Thomas Friedman in NYT:
Last week, five men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan, where they went, they told Pakistani police, to join the jihad against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. They first made contact with two extremist organizations in Pakistan by e-mail in August. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday: “ ‘Online recruiting has exponentially increased, with Facebook, YouTube and the increasing sophistication of people online,’ a high-ranking Department of Homeland Security official said. … ‘Increasingly, recruiters are taking less prominent roles in mosques and community centers because places like that are under scrutiny. So what these guys are doing is turning to the Internet,’ said Evan Kohlmann, a senior analyst with the U.S.-based NEFA Foundation, a private group that monitors extremist Web sites.”
The Obama team is fond of citing how many “allies” we have in the Afghan coalition. Sorry, but we don’t need more NATO allies to kill more Taliban and Al Qaeda. We need more Arab and Muslim allies to kill their extremist ideas, which, thanks to the Virtual Afghanistan, are now being spread farther than ever before.
Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.
Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.
What is really scary is that this violent, jihadist minority seems to enjoy the most “legitimacy” in the Muslim world today. Few political and religious leaders dare to speak out against them in public. Secular Arab leaders wink at these groups, telling them: “We’ll arrest if you do it to us, but if you leave us alone and do it elsewhere, no problem.”
How many fatwas — religious edicts — have been issued by the leading bodies of Islam against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda? Very few. Where was the outrage last week when, on the very day that Iraq’s Parliament agreed on a formula to hold free and fair multiparty elections — unprecedented in Iraq’s modern history — five explosions set off by suicide bombers hit ministries, a university and Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, killing at least 127 people and wounding more than 400, many of them kids?
My thought – the Civil War didn’t simply start one day. The tension between the slave and free states had been obvious for decades (and forced a punt at the Constitutional Convention.)
So my question – does Mr. Friedman, or anyone else, see the early signs of an Islamic reformation? Thomas Jefferson feared an eventual civil war at the time of the Missouri Compromise in 1820 – are there any comparable precursors to an Islamic reformation?
Saad Kahn at Huffington Post:
Thomas Friedman’s latest op-ed in the New York Times suggested that the Arab World and Muslims should stand up against the extremists and defeat them at their own turf. He said:
Arab and Muslims are not just objects. They are subjects. They aspire to, are able to and must be challenged to take responsibility for their world. If we want a peaceful, tolerant region more than they do, they will hold our coats while we fight, and they will hold their tongues against their worst extremists. They will lose, and we will lose — here and there, in the real Afghanistan and in the Virtual Afghanistan.While he has truly described the incompetence and inaction of the Muslims in combating extremism, his premise fall shorts on some core problems of the Islamic World. He has diagnosed the problem but has failed to mention an important aspect of this region. And that is freedom of speech.
There is practically no Islamic country where people are allowed to open their minds and hearts in public. They cannot even raise questions about their illegitimate governments and monarchies let alone raising voice against the extremists. Most of these extremists actually use this lack of freedom of speech to recruit from the Muslim World. They raise valid questions about the monarchies and dictatorships and then ask the disenfranchised youth to join their ranks. Even Al-Qaeda had its genesis in a strong opposition of the Saudi monarchy and Egyptian dictatorship but later graduated to a full-fledged terrorist outfit.
The situation is even worse in Pakistan, a supposedly fledgling democracy, as people have to fight a daily war of sustenance and thus find no time to combat extremists. Extremism and poverty are strange bedfellows. Jihadi outfits have set up seminaries in the poorest parts of Pakistan where they provide food, shelter and Islamic education to millions of students. Their poor and illiterate parents do not have any knowledge of Islam or what their children would be subjected to in these seminaries. They happily send them to these places as they can do away with a hungry mouth to feed.
Yes, what problem can’t be solved by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, egged on from the sidelines by a newspaper columnist? I love how later in the column Friedman can’t understand why there was “no meaningful condemnation emerging from the Muslim world” about select atrocities committed by Muslims. Well, maybe when the most important foreign affairs columnist for the world’s most important newspaper gets a boner from the prospect of mass Muslim deaths, maybe those leaders are going to worry about playing into his hands.
I’m not defending that practice. It’s always better to address an issue at its root, rather than get caught up in second- or third-order concerns. But we Jews have a Yiddishism, shanda ver der goyim, which at its heart is the very human impulse to say, “Stop airing our dirty laundry in public for the outsiders to see and use against us.” Maybe Friedman ought to think on this for awhile. You know, strategically. Like he gets paid oodles of cash to do.
More Ackerman, at Washington Independent:
No one ought to diminish the threat posed by Internet-borne extremism. But no one ought to inflate it, either. Lost in the pearl-clutching over viral and online takfirism is the fact that … those Virginians were promptly apprehended by the Pakistanis before they could do anything. And as I reported in my piece Monday, the more al-Qaeda’s recruitment goes online, the further it endangers itself to penetration by intelligence and law enforcement. The plots that don’t get busted up tend to be disturbed individuals acting alone. That’s a dangerous problem, of course, and one that requires vigilance. And here, yes, Friedman and others do have a point, since online fora for extremism can contribute to such acts even without serving as a conduit to specific terrorist organizations. But Friedman shouldn’t act as if this is a danger of equal intensity or that the United States is powerless to effect it.
There are many, many problems with urging on a “civil war” among Muslims. I don’t expect Friedman to be careful in his choice of words, but his use of the phrase “civil war” shows how confused he is. A civil war is fought between citizens of the same polity for control of its government. By speaking of a “civil war” within Islam, he unwittingly writes as if he accepts a global Islamic polity as a reality and something over which Muslims of various stripes can fight one another to control. Obviously, such a polity does not and never will exist.
As he did late last month, Friedman is carelessly reproducing pan-Islamist ideas as part of his own effort at looking for red herrings because he doesn’t want to “look inward.” In his case, the red herring is the lack of Muslim outrage. Maybe Muslims should be expressing more outrage over jihadist atrocities, but Friedman is demanding impassioned reaction from hundreds of millions spread out across four continents in response to events that are mostly abstract and far removed from them. It could be that large numbers of these people appear indifferent or quiescent not because they approve of the atrocities or fear the jihadists who commit them, but simply that they are indifferent to events that occur thousands of miles away in other lands. What we have seen in Iraq and Pakistan is the revulsion local populations come to feel for jihadists who target their people. Unless I miss something, the only way Friedman is going to get the war he wants is for jihadists to become much more numerous and widely distributed throughout Muslim-majority countries so that every Muslim society can be terrorized and then react against the attackers. That would mean a dramatic increase in terrorism worldwide and all of the attendant excesses that various national governments would engage in to combat these threats.
What Friedman is trying to avoid looking at are all those aggressive policies that he has vociferously backed for years that have done so much to sow distrust of the U.S. among Muslims. If jihadists have been making gains, it is partly because we have provided them abundant provocations and attacks to use as fodder for their propaganda. These policies have radicalized entire populations. That is what wars do: they radicalize and intensify political and/or religious beliefs, and they typically empower maximalists and fanatics. As destructive as the conflicts he would wish upon all Muslims would be, the end result could still very well be a larger population of deeply radicalized people, which would be disastrous for the welfare of all these societies and likely damaging to the security of the U.S. and allied nations.
UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias
UPDATE #2: Atrios
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