Anti-Islamic cartoons: Communists speak out

Time to stop choosing sides set by our enemies. The imperialists in Europe and the USA hide behind the mantle of liberal psuedo-tolerance while Arab reactionaries and autocrats claim the name of Allah. A World To Win News Service distributed an editorial at the beginning of the anti-Islamic cartoon controversy that stripped away the bullshit on all sides. Send this to everyone you know, especially to countries where communist writing is banned. When versions of the AWTW commentaries are available in Farsi, Arabic and Urdu, I will post them here.

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From A World to Win News Service:
The anti-Islam cartoons and the imperialist powers’ strategic considerations

The worldwide upsurge of anger sparked by the anti-Islamic cartoons was the main item on the agenda for the meeting of Nato defence ministers at the weekend. This reveals how much all the imperialist powers feel that their strategic interests are at stake. It is impossible to understand the fury surrounding these caricatures first published in Denmark without looking at the material interests and political and economic factors involved. It is also important to examine the relationship between those interests and the propagation of certain ideas, and the complex interaction between those two spheres.

The “Greater Middle East” from Morocco to Afghanistan is the centre of contradictions in today’s world. The US is determined to seize exclusive control over the region and its resources, not simply because of their importance to America but because control over them is decisive in whether or not the US will be able to control the world (including preventing the rise of rival powers). One of the biggest recent changes is an increasingly direct and open European involvement throughout the region. France, Germany and other continental European powers have shifted – how temporary remains to be seen – from defending their interests by opposing US moves to defending them by working with the US. In this constantly changing game, both collusion and contention are always present. One reason for this shift is the outcome of the US invasion of Iraq: the failure of the US to achieve its aims has given the European powers more room to manoeuvre, while all the imperialist powers share the fear that the instability of the region following a US defeat would be catastrophic for their own strategic and regional interests.

This growing European involvement in increasingly explosive situations includes:

• Iraq itself, where Denmark, like the UK, Italy and Poland, is taking part in the occupation, while Germany, especially, as well as France, is playing less of an oppositional role than before. The importance of participating in this and similar wars for the smaller powers was well put by a senior Polish official, who, explaining his government’s decision to keep troops in Iraq despite the unpopularity of the war among the Polish people, unabashedly pointed to the need to cement a strategic alliance with the US with blood. He also pointed to the unprecedented opportunities for building up and battle-hardening the Polish army, turning “civilians in uniform into warriors”. Since there is no foreseeable need for such “warriors” to defend Poland, he could only be talking about toughening Polish troops for more wars of aggression against third world countries and to strengthen Poland’s claims to the spoils of empire. The same logic applies to Denmark.

• Afghanistan, where the US-led occupation has also run into serious resistance, and where all the major powers (and minor ones like Denmark) have sent troops as markers for their own geopolitical and economic interests.

• The collapse of the Israel-Palestine “peace process”. For instance, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s successor Ehud Olmert recently reiterated Israel’s intention to keep 40 percent of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem. This is a slap in the face to the “road map” agreement brokered by the “Quartet” (the US, UN, EU and Russia), but the European powers didn’t even go as far as the US in making a hypocritical, formal protest.

• The US-initiated push against the Syrian government and to change the political system in Lebanon. France created Lebanon and used to run it, creating the political arrangements in which competing ethnic-based clans control the country. For decades France has had friendly relations with the Syrian regime, which in turn helped to prop up this system. Now France has suddenly switched positions, backing the US against Syria’s presence in Lebanon and joining with the US in the push for regime change in Syria.

• US/Europe rapprochement against Iran. The UK, France and Germany, all with strong interests in Iran, initially opposed the American policy of seeking an early confrontation with the Tehran regime. Now these countries have come closer to the US – and nuclear-armed Israel – in a conspiracy to use Iran’s nuclear programme as a pretext to bend or break the regime. In this context, French President Jacques Chirac recently shocked many people when he issued a boasting reminder that France has nuclear weapons and is prepared to use them. This was meant to be understood not only as a threat against the Islamic Republic of Iran but also as a warning to the US that France must be considered a player in the new re-division of the Middle East.

• The “war on terror’”. Revelations about how nearly every country in Europe has been complicit with the US “extraordinary rendition” programme in which the CIA shuttles around prisoners to torture facilities dramatically illustrate the degree to which these governments often secretly cooperate with the American policies they publicly condemn.

Public reaction to the publication of the cartoons in all the Middle Eastern and other predominantly Islamic countries, as other observers have pointed out, has not been a single, homogenous phenomenon but is very much conditioned by the different political situations and forces in each country. Yet in general, the relationship between these countries and US and European imperialism was a driving factor. This has been true in predominantly Islamic countries where ruling regimes clearly created by and/or sustained by the US led protests, countries where the protests were directed against these regimes, and other countries where forces in conflict with the US took up this cause.

For instance, the Egyptian government – one of the most US-dependent regimes in the world – played the leading role in first making the controversy an international issue. Government-friendly imams there organised the Arab world’s first mass demonstrations against the cartoons. Ordinarily, public protests are violently repressed in Egypt, especially when they target the US and its war in Iraq. In Syria, the big demonstrations that helped initiate the international wave of protests were led by pro-regime forces according to some experts and by anti-regime forces according to others, but either way the current contradictions between the regime and the West were a big part of what energized these unusual public outbursts. Rallies against the cartoons were used not only by anti-US forces but also by pro-US forces across the Middle East, Malaysia (another pro-US government that put itself at the head of the outrage) and Indonesia. The Bush regime took a carefully ambiguous attitude, declaring solidarity with allies like Denmark but also not distancing itself from pro-US Islamic forces.

As for the region’s four main Islamic fundamentalist regimes, there was great governmental restraint in both Saudi Arabia and Iran, where Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the country’s single most powerful figure, said, “We need to put forward our calm and compassionate side, our gentleness”. The Tehran crowds of 400 who attacked the Danish embassy and 60 who did the same to the British may have had support from some regime forces, but they were miniscule compared even to the rallies the regime is able to hold in its own name. (Some informed observers say that the lack of a more outraged public reaction may have to do with popular indifference to religion and dislike of the mullahs after a quarter century of theocracy. The Islamic Republic’s lack of appetite for encouraging confrontation may be explained by its continuing efforts to come to an accommodation with the West, or at least with Europe).

In Iraq, where Islamic fundamentalists have come to power with the backing of American guns, the protests were taken up by forces rather happy to defend the faith and attack Danish imperialism while not taking on the US. In the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, on the contrary, the protests seem to have taken on an anti-regime character. It is noteworthy that much of the upheaval has taken place in areas not known for Taleban activity, and especially that it has targeted the US military bases and the occupation.

In short, while all of these specific situations and especially the rise of political Islam in general requires much more analysis, we can clearly see two factors at work:

First of all, in all the countries where the outbreaks occurred, people have great reason to hate the US and Europe regardless of religious factors. What we are witnessing is not a “clash of civilizations” but an indirect reflection, in the realm of ideas, of the fact that the handful of monopoly capitalists who rule over the most bloodthirsty “civilisation” in the history of mankind plunders these countries economically (even while fighting over the spoils), bullies and dictates to them politically, stomps on their national pride and humiliates their peoples.

Secondly, various regimes and other reactionary forces have sought to manipulate the reaction to the cartoons, in many cases to give safer outlets to the people’s anger and national sentiments, whether to protect themselves from the people or to pressure the West to save their own skin. Above all they want to avoid stirring up a full-scale political confrontation between the people and the ruling systems that are ultimately dependent on imperialist finance, trade and often arms, regardless of the occasional anti-Western stance of the rulers.

The Western powers, and most notably but far from exclusively the US, have to various degrees at various times encouraged and outright subsidized Islamic fundamentalist forces. For instance: the British-installed and US-backed medieval Saudi regime, the US’s flirtation with armed Islamic fundamentalists in French-dominated Algeria, US/Israeli past support for Hamas to weaken the secular PLO, the CIA support given to Bin Laden and Afghanistan’s Islamic warlords against the USSR, and the US-backed military/mullah regime in Pakistan. In some times and places the US and other Western powers are completely behind Islamic forces they consider controllable or strategic allies; at other times, the relations are more ambiguous or even hostile. But it general it can be said that the imperialists prefer that the national sentiments and resistance of the masses be diverted through the more easily manipulated, dead-end channels of religious sentiment. (This does not mean that there are no material causes for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is these countries, but that issue is beyond the scope of this article).

Yet what should strike us the most about this whole affair is what is happening in the imperialist countries themselves, especially but not only Europe, where most immigration is from historically Islamic lands, mainly because of where the European powers have long had colonies and continuing spheres of influence. Here too we see the imperialist double game with religion.

On the one hand they foster religious institutions to control immigrant masses. This is very clear in France, where the government openly props up Islamic organisations as a dyke against the threatened deluge involving not very religious immigrant working class youth. According to Le Monde, these youth were explicitly not invited to the 11 February Paris demonstration against the cartoons led by these Islamic groups, which featured French flags. Nowhere is this policy more blatant than in Canada, where the government shamefully backs the application of Sharia law for predominantly Islamic immigrant communities.

But on the other hand, the real target of the current controversy is not immigrants and their families but the native-born. Nearly everywhere these cartoons have been reproduced, they have been presented as a blow for “freedom” – of speech, of the press, of non-Muslims in general – against the “intimidation” of believers in Islam. (See the interview with Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, Newsweek, 13 February).

There is much that should make people stop and think in the facts about this newspaper and its pro-Nazi past, the Danish government and fascistic right it is aligned with, and the editor himself, who reacted to the explosion of protest by planning to print anti-Semitic cartoons. But they are only bit players in this drama. (For more on links between Rose, the Jyllands-Posten and Bush’s inner circle, see the 9 February blog entry at www.juancole.com) The cartoons have been eagerly seized on in many countries by ruling class forces seeking to whip up a hysterical atmosphere in which Europeans and North Americans are to see themselves not as inhabitants of countries whose rulers oppress most of the world’s nations but as victims of the third world. One of the most disgusting forms is the contention that Christianity, especially in the US, and in Europe sometimes secularism (although usually a very pro-Christian secularism), are threatened by Islam as a religion and by those who believe in it or even happen to have Islamic-seeming names and complexions. This is not very far from the Nazi idea that the Jews oppressed Germany.

Yes, there are some very backward people in the “Greater Middle East," especially those in power with imperialist support who inflict theocratic regimes on the people. But in today’s world, the most powerful forces of the dark ages and the biggest threat to science and secularism are headquartered in Washington. The struggle against religious obscurantism and the backward and oppressive social relations it represents is one in which people of the East and West share the same interests.

In this sense, for all its important specific features, the cartoon controversy can only be understood in the context of what the US Defence Department and the Bush White House used to call the “war on terrorism” and now term the “long war”: the US drive to reshape the world that was unleashed in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks and the manoeuvring of the various imperialist powers in this context. To the degree that this is cloaked as a “clash of civilisations” or wars of religion, the people in both kinds of countries, imperialist and oppressed, will have trouble seeing the real, material interests at stake, the face of their real enemies and the very real and material common interests of the peoples of the world in moving beyond an imperialist world toward the liberation of all of humanity.

Comments

[antid]

Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten editor who published the Danish cartoons has called for the establishment of concentration camps:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702499.html

Well, maybe not. If this is Mein Kampf 2, it is awfully timid and chastened.

The ambiguities of this issue, in the deepest sense of the term, contiue to fascinate. The latest AWTW editorial notes:

"The Bush regime took a carefully ambiguous attitude, declaring solidarity with allies like Denmark but also not distancing itself from pro-US Islamic forces."

AND, Burningman in his introduction claims:

"Time to stop choosing sides set by our enemies."

The prevalence of this nuance, this oh-so-fine calibration of not offending, serves as a tactic for the Bush regime as well . . . in their efforts to highlight their phony inclusivity and balance among their allies, Islamic or otherwise. At least in Burningman's recent statements, there is more forceful proclaimations of bias and principle:

"Oh -- fuck religious fundamentalists. Mohamed was a man and was not a prophet of Allah, who does not exist. Jesus is more useful to keep slaves turning the other cheek than he ever was with dishing out "salvation." Moses was a dick and the Dalai Lama should get a real job."

(comments: "The anti-Islam cartoon cotrovery -- Not about "freedom of speech" 2/13/06 10:37pm)

AND Burningman opined (in comments: Prachanda speaks to BBC 2/13/06):

"In fact, to the anonymous and hesitant -- I'd ask "what is so dirty about democratic rights?"

Why is freedom of association, freedom of the press and so on called "bourgeois?"

Who gave them the fucking charter on free thinking?"

So, "not choosing sides"?! It looks as if Burningman alread has. Are these not the sentiments and defenses of Flemming Rose?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702499.html

[antid]

Above comment mine.

[the burningman]

Yes, I choose the side of the international proletariat and reject the liberal-imperial/feudal-fundamentalist dichotemy of so much use to reactionaries.

I reject racist bullshit and medieval superstition. Like Denmark's state church and cross-embossed flag for a country where hardly anyone actually attends church.

And more than anything, it is crucial to recognize what this campaign of incitement is about -- promoting fundamental hatred towards the masses of Arab and Muslim people as the European states fall in line (more or less) behind the USA's "long war."

Muslim fundamentalists murder revolutionaries, enforce feudal gender relations and will accomodate with imperialism as they have for centuries.

When the NAACP campaigned against Amos and Andy, they weren't "censors," they were demanding that the white power denigration of African-Americans end.

I work for a newspaper in the United States. We did not print the cartoons becuase they are reactionary and, in my analysis, part of the war campaign.

[antid]

And in choosing to support the international proletariat, you have embraced the tools of democratic rights, of a free press, and of blasphemy. Which system in this "false dichotomy" allows you to deploy those tools for the historical agency of your choice? Could this blog, with its anti-Mohammedan slurs (see above comments by Burningman), operate without retaliation in Iran, in Syria or Pakistan?

The AWTW editorial, while better than its preceding one, still can not accept the claims made by Islamists at face value. The Muslim sense of outrage over PROFANITY must be subsumed as superficial, a primitive superstition that, in actuality, masks a war over material inequality. The idea that a culture could choose a spiritual good, a religous claim, over economic advancement must be horseshit. The other does not know its own desires, and its morality, its sense of the sacred is nothing but false consciousness. We all on this thread take that as a given, but how do you think the Islamic world will receive this most patronizing message? Does the world belong to Allah, or the Hegelian unfolding of history? Yes, sides have been chosen, but at a deeper level than most "communists" can yet admit.

[leftclick]

antid: it looks to me like you are making two kind of arguments: either the Jyllands-Posten cartoons are really about freedom of speech or you don't really care about that as long as it gives you an excuse to attack religion.

Firstly, in another post I posted a link to an article showing how Jyllands-Posten had refused to print a cartoon depicting Christ because its readership would find it offensive. Here it is again: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060227/younge. This was also exposed in the Guardian UK [still trying to find that link again]. I read the interview with Flemming Rose and he didn't mention the Christ cartoon. Self-exposure might be too much to expect from him, but why are you taking HIS claims at face value? I don't see any arguments against freedom of speech or the press here. I do see an attempt to address the actual content of the cartoons which 'freedom of speech' allows people to avoid.

Secondly, religion is NOT just false consciousness and you should not assume everyone here believes that. It plays an important structuring role in people's lives and should be taken seriously not dismissed. As an atheist myself I do not subscribe to its ontological claims and despise all religious [and ideological] fundamentalisms, but if we are to struggle with religious forces in hopes of building a more liberated world, all methods, especially racist ones, are not permissible. To call Islam "primitive superstition" smacks too much of good ol' colonialist mentality.

In the same way, we cannot accept anti-semitism as a way of opposing Zionism, nor can we lump in all Christian with the fundamentalists.

[oh yeah]

Everyone knows about the famous European and Western tolerance.

World famous.

All the kids in France are raving about it... and in the enlightened corners of, say, Texas.

[leftclick]

clarification: in my last post, the section that begins "I don't see any arguments against freedom of speech or the press here..." should be s separate paragraph since it refers to this blog, not the Flemming Rose interview.

Also, no one here is advocating a double-standard in which we can express what we want but support the repression of speech elsewhere.
In fact, I insist that if Flemming Rose wants to publish his anti-Islamic cartoons he should be open about his agenda.

antid dosen't seem to be advocating freedom of speech as much as freedom to evade resposibility for speech.

[antid]

left click, you must have misread the interview. Here's Flemming Rose from the Washington Post op-ed (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702499.html):

"On occasion, Jyllands-Posten has refused to print satirical cartoons of Jesus, but not because it applies a double standard. In fact, the same cartoonist who drew the image of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban drew a cartoon with Jesus on the cross having dollar notes in his eyes and another with the star of David attached to a bomb fuse. There were, however, no embassy burnings or death threats when we published those."

I don't know, maybe he's right and the Nation's wrong -- that J-P really has posted Christ cartoons before. I've, as of yet, no way to verify these claims at their face value, but Rose HAS addressed the complaint in this interview.

Left click writes: “antid dosen't seem to be advocating freedom of speech as much as freedom to evade responsibility for speech.”

Rose has apologized for the offense both in this interview and elsewhere. What more responsibility should he assume? What sort of responsibility do you think Burningman should take on for his own slurs against the Prophet (see above)? If Burningman’s statements where to be as widely publicized as the cartoons, what do you think the Islamist reaction would be?

[antid]

leftclick writes:
Secondly, religion is NOT just false consciousness and you should not assume everyone here believes that.

The AWTW editorial DOES indeed posit that the Islamist claims of outrage are a symptom of false consciousness, that materialism is at the base of the Muslim world’s grievances. I agree with you that religious beliefs and claims, especially Islamist ones, should be taken seriously, and that we should try to understand their value systems on their own merits. Communist and hard Left movements have neglected this approach at their growing peril and irrelevance. You inquire as to whether “primitive superstition” “smacks” of colonialism. Well, come on, you know what the communist response would be, don’t you? ALL religions are primitive superstition, Burningman says, and whose minds have been “colonized” into the subservience of waiting for justice in the afterlife? Isn’t Islam simply the religion of Arab imperialism as it carved out its own sphere of dominion?

If we are to take Islam seriously we should also understand how we on the hard Left are viewed by Islamic radicals and imams, the many ways in which our values and hopes are utterly irreconcilable with theirs. Look what is advocated for on this blog: SECULAR social and economic justice, “democratic rights”, free press, freedom of association, free thinking and a right to blaspheme (Burningman). Or, as in your case, left click, religious tolerance as propounded by an ATHEIST. According to Islamist theorist from Shariati to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb, these are ALL symptoms of “westoxification” or “hideous schizophrenia”, and those theories are being put into violent practice around the globe. The hard Left is either ignored by Islamist because of its relative impotence or condensed into the West as just another varietal of degeneracy. We do not get an exemption. In thousands of ways, from what we fight for as Leftist to our (agonized and reluctant) paying taxes that fund the war machine, we have already chosen sides in this conflict.

[??]

"The hard Left is either ignored by Islamist because of its relative impotence or condensed into the West as just another varietal of degeneracy."

You obviously have little idea what you are talking about. Have you ever spoken with an Islamicist? Anti-socialism as an athiest plague is at the VERY top of their concerns, both intellectually and in practice.

One of the first acts of Hamas was to promise release of PFLP prisoners held by the Palestinian Authority on behalf of Israel. In general, outside of the very particular Palestinian conflict where Hamas reconfigured itself as a "resistance" organization, the Islamicists from Egypt to Iran to Afghanistan have had an almost singularly murderous orientation towards the "hard left."

Recognizing this is distinct from issues of demeaning believers, particularly among those who are oppressed because of their particular religion. Islam is no better or worse than any other, but in the context of imperialism's assault (with the non-Christian Japanese in the mix), the "hard left" had better get real hard about all the cultural chauvinism and hypocrisy of looking down on the "barbarians" (Berbers...).

Islam isn't "simply" anything. Nor is Christianity "simply" the Constantinian expansion of the "west." It is that, as it was Dr. King's deep faith and love. Islam is "submission," as it is profoundly internationalist and anti-racist in ways that Christianity has not been. The world is complicated.

What paying taxes has to do with this...?

[srogouski]

Rose has apologized for the offense both in this interview and elsewhere. What more responsibility should he assume?
____________________________

He needs to come clean about his association with Daniel Pipes.

BTW, there is no "free speech" in any European country. None of them have a First Amendment and all of them have laws against certain types of "speech".

Ask David Irving.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060220/ap_on_re_eu/austria_holocaust_denial

[antid]

?? writes:
"You obviously have little idea what you are talking about. Have you ever spoken with an Islamicist? Anti-socialism as an athiest plague is at the VERY top of their concerns, both intellectually and in practice. . . .the Islamicists from Egypt to Iran to Afghanistan have had an almost singularly murderous orientation towards the "hard left."

Exactly. Now we're talking, now we're at last getting to the irreconciability between any sort of Leftist politics and radical Islam (Palestine excepted, though what is Left of the PFLP at this point?). So where does that really leave the hard Left as it tries to opt out of a conflict between Islamists and Empire? There is this dominant fallacy that Islamism only has a beef with Empire and that the hard Left is somehow exempt, that it can somehow just speak for the "international proletariat" and not choose sides in this fight. My claim is that by the very nature of our presence, our activism, our agitation under the dominion of Empire, we have already chosen sides in the perceptions of Islamists, and we should acknowledge this fact. Communism is all part of "the West" in the eyes of the radical mullahs and imams.

What does paying taxes have to do with it? C'mon, that's easy. If your a law-abiding citizen in the US you've already contributed to the war effort, you are already constituted as a "Westerner" in opposition to Jihad. I'm ashamed of this but I didn't flee abroad. Did you? What side did you choose with your 1040?

[the burningman]

Antid, that's just stupid.

[antid]

As stupid as it is true. Add it up, Burningman. Add up what you are fighting for and who you are. On this blog you list goals such as democratic rights, freedom of press and association, free thinking and above all social and economic justice based of secular prinicples. You engage in blasphemy to show the idiocy of religion. You live and work in the US(?) and a portion of your labor goes to fund a war against Islam. On the deepest level you are constituted as part of the Occident. You want to tell us you haven't chosen sides in this conflict? How does all this look to Islamists, what would they think of you? What do they think of Communists?

[scorchedEarth]

antid seems hellbent on making this an issue between Islam on one side vs. communists on the other. So far, there has been no mention of the big dog in the fight: imperialism.

Let's concede that Muslims place western communist revolutionaries and leftists on the top of their list of enemies - although I find that hard to believe. So what?

We stand for secular values but should not make common cause with imperialism to advance them. Wouldn't this be just another 'civilizing mission'?

[??]

Who said it was "Western" communists on the top of the Islamist hitlist?

Did anyone pay any attention at all to the last twenty years? To the build-up of Wannahabi Islamists, subsidized "liberally" by the USA/CIA?

Nawal El Sadawi wrote Death of the Imam about exactly the collaboration between Mubarak and the Muslim Brotherhood... See the Hamas attitude towards women in the struggle... See over and over again.

Hezbollah reaches "understandings" with US imperialism, but has no love for kaffirs.

When the Islamists in Iraq beat students at the university for cross-gender friendship -- note that they DO NOT fight the US.

Iran...

Afghanistan...

And so on.

Imperialism is the big dog, no doubt -- but the fleas are legion.

Antid is not a leftist. He equates New York, where the burningman roams, with the Occident... I mean, the "Occident?" I keep waiting for Bernard Lewis to pop up. Oh, he did. Ahem.

[antid]

scorched earth:
"antid seems hellbent on making this an issue between Islam on one side vs. communists on the other. So far, there has been no mention of the big dog in the fight: imperialism."

The AWTW editorial certainly addressed the big dog angle -- my question is too what degree the Left needs to be concerned with the other side in this multi-faceted conflict. For example: where is the Iraqi Left right now? Where is the Left throughout the Muslim world than we might want to stand in solidarity with?

?? writes:
"Antid is not a leftist. He equates New York, where the burningman roams, with the Occident... I mean, the "Occident?" I keep waiting for Bernard Lewis to pop up. Oh, he did. Ahem."

My use of the Occident is from the Lebanese socialist Farqhir al-Maudi's analysis of bin-Laden's missives, a sophisticated conception highjacked by Ian Buruma. ??, if New York is not the equated with the Occident in the minds of Islamicists, then why do you think it was struck on 9/11?

[sphinx]

Antiid speaking a lot of truth here. Respect.

[the buringman]

if New York is not the equated with the Occident in the minds of Islamicists, then why do you think it was struck on 9/11?

Uh, "New York" wasn't struck. Terrorists certainly aren't gunning for the Lower East Side or Harlem.

The "World Trade Center" and the Pentagon were the targets.

The two largest building complexes in the USA: economic and military respectively.

The demands were for US withdrawl from Saudi Arabia.

Didn't seem to have much to do with the "Occident" at all, save in the minds of racist douchebags on both sides.

I hope Antid keeps up his defense of Vienna... I mean Denmark.

[antid]

BM: "Uh, "New York" wasn't struck. Terrorists certainly aren't gunning for the Lower East Side or Harlem.

The "World Trade Center" and the Pentagon were the targets."

BM, have you ever read anything that bin-Laden has written? The heterogeneity, the infidelity, the decadence are part and parcel of his hatred of the Occident -- along with economic and military might. Have your read any of bin-Ladne's inspirations or mentors like Abdullah Azzam or Sayyid Qutb? Are you aware that Al-Zawahiri, bin-Laden's number two has proclaimed his hatred of the Danish cartoons as well? How do you think your own deliberate blasphemy against the prophet Mohammed would go over with that crowd?

As to Lower East Side and Harlem, just what do you think Salafist Jihadis think of queers, commies, Jews, and the Lost Found Nation of Islam? You can't get more tafiri than that cast.

There is something equitable, if not worse than a racist, and that is a militant monoculturist. You might know that if you've ever argued with a real Islamicist.

Forget Vienna or Denmark for a moment. Would you defend Brooklyn? Are you sure it is immune from Jihadi hatred? Really?

[the burningman]

Different Islamicist think different things. Hamas is saying they will release the leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, currently jailed by US/UK/Israeli demand and Fateh compliance.

Hamas is part of a tacit non-aggression pact among all major factions of Palestinians.

Hezbollah does not to my knowledge have a history of attacking the left in Lebanon. It's guns are pointed at Israel for now.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt? Viciously anti-communist. The mullahs in Iran decimated the communist movement in all its shades.

But you are intent on making your point, and insisting on dichotemies that I don't accept as principle -- even if the antagonists demand we all fall in THOSE lines.

I don't, most people don't.

Why that's so hard for you to get is beyond me.

Also, don't troll this site.