Obama Declares US Not at War With Islam

[tomm2thumbs]

Run time: 02:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lflgg4J61vQ   Posted on YouTube: April 06, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: April 06, 2009 By DU Member: tomm2thumbs Views on DU: 519

 

Turkey does appear to depart from the stereotypical idea of what the muslim world has been portrayed as by the previous administration

Here is more of the speech - although I could not find it in its entirety
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXH8I3YqXQg

[Deep13]

1. I fully appreciate his efforts not to paint with a broad brush...

...and his efforts to have a dialogue-based foreign policy rather than a cowboy-on-meth-based one.

We are certainly not at war with Muslims or with Muslim-majority nations. Islam is an idea that people follow, but it is not the people themselves. And while strictly speaking, a nation cannot be at war with an idea, I do think in a figurative sense the West is at war with Islam. Islam has never had a reformation. It has never had a Cartesian seperation of rational thought from religious thought. And it has never bought into the great Enlightment tradition that seperated the roles of church and state. Like all religious believers, they think they are right, which by implication means everyone else is wrong.

It's very tempting for liberals to want to put the blame for terrorism on material causes. While most of us here are not Marxists, modern liberalism is influenced by the Marxist idea that economics (rather than belief, custom or personality) is at the center of everything. Consequently, terrorism must be caused by the West's exploitation of majority-Muslim nations. While many there may feel angry for that, those willing to destroy themselves and as many infidels as they can are almost always motivated by religion. Islam, like many religions, believes that the dead are judged by god to see if their virtuous deeds outweigh their "sins." A martyr, on the otherhand, gets an automatic pass from god and may invite up to 70 friends and relatives to get an automatic pass too. What is more, its abuses may have cultural rather than religious roots, it is in religious terms that they are preserved today. For a Western example of this, Europe had kings before Christianity, but it was Paul's abmonition to obey state leaders that made the throne sacred and beyond question until the French revolution. Arabs may have fought with each other for centuries, but Islam made it an imperative to spread Mohamed's vision at the point of a sword.

So, while I understand why he said what he said, we should harbor no illusions about this. Islam is hostile to the relavively secular, liberal and modern West and those who believe with the deepest sincerity are often the most violent and the most willing to sacrifice themselves to kill us.