“ There are people who control spacious territories teeming with manifest and hidden resources. They dominate the intersections of world routes. Their lands were the cradles of human civilizations and religions. These people have one faith, one language, one history and the same aspirations. No natural barriers can isolate these people from one another ... if, per chance, this nation were to be unified into one state, it would then take the fate of the world into its hands and would separate Europe from the rest of the world. Taking these considerations seriously, a foreign body should be planted in the heart of this nation to prevent the convergence of its wings in such a way that it could exhaust its powers in never-ending wars. It could also serve as a springboard for the West to gain its coveted objects.”
1902 - Sir Campbell Bannerman, Prime Minister of Britain [1905-08] talking about the Muslims and the Middle East
Why are they after the Muslims?
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
This is the kind of simplistic thinking at the level of a 3-year old that seems to keep the Muslims bogged down. At the beginning of the 20th century the Middle East wasn't a particulrly important region for the world at all. Even after oil was discovered it wasn't that important until the 1973 oil embargo made the world sit up and realize that this region needs to be controlled. The West is after the Muslims? Not until the very late 20th century. The Islamic world was an important factor in bringing down the USSR (the 'death by a thousand cuts' policy) and the US covertly and overtly encouraged and abetted it. The US was the primary arms seller to the Mujahiddeens in Afghanistan. Reagan publicly praised the Taliban many times for driving the soviets out. The US was and is cosied up with people in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan even today. Doesn't look like the West hated Muslims all that much.
Now of course, there is the issue of Israel. The muslims tend to forget here that while US may have created Israel, the US is also pretty much the only leash on Israel. Israel has shown a consistent tendency to ignore any kind of UN regulations when they clash with its survival. Coupled with the presence of nukes, a paranoid population and a hawkish leadership, the situation for Middle East would be much worse with the US out of there than in there.
While I don't claim to know what would improve the image of Islam with more people in the West but strapping explosives to your chest, going into a supermarket and blowing a bunch of shoppers isn't the way for sure.
-N
Now of course, there is the issue of Israel. The muslims tend to forget here that while US may have created Israel, the US is also pretty much the only leash on Israel. Israel has shown a consistent tendency to ignore any kind of UN regulations when they clash with its survival. Coupled with the presence of nukes, a paranoid population and a hawkish leadership, the situation for Middle East would be much worse with the US out of there than in there.
While I don't claim to know what would improve the image of Islam with more people in the West but strapping explosives to your chest, going into a supermarket and blowing a bunch of shoppers isn't the way for sure.
-N
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
What about the Crusades? They have been after Muslims long before the 19th/20th centuries.
You would have thought with one language and one religion, Arabs would have created a nation stretching from Maghareb to the borders of Iran. But the religion has had an opposite effect. Dominance of Mulla thinking ensures local loyalties to abhorrent chieftains than to ideas. Islam is fractured because Quran has answers only so far as local chief agrees are the answers. And every Chief claims direct communication with God. What a mess!
You would have thought with one language and one religion, Arabs would have created a nation stretching from Maghareb to the borders of Iran. But the religion has had an opposite effect. Dominance of Mulla thinking ensures local loyalties to abhorrent chieftains than to ideas. Islam is fractured because Quran has answers only so far as local chief agrees are the answers. And every Chief claims direct communication with God. What a mess!
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
If you are going to go that far back you can pretty much justify anything.
e.g., The jews and Xians have hated each other for pretty much whole of their history, therefore, Israel must not be supported by predominantly Xian nations.
Also, while your second paragraph is essentially correct, it starts with a false premise. Islam has never really been 'one' language or 'one religion'. The schisms in Islam are many and some started less than a day after Prophet Mohammed's death.
-M
e.g., The jews and Xians have hated each other for pretty much whole of their history, therefore, Israel must not be supported by predominantly Xian nations.
Also, while your second paragraph is essentially correct, it starts with a false premise. Islam has never really been 'one' language or 'one religion'. The schisms in Islam are many and some started less than a day after Prophet Mohammed's death.
-M
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
THE ORIGINS OF TERROR
- A war that is profoundly responsible for the world as it is today
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
The carnage billed as the war to end all wars, which began 90 years ago this month, bears a profound responsibility for the world as it is today. Arab discontent, Israeli bullying, the menace of terrorism and Iraq’s anguish can all be traced to World War I, which reinforced and legitimized imperialism although Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi urged Indians to go to Britain’s rescue in her “hour of need” because “the gateway to our freedom is situated on French soil”. He was not alone in professing touching loyalty. Britain’s prime minister, Herbert Asquith, received a telegram that read, “Do not worry, England, Barbados is behind you.” But if the war betrayed promises, exemplified duplicity and set horrendous precedents, Woodrow Wilson’s vision also sparked the twin hopes of economic globalization and an equitable new world order.
A German diplomat I knew, Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein, could never forget June 28, 1914, when a footman informed his father that a Serbian nationalist had shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The father’s first words were to order the castle flag to be lowered to half-mast. Protocol satisfied, he pronounced, “This means world war!” And so it did, though Britain did not enter the fray till August (dragging in an unasked India) when German troops invaded Belgium — the Kuwait of 1914, endlessly eulogized as the gallant little victim of aggression — on their way to France.
Those four years changed the world. Four empires vanished. Artificial states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, fated to disappear, clogged the map. Poison gas was used for the first time, cavalry for the last. Aerial bombardment of civilian targets and submarine attacks against merchant shipping became commonplace. Censorship, official propaganda and patriotic reticence concealed most horrors from the public. Very little was written, for instance, about the outbursts in Rangoon, Singapore, Belgium and Basra when Indian soldiers rejected orders. They were usually Muslims who would not bear arms against Turkey whose ruler was also Caliph of Islam, but Singapore’s Outram Park metro station bears witness to Britain’s ferocious justice: 37 Sikhs were shot there, and another 18 hanged in India.
Muslim sowars of the 15th Lancers refused to fight the Turks around Iraq’s holy cities, which the Americans now bomb with impunity. Then, too, righteous Western allies claimed to be securing the world for democracy. Their thunder against Kaiser Wilhelm’s “archaic militarism, vaulting ambition and neurotic insecurity” made him sound as villainous as the American media’s portrayals of Saddam Hussein.
West Asia is still bleeding from the war, especially from its politics of perfidy. The secret Anglo-French (Sykes-Picot) pact guaranteed continuing instability by turning Iraq into a colony under a puppet king at the beck and call of Britain’s pro-consul. Edmund Allenby’s sweeping victories and conquest of Palestine, conveniently ratified by a mandate, made it possible to implement Arthur Balfour’s promise of “a National Home for the Jewish People” in Palestine without consulting either the indigenous population or Britain’s Arab allies to whom the land had already been promised. The exploits of Lawrence of Arabia, who organized Arabs to bomb railways and bridges, romanticized terrorist action. Lawrence had a role in playing on the ambitions of Husayn, shareef of Mecca, who provided the manpower for sabotaging Turkish lines of communication.
Appropriately, Harold Pinter, the playwright, poet and bitter critic of the invasion of Iraq, has won the award commemorating Wilfred Owen, the poet who was killed, aged 25, in the trenches and who wrote hauntingly of “the pity of war”. Siegfried Sassoon’s bitter lament, “The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still,/ And I remember things I’d best forget” is another reminder that nine million soldiers, out of the 62 million who took up arms, were slaughtered. The letters that Indian soldiers dictated from the front also breathed poignant resignation. “I have no hope of seeing you again and getting safe and sound out of France,” Shankar, a Jat, wrote in 1917. “Give my salaams to Chintaman, and tell them not to be angry for we are about to die.”
India’s 1.4 million soldiers, the biggest contingent from the Empire, 62,000 of whom fulfilled Shan- kar’s dire prediction, again, the biggest fatality list, were not all willing mercenaries. Forcible recruitment was not unknown. Men were kidnapped or women were held hostage until the men enlisted. Michael O’Dwyer, Punjab’s autocratic governor, was accused of using “terrorist methods” to recruit soldiers. In addition, India’s “gift” of £100 million for the war effort was more than a year’s revenue. An impoverished exchequer was also fleeced to yield between 20 million and 30 million pounds for the upkeep of soldiers who were fighting not for themselves or their country, but for England. The Indian Munitions Board was established in 1917 to relieve Britain’s overworked munitions industry.
Some men enjoyed their contact with Europeans, especially with the friendly French. They were flattered to be hospitalized “in the place where the King used to have his throne” (Brighton Pavilion) and were overjoyed “by the great, great kindness of God” when “the King with his royal hand” awarded a wounded soldier the Victoria Cross. But priorities were set by the award of a VC to an English officer and the Indian Order of Merit to the jemadar who also died in that encounter. Contemptuous about fighting “Indians and the scum of Egypt”, the Germans were outraged to find Indians guarding PoW camps.
Victory created further problems, with historians agreeing that the Versailles peace talks (in which Lord Sinha and the Maharajah of Bikaner were allowed a decorative presence) sowed the seeds of the conflagration that engulfed the world in 1939. A cartoon showed Wilson, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau emerging from Versailles after the terms were announced, one of them saying, “Curious: I seem to hear a child weeping.” Hiding behind a pillar, a little boy labelled “1940 Class” was crying his heart out.
Germany lost territory, was shorn of its colonies, suffered humiliating military restrictions and had to pay huge reparations that Maynard Keynes denounced in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. While the Americans and French brought different agendas to the peace talks, some historians now wonder whether Belgium’s King Albert did not provocatively try to play one side against the other.
But the war also promised a brighter future under the aegis of the League of Nations when Wilson enunciated his famous Fourteen Points in a message to Congress. Eight points referred to specific war issues and six to global equity. They included “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”, freedom of navigation, disarmament, impartial adjustment of colonial claims, and removal “of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions”. Clause 14, the most far-reaching, proposed “a general association of nations… formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
The vision was never fully realized. Wilson’s lofty principles excluded Asia and Africa. His own attitude had hardened by the time Germany sought peace on the basis of the 14 points. Congress rejected his benevolent prescription for the League, which itself foundered on Italy’s aggression against Ethiopia. Its successor organization is today struggling against American unilateralism. The hit-and-run attacks that paralyse the world also flow from the war to end all wars. British strategy introduced terrorism to west Asia and taught Lawrence’s Arab allies to regard surreptitious sabotage as a just, honourable, patriotic and even heroic weapon of self-defence. The children of those Arabs are being hunted down today for continuing similar acts of violence against their new enemies, the United States of America and the Zionism it both protects and appeases.
- A war that is profoundly responsible for the world as it is today
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
The carnage billed as the war to end all wars, which began 90 years ago this month, bears a profound responsibility for the world as it is today. Arab discontent, Israeli bullying, the menace of terrorism and Iraq’s anguish can all be traced to World War I, which reinforced and legitimized imperialism although Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi urged Indians to go to Britain’s rescue in her “hour of need” because “the gateway to our freedom is situated on French soil”. He was not alone in professing touching loyalty. Britain’s prime minister, Herbert Asquith, received a telegram that read, “Do not worry, England, Barbados is behind you.” But if the war betrayed promises, exemplified duplicity and set horrendous precedents, Woodrow Wilson’s vision also sparked the twin hopes of economic globalization and an equitable new world order.
A German diplomat I knew, Prince Hubertus zu Loewenstein, could never forget June 28, 1914, when a footman informed his father that a Serbian nationalist had shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The father’s first words were to order the castle flag to be lowered to half-mast. Protocol satisfied, he pronounced, “This means world war!” And so it did, though Britain did not enter the fray till August (dragging in an unasked India) when German troops invaded Belgium — the Kuwait of 1914, endlessly eulogized as the gallant little victim of aggression — on their way to France.
Those four years changed the world. Four empires vanished. Artificial states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, fated to disappear, clogged the map. Poison gas was used for the first time, cavalry for the last. Aerial bombardment of civilian targets and submarine attacks against merchant shipping became commonplace. Censorship, official propaganda and patriotic reticence concealed most horrors from the public. Very little was written, for instance, about the outbursts in Rangoon, Singapore, Belgium and Basra when Indian soldiers rejected orders. They were usually Muslims who would not bear arms against Turkey whose ruler was also Caliph of Islam, but Singapore’s Outram Park metro station bears witness to Britain’s ferocious justice: 37 Sikhs were shot there, and another 18 hanged in India.
Muslim sowars of the 15th Lancers refused to fight the Turks around Iraq’s holy cities, which the Americans now bomb with impunity. Then, too, righteous Western allies claimed to be securing the world for democracy. Their thunder against Kaiser Wilhelm’s “archaic militarism, vaulting ambition and neurotic insecurity” made him sound as villainous as the American media’s portrayals of Saddam Hussein.
West Asia is still bleeding from the war, especially from its politics of perfidy. The secret Anglo-French (Sykes-Picot) pact guaranteed continuing instability by turning Iraq into a colony under a puppet king at the beck and call of Britain’s pro-consul. Edmund Allenby’s sweeping victories and conquest of Palestine, conveniently ratified by a mandate, made it possible to implement Arthur Balfour’s promise of “a National Home for the Jewish People” in Palestine without consulting either the indigenous population or Britain’s Arab allies to whom the land had already been promised. The exploits of Lawrence of Arabia, who organized Arabs to bomb railways and bridges, romanticized terrorist action. Lawrence had a role in playing on the ambitions of Husayn, shareef of Mecca, who provided the manpower for sabotaging Turkish lines of communication.
Appropriately, Harold Pinter, the playwright, poet and bitter critic of the invasion of Iraq, has won the award commemorating Wilfred Owen, the poet who was killed, aged 25, in the trenches and who wrote hauntingly of “the pity of war”. Siegfried Sassoon’s bitter lament, “The rank stench of those bodies haunts me still,/ And I remember things I’d best forget” is another reminder that nine million soldiers, out of the 62 million who took up arms, were slaughtered. The letters that Indian soldiers dictated from the front also breathed poignant resignation. “I have no hope of seeing you again and getting safe and sound out of France,” Shankar, a Jat, wrote in 1917. “Give my salaams to Chintaman, and tell them not to be angry for we are about to die.”
India’s 1.4 million soldiers, the biggest contingent from the Empire, 62,000 of whom fulfilled Shan- kar’s dire prediction, again, the biggest fatality list, were not all willing mercenaries. Forcible recruitment was not unknown. Men were kidnapped or women were held hostage until the men enlisted. Michael O’Dwyer, Punjab’s autocratic governor, was accused of using “terrorist methods” to recruit soldiers. In addition, India’s “gift” of £100 million for the war effort was more than a year’s revenue. An impoverished exchequer was also fleeced to yield between 20 million and 30 million pounds for the upkeep of soldiers who were fighting not for themselves or their country, but for England. The Indian Munitions Board was established in 1917 to relieve Britain’s overworked munitions industry.
Some men enjoyed their contact with Europeans, especially with the friendly French. They were flattered to be hospitalized “in the place where the King used to have his throne” (Brighton Pavilion) and were overjoyed “by the great, great kindness of God” when “the King with his royal hand” awarded a wounded soldier the Victoria Cross. But priorities were set by the award of a VC to an English officer and the Indian Order of Merit to the jemadar who also died in that encounter. Contemptuous about fighting “Indians and the scum of Egypt”, the Germans were outraged to find Indians guarding PoW camps.
Victory created further problems, with historians agreeing that the Versailles peace talks (in which Lord Sinha and the Maharajah of Bikaner were allowed a decorative presence) sowed the seeds of the conflagration that engulfed the world in 1939. A cartoon showed Wilson, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau emerging from Versailles after the terms were announced, one of them saying, “Curious: I seem to hear a child weeping.” Hiding behind a pillar, a little boy labelled “1940 Class” was crying his heart out.
Germany lost territory, was shorn of its colonies, suffered humiliating military restrictions and had to pay huge reparations that Maynard Keynes denounced in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. While the Americans and French brought different agendas to the peace talks, some historians now wonder whether Belgium’s King Albert did not provocatively try to play one side against the other.
But the war also promised a brighter future under the aegis of the League of Nations when Wilson enunciated his famous Fourteen Points in a message to Congress. Eight points referred to specific war issues and six to global equity. They included “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at”, freedom of navigation, disarmament, impartial adjustment of colonial claims, and removal “of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions”. Clause 14, the most far-reaching, proposed “a general association of nations… formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
The vision was never fully realized. Wilson’s lofty principles excluded Asia and Africa. His own attitude had hardened by the time Germany sought peace on the basis of the 14 points. Congress rejected his benevolent prescription for the League, which itself foundered on Italy’s aggression against Ethiopia. Its successor organization is today struggling against American unilateralism. The hit-and-run attacks that paralyse the world also flow from the war to end all wars. British strategy introduced terrorism to west Asia and taught Lawrence’s Arab allies to regard surreptitious sabotage as a just, honourable, patriotic and even heroic weapon of self-defence. The children of those Arabs are being hunted down today for continuing similar acts of violence against their new enemies, the United States of America and the Zionism it both protects and appeases.
-
Average Bohra
- Posts: 924
- Joined: Wed Nov 12, 2003 5:01 am
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
Saif,
Islam must face the "here & now", not the past. A lesson in history does little to comfort the innocent victims of terror, whether they are Muslims, Jews, or Christians.
The solution is to annihilate the terrorists.
Islam must face the "here & now", not the past. A lesson in history does little to comfort the innocent victims of terror, whether they are Muslims, Jews, or Christians.
The solution is to annihilate the terrorists.
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
Victims of terrorists consist of Muslims, Jews and Christians, but terrorists consist only of Muslims.
The number of innocents dead in Iraq and Palestine are still considered to be collateral damage and not victims of terrorism.
No wonder the world is a mess!!
The number of innocents dead in Iraq and Palestine are still considered to be collateral damage and not victims of terrorism.
No wonder the world is a mess!!
Re: Why are they after the Muslims?
anjami
YOU ARE RIGHT
AQA MOULA DOEST NEED BOTHER ABOUT ANYTHING. HIS MAIN INTENTION IS TO MAKE MONEY SO LONG AS HE LIVES.
YOU ARE RIGHT
AQA MOULA DOEST NEED BOTHER ABOUT ANYTHING. HIS MAIN INTENTION IS TO MAKE MONEY SO LONG AS HE LIVES.