to new ideas, backward, antagonistic to progress and change, etc. etc. etc., and that this has been true for hundreds of years because they just didn't want any part of the whole progress thing. So naturally we have to roll over the Arab world with tanks. It's for their own good!

This book is like my mother's Bible for everything to do with the Middle East now. I keep telling her there are other people out there who have written books on the Arab world and Islam who have completely different views of it but no, it's always Bernard Lewis with her. Well, I hope he's happy, cause he's one of the reasons that the supposedly liberal elite was on board with the Iraq war.

:argh:,

The Plaid Adder

[sui generis]

9. I think it's human nature to generalize from a few facts

and it's also human nature to pick the worst possible resulting scenario.

It is true that in any ubiquitous religious community that the chance to influence politics is undeniably tempting, and any thinking person has to acknowledge that there is a proven risk in having a fundamental voting block. Personally, I think it would really teach everyone a lesson if one day someone introduced viable legislation to change "in God we trust" to "in Allah we trust" on our coins, since we're apparenty quite happy to break down the barriers between church (or mosque as the case may be) and state.

It is also true that in any religious community there will always be factions that tend toward fundamentalism, who will seek to influence the world around them, even by manipulating moderates within the same faith. We know it can happen . . . as recently as the last presidential election.

In places where extremism has taken hold, it is because of overwhelming unemployment, or because the government insists on a non-secular education or makes it easier to pursue religious studies than business or technical studies. I don't believe that Wahabi "mullah" style of Islam is any different in promoting extremism in the circumstances of political and financial oppression than any Christian version of religion with their deacons and clergymen and bishops and cardinals and popes.

Here is what I have a problem with: if you have enough freedoms (codified in law) in a society for liberals and conservatives to live together, and conservatives take the ascendancy and change those very freedoms in the law, then you have destroyed the very system that allowed conservatives to live together with liberals.

How do we keep a dominant group from destroying the very checks and balances that made us a leading democracy to begin with?

The same issue ties back into the rise of fundamentalism now. They have the ability to fundamentally change America into something the constitutional forefathers could never have imagined or condoned. Whether they are fundamentalist christians, jews, or muslims or just selfish stupid people, how do we keep them from permanently remaking America into their own medieval worldview?

[seabeyond]

11. the reality for me. yes your mom is right

and sounding like she is trying to see in a balance way. the fundamentalist islamics are of hate. i say equal to the fundamentalist christian, and in the past would say not as barbaric and extreme, but shit in three years, they are catching up fast. the threat islam was to u.s and there was one, as with all countries. in their muhommod text of hate, same as old testament. they pit us against them. they do see it as a biblical war, both sides. that is the reality of it.

the trick to this religion is bring it to the higher in all three, the jew, islamic, and christian. and this is in their progressive part of reading as our new testament. have a greater number of these moderates to heal, as opposed to battle

the simple of now, the battle of old is in progress

[datasuspect]

12. dunno

just got done watching some jihadi videos culled from the internet (the kind we're not allowed to view here) and these guys are basically "picking up their axes and fighting like farmers."

pvc/metal tubing for improvised mortar launchers, what have you. this is not a "military" force. they are revolutionaries fighting for their own dignity.

i can't see it any other way.

if a foreign force came into my world and humiliated everyone and killed indiscriminately, you bet your ass i'd pick up whatever i could find and fight against them.

what sucks is that the u.s. has inflamed the passions of so many people they are trying to give "freedom" to against the u.s. cause, that i fear we will be fighting generation after generation of mujahadeen.

may allah bless and keep us all.

[sui generis]

14. exactly

but often to be willing to die for your political beliefs, it is easier to think that you might have an afterlife that will be better.

Stupid gullible children are manipulated into blowing themselves up by cynical old men who would never strap a bomb to their own ass or even risk getting a hangnail for their political beliefs.

Yes, if we were suddenly invaded by China and told that we would be "liberated" from democracy to practice The One True communist political system, you can be sure there would be one or two insurgents here.

The fact of the matter is we are in a war that was started by stupid selfish people in our government, condoned by stupid selfish scared people on the streets, and we are stubbornly sticking to it even though the blood of over 100,000+ civilians stains each and every one of us Americans, whether we want to believe it or not, a war that we are continuing to conduct out of blind stubbornness and stupidity.

When a driver and passenger sit outside of a bank while their buddy is robbing it and shoots the cashier, the driver and passenger are equally responsible for the death of that person, as are we all for the atrocity that is Iraq.

[Blue_Tires]

16. Dr. Strangelove (2004)

Gen. Jack D. Ripper: "I can no longer sit back and allow Islamist infiltration, Islamist indoctrination, Islamist subversion, and the international Islamist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

[TWiley]

18. They preach this crap on Jesus radio.

Religious radio, around here anyway, is responsible for much of the lies that supported bush before the election. Most church people believe that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, that there was an absolute connection between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein, that the secular Saddam supported the fundamentalist Islamic Tali ban and Al Queda. And .... SUPRISE.....that Islam threatens Christianity not only in the USA, but worldwide. Also, they have been trained to distrust the UN for almost a decade. Many of the malitia types around here believe that the UN was going to invade the northern half of our state. The ignorance of these people has had a profound effect on the beliefs of the average citizen.

You are absolutely correct. If any of us suffer a terrorist attack here in the USA, it will most likely come from the Christian right.

Conservative Republican Christian evangelical fundamentalist organizations include: KKK, Aryan Nations, National Alliance, Armies of God, Christian Identity Movement, World Church of the Creator, the Neo-Confederate movement, the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the NEO-Nazi movement, Militia groups, Survivalist groups, The Order, Posse Comatatus, and so on until I run out of ink. These groups are huge, and they are all National with some being International.

Iraq had a Navy capable of crossing the Ocean and invading New York with the intention of occupying the United States? Ya right. But, this is what these knuckle heads believe

[htuttle]

19. There was a building body of evidence during the 1990's

...that a number of these right wing militant groups in the US had been in contact and collaboration with various Middle Eastern militant groups (one of those 'enemy of my enemy' linkups).

So it's conceivable that al Queda could find a way to use/train a bunch of Army of God or Christian Identity members to pull off an attack here in the US. It would serve both their interests, in any case.

Unless that already happened in Oklahoma City. :shrug:

[TWiley]

20. McViegh and Nichols did Oklahoma city, but there is

another interesting link beyond the Michigan Militia, and that is with the Neo-Nazi group known as "The National Alliance".

Dr Pierce (spelling?) was the founder of that group, and he wrote a book called the Turner Diaries which detailed a Racial / Religious War which the White Christian Protestants won and left them with the Gods inheritance ... the world.

The National Alliance is headquartered in "Heavenly Hillsboro WV" which is famous for the 1930's "Monkey Trial" which put a High School teacher on trial for exposing his students to the theory of evolution.

The Bush Republi-KKK-Lanz obsession with evolution (he does not believe in it) along with their racist attitudes about stealing the mineral wealth of Iraq is not unlike the politic of "The Manifest Destiny" in which God gave whites the "Divine Right" to kill the native Americans and steal their wealth. Again, this was a Religiously supported war that also supported slavery. Apparently, their views are that evolution is incompatible with their idea that God created other humans deliberately to be inferior to whites, and that white people would enjoy "dominion over them" just like the other animals of the earth.

That is where some get the basis of "Patriotic, American, Heritage, and view of the Constitution from". The old religious view supporting slavery. In fact, I had a discussion with militia type who was educated in the principals of Constitutional Law in his Sunday School Class at church. According to him, the Constitution does not explicitly outlaw slavery, the founding fathers all owned them, and taking from the Iraqis through warfare was supported by Gods law.

Only one thing is becoming clear. To survive the next 4 years, we might all have to learn to blurt "hallelujah, praise the lord" after each sentence just to keep our jobs.

[barb162]

21. I think there is a radical Islamic conspiracy, led by al qaida type

groups which is growing tremendously. Whether you want to term this "worldwide" or not, I can't say. How else do you explain 9/11, the Spain train bombing, the Bali bombing, etc.

[Lone Pawn]

23. It's not a conspiracy

That's an outright declared war. Not a whole lot we don't know about; very few shady dealings on their part. The Islamist movement is a conspiracy the same way Ghandi's resistance movement was a "conspiracy:" it's not. It's a mass movement, and we have to fight it like a mass movement. Fighting individual members of it didn't work against the Civil Rights movement, it didn't work against North Vietnam, it didn't work for the British *anywhere* in the world, it didn't work against America during our Revolution, it didn't work for the French Roi-du-Jour against the Revolutions, and it sure as hell isn't working for Israel against Palestine. Taking out the enemy the old-fashioned style works for top-down organizations. It doesn't work for broad-based movements. And this, as terrible as it is, is a movement.

[barb162]

26. good point!

[ieoeja]

29. Saved me making that point.

Muslim Separatists tried taking control of portions of the Philippines to establish an Islamic Republic.

Muslim Separatists tried taking control of portions of Indonesia to establish an Islamic Republic.

The Taliban threw the elected government of Afghanistan out of Kabul and forced an Islamic Republic against the will of most Afghans. And with the government forces pushed into a corner, the Taliban DID begin exporting "revolutionaries" into the other Central Asian stans.

None of this is imaginary. It was LIBERAL organizations who railed against the Taliban for years before 9-11. I have yet to hear the words "Islamic Revolutionary Movement" cross the lips of a single elected official from either party.

[DrWeird]

24. Yeah, but you apologize for torture.

nt

[barb162]

25. asking how one gets info does not= apologizing for torture, let alone

condoning or approving of it. Do you assume you can read my mind? If you do, you misread it.

[Zhade]

27. Just remember, now SHE'S the conspiracy theorist.

It's been used against those of us who know what's happening in the world - time we used it against the ones who actually don't know what's really going on.

[rman]

28. Conspiracies don't exist according to conservatives, except

except when it's about Global Warming, liberals or Islam.

How convenient for them.