Every now and then -- quite often, actually -- someone makes a point so well that there's nothing I can do except republish it. To put it in my own words, or even add any editorial comment, is pointless. Such is the case with an op-ed piece by Thomas L. Friedman in today's New York Times.
In "Say It Like It Is", Mr. Friedman asks why President Obarmy and his flak-catchers can't bring themselves to call the terrorists who shot up Charlie Hebdo, a school in Parkistan, an entire village in Nigeria, and so on (to be continued) what they are -- radical Islamists. Here are some excerpts.
When you don’t call things by their real name, you always get in trouble. And this administration, so fearful of being accused of Islamophobia, is refusing to make any link to radical Islam from the recent explosions of violence against civilians (most of them Muslims) by Boko Haram in Nigeria, by the Taliban in Pakistan, by Al Qaeda in Paris and by jihadists in Yemen and Iraq. We’ve entered the theater of the absurd.
President Obama knows better. I am all for restraint on the issue, and would never hold every Muslim accountable for the acts of a few. But it is not good for us or the Muslim world to pretend that this spreading jihadist violence isn’t coming out of their faith community. It is coming mostly, but not exclusively, from angry young men and preachers on the fringe of the Sunni Arab and Pakistani communities in the Middle East and Europe.
If Western interventions help foster violent Islamic reactions, we should reduce them. To the extent that Muslim immigrants in European countries feel marginalized, they and their hosts should worker harder on absorption. But both efforts will only take you so far.
Something else is also at work, and it needs to be discussed. It is the struggle within Arab and Pakistani Sunni Islam over whether and how to embrace modernity, pluralism and women’s rights. That struggle drives, and is driven by, the dysfunctionality of so many Arab states and Pakistan.
It has left these societies with too many young men who have never held a job or a girl’s hand, who then seek to overcome their humiliation at being left behind, and to find identity, by “purifying” their worlds of other Muslims who are not sufficiently pious and of Westerners whom they perceive to be putting Muslims down. But you don’t see this in the two giant Muslim communities in Indonesia or India.
Only Sunni Arabs and Pakistanis can get inside their narrative and remediate it. But reformers can only do that if they have a free, secure political space. If we’re not going to help create space for that internal dialogue, let’s just be quiet. Don’t say stupid stuff.
Walt particularly likes the first sentence of the third excerpted paragraph. That's what I've been saying right from the inception of WWW. That's what Ron Paul has been saying, again and again and again. We have no business meddling in the Middle East! If the Sunni Muslims want to fight it out with the Shi'ites to see who's holier... let `em. It's not worth a cent of our treasure or a drop of our blood.
Further reading on WWW: "Western leaders finally admit Muslims are waging jihad against us"
Short video worth watching: The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority - Ben Shapiro (who may just have an axe to grind) presents the numbers that expose the lie that the PC media (and the Prez) keep repeating.
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