File 911: Islam and the War
Note: The World Wide Web is, like the web of a spider, ephemeral. Links shown below may have blown away, but, before giving up on them, be sure to check whether the articles can be located elsewhere via Google or have been preserved in the amber of the Internet Wayback Machine.
Stanley Kurtz, "Edward Said, Imperialist" (10/2/01). Which does the Academy's most famous supporter of terrorism hate more: the "genocidal" United States or the "primitive Arabs" who won't accept him as their guru?
Muqtedar Khan, "A Memo to American Muslims" (10/15/01). A Moslem scholar urges his fellow believers to turn away from hatred. "As an Indian Muslim, I know for sure that nowhere on earth, including India, will I get the same sense of dignity and respect that I have received in the U.S."
Michelle Cottle, "White Hope" (12/3/01). The not-so-strange alliance between White supremacists and Islamic radicals.
Farrukh Dhondy, "An Islamic Fifth Column" (12/26/01). How multiculturalism undermines the loyalty of British and American Moslems.
Theodore Dalrymple, "I See Richard Reids in Jail Every Day" (12/30/01). A prison doctor describes the pervasive Islamic proselytization in British prisons and the ambivalent motives for conversion.
Rod Dreher, "Teaching Islam" (2/12/02). How California instructs 7th graders in the merits of Islam.
Stanley Kurtz, "With Eyes Wide Open" (2/20/02). Bringing modern ways to the Islamic Middle East will require recognizing the strength of engrained habits.
Tunku Varadarajan, "Dialogue With the Deaf" (2/21/02). The Islamic world needs honest criticism, from itself and others, if it is to have any hope of shaking off backwardness and tyranny.
Victor Davis Hanson, "Why the Muslims Misjudged Us" (2/25/02). "We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more ores or better weather, but because of our culture."
Victor Davis Hanson, "Listen to the Kuwaitis" (3/11/02). "The solution for our fickle friends in the Gulf is a long overdue accounting with the terrorist autocracy of Iraq and the implementation of consensual government in its place. We saved Kuwait once from Iraqi fascism and apparently received ingratitude for our efforts. Perhaps next time we should encourage a new and free Iraq to ignite a chain reaction of democratic revolution in the Gulf."
Richard Morin & Claudia Deane, "The Poll That Didn't Add Up" (3/23/02). An exposé of the flawed methodology underlying the CNN/USA Today poll of "the Moslem World".
Mansoor Ijaz, "Citizenship Before Civil Rights" (4/4/02). An American Moslem argues that his co-religionists "have a responsibility to stand up to greater scrutiny and to offer more transparency by assisting U.S. authorities in unearthing potential terrorist sleeper cells planning attacks against the United States".
Saul Singer, "Domino Democracy" (4/8/02). Based on an interview with Bernard Lewis, this article offers both hopeful and cautionary notes about the future of the current Arab and Iranian regimes. "If anything deserves ridicule, then it is the view that systematic change can be wrought without toppling the first domino of Arab tyrannies - Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The likely alternative to the West playing this game in earnest is not the status quo, but dominoes toppling the other direction."
Fouad Ajami, "Don't Let Arafat Distract Us" (4/13/02). "There is a truth we should know: In the Arab world that beckons American power and hectors it at the same time, there are people terrified that the young men--and now young women--of terror may yet prevail. In the aftermath of victory in Afghanistan, these people saw prospects of deliverance. We owe them and ourselves fidelity to this new campaign."
Reuel Marc Gerecht, "Better to Be Feared Than Loved, cont." (4/25/02). Demonstrations of American and Israeli strength enchance our position in the Arab world, regardless of the anger than they generate.
Dinesh D'Souza, "Osama's Brain" (4/29/02). A portrait of Osama bin-Laden's intellectual mentor.
Ralph Peters, "A Remedy for Radical Islam" (4/29/02). Our best hope of heading off perpetual conflict with Islam is to seek peaceful engagement "where it is still developing--on its vibrant frontiers, not in its arthritic Arab homelands."
David Pryce-Jones, "The Muslims' Great Mistake is to See the West as the Enemy" (5/4/02). "Captured documents reveal Arafat's direct connection to smuggling arms and the authorisation of suicide bombing. The European taxpayer thus becomes the unwitting accomplice of the man who has brought violence down on his own people.
Thomas L. Friedman, "War of Ideas" (6/2/02). "America and the West have potential partners in [Arab] countries who are eager for us to help move the struggle to where it belongs: to a war within Islam over its spiritual message and identity, ot a war with Islam."
Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101" (6/9/02). An in-depth look at how badly the Middle East Studies establishment misread radical Islam, both before and after September 11th.
Bat Ye'or & Andrew Bostom, "Jihad Conquests" (6/19/02). "If Muslims continue to avoid meaningful self-criticism of their own history of jihad and dhimmitude, it will be impossible for Islam to accept non-Muslims as full equals, and past prejudices will continue to be rampant."
Martin Kramer, "Arabic Panic" (6/20/02). "It's difficult to see how this new investment in Middle Eastern studies could produce a return that serves the national interest. Given what goes on in some Middle East centers, perhaps the government should pay them, like farmers, not to produce anything."
Eric Reeves, "The Terror in Sudan" (7/6/02). "The number is so shockingly large as to defy casual comprehension. We must exercise both moral and statistical imagination to understand the evil represented: 1.7 million human beings, the most recent U.N. estimate for people in southern Sudan deliberately being denied humanitarian aid by Khartoum's National Islamic Front regime."
Bat Ye'or, "Culture of Hate" (8/2/02). "At the dawn of the new millennium, the world is being confronted with an absolute culture of hate, characterized by paroxysms of international terrorism against civilians, and religious intolerance. This culture of hate has multiple heads from Algeria to Afghanistan, to Indonesia, via Gaza and the West Bank, Damascus, Cairo, Khartoum, Teheran, and Karachi. It scatters the seeds of terrorism from one end of the earth to the other."
Daniel Pipes & Khalid Durán, "Faces of American Islam" (8/8/02). A detailed study of the demographics of Moslem immigration to America - a more varied and interesting phenomenon than Americans often assume.
The Times of London, "Schools of Hatred" (8/10/02). "What the West has shockingly failed to acknowledge is that the funds to support some of the most fanatical and anti-Western [Moslem] seminaries have often come from the West."
Claudia Rosett, "Free Arabia" (8/14/02). "Immerse yourself in human rights reports on the Middle East--Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House--or just read the wires, and it gets hard to see why anyone talks about the ordinary people of the Middle East as the Arab street. The better phrase might be the Arab gulag."
Jonathan Schanzer, "Militant Islam's Burgeoning Borders" (8/19/02). "Once a primarily Middle East phenomenon, militant Islam has become a world epidemic. As allied troops fight to rid Afghanistan, Yemen, Georgia and the Philippines of its radical Islamic elements, new movements gain strength elsewhere around the globe. Today, its roots are growing in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nigeria, proving that hard work lies ahead, if militant Islam's burgeoning borders are ever to be contained."
Bernard Lewis, "Time for Toppling" (9/28/02). ". . . the dictatorships that rule much of the Middle East today will not, indeed cannot, make peace, because they need conflict to justify their tyrannical oppression of their own people, and to deflect their peoples' anger against an external enemy. As with the Axis and the Soviet Union, real peace will come only with their defeat or, preferably, collapse, and their replacement by governments that have been chosen and can be dismissed by their people and will therefore seek to resolve, not provoke, conflicts.
Martin Kramer, "Can There Be a Liberal, Democratic Middle East?" (10/5/02). "Arab democracy? A good idea-provided the Arabs come up with it themselves." The author doubts that they will and warns that force-fed democracies may prove worse than the current collection of dictators, kings and presidents-for-life.
Paul Marshall, "The Next Hotbed of Islamic Radicalism" (10/8/02). "There are encouraging signs that, in the Middle East, the United States is now less reluctant to push for human rights in Muslim settings. It needs to do the same with Nigeria, encouraging and helping it to oppose extremist sharia."
Stanley Kurtz, "Bali & Karachi" (10/16/02). The bomb blast on Bali and the elections in Pakistan suggest that, however desirable it may be, democracy will not come easily to the Moslem world.
Daniel Pipes & Jonathan Schanzer, "Militant Islam's New Strongholds" (10/22/02). A summary of the disturbing rise of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nigeria. "That militant Islam and its companion violence have spread from the Middle Eastern core to the periphery of the Muslim world is of great concern. It means that the enemies of the United States, moderate Islam, and of civilization itself are far more numerous and entrenched than previously thought. This implies that the current war will likely be longer, bloodier and more demanding than most people imagine."
Stephen Schwartz, "Defeating Wahabbism" (10/25/02). A detailed account of the Islamic sect whose teaching inform al-Qaeda and many other Islamofascist groups.
Daniel Pipes, "The Snipers: Crazy or Jihadis?" (10/29/02). ". . . when Muslims engage in terrorism against Americans, the guiding presumption must be that they see themselves as warriors in a jihad against the 'Great Satan.' Not to see this real and present danger renders the United States vulnerable to more violence by the forces of militant Islam."
Bob Tyrrell, "Uprooting Christianity in the Holy Land" (12/24/02). The travails of Christians under the Palestinian Authority. "I know our government tells us that Islam is a very tolerant and pious religion, but I see many signs that it is neither. The fact is that here in a region where Israeli political control has preserved sacred shrines for all three of the monotheistic religions, Palestinian Muslims under the Palestinian Authority set up after the Oslo Accords have desecrated holy places, brutalized non-Muslims and driven Christians from Bethlehem."
Robert Spencer, "Rape in Islam: Blaming the Victim" (1/22/03). "Sharia courts all over the Islamic world seem only too willing to reinforce the stereotypes of Islam that Said deplores, particularly where women are concerned."
Irfan Khawaja, "The Problem of Muslim Anti-Semitism" (1/22/03). A roundup, with many informative links, of materials on antisemitism in the Islamic world, including hopeful evidence that a few Moslems see antisemitism as an evil that needs to purged from their religion.
Mansoor Ijaz, "Supporting Our Armed Forces: An American Muslim's Perspective" (3/21/03). "Unfortunately, there is a chasm between responsible Arab- and Muslim-American voices and those of activist immigrants from the Arab and Islamic world who come to our shores in search of civil rights protections before accepting the responsibilities of citizenship."
Claudia Rosett, "Who Lost Turkey?" (4/2/03). The author argues that a major reason for Turkish alienation from the U.S. is our government's provision of many-strings-attached IMF loans that have worsened the country's economic problems. "Next time we deem a valued partner too strategically vital to fail, maybe we should note that turning it into an IMF-World Bank welfare case is a strategy too dumb to repeat."
Isabel Vincent, "Poverty, Religion, Old-World Tactics Curb Arab Armies" (4/12/03). A roundup of expert opinion on the deficiencies of the armed forces of Arab nations. A useful reminder that defeating the Iraqi Republican Guard is more like slaughtering sheep than killing wolves.
Fouad Ajami, "Through Arab Eyes, Blindly" (4/13/03). "A thoughtful Saudi commentator, Abdul Rahman Al Rashed, has seen in the fevered way this war is covered a continuity with the old ways of days past. The new technology and satellite channels, he says, mimic the journalism of the West. But the borrowed technology is put at the service of an old and stubborn refusal to face and name things as they are."
